Program Particulars
*Times indicated refer to web version of audio

(01:35–03:02) Music Element
"The Multiples of One"
from Awakening,
performed by Joseph Curiale

(04:37) Citation from Carroll's Alice Through the Looking Glass
Krista cites a passage from Lewis Carroll's Alice Through the Looking Glass as inspiration for the title of the second chapter of her book, "Remembering Forward." In the fifth chapter of Carroll's book, Alice encounters the White Queen, who offers a rather confused Alice a job as her maid. This leads to the following exchange:

"I'm sure I'll take you with pleasure!" the Queen said. "Twopence a week, and jam every other day."

Alice couldn't help laughing, as she said, "I don't want you to hire me — and I don't care for jam."

"It's very good jam," said the Queen.

"Well, I don't want any to-day, at any rate."

"You couldn't have it if you did want it," the Queen said. "The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday — but never jam to-day."

"It must come sometimes to 'jam do-day,'" Alice objected.

"No, it can't," said the Queen. "It's jam every other day: to-day isn't any other day, you know."

"I don't understand you," said Alice. "It's dreadfully confusing!"

"That's the effect of living backwards," the Queen said kindly: "it always makes one a little giddy at first —

"Living backwards!" Alice repeated in great astonishment. "I never heard of such a thing!"

"—but there's one great advantage in it, that one's memory works both ways."

"I'm sure mine only works one way." Alice remarked. "I can't remember things before they happen."

"It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards," the Queen remarked.

"What sort of things do you remember best?" Alice ventured to ask.

"Oh, things that happened the week after next," the Queen replied in a careless tone. "For instance, now," she went on, sticking a large piece of plaster [band-aid] on her finger as she spoke, "there's the King's Messenger. He's in prison now, being punished: and the trial doesn't even begin till next Wednesday: and of course the crime comes last of all."

"Suppose he never commits the crime?" said Alice.

"That would be all the better wouldn't it?" the Queen said, as she bound the plaster round her finger with a bit of ribbon.

Alice felt there was no denying that. "Of course it would be all the better," she said: "but it wouldn't be all the better his being punished."

"You're wrong there, at any rate," said the Queen: "were your ever punished?"

"Only for faults," said Alice.

"And you were all the better for it, I know!" the Queen said triumphantly.

"Yes, but then I had done the things I was punished for," said Alice: "that makes all the difference."

(07:40–08:20) Music Element
"St. Columba" performed by Dan Chouinard

(09:00–09:46) Music Element
"There's Something about His Name" performed by Dan Chouinard and Marc Anderson

(11:13–12:04) Music Element
"Where Are My Seven Good Years" by David Meyerowitz, performed by Dan Chouinard and Marc Anderson

(12:08) Met Elie Wiesel
Krista's second interview with Elie Wiesel is included in the Speaking of Faith program, "The Tragedy of the Believer." Wiesel's most famous book, Night, to which Krista refers, includes a passage about Wiesel losing his faith the first night in Auschwitz:

But I told him that I did not believe that they could burn people in our age, that humanity would never tolerate it.

"Humanity? Humanity is not concerned with us. Today anything is allowed. Anything is possible, even these crematories…"

His voice was choking.

"Father," I said, "if that is so, I don't want to wait here. I'm going to run to the electric wire. That would be better than slow agony in the flames."

He did not answer. He was weeping. His body was shaken convulsively. Around us, everyone was weeping. Someone began to recite the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. I do not know if it has ever happened before, in the long history of the Jews, that people have ever recited the prayer for the dead themselves.

Former prisoners of Buchenwald stare out from the wooden bunks in which they slept three to a bed. Elie Wiesel is pictured on the far right next to the vertical beam. Courtesy: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Yitgadal veyitkadach shmé raba…. May His Name be blessed and magnified…." whispered my father.

For the first time, I felt revolt rise up in me. Why should I bless His name? The Eternal, Lord of the Universe, the All-Powerful and Terrible, was silent. What had I to thank Him for?

