Religion and Philosophy

Religious historian Jeffrey Kripal believes that anomalous experiences — near-death experiences, telepathic dreams and other primal spiritual encounters — are the deep roots of religion. You might call it "religion before it becomes religion."More

Greg Cootsona was born again on February 8, 1981. And this is his “testimony.”More

Water walkers

Since 2003, Grandma Josephine Mandamin led fellow Anishinaabe women on sacred “water walks” around Great Lakes. Fellow water walker, Siobhan Marks, tells her story.More

Margery Kempe was one of the world's most famous Christian mystics — a medieval pilgrim with a penchant for uncontrollable sobbing. More

Left to right: mathematician Georg Cantor, mathematician, and philosopher Kurt Gödel, mathematician and political activist Evariste Galois, and  mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing.

There’s a well-documented link between exceptional creativity and mental illness. Philosopher Jim Holt recounts stories of some of the most beautiful minds in math and science. Were their achievements worth the personal costs? Absolutely.More

A push of the clock

Dan Pink has written several books about motivation, work and behavior. His most recent, called “When,” is all about timing. He says people facing an ending seems to push people in new directions.More

A flower at the end of life

Author and professor Simon Critchley offers a dangerous idea that concerns time. And death.More

Crossing the plains of the Gnostic Gospels

The religion scholar Elaine Pagels introduced the world to the ancient Gnostic Gospels. 25 years later, she's finally ready to talk about how her own grief — after the deaths of her young son and husband — shaped her religious imagination.More

horoscope

Astrology, the Myers-Briggs test, and even Buzzfeed place you into the same archetype as thousands of other people. So why turn to them? It comes down to crafting a personal narrative using archetypes.More

Trapped in our bulb

Anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann's Dangerous Idea? To be better adjusted, change the way you think about thinking.More

guilt for smoking

A lot of people feel guilty about something - diet, money, relationships or something else. Our host Anne Strainchamps and writer Devorah Baum definitely do. So we asked them to sit down to talk about how we wound up about in a giant cultural guilt trip.More

Adam and Eve

We decided to trace Western culture's fixation on guilt back to one of its earliest origins — the story of Adam and Eve. It's only a page and a half in the Bible, but literary historian Stephen Greenblatt told Steve Paulson why it has been so influential.More

Winged victory

Religion scholar Serinity Young noticed the famous Greek statue "The Victory of Samothrace" in the Louvre Museum and couldn’t stop thinking about it. She spent more than 20 years investigating winged women and found them everywhere.More

plant

Sabrina Frey has metastatic ocular cancer, but she's already lived longer than her doctors expected. What can we learn from how she looks at life? For one, she lives in the moment.More

TTBOOK

Benjamin Kunkel is not only a bestselling novelist and co-founder of the literary magazine n+1. He tells Steve Paulson why he's also a become Marxist public intellectual. More

"Religion always starts with mysticism," says David Steindl-Rast. Now 89, he's been a Benedictine monk since 1953. More

Getting a good night's sleep is hard for a lot of people, but imagine trying to drift off when you have terrifying hallucinations.More

When evangelical Christians say they talk to God, what do they mean? Anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann wanted to find out.More

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