Learning, Doing, Being — A New Science of Education
What Adele Diamond is learning about the brain challenges basic assumptions in modern education. Her work is scientifically illustrating the educational power of things like play, sports, music, memorization and reflection. What nourishes the human spirit, the whole person, it turns out, also hones our minds.

"The Happiest Man in the World" — Meeting Matthieu Ricard
A renowned Buddhist teacher and author, Matthieu Ricard trained as a cell biologist and is now part of the Dalai Lama's ongoing dialogue with scientists. We'll explore why he's been called "the happiest man in the world," and how he understands spirituality as "contemplative science."

The Freelance Monotheism of Karen Armstrong
Karen Armstrong speaks about her progression from a disillusioned young nun into, in her words, a "freelance monotheist." She's a formidable thinker and scholar, but as a theologian she calls herself an amateur — noting that the Latin root of the word "amateur" means a love of one's subject. Here, we hear the story behind Armstrong's developing ideas about God.

Stem Cells, Untold Stories
Using stem cells, Doris Taylor brought the heart of a dead animal back to life and might one day revolutionize human organ transplantation. She takes us beyond lightning rod issues and into an unfolding frontier where science is learning how stem cells work reparatively in every body at every age.

The Need for Creeds
For many modern Americans, the very idea of reciting an unchanging creed, composed centuries ago, is troublesome. But, Jaroslav Pelikan, who died on May 13, 2006, was a scholar who devoted his life to exploring the vitality of ancient theology and creeds. He discusses the history and nature of creeds, and how a fixed creed can be reconciled with an honest, intellectual faith that changes and evolves.

Curiosity Over Assumptions — Interreligiosity Meets a New Generartion
We shine a light on two young leaders of a new generation of grassroots Muslim-Jewish encounter in Los Angeles. They're innovating templates of practical relationship that work with reality, acknowledge questions and conflict, yet resolve not to be enemies — whatever the political future of the Middle East may hold.

The Power of Eckhart Tolle's Now
One of the most influential spiritual teachers in the world today draws on and synthesizes core teachings of several traditions, especially Buddhism. Eckhart Tolle believes that a planetary shift in consciousness is underway, and his vision fundamentally challenges the notion that Descartes captured in a sentence: "I think, therefore I am."

Language and Meaning — an Ojibwe Story
Novelist and translator David Treuer is helping to compile the first practical grammar of the Ojibwe language. He describes an unfolding experience of how language forms what makes us human. Some memories and realities, he has found, can only be carried forward in time by Ojibwe.

Living Islam
Nine Muslims, in their own words, reveal a creative convergence of Islamic spirituality and American identity that is unfolding, largely unnoticed, in the United States. A lawyer turned playwright, a teacher who's a lesbian, a retired federal prosecutor — all sharing how tricky it can be to unravel Islamic religious tradition from the many cultural traditions.

The Inner Landscape of Beauty
The Irish poet and philosopher John O'Donohue was beloved for his book Anam Cara, Gaelic for "soul friend," and for his insistence on beauty as a human calling and a defining aspect of God. In one of his last interviews before his death in 2008, he articulated a Celtic imagination about how the material and the spiritual, the visible and the invisible worlds intertwine in human experience.

Revealing Ramadan
Through vivid memories and light-hearted musings, 14 Muslims reveal the richness of Ramadan — as a period of intimacy, and of parties; of getting up when the world is quiet for breakfast and prayers with one's family; of breaking the fast every day after nightfall in celebration and prayers with friends and strangers.

Yoga. Meditation in Action
Yoga studios are cropping up on street corners across the U.S., and there are now yoga classes at YMCAs, law schools, and corporate headquarters. Seane Corn takes us inside the practicalities and power of yoga, and describes how it helps her face the darkness in herself and the world.

The Ethics of Aid: One Kenyan's Perspective
We explore the complex ethics of global aid with a young writer from Kenya, Binyavanga Wainaina. He is among a rising generation of African voices who bring a cautionary perspective to the morality and efficacy behind many Western initiatives to abolish poverty and speed development in Africa.

The Novelist as God
Mary Doria Russell has grappled with large moral and religious questions on and off the page. We discover what she discerned — in the act of creating a new universe — about God and about dilemmas of evil, doubt, and free will. The ultimate moral of any life and any event, she believes, only shows itself across generations. And so the novelist, like God, she says, paints with the brush of time.

Obama's Theologian: David Brooks and E.J. Dionne on Reinhold Niebuhr and the American Present
President Obama has cited Reinhold Niebuhr's teachings as significant in shaping his ideas about politics and governance. In a public conversation, we discuss the great public theologian's legacy and ideas — and what influence they may play in the future of American politics.

Fishing with Mystery
James Prosek is an artist, fly-fisher, author, and environmental activist who has always, as he puts it, found God "through the theater of nature." From a young age he has been fascinated by trout and now eel, and he's captured them literally and artistically, by way of both angling and paint. We explore the sense of meaning and mystery he has developed along the way.

