Listening Generously: The Medicine of Rachel Naomi Remen
Dr. Remen is a clinical professor and a leader in the growing field of integrative medicine, bringing together the best of modern knowledge both scientific and spiritual. We speak about her art of listening to patients and other physicians, the difference between curing and healing, and how our losses help us to live.

The Wisdom of Tenderness
For the Christmas season and the New Year, a rare conversation with one of the wise men in our world today — Jean Vanier. The philosopher and Catholic social innovator created a model of community, L'Arche, that embodies the ideal of power in smallness and light in the darkness of human existence.

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.

The New Evangelical Leaders: Part II - Rick and Kay Warren
The best-selling author of The Purpose Driven Life, Rick Warren and his wife Kay lead one of the largest conservative Evangelical churches in the U.S. They are now teaming up with some unlikely partners in global ventures to fight AIDS and poverty.

The New Evangelical Leaders: Part I - Jim Wallis
Jim Wallis founded Sojourners and now advises presidential candidates and world leaders in what he calls the "post-Religious Right" era. He is determined to put poverty at the top of America's "moral values" agenda.

The Heart's Reason: Hinduism and Science
Theoretical physicist and Hindu scholar V.V. Raman has been described as "a transcultural voyager — who finds meaning in life as he courses from physics to philosophy, from music to metaphysics, from Bhagavad Gita to Gregorian chants." We explore the enriching interplay between Hindu spirituality and the insights of physics in his life and thought.

An Architecture of Decency
Auburn University's Rural Studio in western Alabama draws architectural students into the design and construction of homes and public spaces in some of the poorest counties in the United States. They're creating beautiful and economical structures that are unique in the world — and that nurture sustainability of the natural world as of human dignity.

Money and Moral Balance
Many of us are gearing up to spend more money than we actually have for the upcoming holiday season, which has deep roots in religion. We explore the turmoil many of us experience with money in our day-to-day lives — and how we might work towards a moral and practical balance for ourselves and the next generation.

Burma — Buddhism and Power
With anthropologist and former Burmese Buddhist nun Ingrid Jordt, we look inside the spiritual culture of Burma, exploring the meaning of monks taking to the streets there in September, the way in which religion and military rule are intertwined, and how Buddhism remains a force in and beyond the current crisis.

Moral Man and Immoral Society: Rediscovering Reinhold Niebuhr
Reinhold Niebuhr was a twentieth-century theologian who had crossover appeal among religious and secular Americans. He's now being rediscovered as decision-makers on the right and the left ponder war, nation-building, and the relationship between politics and religion.

Beyond the Atheism-Religion Divide
In 1965, young Harvard professor Harvey Cox became the best-selling voice of secularism in America with his book The Secular City. He sees the old thinking in the "new atheism" of figures like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Cox says that either/or debates between religion and atheism obscure the truly interesting interplay between faith and other forms of knowledge that is unfolding today.

The Body's Grace: Matthew Sanford's Story
An unusual take on the mind-body connection with author and yoga teacher Matthew Sanford. He's been a paraplegic since the age of 13. He shares his wisdom for us all on knowing the strength and grace of our bodies even in the face of illness, aging, and death.

Obedience and Action
In over 50 years as a Benedictine nun, Joan Chittister has emerged as a powerful and at times uncomfortable voice in Roman Catholicism and in global politics. If women were ordained in the Catholic Church in our lifetime, some say, she should be the first woman bishop.

Being Autistic,
Being Human
We step back from public controversies over causes and cures of autism, and explore the mystery and meaning in one family's life — and in history and society. Our guests say that life with their child with autism has deepened their understanding of human nature — of disability, and of creativity, intelligence, and accomplishment.

Evolution and Wonder: Understanding Charles Darwin
From the Scopes Trial to school board controversies in our day, Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution are portrayed as a refutal of the very idea of God. With Darwin biographer James Moore, we learn about the world in which Darwin formulated his ideas and how he took religion seriously.

Surviving the Religion of Mao
Anchee Min published her second novel about the last Chinese empress. Min's own dramatic life story, like her writing, offers a surprising window into the spiritual world of China — past and present.

Days of Awe
With a young Los Angeles rabbi, Sharon Brous, we delve into the world and meaning of the approaching Jewish High Holy Days — from the new year of Rosh Hashanah through Yom Kippur's rituals of atonement — a span of ten days known as the Days of Awe. She's an energetic voice in a Jewish spiritual renaissance taking many forms across the U.S.

