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
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Religion and Philosophy
Margery Kempe was one of the world's most famous Christian mystics — a medieval pilgrim with a penchant for uncontrollable sobbing. More
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
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
Author and professor Simon Critchley offers a dangerous idea that concerns time. And death.More
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
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
Anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann's Dangerous Idea? To be better adjusted, change the way you think about thinking.More
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
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