n the year 2000, against strong opposition, the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act passed Congress by unanimous vote. It's supporters proclaimed that "God worked a miracle" that day on Capitol Hill. Our guest, John Mauck, was instrumental in crafting the ideas and language that became the Act. He tells us the story of how it became law.

Also on the show, Mary Morrison discusses pop music's body image problem

In part 1 of our interview with Phyllis Tickle, we explore the idea that our culture has been shaped by roughly 500-year cycles, which have helped define our major religious traditions for the past two millennia. According to Tickle, our present epoch - referred to by some as "The Great Emergence" - has the potential to yield a new Christianity distinct from Protestantism, Catholicism, and Orthodoxy.

Also on the program, Katy Scrogin reviews a new study of philosopher Alain Badiou by Hollis Phelps. 

This is part one of our conversation with scholar and author S. Brent Plate. Plate researches the way in which lived religious experience is influenced by materiality and physical objects. He discusses this issue in his latest book, A History of Religion in 5 1/2 Objects: Bringing the Spiritual to Its Senses.

Also on the show, we present an excerpt from the new Chicago Sunday Evening Club television documentary, Divided Families: Responding with Faith.

Kathryn "Kat" Banakis is a pastor, fundraiser, big data analyzer, and author. In part one of our conversation, we discuss all the twists and turns that helped lead to her work as a "bi-vocational" minister, caring for both a congregation and a workplace, and her recent book, Bubble Girl.

Also on the program, David Dault reviews the HBO crime drama, True Detective. 

Lillian Daniel has been the pastor of the First Congregational Church of Glen Elyn, Illinois for the past decade. In 2013, she caused a stir with the bold title of her book, When 'Spiritual but Not Religious' is Not Enough: Seeing God in Surprising Places, Even the Church. We talk about the ideas behind that title, as well as the influence Congregationalism and non-liturgical corporate worship had on early American democracy.

Also on the show, Katy Scrogin reviews the new book by S. Brent Plate, A History of Religion in 5 1/2 Objects: Bringing the Spiritual to Its Senses. 

For some, a lightning rod. For others, an international voice of reason and reconciliation. For us, a fascinating conversation about the face of Islam in contemporary international politics, and the vital need for hospitality and honest conversation between Islam and the west. We present the first half of David Dault's in-depth conversation with Imam Rauf, where we discuss misconceptions about Islam and the core of religious identity.

Also on the show, Katy Scrogin discusses The Man Who Quit Money, by Mark Sundeen. 

For the past decade Lillian Daniel has been the pastor of the First Congregational Church of Glen Elyn, Illinois. In 2013, she caused a stir with the bold title of her book, When 'Spiritual but Not Religious' is Not Enough: Seeing God in Surprising Places, Even the Church. In this episode, we talk more about the ideas behind that title, as well as the influence the church had on early American democracy.

Also on the show, Katy Scrogin reviews The Still Point of the Turning World, by Emily Rapp 

What does the Constitution really say about the separation of Church and State? Our guest, Wheaton professor Amy Black, discusses the concept of disestablishment, as well as the divide between politically-active believers and non-beleivers - the "God gap" - and what it means for both American history and current American political life. Dr. Black is the author of Honoring God in Red or Blue: Approaching Politics with Humility, Grace, and Reason.

Also on the show, Katy Scrogin discusses The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen Year Old Boy with Autism 

We continue our conversation with Dr. Amy E. Black about the history of Church and State relations in America. Dr. Black analyzes survey data to explore the "God Gap" - the political divide between believers and non-believers in our nation. Our conversation occurred as part of the Wheaton College conference on The Bible and Democracy in America, co-hosted by the American Bible Society.

Also on the show, we feature "Jesus the Muslim," a piece produced by our friends at the United Kingdom's Things Unseen podcast. 

Last October, Things Not Seen Radio went on-location to Wheaton College to speak to participants in their conference on the Bible and Democracy in America, co-sponsored by the American Bible Society. Our guest this week is University of Chicago professor and historian, Catherine Brekus.

Also on the show, Katy Scrogin discusses Martha C. Nussbaum’s book, Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice. 

Over a decade ago, pastor Lia Claire Scholl began a ministry among women who work in the sex industry. Her experiences with these women challenge our society's expectations about care, morality, and the Gospel. In part two of our interview, we learn about the personal costs of her work as a "harm reduction activist," and the vulnerable edge of caring for those who have passed beyond the range of social acceptance. We discuss her work and her recent book, I Heart Sex Workers: A Christian Response to People in the Sex Trade.

Also on the show, Alexander Badenoch discusses the relationship of writers' block to radio. 

