418 episodes listed below
Patient conversations across faith and doubt.
Common Threads brings Fred Stella into long-form conversations with authors, activists, faith practitioners, and directors about religion's place in ordinary and public life. Its best moments slow down difficult ideas until belief, grief, justice, and tradition become easier to think with.
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Common Threads is an interfaith interview show with a patient pace and a broad theological appetite. Fred Stella opens with a question, often a large one, and then lets the conversation travel. The show is not built for quick takes. It gives authors, activists, practitioners, and directors enough room to explain the language behind their claims before those claims are tested. One episode asks how religions shape happiness, then follows that question into death, heaven, daily practice, and the promise of joy. Another turns toward social fracture, treating apocalypse less as spectacle than as a way to talk about separation, othering, and the possibility of wholeness. The conversations can be pointed. They rarely become combative. Fred Stella's style is to restate, clarify, redirect, and widen the frame until the listener can see both the spiritual argument and the human stakes. The show's recent range is striking. It considers the future of God through academic fields, examines criticism of Hinduism in American education, and gives space to the history of Bhutanese refugees. It also spends time with contemplative tradition, Catholic and Hindu points of contact, and the stubborn difficulty of living a disciplined spiritual life inside ordinary chaos. Even paranormal material is handled through inquiry rather than sensation. The episode on Life with Ghosts treats ghost experiences as a meeting point between grief, family memory, and claims about science. Common Threads works best when a guest's personal story opens onto a larger pattern. It is serious without being airless. It is accessible without sanding off complexity. The show returns often to the borderlands between doctrine and lived experience, where faith traditions become questions about bodies, communities, suffering, hope, and meaning. Its editorial center is curiosity across difference. Its method is slow conversation.
Made for: For listeners who want thoughtful religion coverage that connects theology with politics, culture, grief, scholarship, and daily practice. It especially suits people comfortable with long questions, nuanced answers, and respectful disagreement.
What sets it apart: The show stands out by treating interfaith dialogue as careful translation rather than debate. It gives spiritual claims, academic arguments, and personal testimony the same steady attention.
Rated as the #1 podcast on all matters interfaith by Feedspot (https://blog.feedspot.com/interfaith_podcasts/), this is a weekly program that airs on Michigan NPR affiliates WGVU and WGVK. These 2 stations cover the entire western portion of the state. The show is hosted by Fred Stella, President of Interfaith Dialogue Association, an affiliate of Kaufman Interfaith Institute, which operates out of Grand Valley State University, the license holder of both stations.Each week Fred invites clerics, authors, activists and the occasional mystic into conversation about the role of spirituality and religion in politics, world affairs, societies and individuals. The parameters are quite wide.Besides…
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Fred Stella turns interfaith conversation into a close look at how religious ideas shape suffering, practice, identity, and public life.
Common Threads: An Interfaith Dialogue follows Fred Stella as he brings large religious questions into patient, guest-led conversation. A book or film often supplies the doorway, then the discussion widens into contemplative spirituality, religious understandings of happiness,…
From pizza and beer to the Vatican observatory, your strangest faith questions get room to breathe.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A thoughtful conversation on how heaven has shaped religious ideas about happiness in this life.
Common Threads follows a plain religious promise, happiness, into the more difficult work of emotional practice. Fred Stella's conversation with sociologist Robert Wethnow looks at how religions have tied happiness to heaven, particularly when death, illness, hunger, and family…
Fred Stella and Liza Ranko connect mystical wholeness with public conscience and resistance to othering.
Fred Stella and Liza Ranko consider how faith and public conscience might answer political fracture and cruelty. The discussion finds its clearest focus in their treatment of apocalypse.
A thoughtful conversation about whether belief in God is declining, changing or taking another form.
What future might belief in God have when theology sits alongside sociology, biology and physics? Fred Stella asks Stephen Schwalbe how his book takes on that broad question, bringing religious claims into conversation with social change, scientific evidence and intelligent…
A clear, moving account of Bhutanese displacement, family memory, and resilience after forced migration.
Fred Stella opens with familiar ground on Hinduism and Buddhism, then moves into a history many listeners may not know: Bhutan's expulsion of tens of thousands of citizens tied to religion, primarily Hinduism, and Nepali ethnicity.
A grounded interfaith conversation about making contemplation live inside the complications of ordinary life.
Contemplation lands here as something less remote than the usual images suggest. Fred Stella begins with the familiar picture of monks, nuns, retirees, and professional meditators set apart from the noise, then brings the question back to ordinary discipline under daily…
A thoughtful conversation on cultural care, religious belief, and dignity at the end of life.
Death and dying are treated here as matters of cultural care, as Fred Stella speaks with Dr. Frank M. Tedesco, producer and executive producer of Good Death, Auspicious Rebirth.
A grounded conversation about UFO contact, Catholic discernment, and the challenge of naming the unknown.
Common Threads turns Diana Walsh Pasulka's work on UFOs, religion, technology, and purgatory into an interfaith conversation that begins in a surprisingly ordinary place: host Fred Stella recalling a pizza-and-beer recommendation from his cousin Andres.
Host Fred Stella interviews Dr.
Host Fred Stella interviews Dr.
This episode discusses Rabbi Philip Siegel's book on Jesus as a proto-rabbi and his relationship with Jewish law, highlighting interfaith dialogue.
Fred Stella introduces a discussion on eschatology and the book 'The Americanization of the Apocalypse' by Professor Donald Atkinson.
Fred Stella interviews Alex Dunsing about his founding of Terran Judaism, a new Jewish movement rooted in Michigan.
An interfaith dialogue host interviews the director of a documentary exploring the intersection of science and belief in ghosts.
Fred Stella interviews Harrison Hill about his book The Oracle's Daughter, which follows the Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps, founded by Jim and Deborah Green after they moved from the 1960s-70s counterculture into Pentecostal-influenced Christianity.
Fred Stella and Robert Wuthnow use Nurturing Happiness, How Religion Shapes Emotional Practice to ask how faith traditions promise happiness and how that promise changes over time.
Fred Stella interviews Liza J.
Fred Stella frames Steve Schwalbe’s book, The Future of God: An Academic Perspective, around four academic fields: theology, sociology, biology, and physics.
Fred Stella interviews Ravi Joshi about the book 'Invading the Sacred,' which critiques Western academic bias against Hinduism, particularly from the University of Chicago's religion department.
Host Fred Stella introduces Dean Overman's book 'A Case for the Existence of God' as a comprehensive response to atheism, emphasizing its interfaith relevance.
Adhikari says Bhutan’s 1980s policy demanded that ethnic Nepalis stop speaking Nepali and wear only the king’s national dress.
Common Threads with Fred Stella centers on Jacob Reif and his book Contemplate, Toward an Expansive Heart, which draws on "1,600 years" of Western contemplative tradition.
An interfaith dialogue host interviews the director of a documentary exploring the intersection of science and paranormal beliefs, sparked by his mother's ghostly experiences.