Repossessing Virtue: Wise Voices from Religion, Science, Industry and the Arts
As the global economic crisis began to unfold last fall, we wanted to respond immediately, in our way. We began by contacting past Speaking of Faith guests who we thought might speak to the tough economic climate in fresh and compelling ways. Here we've collected several of their insightful and edifying reflections on their own experiences, questions, answers, and how they're living their lives differently.

Repossessing Virtue: Parker Palmer on Economic Crisis, Morality, and Meaning
We explore human and spiritual aspects of economic downturn with a wise public intellectual of our time, the Quaker author and educator Parker Palmer. He works with people from all walks of life at the intersection of spiritual, professional, and social change, and stresses the need to acknowledge the inner life of human beings as a source of reality and power.

TV and Parables of Our Time
Diane Winston appreciates good television, studies it, and brings many of its creators into her religion and media classes at the University of Southern California. In what some have called a renaissance in television drama, we examine how TV is helping us tell our story and work through great confusions in contemporary life.

The Science of Trust: Economics and Virtue
As part of our ongoing Repossessing Virtue series, we talk to pioneering neuroeconomist Paul Zak. We look at what science is learning about trust, fair play, and empathy — and what these qualities have to do with human character and economics.

Play, Spirit, and Character
Stuart Brown, a physician and director of the National Institute for Play, says that pleasurable, purposeless activity prevents violence and promotes trust, empathy, and adaptability to life's complication. He promotes cutting-edge science on human play, and draws on a rich universe of study of intelligent social animals.

Fragility and the Evolution of Our Humanity — A Geophysicist's View
Xavier Le Pichon is one of the world's leading geophysicists, as well as a compelling spiritual thinker. He reflects on the meaning of what we call "humanity" through his discoveries in plate tectonics; his view of history and the life sciences; and his life shared in intentional communities that face human suffering.

Joe Carter and the Legacy of the African-American Spiritual
The spiritual is the source from which gospel, jazz, blues, and hip-hop evolved. It was born in the American South, created by slaves, bards whose names history never recorded. We celebrate the life of Joe Carter, who explored the meaning of the Negro spiritual in word and song — through its hidden meanings, as well as its beauty, lament, and hope.

The Long Shadow of Torture
Iranian-American political scientist Darius Rejali is one of the world's leading experts on torture, and how democracies change torture and are changed by it. We'll explore how his knowledge might deepen public discourse about practices in U.S. military prisons in recent years — and inform our collective reckoning with consequences yet to unfold.

Brother Thây: A Radio Pilgrimage with Thich Nhat Hanh
We visited the Buddhist monk at a Christian conference center in a lakeside setting of rural Wisconsin. Here, the Zen master and poet offers stark, gentle wisdom for living in a world of anger and violence. He discusses the concepts of engaged Buddhism, "being peace," and mindfulness.

Obama's Faith-Based Office — Meeting Joshua DuBois
A live public conversation with Joshua DuBois — the 26-year-old political strategist and Pentecostal minister who's heading the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. We explore what's being retained from the Bush years and what will change — and how the experience of the Obama campaign shaped DuBois' vision of what is possible.

The Sunni-Shia Divide and the Future of Islam
We seek fresh insight into the history and the human and religious dynamics of Islam's Sunni-Shia divide. Our guest Vali Nasr says that it is not so different from dynamics in periods of Western Christian history. But he says that by bringing the majority Shia to power in Iraq, the U.S. has changed the religious dynamics of the Middle East.

Living in and Beyond Economic Crisis
Many are grappling with the shame that comes in American culture with the loss of a job, and many are seeking community in old places and new. For some, economic instability — a kind of life on the edge — is not new. They've been cultivating virtues of patience, self-examination, service and good humor that might help us all. We feature the voices of our listeners.

The Spirituality of Parenting
How do parents and grandparents nurture the spiritual and moral awareness of the children in our lives? Rabbi Sandy Sasso has written books that help children and adults of many backgrounds discuss religion and ethics together. The spiritual life, she says, begins not in abstractions, but in concrete everyday experiences. And children need our questions as much as our answers.

Planting the Future with Wangari Maathai
Wangari Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement — a grassroots organization that empowers African women through planting trees. She knows what many in the West have forgotten — that ecological crises are often the hidden root causes of war. Maathai speaks about the global balance of human and natural resources, and she shares her thoughts on where God resides.

The Ecstatic Faith of Rumi
The 13th-century Muslim mystic and poet Rumi has long shaped Muslims around the world and has now become popular in the West. Rumi created a new language of love within the Islamic mystical tradition of Sufism. We hear his poetry as we delve into his world and listen for its echoes in our own.

Opening to Our Lives — Jon Kabat-Zinn's Science of Mindfulness
Scientist and author Jon Kabat-Zinn has changed medicine through his work on meditation and stress. We explore what he has learned, through science and experience, about mindfulness as a way of life. This is wisdom with immediate relevance to the ordinary and extreme stresses of our time — from economic peril, to parenting, to life in a digital age.

