On Being with Krista Tippett

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.

Vodou is the African-based spiritual world of the people of Haiti, a living religion wherever Haitians are found. It involves dramatic rituals and drumming, trances and dreaming, and belief in a spiritual realm that mirrors the physical world and interacts with it. But contrary to popular notions, it has nothing to do with sticking pins into dolls. With Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, a scholar who is also a Vodou priest, we explore its practices and metaphysics.

The news has been marked in recent years, at regular intervals, by the moral and practical downfall of prominent businesses. 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."

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.

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 in grand historical perspective, China is a crucible of religious and philosophical thought and practice. Anthropologist and filmmaker Mayfair Yang says that the upheavals of the 20th century created an amnesia -— in the West as in China itself -- about this rich, pluralistic spiritual inheritance. She traces some of this story for us, and describes a subtle new revival of reverence and ritual.

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.

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.