We continued our march. We were gradually drawing closer to the ditch, from which an infernal heat was rising. Still twenty steps to go. If I wanted to bring about my own death, this was the moment. Our line had now only fifteen paces to cover. I bit my lips so that my father would not hear my teeth chattering. Ten steps still. Eight. Seven. We marched slowly on, as though following a hearse at our own funeral. Four steps more. Three steps. There it was now, right in front of us, the pit and its flames. I gathered all that was left of my strength, so that I could break from the ranks and throw myself upon the barbed wire. In the depths of my heart, I bade farewell to my father, to the whole universe; and, in spite of myself, the words formed themselves and issued in a whisper from my lips: Yitgadal veyitkadach shmé raba…. May His name be blessed and magnified…. My heart was bursting. The moment had come. I was face to face with the Angel of Death….

No. Two steps from the pit we were ordered to turn to the left and made to go into a barracks.

I pressed my father's hand. He said:

"Do you remember Madame Schächter, in the train?"

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.

Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever.

Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.

(14:11) Voice of Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born a century ago, in 1906, to an intellectual and aristocratic German family. He became an acclaimed theologian as a very young man, before the rise of Fascism, writing about ethics, biblical faith and the nature of Christian community. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was 27 years old. He watched the rise of Fascism in Germany, including the increasing persecution of Germany's Jews. The complicity of German Christians compelled him to reconsider the very notions of faith and of church. He became one of the founders of what is known as the Confessing Church, the center of Protestant resistance to Fascism.

The Speaking of Faith program, "Ethics and the Will of God: The Legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer," explores this 20th-century German theologian whose life spanned the rise and fall of Hitler's Germany. He resisted Nazi ideology, while much of the German church succumbed, during the apex of its power and influence. During the late 1930s Hans von Dohnanyi, Bonhoeffer's brother-in-law, introduced him to a group seeking to overthrow Hitler. On April 5, 1943, Bonhoeffer was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned at Tegel, a military prison, until October 8, 1944. Despite the unsanitary conditions and severe conditions, he befriended the Nazi guards, who helped preserve his papers and correspondence and allowed him to minister to other prisoners.

At first the Gestapo thought that Bonhoeffer and von Dohnanyi were embezzling money for personal goals. Eventually the facts surfaced, and Bonhoeffer faced a litany of charges, including conspiring to aid and rescue Jews. Several months after the failed assassination attempt of Hitler on July 20, 1944, the Gestapo realized Bonhoeffer's role and transferred him several times: to a Berlin prison, to Buchenwald concentration camp, to Schönberg, and finally to the concentration camp at Flossenbürg. He was hanged on April 9, 1945, just three weeks before Hitler committed suicide in his bunker as the allies closed in to liberate Berlin.

Bonhoeffer is best known through his letters and papers from prison. These were compiled as a book after Bonhoeffer's execution in the waning days of Hitler's Third Reich. It is a classic work of narrative or first-person theology, ideas about God as articulated in the crucible of human experience.

(15:10–16:08) Music Element
Franz Liszt, "Etude in D Minor Un Sospiro" by Franz Liszt, performed by Dan Chouinard

(17:05) Reference to Karen Armstrong
Krista spoke with Karen Armstrong in spring 2005. To hear that conversation in full and her thoughts on how people should treat religion like poetry, listen to the Speaking of Faith program "The Freelance Monotheism of Karen Armstrong."

(19:15–20:15) Music Element
"Scenes of Childhood, op. 15 no. 1" from Foreign Countries and People by Robert Schumann, performed by Dan Chouinard and Marc Anderson

(20:42) Rilke's Advice to a Young Poet
Krista refers to the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who is regarded as one of the greatest European poets of the 20th century. Rilke was born on December 4, 1875 in Prague. At a young age his parents sent him to a military school in the hope that he would become an officer. He attended for several years, but dropped out eventually and went on to attend Charles University in Prague. In 1897, he traveled to Russia — where he met Leo Tolstoy and Leonid Pasternak. The trip proved to be a transforming experience for his work as a writer. He traveled to Italy, Spain, and Egypt among many other places, but it was during the 12 years that he lived in Paris that he perfected his lyrical poetry, influenced by visual artists such as Rodin.

