Everyman

The Rev William Sloane Coffin is no ordinary minister. Once a CIA officer training agents to parachute into Russia, he became Chaplain of Yale and was twice arrested in the 1960s for his part in the student campaign of civil disobedience. Now, much to his surprise, he has been invited to America's most prestigious Protestant pulpit - Riverside Church, in New York's Manhattan. "I would like to think I will always maintain a healthy disregard for respectability. After all, faith means you can have a thumb-nosing independence of all the powers of Death Militant."

An expression of the passionate religious feeling of a community portrayed until now as lunatic, bigoted Sabbatarians, concerned only with the suppression of joy and the threat of hell-fire. It is the story of an island where Christianity in its purest Calvinist form is right at the centre of life, a story of fervent devotion, of pre-destination and the certainty of grace for God's elect. This is Puritan England of 300 years ago, still alive today in the Outer Hebrides.

Many parents no longer have a clear religious belief to pass on to their children. Many primary schools no longer provide Religious Education. So what ideas are modern children picking up about God, and goodness and badness, and what happens after death? Where do their beliefs come from? In this International Year of the Child Everyman listens to one class of 9-year-olds growing up in a secular school in an expanding post-war community as they talk about their beliefs.

Desert landscapes are magnificent, enticing and for those who venture deep into them, simply overwhelming. It is this experience that has fascinated Western explorers and romantics of the past. Today's explorers and romantics in their thousands, scientists, adventurers, farmers and artists are rediscovering that hypnotic attraction of the wilderness. Could the deserts' unique qualities have shaped the emergence of Judaism, Christianity and Islam? And indeed could they still possess a powerful message for the modern world? Everyman has followed the lives of desert dwellers, ancient and modern, in Arizona, Israel and the Sinai Peninsula. In tonight's programme we journey with the Beduin in search of those spiritual and physical roots that mysteriously sustain them in so uncompromising a world.

The great deserts of the American South-West are among the fastest expanding in the USA, attracting sun-lovers from the East coast, Mid-West and Canada. With the population boom comes massive investment and some remarkable new technology, but little general awareness of the real spiritual potential of the desert. The vast Sonoran Desert is a place of fragile beauty that demands a special sensitivity from modern man. From the McMath solar telescope in Papago territory into the little-known Indian tributary of the Grand Canyon and across to an extraordinary new desert city, Everyman explores an evolving faith whose symbol is the sun.

To many Israelis the harsh, arid lands of the Biblical wilderness are a magical, wondrous place, offering a huge promise to Man - the focus of a New Enlightenment. Tonight in the Sinai and Negev deserts we explore the faith of religious and non-religious people, who claim the desert may witness the birth of a new breed of man.

An Everyman profile of Michael Dummett , Wykeham Professor-Elect of Logic, Oxford University, Presented by Robert Kee For 19 years the Professor of Logic at Oxford has been SIR ALFRED AYER , a humanist who believes that religious language is meaningless. This year a new Professor will be taking up the post - MICHAEL DUMMETT. Ayer has called his successor ' one of the oustanding philosophers of the present time '. But Dummett is a devout Catholic. Is there any strain between his devotion to logic and his adherence to his faith?

The Madonna and Child dominate Christian imagery of women. How deep is the connection between the church's attitude to women, and that of male society? And how far does this picture of the ' perfect mother' reflect the reality of women's experience? In this Everyman film Christian and non-Christian women explore the effect on their lives of this image of idealised motherhood.

World hunger; the energy crisis; the poisoning of the environment - questions undreamed of by our forebears have become the common currency of today's news bulletins. In this Everyman film Ronald Higgins looks beyond our immediate crises to what lies behind them. Four years ago he gave up careers in the Foreign Office and at The Observer to explore the six threats he saw menacing mankind's future and to search within himself for the human factor which he believes to be the greatest threat of all: The Seventh Enemy.

