Four stars go to KSFR host Chris Goldstein's interview of astronomer Carl Sagan's widow about her late husband's new book, "Varieties of Scientific Experience: a Personal View of the Search for God," a collection of lectures Sagan gave for the Gifford Foundation in 1985. During the 11 years since he died, the views Sagan espoused so passionately in 1980 on his 13-part TV series, "Cosmos," have succumbed to the current Zeitgeist. His faith in science, which amounted to religious fervor, has suffered a drubbing during The George W. Bush Years. Lately, believers in Intelligent Design prefer to think of the Earth as merely thousands of years old.

The book's editor Druyan laments this pre-Copernican creationism. Deep down, the compartmentalization of science and religion strikes her as shallow. When she steps outside and gazes up at the stars, she is looking back many thousands, even millions of years. Just like Galileo in 1609, today, nearly four hundred years later, she's excited to think of The Creation as embracing what America's Founding Fathers, mainly Deists, referred to as Nature's God.

For Druyan the universe is "counter-intuitive": rather than clinging rigidly to a credo, we need to be able to adapt our beliefs to new knowledge about Nature. "Science," she says, "is a very humbling spiritual discipline, which requires a degree of devoutness and faithfulness to its ethos." For example, when we discover new distant clusters of galaxies and quasars, we may need to revise our intuitive hunches about the outer limits of the known universe. Ditto vis-a-vis our beliefs about a Judeo-Islamic-Christian deity. Listening to our twenty-first century's version of a music of the spheres, we may hear what one poet called "ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds."

Goldstein's conversation with Druyan may be anathema to "the religious right." As an interview, it is all the more remarkable considering that it was built into KSFR's March 2007 fund drive.