Restoring the Senses: Life, Gardening, and an Orthodox Easter
Theologian Vigen Guroian experiences Easter as "a call to our senses." We'll explore his Eastern Orthodox sensibility that is at once more mystical and more earthy than the Christianity dominant in Western culture. And at this time of year and beyond, Guroian does real theology in his garden as richly as in church.

Exodus, Hidden Cargo of Stories
Avivah Zornberg is one of the great, creative interpreters of Talmud and Torah in the contemporary world. She guides us through the Exodus story that is remembered at Passover, and that has inspired oppressed peoples in many cultures across history. We find meaning in the text that Cecil B. DeMille and Disney never imagined — about the worst and the best of human nature, and the realities and ironies of human freedom.

Alzheimer's, Memory, and Being
Our guest, psychologist Alan Dienstag, has led support groups and a writing group for people in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. We explore the human and spiritual terrain of this illness, what it might teach about the nature of human memory and identity, and what remains when memory unravels.

Laying the Dead to Rest: Meeting Forensic Anthropologist Mercedes Doretti
We explore the human landscape of forensic science and its emergence as a tool for human rights. Mercedes Doretti is an Argentinean forensic anthropologist who has unearthed bones and stories of dead and disappeared civilians from Argentina's Dirty War. She shares her perspective on reparation, the need to bury our dead, and the many facets of justice.

The Biology of the Spirit
Former surgeon Sherwin Nuland speaks about his sense of wonder at the body's capacity to sustain life and support our pursuits of order and meaning, and why he believes the human spirit is an evolutionary accomplishment of the brain. The three-pound human brain, he says, is the most complex structure that has ever existed on this planet.

Repossessing Virtue: Wise Voices from Religion, Science, Industry, and the Arts
As the global economic crisis began to unfold last fall, we wanted to respond immediately, in our way. We began by contacting past Speaking of Faith guests who we thought might speak to the tough economic climate in fresh and compelling ways. Here we've collected several of their insightful and edifying reflections on their own experiences, questions, answers, and how they're living their lives differently.

The Soul in Depression
As a society, we're increasingly aware of the many faces of depression, and we've become conversant in the language of psychological analysis of depression and medical treatment for it. But there is a growing body of literature by people who have struggled with depression and found it to be a lesson in the nature of the human soul. We engage some of these voices to see depression from a range of experiences and religious perspectives.

Math Purpose, and Truth
As a theoretical physicist, Janna Levin probes whether the universe is finite or infinite. As a novelist, she explored the separate but parallel lives of two influential 20th-century scientists: Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing. Their work laid the foundations for computer intelligence while challenging fundamental notions about how we can know what is true.

Obama's Theologian: David Brooks and E.J. Dionne on Reinhold Niebuhr and the American Present
In a public conversation with political commentators David Brooks and E.J. Dionne, we explore how Reinhold Niebuhr's merger of intellect, faith, and realism might be speaking to a new era of American turmoil and American power.

Evolution and Wonder: Understanding Charles Darwin
Darwin took religion seriously, but he understood creation as an unfolding process. He rejected the Victorian idea of a God who had fixed every detail — including every social flaw and injustice — at the beginning of time. We seek to understand the world that formed Darwin, and what his observations about the natural world really said about God.

The Novelist as God
Mary Doria Russell has grappled with large moral and religious questions on and off the page. We discover what she discerned — in the act of creating a new universe — about God and about dilemmas of evil, doubt, and free will. The ultimate moral of any life and any event, she believes, only shows itself across generations. And so the novelist, like God, she says, paints with the brush of time.

The Buddha in the World
Indian journalist Pankaj Mishra pursued the history and meaning of the Buddha — not as a religious figure, but as a critical and social thinker. In an intellectual and personal adventure, he pondered the Buddha's ideas in Kashmir and Afghanistan, Europe, and post-9/11 america — and found a new way to critique and live in the modern world.

Preserving Words and Worlds
The Hill Museum & Monastic Library rescues manuscripts from across the centuries and across the world. We explore this with a Benedictine monk and an Ethiopian scholar who have led some of its most intriguing work. In their lives as in this work, the relevance of ancient manuscripts to people of the present, and the cultural cargo of the past itself, are revealed in a new light.

A History of Doubt
Poet and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht says that as a scholar she always noticed the "shadow history" of doubt out of the corner of her eye. She shows how non-belief, skepticism, and doubt have paralleled and at times shaped the world's great religious and secular belief systems. She suggests that only in modern time has doubt been narrowly equated with a complete rejection of faith, or a broader sense of mystery.

The Inner Lives of Children
Psychiatrist Robert Coles has spent his career exploring the inner lives of children. He says children are witnesses to the fullness of our humanity; they are keenly attuned to the darkness as well as the light of life; and they can teach us about living honestly, searchingly and courageously if we let them.