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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Stuart Chittenden Podcasts
Award-winning author Anna Monardo shares how her Italian-American heritage, family history, and exploration of memory, place, love, and belonging shape her writing. We talk about identity, gender, and the power of reimagining one’s life through story. From Italy to Pittsburgh to Omaha, fiction and memoir, Monardo traces the emotional geography of t…
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Dr. Andrea Grover, Associate Professor in Information Systems & Quantitative Analysis at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, discusses their journey from a childhood love of learning to an academic career focused on the intersection of technology, nature, and public participation in science. They explored how citizen science enables everyday peopl…
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AB Gorham, artist, poet, and Assistant Professor of Book Arts and Papermaking at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. In the show Gorham talks about the tactile and transformative nature of book arts, where a choreography of sculpture, language, and paper come together in experiential forms. She shares how her creative process is driven by intuitio…
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Matthew Henkes is the Vice President of Grants and Initiatives at the Iowa West Foundation. He talks about a life spent exploring the tensions between human connection and achievement. Raised in California, Henkes studied and worked across the world on various philanthropic and community aid projects. He then made the choice to move to Council Bluf…
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Mike Battershell, President and CEO of Bergman Incentives, talks about growing up a punk kid in a cowboy town; his efforts to make Omaha better as a community trouble-making do-gooder, and the evolution of that spirit to better the world now through the lens of building his business as a self-described capitalist and socialist. Bergman Incentives a…
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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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