APM: Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippett

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.

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.

Novelist and translator David Treuer is helping to compile the first practical grammar of the Ojibwe tongue of his tribe -- one of the 90 percent of human languages that could be endangered in this century. 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.

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.

Heschel was a mystic who wrote transcendent, poetic words about God. At the very same time, he marched alongside Martin Luther King Jr. and organized religious leadership against the war in Vietnam, embodying the extreme social activism of the biblical prophets he studied. We explore his teachings and his legacy for people in our day.

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.

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.

Alcoholics Anonymous co-founder Bill Wilson once said that the program he helped create is, "utter simplicity which encases a complete mystery." 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 12 Steps; Cheever tells her personal story and that of her father, the late fiction writer John Cheever.

Karen Armstrong speaks about her progression from a disillusioned and damaged 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. Seven years in a strict religious order nearly snuffed out her ability to think about faith at all. Here, we hear the story behind Armstrong's developing ideas about God.

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.

In honor of Earth Day, a riveting Kenyan environmentalist and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Wangari Maathai. 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.

A passionate discussion is unfolding among Evangelical leaders and communities. Should Christians be involved in politics and if so, how? What has gone wrong, and what has been learned from the Moral Majority to today? Chuck Colson, Greg Boyd, and Shane Claiborne are three generations of Evangelicals who discuss and debate these answers.

Forcibly exiled from his native country, Zen master and poet Thich Nhat Hanh recently visited Vietnam for the first time in nearly 40 years. In 2003, Speaking of Faith took a radio pilgrimage with the Buddhist monk 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. Here, he discusses the concepts of "engaged Buddhism," "being peace," and "mindfulness."

More and more people in our time are disconnected from religious institutions, at least for part of their lives. Others are religious and find themselves creating a family with a spouse from another tradition or no tradition at all. And the experience of parenting tends to raise spiritual questions anew. 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.

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, described himself that way until he discovered the tradition of humanism. He is passionate about articulating an atheist identity that is not driven by a stance against religion but by positive ethical beliefs and actions.