Episodes by Circa

Matilda Joslyn Gage puts the alliance of church and state on trial

Clara Barton, the founder of the American Red Cross

A walk through the East End with the Booths, where compassion took organized form and unnecessary suffering became impossible to ignore.

A reflection on how Octavia Hill wove dignity into the spaces people lived, showing why environment, beauty, and stewardship still shape the moral world we inhabit today.

Enmegahbowh, the first Native American priest in the Episcopal Church

A look at Mother Mary’s quiet courage as she protected young factory workers and helped shape the early moral foundations of modern labor protections.

The story of Antoine Chevrier, who turned an abandoned Lyon ballroom into a shelter, seeing not charity but restitution owed to the poor.

The Vatican Observatory's centuries-long tradition of astronomical research reveals that wonder and service, science and faith, are expressions of the same love.

How Henri Dunant’s compassion at Solferino sparked the Red Cross, the Geneva Conventions, and a new global understanding of mercy.

The story of Isaac Hecker, founder of the Paulists, and his insistence that spiritual and civic life are not separate --- and why that question now belongs to the whole world.

George MacDonald lost his pulpit and found something larger --- the ancient truth that story is how the largest truths have always traveled to the human heart.

A look at how Florence Nightingale helped medicine awaken, turning compassion into structure and revealing the deeper shift that made modern healthcare possible.

Harmonia traces Zoroastrianism from Zarathustra's radical vision of monotheism to Maneckji Hataria's 19th century mission to save a dying faith.

Antoinette Brown Blackwell

Harmonia remembers Tahirih (1814-1852), the Persian poet, theologian, and revolutionary who defied her world with words and unveiled her face at the Conference of Badasht.

How Dorothea Dix exposed hidden suffering and helped transform mental health care through steady, uncompromising compassion.

In a quiet classroom in 19th-century Karbala, Siyyid Kzim Rasht whispered of a sacred change drawing near.

Jarena Lee was born free in a land built on slavery. Denied a pulpit, denied authority, and denied permission, she preached anyway

How Elizabeth Fry transformed the brutal women’s ward of Newgate Prison through structure, dignity, and disciplined compassion—and reshaped society’s conscience.

Shaykh Ahmad al-Ahsá'í spent his life preparing the ground for a new age he could sense but never see --- his story is the pre-dawn of the morning we inhabit.

The story of Elizabeth Ann Seton, founder of the Sisters of Charity, and the enduring power of service as a spiritual calling.

How William Wilberforce's interior transformation on a carriage ride gave him the moral grounding to abolish the British slave trade.

Ryōkan Taigu was an Edo-period Zen monk whose life of radical simplicity and chosen joy continues to illuminate what it means to be fully, deliberately alive.

Harmonia explores Judith Sargent Murray, whose radical belief in the equality of every soul helped build the world we live in today.

A reflection on Lessing and the moment when humanity began learning to discover spiritual truth as responsibly as scientific truth.