On Being with Krista Tippett

One year ago this month, Hurricane Katrina brought horrific pictures of urban poverty in America into all of our living rooms. Dr. David Hilfiker tells the story of how concentrated poverty and racial isolation came to be in cities across America. He lives creatively and constructively with questions many of us began to ask in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

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.

Author Anchee Min has won acclaim for her memoir of growing up in China under Mao Zedong. She's also written several works of fiction in which she explores the human hunger to survive against extreme social brutality. In this conversation, Anchee Min tells us what she learned about the human spirit in the forced labor camp in which she spent her teenage years, and how she's found healing in America.

Our culture's acrimonious debate on the morality of gay marriage has been framed in religious — largely conservative Christian — terms. With Richard Mouw and Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, we go behind the rhetoric to explore the human confusion, hopes, and fears this subject arouses. We'll name hard questions that these religious people on both sides of the issue are asking themselves, and that they would like to ask of others.

From the Scopes Trial to school board controversies in our day, Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution are portrayed as a refutal of the very idea of God. With Darwin biographer James Moore, we'll learn about the world in which Darwin formulated his ideas and how he took religion seriously.

With Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, we explore the literary and religious journey that unfolded after Night, his memoir of the Holocaust that has climbed to bestseller lists five decades after its publication. We hear passages of his varied writings of the last 50 years. And, we explore his thoughts on God and evil, youth in Jerusalem and Berlin, and prayer after the Holocaust.

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. 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.

In over 50 years as a Benedictine nun, Sister Joan Chittister has emerged as a powerful and uncomfortable voice in Roman Catholicism and in global politics. If women were ordained in the Catholic Church in our lifetime, some say, she would be the first female bishop.

The word healing means to make whole. But historically, in a field like cardiology, Western medicine has taken a divided view of human health. It has stressed medical treatment of biological ailments. Cardiovascular surgeon Mehmet Oz speaks about the intersection of Western medicine, human spirituality, and the physiology of the human heart.

How do parents and grandparents nurture the spiritual and moral awareness of the children in our lives? Rabbi Sandy Sasso has written books that help children and adults of many backgrounds discuss religion and ethics together. The spiritual life, she says, begins not in abstractions, but in concrete everyday experiences. And children need our questions as much as our answers.

Poet and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht has published a sweeping, lyrical history of the world's great doubters, and she shows that the act of questioning, as much as the act of believing, has changed the world.

The wildly popular novel turned movie reimagines the New Testament, in part, as a cover-up. What really happened in the fluid early years of Christianity? What is the truth about Mary Magdalene? We separate fact from fiction in the story's plot with two New Testament scholars, Luke Timothy Johnson and Bernadette Brooten, who say that the story is simpler and much more interesting than conspiracy theories suggest.

Since September 11, 2001, 1.3 million military men and women have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. More than one million have returned home. Chaplain Major John Morris has helped to develop a pioneering program, the first of its kind in the country, to support the reintegration of National Guard and Reserve members into their lives, their families, and their communities.

For many modern Americans, the very idea of reciting an unchanging creed, composed centuries ago, is troublesome. But, Jaroslav Pelikan, a scholar who has devoted his life to exploring the vitality of ancient theology and creeds, insists that even modern pluralists need strong statements of belief. Here, we revisit Krista's 2003 conversation with him, who, then, in his 80th year, had released a historic collection of Christian faith from biblical times to the present and from across the globe. They discuss the history and nature of creeds, and how a fixed creed can be reconciled with an honest, intellectual faith that changes and evolves.

Richard Cizik is evangelical Christianity's key advocate before Congress, the White House, and the Supreme Court. In a wide-ranging and unpredictable conversation, Cizik speaks about new directions for politicized evangelical Christianity — from climate change and the war in Iraq to the virtue of humility. If you think you've got American evangelicals figured out, he may surprise you.