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 religions dynamics of the Middle East.

Studs Terkel on Life, Faith, and Death
We remember Studs Terkel, who recently died at the age of 96. The legendary interviewer chronicled decades of ordinary life and tumultuous change in U.S. culture. We visited him in his Chicago home in 2004 and drew out his wisdom and warmth on large existential themes of life and death.

Getting Revenge and Forgiveness
Scientific studies are revealing that human beings are instinctively equipped for revenge — and forgiveness. Knowing this, Michael McCullough says, suggests ways to calm the revenge instinct in ourselves and others and embolden the forgiveness intuition. We explore how.

Liberating the Founders
As we elect a new president, we return to an evocative, relevant conversation with journalist Steven Waldman. From his unusual study of the American founders, he understands why 21st-century struggles over religion in the public square spur passionate disagreement and entanglement with politics at its most impure.

African American, Woman, Leader
Vashti McKenzie is a pioneering figure on the issues of gender, race, and religion; when she became the first woman bishop of the oldest historic black church in America, she declared: "The stained glass ceiling has been pierced and broken." We offer her story, her wisdom, and her good humor as an edifying lens on the American past, present, and future.

Being Autistic, Being Human
One of every 150 children is now diagnosed to be somewhere on the mysterious spectrum of autism. Jennifer Elder, an artist, and Paul Collins, a literary historian, have unearthed a vivid history of people grappling with autism, before it had a name. Through the experiences of their autistic child, they share what all of this is teaching them about what it means to be human.

The Faith Life of the Party — Part II, The Right
Rod Dreher is an outspoken critic of mainstream Republican economic and environmental ideas and the conduct of the Iraq war, but he voted for George W. Bush twice. With him we explore the little-known story of religiously-influenced impulses within this conservative movement that diverges from the Religious Right.

The Faith Life of the Party — Part I, The Left
The Religious Right has gotten a fair amount of coverage in recent years, while the political left has rarely been represented with a religious sensibility. Amy Sullivan is a political liberal and an Evangelical Christian, and in this conversation she'll explore the Democratic Party's complex relationship with faith — and the little-told story of the left's response to the rise of the Religious Right.

Days of Awe
Sharon Brous, a young rabbi in L.A., is one voice in a Jewish spiritual renaissance that is taking many forms across the U.S. The vast majority of her congregation are people in their 20s and 30s, who, she says, are making life-giving connections between ritual, personal transformation, and relevance in the world.

The Origins and Impact of Pentecostalism
In 2006, Pentecostals from all around the globe traveled to the birthplace of this tradition — Azusa Street in Los Angeles. We were there to cover the centennial celebration — and now we bring this program into the present, exploring the origins, theology, and impact of this faith that now reaches an estimated half a billion people globally.

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.

Stress and the Balance Within
The American experience of stress has spawned a multi-billion dollar self-help industry. Wary of this, Esther Sternberg says that, until recently, modern science did not have the tools or the inclination to take emotional stress seriously. She shares fascinating new scientific insight into the molecular level of the mind-body connection.

Fishing with Mystery
James Prosek is a 33 year old 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.

Rick and Kay Warren at Saddleback
In this program we revisit a 2007 conversation with evangelical leaders Rick and Kay Warren — exploring where they came from and what motivates them. Rick Warren hosted the first post-primary joint appearance of Barack Obama and John McCain at his Saddleback Church in southern California. This two hour event is just one sign of the cross-cultural authority he and Kay have achieved in a handful of years.

The Power of Eckhart Tolle's Now
Eckhart Tolle has become one of the most influential spiritual teachers in the world today. He draws on and synthesizes core teachings of several traditions, especially Buddhism. He 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."

Living Vodou
The word "Vodou" 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. We walk through this mysterious tradition — one with dramatic rituals of trances and dreaming and of belief in spirits, who speak through human beings, with both good and evil potential.

The Business of Doing Good
Jonathan Greenblatt is among a new generation of entrepreneurs who want to lead a fundamental shift in corporate culture as well as philanthropy — a merger between making a profit and doing good. We explore his way of seeing the world and his economics of "ethical brand architecture" and "fiercely pragmatic idealism."

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.

Recovering Chinese Religiosities
Put the words "religion" and "China" in a sentence together, and Western imaginations may go to indifference at best, to brutal repression at worst. Yet anthropologist and filmmaker Mayfair Yang says that the upheavals of the 20th Century created an amnesia — in the West as in China itself — about China's rich, pluralistic spiritual inheritance.

Joe Carter and the Legacy of the African-American Spiritual
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 Ethics of Eating
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.

Presence in the Wild
Kate Braestrup is a writer, mother and a chaplain to game wardens on search-and-rescue missions in Maine. She is called in when children disappear in the woods and when snowmobilers disappear under the ice. There, she says, the rubber meets the road theologically. And her sense of life, death, and God is formed by what happens between and among people.

