Religion & Spirituality

The New York City band Golem describes its music as punk-klezmer. On Tanz, they mange to find new ways to balance urban irreverence with folk tradition.

Polish-born director Pawel Pawlikowski's new film centers on an orphan who learns the secret of her past when she's on the brink of becoming a nun.

Critic Maureen Corrigan recommends two graphic novels -- one about a Yiddish advice column in the early 1900s and another about a regiment of African-American soldiers who fought during World War I.

Barbara Ehrenreich -- a rationalist, atheist and scientist by training -- has written a new memoir called Living With a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything.

Fresh Air listens back to our 1989 interview with Snow Leopard author and Paris Review co-founder Peter Matthiessen, who died Saturday at age 86. His new novel In Paradise comes out Tuesday.

In How Jesus Became God, Bart Ehrman explores how a Jewish preacher from Galilee was transformed into a deity. "Jesus himself didn't cal himself God and didn't consider himself God," Ehrman says.

In Little Failure, the novelist recounts his emigration from the USSR to the U.S. when he was 7. For the first few years, he says, he would sit alone in the school cafeteria, talking to himself in Russian "in this gigantic fur hat and fur coat." It wasn't long before a teacher advised, "Children won't play with you if you have that much fur on."

His new book, Dissident Gardens, follows three generations of an activist family, from Rose, a secular Jew and communist, to Sergius, her commune-raised grandson. The book is fiction, but its characters were inspired by Lethem's own family story.

At 60, New York City composer John Zorn is wiser, sure, but no less prolific, thoughtful and antagonistic than before. He tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross that, at his age, "there are no more doubts."

Reza Aslan converted to Christianity when he was a teenager, but became more interested in Jesus than as a Messiah. His book, Zealot, considers Jesus in the context of the time and place he lived in.

Author and journalist Yoram Kaniuk died June 8 at age 83. He joined Fresh Air's Terry Gross in August 1988 to talk about fighting in the Israeli underground and his belief that, for Israelis and Palestinians, "the only way is to live somehow together."

Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg met as adolescents on the Vancouver bar mitzvah circuit -- and soon after began writing the script for what would become the movie Superbad. Their project This Is the End, is a disaster-movie spoof in which the Rapture hits home in Hollywood.

"The more carny it got, the better I liked it," King says of his new thriller, Joyland. The book, set in a North Carolina amusement park in 1973, is part horror novel and part supernatural thriller. King talks with Fresh Air's Terry Gross about his career writing horror, and about what scares him now.

The New York Times reporter talks about spending much of the past year with rebels in Syria. Chivers is also the author of The Gun, about how the AK-47 has defined modern warfare.

In The Child Catchers, Kathryn Joyce explores the outsized influence of evangelical Christian groups on the overseas adoption industry. The adoption movement has orchestrated a boom-and-bust market that can exploit poor families in countries where regulations are weak and "orphans" may not actually be orphans.

The director's latest cinematic meditation on the meaning of life stars Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams, Olga Kurylenko and Javier Bardem and revolves around the question of how we might locate the presence of God in the everyday and how we can accommodate ourselves to our expulsion from the Garden.

As Deputy Director of President George W. Bush's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, Kuo hoped to be a force inside the White House advocating for the poor. He left after two years, disillusioned and believing he had been used solely to recruit evangelical voters. Kuo, who died Friday at 44, talked to Fresh Air in 2006.

John Thavis covered the Vatican from Rome for nearly 30 years while working for the Catholic News Service. In his new book, The Vatican Diaries, he describes a place much less organized and hierarchical than the public imagines.

On her latest album, Claroscuro, the jazz clarinetist explores influences that range from Louis Armstrong to Brazilian music to that of her native Israel. It's the desire to adapt the instrument to so many musical traditions that has earned Cohen such acclaim.

Adam Nossiter, the West Africa bureau chief for The New York Times, is one of the few reporters covering the situation in northern Mali, where Islamist extremists allied with al-Qaida have taken control after a coup destabilized the country in April.