Churches may not be full on Sundays-but does it follow that religion plays little part in our society today? For this Everyman report Peter France visited one street at random, Clough Road , in one town, Rotherham, on one Sunday. Is Sunday still the Lord's Day in Clough Road?

An Everyman film with reconstructions taken from original texts. Seventy-five years ago the Rhondda Valleys were the most famous coal-producing area in the world. The life of the people was harsh, their work dangerous. They had two hopes - the chapels and the unions, religion and socialism. This film tells the story, in the words of the time, of the rise of these hopes - expressed in bitter strikes and religious revivals - and goes to the Rhondda to see what remains of them today.

You don't have to go to the Holy Land to celebrate the theme of Easter: the story of death and rebirth is echoed in the cycle of the English seasons as spring begins, and in personal stories of hope triumphing over suffering. For some, Easter means children acting out the resurrection of Jesus or making Easter gardens; for many others it means Dame Isobel Baillie singing ' I Know that my Redeemer Liveth '.

As Pope John Paul II returns to the Vatican from his native Poland, Everyman looks back to the historic week in October when his election delighted an unprepared world. In Cracow that week the delight was mixed with sadness as the citizens felt the loss of their beloved Cardinal. The Everyman team were the first Western journalists to reach Cracow the day following the announcement, and brought back exclusive film of the reaction in the city. PETER FRANCE talks to the students, peasants and priests who made up the Pope's former diocese.

Everyman reports on a 48-year-old peasant woman called Maria da Conceicao, whose community in Ladeira, Northern Portugal, has become the centre of an ecstatic cult. Her followers claim she is a saint, and she herself says she has visited heaven 15 times. Contrary to scientific evidence, she declares, the moon and various planets she passes on her way are inhabited. The Church has excommunicated her. This film shows two events which her followers acclaimed as miracles, witnesses the scenes of hysteria which accompanied them, and examines the reasons for her celebrity - and notoriety.

Today, Pope John Paul II, Vicar of Christ on Earth, makes pilgrimage to a remote and windswept village on the west coast of Ireland. One hundred years ago at the gable wall of the local church in Knock, Co Mayo, Mary the Mother of God appeared in a blaze of light to some 15 villagers. Their witness has transformed the village into a shrine for millions of pilgrims from all over the world, and the faithful in Ireland accept it as living proof of God's timely intervention in the lives of ordinary people. Everyman has been to Knock to try to understand the nature of this faith, and the visions it produces - visions which, to the eye of faith, are ' nothing wonderful at all'.

A small village in West Sussex is faced with the strange prospect of saffron-robed Buddhist monks in its midst. They have just set up their first Western sanctuary for training along strict traditional lines. Part of their tradition is to rely for their food on the local villagers: but how will this go down in West Sussex? This Everyman report follows the monks' attempts to explain what they do and why; and it explores why many Western people are being drawn to Buddhism.

In a darkened room somewhere in England, three young Christians are being taught how to break the law. They have volunteered for a mission that will involve subterfuge, intrigue, and, if caught, imprisonment. They are smuggling Bibles into Communist countries in Eastern Europe, deliberately violating the laws of the land. There are some 40 highly organised international missions involved in these cloak and dagger activities, and they all passionately believe that Christians living in Communist lands are in need of both their support and their Bibles. Everyman investigates their methods, their claims, and their ethics, and separates the fiction from the fact.

Twenty years ago an American ex-alcoholic called CHUCK DEDERICH founded Synanon, an idealistic commune dedicated to curing heroin addicts. Its lifestyle-a combination of strong discipline and the seductive ' Synanon game ' - proved so attractive that non-addicts began to join. By the 1970s Synanon had developed into a multi-million-dollar religious cult, and Dederich into a semi-divine leader. Under his leadership the Synanon members shaved their heads, divorced their wives, and submitted to vasectomies. Today Dederich is on trial for conspiracy to murder. In this Everyman report Peter France tells the story of the rise and fall of Synanon, learns why its followers surrendered to Dederich, and why, like so many cults, the original dream turned to nightmare.

