A conversation with celebrated novelist E.L. Doctorow on creation from Genesis to Huck Finn, Hemingway to Einstein.

Descartes said “I think, therefore I am.” Bestseller Russell Shorto reminds us it’s more complicated than that, in his new tale of faith, reason, and “Descartes’ Bones.”

Philosopher Susan Neiman gets back to basics in her new book “Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists.”

Kerry Kennedy — daughter of Bobby and niece of JFK — joins us to talk about what it means to be Catholic now.

Forty years after Robert Pirsig began the journey that became “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” we retrace his tracks and his philosophy of life.

“He does not speak for me,” says Barack Obama, of his former Chicago pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright. But Jeremiah Wright keeps speaking anyway.
After weeks of lying low, in the past week Rev. Wright has been all over: with Bill Moyers Friday night, preaching in Dallas and speaking before the NAACP on Sunday, taking questions at [...]

Next week Pope Benedict makes his first papal visit to the United States. He won’t come wagging his finger at a country in moral decline, as some may expect. We’re told he will come with a gentle message, eager to share his church’s values of honesty and love of faith.
But the big question is how [...]

In our post-9/11 world, religion is often seen as one of the most divisive forces. And for good reason. Religious extremism drives conflicts from Afghanistan to Iraq, fuels terrorism from Europe to Sri Lanka, and makes enemies of Israelis and Arabs.
And yet, says scholar Alan Wolfe, the world is not headed for a new era [...]

Sister Olga Yaqob was born and raised in Iraq. She came of age in the terrible years of Saddam Hussein’s rule and hard Western sanctions. She worked with the poor and wretched in the streets of Baghdad and in Abu Ghraib prison long before American troops took the Iraqi capital.
For the last half dozen years, [...]

There was a time in the 1970s when you could not pass a telephone pole or bulletin board on an American college campus without seeing a flier with the long, flowing hair and beard of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the guru who brought transcendental meditation to the West.
When the Beatles trekked to his ashram in India [...]

“Faith doesn’t just influence me,” Mike Huckabee told evangelicals last week. “It defines me.” And then he lost in South Carolina to John McCain.
In Nevada, labor lined up for Barack Obama, then Clinton took the vote. And Latinos carved their own way over political and color lines.
These are big players, speaking for the first time [...]

It sounds like a culture-war set piece: Hollywood rolls out a religious-themed Christmas blockbuster and conservative believers go ballistic. That was the story this weekend with the release of “The Golden Compass.”
Based on the wildly popular fantasy novels by British author Philip Pullman, a famously outspoken atheist, the film casts God and the Church as [...]

In Alan Lightman’s new novel, “Ghost,” you’re never quite sure what to believe.
But Lightman, a theoretical physicist who a decade ago gave us the bestselling novel “Einstein’s Dreams,” knows what he’s up to. He wants to explore the edges of belief — both religious and scientific.
David, his protagonist, works at a funeral home, and one [...]