Heart and Soul: The Integrative Medicine of Dr. Mehmet Oz
We explore the philosophy and practice of a leading cardiovascular surgeon — and hear what he is learning at the intersection of Western medicine, human spirituality, and the physiology of the human heart.

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.

Religious Passion, Pluralism, and the Young
We revisit Krista's 2005 conversation with Eboo Patel, who calls al-Qaeda the most effective youth organization in the world. But contrary to the wisdom of secular society, he's working to deepen rather than tame the religious energies of the young across many traditions. And he believes this may be our only chance for survival.

Reviving Sister Aimee
Twentieth-century Pentecostal evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson helped to popularize a charismatic faith that touched millions of people and now reaches an estimated half billion people. The eccentricity and integrity of Sister Aimee shed light on some of the most confusing and powerful religious currents in our world today.

L'Arche: A Community of Brokenness and Beauty
In this international movement, community is formed around people with mental disabilities and others who share life with them. This week we travel into the world of L'Arche — its rhythm of life, its habits of love and forgiveness, its openness to pain and failing, its music and laughter.

Latino Migrations and the Changing Face of Religion in the Americas
We tend to speak about immigrants in terms of their political and economic impact. Salvadoran-American scholar of religion and social change Manuel Vásquez explores how religious and spiritual worldviews anchor Latino cultures and are reshaping North American culture in fascinating ways.

The Ethics of Eating
Author Barbara Kingsolver describes an adventure her family undertook to spend one year eating primarily what they could grow or raise themselves. As a citizen and mother more than an expert, she turned her life towards questions many of us are asking. Food, she says, is a "rare moral arena" in which the ethical choice is often the pleasurable choice.

Stress and the Balance Within
Dr. Esther Sternberg works at the molecular level of the mind-body connection. The language of genes, neurotransmitters, and hormones, as she describes it, is helping science understand how our emotions and our bodies are connected — why stress can make us sick, and loving and believing can help us be well.

Marriage, Family, and Divorce
American ideals of courtship and marriage echo with Biblical imagery - "bone of my bones" "flesh of my flesh." But what does the Bible really say, and how has it been taught across the centuries in which the institution of marriage has changed dramatically? Rabbi Elliot Dorff and New Testament scholar Luke Timothy Johnson bring their personal perspectives and insights to the conversation.

Living Vodou
The word "voodoo" evokes images of sorcery and sticking pins into dolls. In fact, it's a living tradition wherever Haitians are found based on ancestral religions in Africa. Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, a Vodou priest, guides us through this mysterious tradition — one with dramatic rituals of trances, and dreaming and of belief in spirits who speak through human beings.

A Spirit of Defiance
A film based on Mariane Pearl's memoir, A Mighty Heart, opens in theaters, with Angelina Jolie in the starring role. Mariane Pearl, a Buddhist, speaks about how she makes sense of her husband's murder and her spiritual ethic on what she calls the front line of the war on terror.

Joe Carter and the Legacy of the African-American Spiritual
We celebrate the life of performer, educator, and humanitarian Joe Carter with his exploration in word and song of the meaning of the African-American spiritual. Before his death, he introduced the Spiritual to audiences from Novosibirsk to Nigeria. He had a singular understanding of the religious sensibility of this music — its hidden meanings, as well as its beauty, lament, and hope.

Remembering Forward: Krista Tippett on Speaking of Faith
Before a live audience at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, Minnesota, Krista reads from her book, Speaking of Faith. She traces the intersection of human experience and religious ideas in her own life, and reflects on her adventure of conversation across the world's traditions — and on the whole story of religion in human life, beyond the headlines of violence.

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 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.

The Soul of War
For Memorial Day weekend, we revisit Krista's 2006 conversation with Chaplain Major John Morris. He reveals his experiences of war and its imprint on a soldier's spirit. He offers practical guidance for veterans and civilians for the sake of our common life.

The New Monastics: Meeting Shane Claiborne
Shane Claiborne is a leading voice, a creative spirit, in a gathering movement of young people known as the "new monastics." With virtues like simplicity and imagination, they are engaging great contradictions of our time — beginning with the gap between the churches they were raised in, the needs of the poor, and the "loneliness" they find in our culture's vision of adulthood.

