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Every Sunday at 9am on KIOS 91.5FM, Omaha's NPR affiliate, Season Three of Lives will tackle the big questions: What is a good life? Why are we here? How might we feel more connected? These and other big questions about how we live will be explored each week. Through intimate conversations, fascinating guests will share their spiritual, philosophical, artistic, and cultural approaches to exploring the wonders of our human experience. Join me as we delve into the practical and profound possib ...
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Mental health counselor and community activist, Elaine Wells, talks about her work as a counselor - helping couples find relationship harmony - and what drew her to that field. Wells also shares her evolution from being raised in a conservative Southern Baptist faith to Unitarian Universalism and how that religion of love and humanism aligns with h…
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The Reverend Kevin Jagoe, minister to BuxMont Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, shares his journey from small-town Minnesota to Unitarian Universalist ministry, weaving together life as a gay man, humanism, and a call to serve. He reflects on religion, purpose, and - in a changing spiritual landscape - what it means to lead with love. The Reverend…
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Poet Steve Langan talks about his poetic craft and his new poetry book, Bedtime Stories, with themes of death and desire, faith and healing. Langan also reads some of his poems for us and shares how art and poetry in his life have yielded new emotional knowledge. Steve Langan has a background in creative writing and public health. His most recent p…
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Environmental consultant and biologist Barbi Hayes talks about a passion for the natural world that encouraged her as a nontraditional student to study biology and later to start her own environmental and research consultancy. Revealing a zest for life, Hayes shares her advocacy for changing our attitudes to nature and how we live with and within i…
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Author Teresa Carmody's work is creatively formed as autofiction, playfully structured by procedure and constraint. Wielding language to create space for change, Carmody explores her life experiences, including spirituality, gossip, queer relations, friendship, and much more, re-emerging into a fresh understanding of herself. Carmody also reads exc…
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Venture capital investor and retired executive, Doug Wilwerding, talks about the example set by his entrepreneurial father, finding his own way into effective leadership, and the lessons he learned in business and life. Wilwerding also shares the evolution of his personal values and perspective on the American Dream. Doug Wilwerding’s business care…
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Raúl Arcos Hawkins, a community leader in Grand Island, Nebraska, explores the American Dream from his perspective. Hawkins talks about his journey as a child from Mexico to Nebraska, his professional and personal contributions to his community, and the uncertainty faced by him and other DACA recipients across the country. Hawkins is the Executive …
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Research scientist and conservation geneticist Cynthia Frasier talks about her early natural world experiences in New Jersey, her pursuit of a career in science, and her work and life in Madagascar and now in the Midwest. Dr. Cynthia Frasier has a long-standing interest in wild places and habitat conservation and is particularly motivated to foster…
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Chef Cedric Fichepain talks about the origins of his passion for cuisine and combining the role of chef with the role of restaurateur, founding Le Voltaire French restaurant more than twenty years ago. Fichepain also shares his perspectives on being an immigrant and his position as Honorary Consul for France for the State of Nebraska. Cedric Fichep…
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Artist Lee Emma Running talks about her childhood independence and an insatiable curiosity underpinning a lifetime dedicated to making art. Together with iron, glass, paper or bone, Running illuminates our human intersection with the world’s edge spaces and its cabinets of curiosities. Running engages audiences in conversations about the impact of …
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Luke Jensen is a veteran, neuroscience researcher, and plant medicine practitioner. Returning disenchanted and lost after a deployment to Afghanistan, Jensen shares how his search for healing led to him living in Peru’s beautiful Sacred Valley and now offering retreats rooted in indigenous spiritual wisdom, the healing properties of ayahuasca and o…
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Gold medal paralympian, Jeromie Meyer, shares how he adapted to life using a wheelchair after being paralyzed as a child by a drunk driver and, more than adapted, developed his athletic skills to earn the call to represent his country in wheelchair basketball, culminating in the exhilaration of wining gold at the Paris 2024 Paralympic Games. Iowa n…
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Carol Horner shares how her decades long career and idiosyncratic approach to being an organization development consultant culminated in the Spiral of Accountability™, her model guiding personal growth and professional success. Horner also talks about her life below water - being an avid scuba diver whose spiritual experiences beneath the waves sha…
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Chef Djamil Djibril Bah-Traore talks about a passion for cooking beginning in his childhood home in Togo, honoring a long if counter-cultural tradition in his family. Immigrating to America Bah-Traore has founded a family of culinary organizations furthering his belief that you can’t hate someone whose food you love. Chef Djamil Djibril Bah-Traore …
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Philosophy professor Joe McCaffrey – in our conversation recorded in May at the end of the academic year – guides us through that broad labyrinth of meaning and purpose by sharing his students responses to the question: How might we lead good lives. McCaffrey also shares what it is to be a philosopher and how he came to be one. Joe McCaffrey is an …
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Firefighter, cancer survivor and advocate Nick Howe shares his experiences of surviving cancer with an experimental treatment, only a few years later to require a new heart during which time a spinal stroke left him paralyzed from the waist down. Howe talks about a desire to dedicate his life in service to others initially taking the form of being …
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Leslie Smith candidly shares her journey from an abusive childhood to college and to a professional career, currently as the leader of the Omaha Municipal Land Bank, a quasi-public nonprofit organization that transforms vacant and abandoned properties into community assets, manifesting Smith’s passion for improving the quality of life for all peopl…
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Musician and producer Laura Bird Burhenn talks about the changes in her vocation and life since we last spoke in 2018, including shifting more to work with her production company, Our Secret Handshake. Burhenn also shares how her commitment to a more loving, inclusive world, expressed through her art, has evolved and been re-imagined in her latest …
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Artist Bart Vargas talks candidly about a chaotic childhood, which found expression in drawing. After military service, Vargas turned full-time to art. He shares his love for color theory and the use of salvaged materials in his craft, his exploration of themes of identity, consumerism, abundance and waste, and the unexpected discovering of his per…
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Melissa Breazile, a mindful outdoor guide and master naturalist, shares those early experiences of nature that inspired her creation of Wild Tree Collaborative, which offers outdoor experiences that reconnect people with themselves, each other, and the living earth. Breazile also talks about the wonder inherent in our natural world, including its s…
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International health professional, Ruth Stark, talks about a life in global health, training local health workers and developing nursing programs, eventually being appointed by the World Health Organization as its representative to Papua New Guinea. Stark shares the origins of this calling in her grandmother's stories of exploration, which inspired…
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Carol Russell, a community advocate and civic leader, talks about the events and experiences that have shaped her life vocation. Russell shares her early career as a medical technologist involved in cancer research studies, and, with more than 80 causes and organizations over many years, shares her passion for philanthropy and for Omaha’s collabora…
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Maggie Wood, executive director of Film Streams, talks about working in the nonprofit world, especially in building welcoming communities and elevating the arts and cultural landscape. wood shares the evolution of her leadership, influenced not only by her work experience but also insights revealed during international travel and a recent career br…
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Demetrius “Dee Dee” Gatson, the founder of Q.U.E.E.N.S. Butterfly House, talks about the many challenges that face formerly incarcerated people as they return to their communities and, drawing from her own experiences with incarceration, how she was inspired to create the nonprofit Q.U.E.E.N.S. Butterfly House a safe and supportive place for women …
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Mindy Rush Chipman, the Executive Director of the ACLU of Nebraska, talks about difficult experiences in her early life and shares her personal story of seeking an abortion. She talks too about the stigma and the difficulties of telling that story. We’ll also hear Rush Chipman on the work of the ACLU and her path from working at a correctional faci…
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