Sustaining Language, Sustaining Meaning — an Ojibwe Story
Novelist and translator David Treuer is helping to compile the first practical grammar of the Ojibwe tongue of his tribe. Treuer describes an unfolding awareness of aspects of his personality, of a sense of what brings him joy, an understanding of what makes him human — that the Ojibwe language distinctly conveys.

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

The Spiritual Audacity of Abraham Joshua Heschel
Born into an esteemed Hasidic family in Poland in 1907, Heschel became a public intellectual and a provocative leader in 1960s America on race, war, and interreligious encounter. We explore his teachings and his legacy for people in our time.

Quarks and Creation
Science and religion are often pitted against one another; but how do they complement, rather than contradict, one another? We learn how one man applies the deepest insights of modern physics to think about how the world fundamentally works, and how the universe might make space for prayer.

Approaching Prayer
Americans are religious and non-religious, devout and irreverent. But in astonishing numbers, across that spectrum, most of us say that we pray. We open up the subject of prayer and explore how it sounds and what it means in three different traditions and lives.

The Spirituality of Addiction and Recovery
We explore the spiritual foundations of addiction and recovery with authors Kevin Griffin and Susan Cheever. Griffin reflects on the consonance of Buddhist teachings and the Twelve Steps; Cheever tells her personal story and that of her father, the late fiction writer John Cheever.

The Freelance Monotheism of Karen Armstrong
Karen Armstrong speaks about her progression from a disillusioned and damaged young nun into, in her words, a "freelance monotheist." Here, we hear the story behind Armstrong's developing ideas about God.

The Beauty and Challenge of Being Catholic — Hearing the Faithful
We depart from our usual format and listen to a spectrum of lay Catholic voices on the force of this vast and ancient tradition on their lives, the way they struggle with it, the sources of their love for it. Even to be a "lapsed Catholic," we hear, is a complex state of being.

Planting the Future
Wangari Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement — a grassroots organization that empowers African women to improve their lives and conserve the environment through planting trees. After helping plant 30 million trees, she speaks about the global balance of human and natural resources and shares her thoughts on where God resides.

Evangelical Politics: Three Generations
In a live event, Krista interviews Evangelical leaders from three eras: Chuck Colson, Greg Boyd, and Shane Claiborne. We take you inside a passionate discussion unfolding among these communities, who are questioning the place of religion in politics.

Brother Thây: A Radio Pilgrimage with Thich Nhat Hanh
In 2003, Speaking of Faith took a radio pilgrimage with the Buddhist monk at a Christian conference center in rural Wisconsin. Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh — called Thây by his students — offers stark, gentle wisdom for living in a world of anger and violence.

The Spirituality of Parenting
We sense that there is a spiritual aspect to our children's natures and wonder how to support and nurture that. The spiritual life, our guest says, begins not in abstractions, but in concrete everyday experiences. And children need our questions as much as our answers.

Exploring a New Humanism
In a recent Pew poll, 16 percent of Americans identified themselves as "unaffiliated" — atheist, agnostic, or most prominently "nothing in particular." Greg Epstein, a Humanist chaplain at Harvard, is passionate about articulating an atheist identity that is not driven by a stance against religion but by positive ethical beliefs and actions.

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 insisted that even modern pluralists need strong statements of belief.

Liberating the Founders
The culture wars of recent years, journalist Steven Waldman says, hijacked Americans' understanding of the country's founders and of the meaning of religious liberty. This distortion muddles current debates about the relationship between government and religion, and may even distort the wisdom we might bring to young democracies around the world.

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 Inner Landscape of Beauty
John O'Donohue was an Irish poet and philosopher who insisted on beauty as a human calling and a defining aspect of God. He had a very Celtic, lifelong fascination with what he called "the invisible 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.

No More Taking Sides
In their unlikely friendship and determination, Robi Damelin and Ali Abu Awwad defy headlines of despair. She is an Israeli who lost her son to a Palestinian sniper. He is a Palestinian who lost his brother to an Israeli soldier. They are part of a citizen-led movement to turn pain into hope.

Reflections of a British Muslim Extremist
British activist Ed Husain was seduced, at the age of 16, by revolutionary Islamist ideals that flourished at the heart of educated British culture. Yet he later shrank back from radicalism after coming close to a murder and watching people he loved become suicide bombers. He dug deeper into Islamic spirituality, and now offers a fresh and daring perspective on the way forward.

Remembering Forward
Before a live audience at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, Minnesota, Krista reads from her book. 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.

Inside Mormon Faith
We avoid well-trodden ground to seek an understanding of the lived beliefs and spirituality of Latter-day Saints, with a leading scholar of the church and a lifelong practitioner. Robert Millet describes a developing young religion with distinct mystical and practical interpretations of the nature of God, family, and eternity.

Discovering Where We Live: Reimagining Environmentalism
Environmentalism and climate change are hot topics; yet they're still often imagined as the territory of scientists, expert activists, and those who can afford to be environmentally conscious. We discover two people who are transforming the ecology of their immediate worlds in Dunn, Wisconsin and New York's South Bronx.

Mathematics, 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.

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.