On Being with Krista Tippett

Financial advisor Nathan Dungan sees the global financial collapse as something that was architected. And, he argues, these values of consumption and materialism are instilled early on in children through marketing and family behavior. He finds culpability in all of us and says that we need to return to the strong sense of thrift and service that built the United States.

As a society, we're increasingly aware of the many faces of depression, and we've become conversant in the language of psychological analysis of depression and medical treatment for it. But there is a growing body of literature by people who have struggled with depression and found it to be a lesson in the nature of the human soul. In this program you'll hear intimate conversations with author Andrew Solomon, Quaker activist and educator Parker Palmer, and poet and psychologist Anita Barrows on their lived and spiritually edifying experiences with depression.

Poet Katie Ford lived through the natural disaster of Hurricane Katrina, and the financial and social crisis that ensues. For her, this economic crisis is an opportunity to reevaluate what's truly worthy of trust and faith. And, she says, it's the poetry of James Wright, a man who lived through the Great Depression that helps her put the current economic climate in perspective.

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.

Activist Majora Carter says she doesn't think of her work at Sustainable South Bronx as a moral endeavor, but a pragmatic one. Nevertheless she looks on this period of economic tumult as a chance for being happy and passing that on to others.

President Obama has cited Reinhold Niebuhr's teachings as significant in shaping his own ideas about politics and governance. In a public conversation, Krista Tippet interviews conservative columnist David Brooks and liberal columnist E.J. Dionne about the great public theologian's legacy and ideas -- and what influence they may play a role in the future of American politics.

Novelist Anchee Min grew up during the Cultural Revolution in Mao's China. Living in the United States for several decades, she offers a challenging assessment of American reactions to these times based on her harsher experiences.

As the bicentennial of Darwin's birth is celebrated, we seek to understand the world that formed him, and what his observations about the natural world really said about God. Darwin took religion seriously, but he understood creation as an unfolding process. He rejected the Victorian idea of a God who had fixed every detail -- including every social flaw and injustice -- at the beginning of time.

The Buddhist teacher and author Sharon Salzberg reflects on our current culture and its inability to acknowledge the inevitability of suffering. We hide from it, and hide it from others. She argues that we need not fear this, but look to others for compassion and wisdom and generosity as well as being touch with ourselves.

Mary Doria Russell has grappled with large moral and religious questions on and off the page. We discover what she discerned -- in the act of creating a new universe -- about God and about dilemmas of evil, doubt, and free will. The ultimate moral of any life and any event, she believes, only shows itself across generations. And so the novelist, like God, she says, paints with the brush of time.

The Harvard Humanist chaplain Greg Epstein finds that these economic times have prompted him to think about community and activism differently. He finds humanists and atheists are learning to define themselves in terms of activism and outreach rather than just protesting the religious faithful.

A few years ago, journalist Pankaj Mishra pursued the social relevance of the Buddha's thought across India and Europe, Afganistan and America. He emerged with a startling critique of Western political economy that is even more resonant at present. Mishra is the author of "An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World," and a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, and The Guardian.

SOF First Person continues its series on the economic downturn with Dr. David Hilfiker, who gives insight into the issue of poverty and its modern history. Hilfiker discusses how poverty is as much of an issue now as it ever has been, and how the current economic situation might provide an opportunity to renew a social contract between the affluent and the needy.

We travel to a monastic library that rescues manuscripts from across the centuries and across the world. And there are worlds in this place on palm leaf and papyrus, in microfilm and pixels -- stories of ordinary life as well as the rise and fall of civilizations. We explore this with Fr. Columba Stewart, a Benedictine monk and its executive director, and Getachew Haile, an Ethiopian scholar who has led some of its most intriguing work. In their lives as in this work, the relevance of ancient manuscripts to people of the present, and the cultural cargo of the past itself, are revealed in a new light.

SOF First Person continues its series on the economic downturn with Dr. Esther Sternberg, a rheumatologist and stress researcher. She doesn't see the financial crisis in moral terms in so much as biological ones. She elaborates on these scientific points and then relates them on a personal level, often by looking inward and exposing the frailty of her own humanity.