On Being with Krista Tippett

As part of our SoundSeen series, photojournalist Stephanie Keith met a Vodou priest at a Buddhist interfaith event in New York. He invited her to photograph and experience the religious world of his Haitian culture. Ten ceremonies later, she offers her images and reflections on these late-night rituals.

We revisit Krista's 2005 conversation with Eboo Patel, who calls al-Qaeda the most effective youth organization in the world. But contrary to the wisdom of secular society, he's working to deepen rather than tame the religious energies of the young across many traditions. And he believes this may be our only chance for survival.

Twentieth-century Pentecostal evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson helped to popularize a charismatic faith that touched millions of people and now reaches an estimated half billion people. The eccentricity and integrity of Sister Aimee shed light on some of the most confusing and powerful religious currents in our world today.

As part of our SoundSeen series, photojournalist Diana Matar describes her exquisite series of images portraying a new generation of Muslim women in Cairo. These women are reclaiming and redefining the veil as a symbol of political dissent, piety, and fashion in contemporary Egypt.

We make a radio pilgrimage into the world of L'Arche, communities formed around people with mental disabilities and others who share life with them. At the heart of the L'Arche movement is a religious idea of difference as normal and imperfection as a source of strength.

With Salvadoran-American scholar Manuel Vasquez, we explore how religious and spiritual worldviews anchor Latino cultures and are reshaping North American culture in fascinating ways.

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. What can climate change and sustainability really have to do my family's daily routines? Where does the food we eat come from? And why do we resist when the healthiest choices can be a delight?

Dr. Esther Sternberg works at the molecular level of the mind-body connection. The language of genes, neurotransmitters, and hormones, as she describes it, is helping science understand how our emotions and our bodies are connected -- why stress can make us sick, and loving and believing can help us be well.

American ideals of courtship and marriage echo with Biblical imagery — "bone of my bones" "flesh of my flesh." But what does the Bible really say, and how has it been taught across the centuries in which the institution of marriage has changed dramatically? With a rabbi and a New Testament scholar, we explore nuances of biblical teachings about marriage, family, and divorce — the surprising ambiguities of the New Testament and the striking practicality of Jewish tradition across the ages.

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.

A film based on Mariane Pearl's memoir, "A Mighty Heart," opens in theaters, with Angelina Jolie in the starring role. Pearl was married to the "Wall Street Journal" correspondent Daniel Pearl, who was murdered by Al Qaeda operatives in Pakistan. He was killed in part because he was American and Jewish. Mariane Pearl, a Buddhist, spoke intimately with Krista about making sense of her husband's murder and her spiritual ethic on what she calls the front line of the war on terror.

We celebrate the life of performer, educator, and humanitarian Joe Carter with his exploration in word and song of the meaning of the African-American spiritual. Before his death last year at the age of 57, he traveled the world and introduced the spiritual to audiences from Novosibirsk to Nigeria. He had a singular understanding of the religious sensibility of this music -- its hidden meanings, as well as its beauty, lament, and hope.

Before a live audience at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, Minnesota, Krista reads from her book, "Speaking of Faith." She traces the intersection of human experience and religious ideas in her own life, just as she asks her guests to do each week. Krista 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.

In an adventure of travel and thought across India and Europe, Afghanistan and America, Pankaj Mishra followed the legacy of the Buddha. He developed a provocative critique of modern politics, culture, and economics as he pursued the social relevance of the Buddha's core questions: Do desiring and acquiring make us happy? Does large-scale political change really address human suffering?

For Memorial Day weekend, we revisit Krista's 2006 conversation with Chaplain Major John Morris. He reveals his experiences of war and its imprint on a soldier's spirit. He offers practical guidance for veterans and civilians for the sake of our common life.