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
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Religion and Philosophy
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
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
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
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
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
"Religion always starts with mysticism," says David Steindl-Rast. Now 89, he's been a Benedictine monk since 1953. More
When evangelical Christians say they talk to God, what do they mean? Anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann wanted to find out.More
"To The Best Of Our Knowledge" producer and interviewer Charles Monroe-Kane started hearing voices when he was a child. He became a child preacher once he thought God was talking to him. More
Philosopher Alva Noe has a theory about art. He says art is like philosophy, and the best art is disorienting and uncomfortable. It...More
Religious scholar Michael Muhammad Knight thinks that most religions, including his own Islamic faith, have a secret history of magical practice.More
Shulem Deen was a Skverer— a member of one of the most insular Hasidic sects in the U.S. Then he got curious about secular life and the world outside his small village in Rockland County, NY. The community branded him a heretic and expelled him.More
Writer Rod Dreher on how his faith compelled him to return home in search of forgiveness.More
Psychologist Robert Enright breaks down cognitive steps to letting go of trauma.More
The story of one famous mathematician’s obsession with the ancient and mystical and numerical world of the Kabbalah, from Shlomo Maital of the podcast "Israel Story."More
During the last two years of his life, Philip K. Dick tried to make sense of a series of strange visionary experiences. Jonathan Lethem explains how these events changed Dick's life.More
The central question of Philip K. Dick's fiction is "What is reality?" Literary critic Umberto Rossi explains that Dick's work often contains many possible realities.More
If people were more empathetic, the world would be a better place, don’t you think? Paul Bloom thinks perhaps not.More