Rilke wrote in both verse and prose. One of his most famous works of prose includes the book from which Krista quotes, Letters to a Young Poet:

Quite early, I put away most of the books I brought along. I read Rilke, whom I had loved for years and whose gorgeous iconoclastic language felt right in this place. I re-read his advice to a young poet,

"to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, some day far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."

From 1903 to 1908, while still himself a young man, Rilke wrote a series of responses to a young student who had sent him some of his work, asking for advice about becoming a writer. The two never met, but during this five-year period Rilke wrote him 10 letters — the fourth letter contains Rilke's advice to "live the questions now."

Rilke died of leukemia on December 29, 1926 in a sanatorium in Switzerland. At the time of his death, his work was highly regarded by many leading European artists, but was virtually unknown to the general public.

In the "The Soul in Depression," Krista speaks at length with poet and translator Anita Barrows about darkness in Rilke's poetry drew her in and helped her with her illness.

(21:06–21:33) Music Element
"Wondrous Love" by Dan Chouinard

(21:33–24:53) Music Element
Untitled piece for Gambian xylophone by Marc Anderson

(28:30) The Wave-Particle Duality of Light
As early as 1803, experiments by the scientist Thomas Young gave credence to the idea that light possessed wave properties in addition to the particle characteristics established by Isaac Newton. Newton argued that when an object casts a shadow, it was because of the particle nature of light. But the particle theory failed to explain why the edge of the shadows are diffuse and not sharp. It's the wave character of light that causes the diffuse edge. The illustration to the right demonstrates the wave behavior of light. It was not an either-or postulation but a both-and solution.

In 1928, Paul Dirac published a paper on quantum field theory that contained the breakthrough Dirac equation, which united Einstein's theory of special relativity and quantum mechanics. Dirac's equation, demonstrating the spin and magnetic properties of an electron, provided two solutions — an electron and a particle of opposite charge: anti-matter. Once asked how he had found the equation, Dirac responded, "I found it beautiful."

Physicist and theologian John Polkinghorne describes the impact and consequences of Dirac's discovery in Quarks, Chaos, and Christianity:

In Cambridge in the late 1920s, Paul Dirac was able to invent something called quantum field theory, which explained how light could give a wave-like answer if you asked a wave-like question, or a particle-like answer if you asked a particle-like question. Nature was not irrational after all, but it had a deeper rationality than we could ever have guessed beforehand.

If science teaches you anything, it is that the world is full of surprises. Common sense is not the measure of everything. Quantum theory tells us that the way things behave on the scale of atoms or smaller is totally different to the way that 'large' objects behave in our everyday world. There is a price to be paid for the clever trick of being able to be sometimes like a wave and sometimes like a particle. The cost is a lack of precise information about what is exactly going on. If you have something like an electron, then, if you know where it is, you can't know what it's doing; if you know what it's doing, you can't know where it is. That's Heisenberg's celebrated Uncertainty Principle in a nutshell. This strange quantum world is unpicturable for us, but, nevertheless, we find that, in the end, we can understand it. We learn to respect its strange ways, and see that they make their own kind of sense.

(29:35–30:42) Music Element
Improvisation of "The Multiples of One" by Joseph Curiale, performed by Dan Chouinard

(34:05) Reference to Sandy Eisenberg Sasso
Krista spoke with Rabbi Sandy Eisenberg Sasso for the Speaking of Faith program, "The Spirituality of Parenting." Rabbi Sasso provides her definition of "spirituality" and "religion" for a helpful distinction between the two:

Ms. Sasso: I think that children, with or without religious instruction, have this deeper sense of something grander in the universe and have these deeper questions, whether or not they're involved in a religious community. On the other hand, I do feel that being involved in a religious community and participating in some traditional rituals and ceremonies really helps provide a language for a child to give expression. Perhaps it might be helpful to maybe distinguish between spirituality and religions…

Ms. Tippett: Right.

