“With charity people don’t ask, do I get better value for my money by giving to this charity rather than that one? That aspect of market thinking, that I want value for money, is something the effective altruism movement is trying to bring into philanthropy.” More →

December 11, 2015

“People are going back to the basic texts, and they’re stripping away centuries of culture and tradition and looking for what they see at the heart of the religion,” says American journalist Carla Power, author of If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran. More →

November 3, 2015

“What I really loved about researching this book was reading [Abraham Joshua] Heschel on the Hebrew prophets. He says these are some of the most confounding and troublesome men who ever lived, and I’ve always been attracted to brave idealists—the people who take the human condition, the ethical framework, and push it a bit further.” More →

October 16, 2015

“This is a joy that stands up and says, ‘Even in the midst of darkness and loss, I will still fight back and rejoice,'” says the evangelical author of “Fight Back with Joy,” a memoir of her journey from grief to joy despite breast cancer. More →

April 3, 2015

“With the death of Thomas Merton, we lost really one of the great Catholic voices, one of the great prophetic figures within the Catholic Church. And I think that’s why his books are still selling, why they’re still being translated because that message is as relevant today as when he wrote it,” says Dr. Paul Pearson who oversees the Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University. More →

January 30, 2015

“My goal is to be present,” says this writer and spiritual teacher, to the “emotional reality” of Native Americans and “put it in the voices and characters of real people. My job is to present a truth that you will embrace more fully if you believe it as you read it.” More →

October 31, 2014

A new book by religion scholar Reza Aslan portrays Jesus as a Jewish revolutionary and just one of many in a line of “failed messiahs.” “It was a phenomenon that was quite widespread and that led to a number of rebellions and insurgencies throughout the first century,” says Aslan, “and the argument of the book is that those zealot ideals and principles are at the heart of Jesus’ teachings and actions.” More →

November 1, 2013

“On the one hand, knowing what it is to worship Jesus has given me a profound sense of respect for the faith of Christianity…But I also, as a historian and a scholar of religions, have been able to look at Jesus in a sense unburdened by dogma and doctrine.” More →

November 1, 2013

Baseball, like religion, has its own relics, prophets, rituals, and in the game’s most magnificent moments, a sense of “the ineffable,” according to John Sexton, president of New York University and author of “Baseball as a Road to God.” More →

April 26, 2013

He is a Catholic deacon as well as a professor of English and creative writing, and his many novels come face to face with “the imponderables of life.” More →

September 7, 2012