Paul Elie is a senior fellow with the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and the director of the American Pilgrimage Project. His books include “The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage” and “Reinventing Bach.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Paul Elie — Faith Fired by Literature.” Find more at onbeing.org.

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The writers Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy, social activist Dorothy Day, and the Trappist monk Thomas Merton — all four shared a complex Catholic faith. Paul Elie takes us on a kind of literary pilgrimage through a Catholic imagination that still resonates in our time.

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David Hartman was an Orthodox rabbi and founder of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. He authored many books, including “A Heart of Many Rooms” and “The God Who Hates Lies.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “David Hartman — Hope in a Hopeless God.” Find more at onbeing.org.

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David Hartman died a year ago this week. The Orthodox rabbi was a charismatic and challenging figure in Israeli society, called a “public philosopher for the Jewish people” and a “champion of adaptive Judaism.” We remember his window into the unfolding of his tradition in the modern world — Judaism as a lens on the human condition.

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The coming stage of evolution, Teilhard de Chardin said, won’t be driven by physical adaptation but by human consciousness, creativity, and spirit. We visit with his biographer Ursula King, and we experience his ideas energizing New York Times Dot Earth blogger Andrew Revkin and evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson.

 

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Ursula King is Professor Emerita of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Bristol. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Ursula King, Andrew Revkin, and David Sloan Wilson — Teilhard de Chardin’s “Planetary Mind” and Our Spiritual Evolution.” Find more at onbeing.org.

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Patrick Bellegarde-Smith is a professor at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee and author of many books about Vodou. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Patrick Bellegarde-Smith — Living Vodou.” Find more at onbeing.org.

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The word “Vodou” evokes images of sorcery and sticking pins into dolls. In fact, it’s a living tradition wherever Haitians are found based on ancestral religions in Africa. We walk through this mysterious tradition — one with dramatic rituals of trances and dreaming and of belief in spirits, who speak through human beings, with both good and evil potential.

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What do a fiction writer and an astrophysicist have in common? Marilynne Robinson and Marcelo Gleiser connect the dots between the cosmos, our minds, and all the ways we discover the story of where we came from.

This is On Being’s unedited conversation with Marilynne Robinson and Marcelo Gleiser. She’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and essayist. He’s an astrophysicist and professor at Dartmouth College. Krista Tippett spoke with them on October 15, 2012 at a public event in Philadelphia, “The Mystery We Are.” Download the mp3 of the produced show at onbeing.org.