On Being with Krista Tippett

It's about this child, Amul who is very ill and his doctor has refused to allow him out of his room. He's confined to his bed in his room.

And the watchman has yors him that the raja himself would soon be sending him a letter and almost longing for that vast and beautiful earth becomes intensified into his longing for that letter. It arrives and he's read.

It was produced in the Warsaw ghetto by a great child psychologist, Janusz Korszak who knew what was happening in Warsaw and chose this play to be dramatized acted over there.

I don't, I don't do book interviews per say. I find that when people are on book tour it's the least revealing an interesting time for them to talk about what they do.

But so, okay. I'm just going to say. In case you are in all interest, I'm a little blurrier. I was on the, I was on, you know, communicating with the Muslim brothers. I had the Egyptian Muslim brothers in Cairo all this morning before they pushed off to the, to the demonstrations.

So, I'm really interested in the sweep of your work and your thought and what you know. And of course we will also tell people about the book.

Because those are the terrorists. Those are those who would be terrorists or would be us or our friends. And it is up to us and how we deal with the political world. And the hopes and dreams that emerge in their own societies that will decide whether they go one way or the other.

At the beginning of your book, which is called Talking to the Enemy Faith, Brotherhood and the Unmaking of Terrorists, right? Before the table of contents, you have this absolutely beautiful picture of children. Looks like they're either coming out of school or going to school. They're beautiful children. It's kind of a heartbreaking picture in a lovely way.

I got into this utterly by accident. It was really the last thing I planned to do.

I tended to think of it as a general trend towards progress. I now have some doubts.

In the 1840s when large numbers of Catholics, particularly Irish Catholics come to this country. They encounter a fair degree of prejudice from Protestants not all Protestants but certainly many.

Uma never had a notebook again. The Notebook of her husband on the other hand went down accumulating, designing dissertations and thorny theories. There was no one to seize it from him and destroy it for the benefit of mankind.

It's about this child, Amul who is very ill and his doctor has refused to allow him out of his room. He's confined to his bed in his room.

And to go to a lot about this, it's such understanding because he'd known imprisonment of as a child, the imprisonment of the spirit, not the body.

And when it goes a little boy would be confined to his immense and rather gloomy family home in Calcutta. He could only gaze with longing at this limitless thing called outside, flashes sounds and sense of which used to come and touch me through interstices.

And there's another base similar story. Again, it's only a few pages long, it's called The Notebook.

Uma never had a notebook again.

The Notebook of her husband on the other hand went down accumulating, designing dissertations and thorny theories. There was no one to seize it from him and destroy it for the benefit of mankind.

There's a little tiny book a small play called the Post Office in which this is best represented.

It was produced in the Warsaw ghetto by a great child psychologist, Janusz Korszak who knew what was happening in Warsaw and chose this play to be dramatized acted over there.

I was once given a book by a man who, and what's his name? It'll come to me. It'll come to me. In his library he collected hymnals. And I was just thumbing through his library. And I found this one little book called Spiritual Songs.

I got into this utterly by accident. It was really the last thing I planned to do.

And what struck me as all the more strange of course was that the folks who were being accused holding this view religious dissenters minorities. I happened to know from other work. Never advocated separation of Christian state or separation of religion and government.

In 1840s when large numbers of Catholics, particularly Irish Catholics come to this country. They encounter a fair degree of prejudice from Protestants not all Protestants but certainly many.

And in some cities going so far as to engage in full scale riots to strine Catholic neighborhoods.

Yes, we now think of the Klan mostly as a racist organization and it was that. But it also had other animosity and in that sense I suppose they were more varied than is often assumed.

At the very beginning of my conscious life and my efforts to attain and grasp the solidity to which my innate demand for planetoid and pelg me. And I try to above all to capture the essence of matter by looking for it in its most closely defined and concentrated and heaviest forms.

Then it was that my newly born attraction to the world of rocks began to produce the beginning of what was to be a permanent broadening of the foundations of my interior life.

the truth is that he's never been able to feel at home even at the peak of his spiritual trajectory unless immersed in an ocean of matter.

St. Augustin who wrote probably the most important book about the Holy Trinity ever written, and an enormous work in abstract Latin exploring. If we are created in the image of God and God is Trinity then how is the human soul, a Trinity?

And at the end of this enormous work on which he spent so many years, he said, We have said this not in order to say something but in order not to remain altogether silent.

He sold more copies than the Bible. I mean, he had more money than God.