Becoming Wise

Paul Muldoon holds the Howard G.B. Clark chair in the Humanities at Princeton University. He has served as the poetry editor at the The New Yorker since 2007. He is the author of 12 major collections of poetry, including “Horse Latitudes,” “Hay,” and “One Thousand Things Worth Knowing.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Paul Muldoon — A Conversation with Verse.” Find more at onbeing.org.

Stay. That’s the message that philosopher, poet, and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht puts at the center of her unusual writing about suicide. She’s traced how the history of Western civilization has, at times, demonized those who commit suicide, and, at times, celebrated it as a moral freedom. She has struggled with suicidal places in her life and lost friends to it. As a scholar, she’s now proposing a new cultural reckoning with suicide, based not on morality or on rights but on our essential need for each other.

Jennifer Michael Hecht is a poet, philosopher, and historian. Her books include “Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It,” “Doubt: A History,” and “Who Said.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Jennifer Michael Hecht — Suicide, and Hope for Our Future Selves.” Find more at onbeing.org.

A transformation of medicine is underway, a transition from a science of treating disease to a science of health. Mark Hyman is a family physician and a pioneer in the new discipline of functional medicine. James Gordon is an expert in using mind-body medicine to heal depression, anxiety, and psychological trauma. Penny George became a philanthropist of integrative medicine after she experienced cancer in mid-life. Before a live audience at the University of Minnesota, they discuss the challenge and promise of aligning medicine with a 21st century understanding of human wholeness.

Mark Hyman is the director of the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine. He is also the founder and medical director of the UltraWellness Center. He’s a practicing family physician and a best-selling author. James Gordon is the founder and executive director of the Center for Mind-Body Medicine and a clinical professor in the departments of Psychiatry and Family Medicine at Georgetown Medical School. Penny George is the board chair of the Penny George Institute Foundation, which supports the work of the Penny George Institute for Health and Healing at Allina Health in Minneapolis, the largest hospital-based integrative medicine program in the U.S. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Penny George, Mark Hyman, and James Gordon — The Evolution of Medicine.”

The folk rock duo Amy Ray and Emily Saliers have been making music for over 25 years. They’re known for their social activism on-stage and off, but long before they became the Indigo Girls, they were singing in church choirs. They see music as a continuum of human existence, intertwined with spiritual life in a way that can’t be pinned down.

Amy Ray and Emily Saliers are singer-songwriters who have been making music together as the Indigo Girls for 30 years. Their latest album, “One Lost Day,” was released in June 2015. Emily Saliers is also the co-author of “A Song to Sing, A Life to Live: Reflections on Music as a Spiritual Practice.” Amy Ray’s latest solo album, “Goodnight Tender,” was released in January 2014. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Amy Ray and Emily Saliers — Music and Finding God in Church and Smoky Bars.”

The philosopher Simone Weil defined prayer as “absolutely unmixed attention.” The artist Ann Hamilton embodies this notion in her sweeping works of art that bring all the senses together. She uses her hands to create installations that are both visually astounding and surprisingly intimate, and meet a longing many of us share, as she puts it, to be “alone together.”

Ann Hamilton is a visual artist and self-described maker. She is Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Art at Ohio State University. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Ann Hamilton — Making, and the Spaces We Share.” Find more at onbeing.org.

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks is the former Chief Rabbi of Great Britain and one of the world’s deep thinkers on religion in our age. He’s just released a new book, “Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence.” In this intimate conversation with Krista, he speaks about how Jewish and other religious ideas can inform modern challenges. Rabbi Sacks says that the faithful can and must cultivate their own deepest truths — while finding God in the face of the stranger and the religious other.