This summer a group of volunteers spent five days under medical supervision in a Kent farm-house living on nothing but mineral water. By the end of the week reporter Peter France , who joined the fast for Everyman, was 13lbs lighter, and totally converted to the benefits of not eating for a week. This film follows the group's physical and emotional changes day by day, in an attempt to understand why fasting has played such a prominent part in religious traditions.

In Lancashire a Christian minister buries a Jack Russell terrier with the full rites of the church. In Coventry a vicar holds a religious service for pets. Yet Christian tradition holds that animals have no souls, and therefore no rights. Everyman investigates the growing movement for animal rights, and asks: is our 'species-ism' (the assumption that humans are superior to other species) the product of our religious heritage?

The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death. (ST PAUL) In California faith in science has, for some people, replaced faith in heaven. Trans Time Inc offers the service of ' cryonic suspension', the deep-freezing of the body on death. Those who have paid for this service believe that when medical science has developed a cure for whatever caused their death, they will be unfrozen and brought back to life. Everyman looks at the process of cryonic suspension, and meets the people who call themselves the Immortalists. Some people want to achieve immortality through their works or descendants. I prefer to achieve immortality by not dying.

Islam means submission to the will of God; but in women's lives obedience to fathers and husbands has predominated, with marriage their only guarantee of honour. ' If a girl doesn't marry she won't go to heaven.' How do women survive this pressure? Everyman filmed with Muslim women in this country, and discovered that for some of them the Koran holds a different message, of independence and equal rights.

Fifty-eight people assemble in a hotel room in London. For three long days they will do as they are told: leaving their seats only with the permission of the trainers, voluntarily submitting themselves to abuse, humiliation, and physical stress. The goal is ' enlightenment ', and they pay the high fee and accept the high pressure because they hope it will bring them enlightenment fast. Everyman follows one ' transformation seminar ' from Friday morning to Sunday night; examines the techniques which critics call brain-washing; and finds out what the weekend does to those who make it to the end.

Fatima in Portugal is the site of the world's largest annual gathering of Christian pilgrims-up to a million each May. It was there that, in 1917. the Virgin Mary appeared to three children and told them of the threat of an atheist Russia spreading its errors and annihilating nations '. Now, in post-revolutionary Portugal, the Fatima pilgrimage is a source of controversy. With the new Portuguese elections coming up, Everyman looks at Fatima-the event which symbolises the clash between two of the world's dominant beliefs - Christianity and Communism.

The dying become like little children: dependent, vulnerable, in need of loving security. Too often nurses treat their terminal cases as failures, and isolate them in the hour of their need. Everymanhas filmed in St Joseph's Hospice, Hackney, where a very different approach to dying: 'It's not so much that you lose anything here, but bit by bit you have to give things back. You give back your sight. You give back your hearing. You give back your friends. Then one day you finish by giving back yourself.'

Have you ever been aware of, or influenced by, a presence or power, whether you call it God or not, which is different from your everyday self? Answers to this question have convinced a group of scientists in Oxford and Nottingham that most of us will at some time experience a ' presence or power ' beyond ourselves. Everyman reports on research which suggests that people who see visions, hear voices, or simply feel the presence of their God can no longer be considered part of a tiny minority of saints or psychotics. What are these experiences, and what effect do they have? Peter France meets the scientists, and some of those prepared to talk about these very private encounters.

Do we have the right to choose to die? In the successful West End play Whose Life is it Anyway? Ken Harrison, a sculptor who has had a road accident and is paralysed from the neck down, decides his life is so reduced that he doesn't want to live. The play is about his struggle to convince the hospital staff that his decision is balanced, that he is not disturbed and that they should morally accept his right to choose. A fictional situation, but what of real life? Most people believe that if they were that disabled, they too, would want to die. But do they? Do people as active, capable and self-aware as Ken Harrison ever reconcile a bright mind to a life of helplessness and dependancy? Tonight's Everyman compares scenes from the play with stories from real life and examines the last right-the right to choose between life or death.