.Historian Jeffrey Kripal makes the case for taking paranormal phenomena more seriously.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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Quaker writer, educator and activist Parker Palmer believes people need to listen to their inner voice in order to make the right life choices.
British novelist Jim Crace is an atheist. He doesn't believe in an afterlife, and tells Jim Fleming that he intended his novel "Being Dead" to be a comfort to readers.
Paul Stoller is an anthropologist who studied sorcery with the Songhay people in Niger. Years later he developed lymphoma and only then did he understand some of what his teacher had been trying to teach him.
Author John D'Agata and fact-checker Jim Fingal talk about the boundaries of literary nonfiction as chronicled in their book, "The Lifespan of a Fact."
How do you set poetry to music? Grammy Award-winning jazz composer Maria Schneider did it with Ted Kooser's poems, sung by Dawn Upshaw. She tells Anne Strainchamps how she finds beauty in her art.
"The Passage" has been described as "an engrossingly horrific account of a post-apocalyptic America." The author says the idea came out of a discussion with his nine-year-old daughter.
Cosmology is on our minds, with the remarkable new discovery confirming the Big Bang. To get a better sense of what it all means – and how creation stories like the Big Bang have shaped our sense of ourselves – Steve Paulson turned to Adam Frank, an astrophysicist who writes for NPR’s science blog 13.7. He’s the author of the book “About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang.”
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