After a life of spiritual wandering, Carl McColman found a home among the Trappist monks of the Monastery of the Holy Spirit outside Atlanta. Now a practicing Lay Cistercian, McColman balances family life with contemplative practices inherited from these ancient traditions. McColman is the author of a dozen books, including Answering the Contemplative Call: First Steps on the Mystical Path, and The Big Book of Christian Mysticism: The Essential Guide to Contemplative Spirituality.

Also on the show, Katy Scrogin reviews Occupy Religion: Theology of the Multitude. 

After she finished college, Beth Katz felt a calling to facilitate interfaith conversations. So she started in the place she knew best - her hometown of Omaha, Nebraska. Now, Project Interfaith is almost a decade old, and has garnered international recognition. This is Part 2 of our interview. You can listen to Part 1 here.

Also on the show, Katy Scrogin reviews Blasphemy, a collection of short stories by Sherman Alexie. 

This is part 2 of our interview with Chris Stedman, assistant humanist chaplain at Harvard University and author of Faitheist: How an Atheist Found Common Ground with the Religious. 

Also on the show, Katy Scrogin reviews The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality, by Andre Comte-Sponville. 

Reverend Fletcher Harper is an ordained Episcopal priest and environmental activist. Since 2002 he has been the executive director of GreenFaith, an ecumenical religious organization dedicated to ecological repair and justice.

Also on the show, Katy Scrogin reviews Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists. 

Reverend Fletcher Harper is an ordained Episcopal priest and environmental activist. Since 2002 he has been the executive director of GreenFaith, an ecumenical religious organization dedicated to ecological repair and justice.

Also on the program, Katy Scrogin reviews The Man Within My Head by Pico Iyer.

David LaMotte has been writing and perfoming music all over America and the world for over two decades now.  In 2008 he put music on hold to accept a Rotary World Peace Fellowship to study International Relations, Peace and Conflict Resolution at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia.  He is the author of two books, S.S. Bathtub, a children's book based on one of his songs, and White Flour, which is based on events that occurred during a two thousand seven protest of a rally by the Ku Klux Klan.  LaMotte describes the book as a story of humor conquering hatred.

LaMotte has also been a key organizer of The Abraham Jam, an occasional evening of music and poetry featuring musicians from the Jewish, Muslim, and Christian faiths.

Our senior producer, Katy Scrogin, reviews Toward a True Kinship of Faiths: How the World's Religions can Come Together, by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. 

The word "postmodernism" has had an interesting history over the past fifty years. Originally, the term described a style of architecture. The word postmodern has since spread to all aspects of culture. Moreover, it has become a key term in the culture wars, especially with regard to certain strands of religious faith.

Postmodernism in these contexts is viewed as the enemy of rationality, revealed religion, and even truth itself. But not all persons of faith agree with this assessment of postmodernism. Our guest, Aaron Simmons, sees postmodernism as one way for religions to recapture a lost humility in the public sphere. For Simmons, postmodernity has less to do with denying truth than it does with saying that truth has certain characteristics that make objectivity and absolute certainty difficult.

Aaron Simmons is assistant professor of philosophy at Furman University in South Carolina. He is the author of God and the Other: Ethics and Politics after the Theological Turn, and he is the editor of several other books dealing with philosophy and religion.

Our senior producer, Katy Scrogin, reviews the film A Late Quartet, directed by Yaron Zilberman and starring Christopher Walken and Phillip Seymour Hoffman. 

By the final years of the twentieth century, nuclear weapons policy in the United States was governed by the dictum of Mutually Assured Destruction. The US stockpiled nuclear weapons in hopes of assuring that nuclear weapons would never be used against us.

Our guest this week, Rev. Tyler Wigg-Stevenson, insists this policy of nuclear deterrence is outdated and morally problematic. Deterrence cannot account for the possibility of nuclear terrorism. It is also impossibly expensive and ecologically ruinous.

How should churches respond in light of these realities?  Is there a Christian message of hope for a humanity that now possesses the power to end itself?  This week, we wrestle with these unsettling but vital questions.

Rev. Tyler Wigg-Stevenson is the chairman of the Global Task Force on Nuclear Weapons, an initiative of the World Evangelical Alliance, and is the founding director of the Two Futures Project, a movement of American Christians for the global abolition of nuclear weapons.  He is the author of the forthcoming book, The World is Not Ours to Save: Finding the Freedom to Do Good (IVP Books, March 2013) and Brand Jesus: Christianity in a Consumerist Age.  He writes frequently for the Huffington Post and Christianity Today.

Our senior producer, Katy Scrogin, reviews Christian Anarchism: A Political Commentary on the Gospels, by Alexandre Christoyannopoulos. 

On Palm Sunday in 1990, attorney Jeanne Bishop received a phone call with the news that three members of her family - including her sister - had been brutally murdered. We take the full hour of our show this week to hear Bishop's account of her twenty-five-year journey towards forgiveness and reconciliation with the man who killed her sister.

