Speaking Of Faith Videos
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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.

James Prosek is a 33-year-old artist, writer, and fly-fisher 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 -- which he sees as "mystical creatures" -- and he's captured them physically and artistically, by way of both angling and paint. We explore the sense of meaning and ritual James Prosek developed along the way, including his concern with how we humans limit our sense of other creatures by the names we give them. We'll also hear the words of Henry David Thoreau, Bruce Chatwin, and Izaak Walton.

Evangelical leader Rick Warren is in the news for bringing John McCain and Barack Obama together at his Saddleback Church in California. This two-hour event, broadcast live on CNN, is just one sign of the cross-cultural authority Warren and his wife Kay have achieved in a handful of years. We revisit Krista's conversation with them at Saddleback last year -- exploring who they are and what motivates them.

Host Krista Tippett creates a certain kind of space in her interviews, and this conversation is no exception. Tolle shares his youthful experience of depression and despair -- suffering that led him to his own spiritual breakthrough, and ultimately, freedom and peace of mind. He also explicates his view of what he calls "the pain body" -- the accumulated emotional pain that may influence us and our relationships in negative ways. And Tolle talks about spirit and God, and what those concepts mean to him.

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.

The spiritual is celebrated in American culture and beyond. It is the source from which gospel, jazz, blues and hip-hop evolved. It was born in the American South, created by slaves, bards whose names history never recorded. The organizing concept of this music is not the melody of Europe, but the rhythm of Africa. And the theology conveyed in these songs is a potent mix of African spirituality, Hebrew narrative, Christian doctrine, and an extreme experience of human suffering.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Shortly before his death in 2008, the late Irish poet John O'Donohue recited his poem "Beannacht", meaning blessing, during an interview with Krista Tippett. We've woven his close friends' photographs of him in his Celtic landscapes with this reading. Produced by Colleen Scheck and Trent Gilliss.

John O'Donohue was an Irish poet and philosopher beloved for his book "Anam Cara" — Gaelic for "soul friend" — and for his insistence on beauty as a human calling and a defining aspect of God. Before his untimely death this year, he spoke with Krista in our studios. And so this hour has become a remembrance of him. But John O'Donohue had a very Celtic, lifelong fascination with what he called "the invisible world." And he would also surely see this also as a serendipitous continuation of his life's work — of bringing ancient Celtic wisdom to modern confusions and longings.

Interviewed shortly before his death, the Irish poet John O'Donohue recited several of his poems during his conversation with Krista. "The Nativity" is the eighth of eight poems that provide a preview of their conversation in The Inner Landscape of Beauty.

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.

Krista Tippett gives a live performance on April 5, 2007 at the Fitzgerald Theater in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota. Accompanied by Dan Chouinard and Marc Anderson, she reads from her 2007 book, titled "Speaking of Faith: Why Religion Matters--and How to Talk About It." Yes, we're a radio program, but sometimes the visual helps -- especially when trying to envision the exotic instruments in the background!

Americans have been hearing about Mormonism in the context of the presidential campaign. But we're learning about this faith of 13 million people indirectly, by way of rhetoric and defense. In this program, we avoid well-trodden, controversial ground and seek an understanding of some doctrinal and spiritual basics of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Robert Millet, a leading scholar of the church and a lifelong practitioner, describes a developing young religion with distinct mystical and practical interpretations of the nature of God, family, and eternity.

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 Godel and Alan Turing. Their work laid the foundations for computer intelligence while challenging fundamental notions about how we can know what is true.

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 second in a two-part series on influential leaders who are reshaping Evangelical Christianity from within progressive and conservative circles. The best-selling author of "The Purpose Driven Life," Rick Warren and his wife Kay lead one of the largest churches in the U.S. They are now partnering in global ventures to fight AIDS and poverty.

Evangelical Christianity has no single, central authority, but it does have guiding figures in every generation. Progressive social activist Jim Wallis has become something of a national celebrity, proposing a new agenda for religion in politics in what he calls the "post-Religious Right era."

Krista says the globe should welcome the challenge of sustainability as an invitation -- a way to strengthen moral resources such as delight, dignity, elegance, and hope: Our emerging national conversation about sustainability has a decidedly "eat your spinach" tone. We're steeling ourselves to enter the realm of sacrifice, and penance. But as I've explored ethics and meaning in American life these past few years, I've been struck by the heightened sense of delight and beauty in lives and communities pursuing a new alignment with the natural world. Innovation in sustainability often begins, I've found, with people defining what they cherish as much as diagnosing what is wrong. I think of Majora Carter. The cutting-edge project she founded, Sustainable South Bronx, began when she and the people of that borough began to reclaim their riverfront for refreshment and play. I think also of the author Barbara Kingsolver, who found in a year of sustainable eating that when it comes to food, the ethical choice is also the pleasurable choice. And she says that as we face the grand ecological crises of our time, one of our most important renewable resources is hope. We simply have to put it on with our shoes every morning. Recently we visited the Rural Studio at Auburn University in Alabama. There, architectural students build elegant homes and public spaces in poor communities. Long before sustainability was fashionable, the Rural Studio was innovating "zero-maintenance" design. This architectural philosophy shelters the body while honoring the environment and human dignity. The writer Frederich Buechner has said that "vocation" happens when our deep gladness meets the world's deep need. I'd like to propose the work of sustainability as an unfolding vocation – not merely a response to problems, but an invitation to possibility and a way to strengthen moral resources such as delight, dignity, elegance, and hope.

We travel to western Alabama to the Rural Studio. Scattered across it are some 75 works of livable art — elegant, sustainable homes and public buildings in some of the poorest counties in the United States. They're the products of an architectural adventure. Here, architecture serves as a "social art" — and as a force for repairing the fabric of human community as well as the natural world.

Former Burmese Buddhist nun and anthropologist Ingrid Jordt takes us 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.

Reinhold Niebuhr was a 20th-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.

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.

In this edition of SOF Unheard Cuts, Krista interviewed Sharon Brous, a Conservative rabbi in Los Angeles who is part of a Jewish spiritual renaissance. Here's your chance to listen to their entire, unedited conversation and observe the editorial process. And let us know what you think.

One in every 150 children is now diagnosed to be somewhere on the mysterious spectrum of autism. We step back from the controversies about the causes and cures of autism and explore one family's experience with an autistic child. 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. And they share what all of this is teaching them about what it means to be human.