Science and Hope
George Ellis straddles the worlds of cosmology and social activism. During a live audience interview in Philadelphia, he tells us how he unites his convictions about faith, ethics, and cosmology.

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 Private Faith of Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter speaks of his born-again faith with a directness that is striking even in today's political culture. Hear his reflections about being commander in Chief while following "the Prince of Peace"; about upholding the law of the land while privately opposing abortion; and about his marriage of 60 years as a metaphor for the challenge of human relationship both personal and global.

A New Voice for Islam
Ingrid Mattson, the first woman and first convert to lead the Islamic Society of North America, describes her experience of Islamic spirituality, which she discovered in her twenties after a Catholic upbringing. We probe her unusual perspective on a tumultuous age for Islam in the West and around the world.

The Evolution of American Evangelicalism
Earlier this year, conservative Christian leaders unsuccessfully called for the removal of Richard Cizik of the National Association of Evangelicals. We'll revisit Krista's 2006 conversation with him. Cizik's views on climate change, poverty, and the war in Iraq riveted our listeners, and have now been strengthened, he says, by the challenge.

Restoring the Senses: Life, Gardening, and an Orthodox Easter
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, Cargo of Hidden 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 commemorated during the eight days of Passover. Passover is also the backdrop of the Easter events of the Christian New Testament. 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.

Truth and Reconciliation
South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which held public sessions from 1996 to 1998, concluded its work in early 2004. We explore the religious implications of truth and reconciliation with two people — one black, one white — who did the work of the commission in charge of it.

Einstein's Ethics
String theorist S. James Gates, Jr. and science writer Thomas Levenson delve into Einstein's Jewish identity, his passionate engagement around issues of war and race, and modern extensions of his ethical and scientific perspectives.

Einstein's God
With physicists Freeman Dyson and Paul Davies, and through the words of Albert Einstein himself, we explore Einstein's way of thinking about mystery, eternity, and the mind of God.

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. With scholar Fatemeh Keshavarz, we hear his poetry as we delve into his world and listen for its echoes in our own.

Sacred Wilderness, An African Story
Isabel Mukonyora has followed and studied a religious movement of her Shona people, the Masowe Apostles, that embraces Christian tradition while addressing the drama of African life and history. Through her stories we explore modern African spirituality, diaspora, and finding meaning, as Mukonyora says, "in the margins."

Pagans Ancient and Modern
Adrian Ivakhiv is an environmentalist who pursued the ecological impulse of Paganism from its ancient roots to its modern revival in Europe and North America. We hear his observations about the spirit of Paganism and its influence on everyday Western culture — and even on old-time religion.

Children of Abraham
Abraham is the common ancestor of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. His story spans dramatic territory of the modern world — both physical and spiritual — from southern Iraq to the West Bank city of Hebron. Journalist Bruce Feiler went in search of Abraham to understand the crises and possibilities of the 21st-century world.

Whale Songs and Elephant Loves
Trained as a musician, acoustic biologist Katy Payne was first to discover that humpback whales compose ever-changing song to communicate, and first to understand that elephants communicate with one another across long distances by infrasound. We hear what she has learned about life in this world from two of its largest and most mysterious creatures.

Diplomacy and Religion in the 21st Century
The greatest threat in the post-Cold War world, says Douglas Johnston, is the prospective marriage of religious extremism with weapons of mass destruction. Yet the U.S. spends most of its time, resources, and weapons fighting the symptoms of this threat, not the cause. The diplomacy of the future, he is showing, must engage religion as part of the strategic solution to global conflicts.

The Biology of the Spirit
Surgeon and author Sherwin Nuland reflects on life by way of elegant detail about physiological realities. He speaks about his sense of wonder at the body's capacity to sustain life and support our pursuits of order and meaning. Nuland believes that the spirit is an evolutionary accomplishment of the brain.

Discovering Where We Live: Reimagining Environmentalism
We'll speak with Majora Carter, who's unraveling ties between ecological hazard and social injustice in the South Bronx and changing the face of the environmental movement; and biologist Calvin DeWitt, who's helped to transform a rural wetland and evangelical Christianity's approach to climate change.

Brother Thay: A Radio Pilgrimage with Thich Nhat Hanh
With this Zen master, poet, and teacher admired by people of many faiths and no faith at all, we explore practical spiritual insights and tools for living in a world of anger and violence.