Bishop is the author of the forthcoming memoir, Change of Heart: Justice, Mercy, and Making Peace with My Sister's Killer. 

This week we take the full hour for David Dault's in-depth interview withMichelle Alexander, author of the groundbreaking 2010 book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

"Our system of mass incarceration has had the effect of creating a permanent undercaste in America," says Michelle Alexander, noting that - particularly in the wake of the "war on drugs" of the past thirty years, persons of color across the United States have lost their rights as citizens to vote, hold jobs, and participate in productive society.

In this wide-ranging interview, our host David Dault talks with Nancy Ellen Abrams, author of A God That Could Be Real: Spirituality, Science, and the Future of Our Planet, about new discoveries in cosmology and their profound effect on our understanding of the universe and religion.

Abrams argues that new revelations in physics and cosmology overturn our traditional understandings of religion. But rather than arguing for atheism, Abrams calls for a grounding of faith in the language of science - a tune-up for the "truth box" we use to describe the world.

Abrams is a philosopher of science, lawyer, and author. She is married to the cosmologist Joel R. Primack, who helped develop the understanding of dark matter and dark energy in the universe. 

As a result of an eating disorder, Abrams joined a twelve-step program. She found herself struggling with the concept of a "higher power." This questioning led her to thoroughly re-examine the basis of religious belief, in light of the discoveries made by her husband and his colleagues.

The result is A God That Could Be Real: Spirituality, Science, and the Future of Our Planet, whichintroduces the reader to a redefinition of God that is both true to her heart and consistent with cutting-edge science.

According to Abrams, we’ve all grown up so steeped in tradition, whether we’ve accepted it or rebelled against it, that it’s hard to grasp that the chance to re-define God is actually in our hands. “But it is,” she proclaims, “and the way we do it will play a leading role in shaping the future of civilization.”

With Primack, she co-wrote The View from the Center of the Universe: Discovering Our Extraordinary Place in the Cosmos, and The New Universe and the Human Future: How a Shared Cosmology Could Transform the World.

You can find out more information about her book at her author website. 

We're re-visiting our 2014 interview with Phyllis Tickle. In our conversation we explore the idea that our culture has been shaped by roughly 500-year cycles, which have helped define our major religious traditions for the past two millennia.

According to Tickle, our present epoch - referred to by some as "The Great Emergence" - has the potential to yield a new Christianity distinct from Protestantism, Catholicism, and Orthodoxy.

About every five hundred years, something really big happens. This is the claim made by our guest, Phyllis Tickle, about human cultures over the last several thousand years. If correct, her analysis can help to explain the major shifts is religious practices in the West - the rise of Christianity from Judaism, the Great Schism, and the rise of Protestantism. Moreover, Tickle claims, we are living in a time of the next major shift: a "new thing" is coming, a distinct form of Christianity that is different from - but related to - Catholicism, Protestantism, and Orthodoxy.

In this in-depth conversation, Dr. Tickle and David Dault discuss the problems in defining and naming this new epoch - Emerging? Emergence? Emergent? - and the ways in which non-religious fields like sociology, quantum physics, and nanoscience are shaping our understanding of religious faith in the 21st century.

Phyllis Tickle was the founding editor of the Religion Department of PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, the international journal of the book industry. Tickle is an authority on religion in America and a much sought after lecturer on the subject. She is the author of over two dozen books on religion and spirituality. You can learn more about her work at her website.

This week we revisit our 2012 interview with John J. Thatamanil,in which we discuss the growing field of "religious pluralism" - where the boundaries of "religion" are loosened and faith traditions are encouraged to mix and blend.  While a controversial concept to some, Thatamanil insists that theologies of religious pluralism are simply exploring the reality of religious mixture that has always been happening, whether we admit it or not. 

John Thatamanil is professor of theology and world religions at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, and is the author of The Immanent Divine: God, Creation, and the Human Predicament.  He is also a frequent writer of editorials for national newspapers and contributor to the Huffington Post. 

In this week's episode we revisit our 2012 interview with Furman philosophy professor, J. Aaron Simmons. Over the course of the hour he helps us understand "postmodernism." Despite the fear some Christians have about the postmodern turn, Simmons is convinced it is complementary with an honest, searching religious identity that takes scripture and tradition seriously.

We also speak frankly about the challenges and opportunities he encounters as a person of faith in a largely secular academic field. 

Just in time for Holy Week and Easter: In this hour-long interview, we speak with Fr. Jim Martin, editor of America Magazine and former chaplain of the Colbert Report, about his new book, Seven Last Words: An Invitation to a Deeper Friendship with Jesus

Michael O'Loughlin is the reporter behind Plague: Untold Stories of AIDS and the Catholic Church. This six-part podcast series premiered on World AIDS Day in December 2019. 

O'Loughlin is interviewed by Dr. David Dault, a Catholic theologian and the executive producer and host of Things Not Seen.