Ms. Sasso: …since those are terms that we often use and don't always know what we're talking about. To me, spirituality is a sense of transcendence or a recognition that there is something greater than ourselves and a perception that all life is interconnected. An example of that would be, from the Bible, of Moses ascending Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments. But while he is up on the mountain, he has a spiritual experience, and we know that because, when he descends, his face glows. Something extraordinary happened up there. The container for that experience is the Ten Commandments, and so the Ten Commandments is a religion. It's a way of giving expression to that extraordinary sense of divine presence or transcendence that Moses felt. So in many ways, religion in its very best form sort of anchors those spiritual experiences and gives them a language in which to speak.

Ms. Tippett: You know, I think that's a really helpful example, because a young couple said to me, at some point recently, they are not religious in any kind of formal way. They felt, though, like they needed to be passing some basic religious tenets on, and they felt like the Ten Commandments were something that their children should know. And they didn't remember all the commandments, and they were embarrassed by this. And so, you know, in the same moment that they wanted to engage that part of their child's life, I think they felt inadequate. But I think what you just put is actually the commandments in the container of a story, which suggested that there's something much larger going on in those commandments than rules.

Ms. Sasso: Oh, absolutely, I know. I think much of religious education tends to be the transmission of a set of rules or dogmas or information. But the very best religious education is much broader than that and gives children a sense of a greater presence. I mean, why follow the rules, you know? Why do the rituals? Why pray? I mean, what's behind all that?

Ms. Tippett: And children do ask those questions, too, don't they?

Ms. Sasso: All the time.

(35:00–35:35) Music Element
"How Can I Keep From Singing" performed by Dan Chouinard and Marc Anderson

(35:38) Miroslav Volf and "Thin" Religion
Krista interviewed Croatian-born theologian Miroslav Volf in early 2004 in front of a live audience at National Cathedral in Washington DC. Listen to Volf distinguish between thin and thick religion, or read a more complete version of this discussion in his paper "Christianity and Violence."

(38:41–39:47) Music Element
"Jacob's Ladder" performed by Dan Chouinard and Marc Anderson

(40:18) Zen Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh
In 2003, Speaking of Faith took a radio pilgrimage with the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh at a Christian conference center in a lakeside setting of rural Wisconsin. Thich Nhat Hanh offers stark, gentle wisdom for living in a world of anger and violence. Krista spoke with him about the concepts of "engaged Buddhism," "being peace," and "mindfulness."

(41:03) Hear Muslim Voices and See Muslim Lives
During the past five years, Muslim guests on SOF have conveyed a thoughtful, questing, diverse, and compelling faith. Step back with us and hear these voices from the traditional and evolving center of Islam. Krista speaks with Seyyed Hossein Nasr, an esteemed Muslim scholar who brings a broad religious and historical perspective to hard questions about Islam and the West that have lingered uncomfortably in American life since September 11, 2001.

(41:12) Quaker Acoustic Biologist
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. Listen to Krista's conversation with Payne and what she has learned about life in this world from two of its largest and most mysterious creatures.

(42:26–43:47) Music Element
Untitled piece for kalimba by Marc Anderson

(44:02) Rachel Naomi Remen
Rachel Naomi Remen's lifelong struggle with chronic illness has shaped her philosophy and practice of medicine. In the Speaking of Faith program "Listening Generously: The Healing Medicine of Rachel Naomi Remen," she speaks with Krista about the art of listening to patients and other physicians, the difference between curing and healing, and how our losses help us to live.

(46:13–46:25) Music Element
Untitled piece for kalimba by Marc Anderson

(48:50) Quote from Saint Augustine
St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE) is one of the most prominent figures of medieval philosophy whose authority and thought have had a lasting influence. Augustine is one of the main figures who merged the Greek philosophical tradition and the Judeo-Christian religious and scriptural traditions. Some of his best-known works are the The Confessions and City of God

(49:12–49:58) Music Element
"I Will Guide Thee" performed by Dan Chouinard and Marc Anderson