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11.13.08
A Life of Surprises
"But on the whole, when Studs Terkel got people talking, they learned — and we learned — that death is an encounter woven through any given life story in the most ordinary, ubiquitous way. Each of us experiences the reality of death vicariously and in all its variety, across the span of a life, through family members, friends, colleagues, and public figures. […] And always, always, such encounters leave us asking questions of meaning, religious and non-religious, with implications both metaphysical and practical."
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11.06.08
Science That Liberates Us from Reductive Analyses
"We had begun to produce this program weeks ago, and then the hard-to-get interview with Bishop Vashti McKenzie came through. And so forgiveness was put on ice, so to speak, while we lived correspondingly through the final, grueling, and at times recriminatory weeks of an election season. We did not really plan to put revenge and forgiveness on our schedule for the weekend after the election — it just landed there. And it does seem right, and good, and helpful."
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10.30.08
Dispelling the Myth of Uninterrupted Triumph and Goodness
"This is not the history that many of us learn in school. Or perhaps we simply don't internalize it in light of the genuine nobility of the grand narrative. Recently at Princeton University I spoke with an undergraduate doing her senior thesis on religious liberty in the early republic. She told me of her utter astonishment at realizing that every original colony aside from Rhode Island was some form of state-sanctioned religion."
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10.23.08
Witnessing Strength and Beauty
"…as I write, I'm at a remarkable Women's Conference Maria Shriver has hosted for the past five years as First Lady of California. I moderated a panel on faith. Vashti McKenzie would be right at home here. She says in our interview that she lives for the day when her race and gender "mean nothing" — that what qualifies a person for leadership are her intelligence, her experience, the gifts she brings."
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10.16.08
What It Means for Me to Be Human
"The very word 'autism' comes from the Greek for 'self' — autos — connoting a state of being in which a person seems quite literally to live in his or her own world. And yet Paul and Jennifer help me grasp that autism is not one thing but a spectrum on the vast continuum of human personality. Autism has deepened their understanding of disability and of intelligence, curiosity, and accomplishment."
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