fox news will have a consultant for contributor for ten years the opinion shows at night are basically commercials for the rnc, msnbc is a virtue signaling to democrats in much the same way. these institutions become in some way co-opted in the political process and we are told because we only listen to media outlets we always agree with the demonization become self-perpetuating and we see the other is a person who that is wrong but against our very way of life and wants to destroy all we hold dear. that is part of the answer rig right. >> that's a taste of "suicide of the west", jonah goldberg's new book, subtitle of the rebirth of tribalism, populism, nationalism and identity politics is destroying american democracy. thank you for your few minutes here in miami. >> great to be here. thank you very much. >> the miami book fair continues now.

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we can enjoy the programs. as you know, there is a microphone and the federal aisle that you can use during the q&a session and i ask you post your questions and take a seat. welcome everyone again. today, at this time we are honored to have elaine in conversation with pbs jeffrey brown. let's welcome them to the stage. [applause] just a little bit about our honored guests here.

as you know elaine is a preeminent academic, impressive scholarship has earned her international regard. the harrington professor of religion at princeton universi university. she was awarded the rockefeller, guggenheim and macarthur fellowship. in three consecutive years. [applause] she is the author of the agnostic gospels. why religion? a personal story is her most recent book. why is religion still around in the 21st century? why do so many people still believe? we will hear from her life interact in a few moments. she is in conversation with jeffrey brown jeffrey is a

senior correspondent and chief arts correspondent for pbs news hour and also the author of the portrait collection. is welcome again our guests. [applause] >> thank you. thank you very much. i hope a little that applause means there's news hour you are secure. good. i had to say that because we are on c-span, you know anyway, thank you for having me and elaine for doing this. >> i'm happy to be here. >> will talk for about 20 minutes or so and open it up. you will have a lot of questions. i've been able to read the book but you probably have not so we will talk about why you did it and what you are thinking about and start there. it's your well-known for the scholarly books.

this is something very differe different. >> definitely different. i thought i would never do but the book our history and i love to do that and i thought there were some people who said history was toast and i thought i love toast. [laughter] >> what kind of toast is your favorite? >> it was not just that. this book came out of some very personal experiences and also the awareness that the questions i have are part of a spiritual quest in a way. can't help it. they just are. i finally wanted to write in a different way about how i connect with the work i do. and the work is a yoga for all the issues that i've been encountering. >> this is you and i were just talking about this earlier the word memoir because it's a part

memoir but you don't love the word or you do not -- no? >> no, i don't love the word. it sounds specific. i did not want to write just about that but write about why religion? that's the question that a lot of people say why do that? that's a question i've been asking myself since i started. especially because i grew up in a family that was culturally protestant but not religious. i father had given it all up in darwin and he found something better than presbyterian. i was told religion would die out as soon as people were educated enough to know something about science. of course, that has not happened. i would not say that it's a matter of people leaving things but these traditions still

engage us in a way whether we believe in them in some, i don't know, dogmatically or not. >> i was surprised to learn a lot of readers and clearly your father was apprised when you first found religion through attending a talk by billy graham and one of the billy graham crusade, born again at the age of 15. >> oh, yes. it was great. i do not expect that but happen to go to san francisco with a group of friends in high school were going -- anything in san francisco would be more interesting than where i was living in palo alto i did not know what was but 18000 people packed into a sports stadium in this very intense, passionate, good-looking preacher talking about america in ways no one had ever talked about that i had heard and then talking about being born again in having a new life. if you are 14 that's

irresistible, at least it was for me. great age for conversion. also the emotional power of that experience. the thousands of people in the choir it was an opening to the imagination opens up the sky and you live in a bigger world. that's what it felt like as long as i was in the room. >> you fell out of the group. >> i did. >> and in many ways in reading your story you are a child of those times and like many people trying a lot of different things and by the way, one of it it turns out we will not go into the story but one of the elaine's friends in her early years happens to be a fellow named jerry garcia, from the grateful dead. he appears in the story. you are trying a lot of different things and have it immediately left her music and

the arts and this sense of religion is something to learn about when you tell us in the book when you apply to school and to graduate schools what was it like, four or five different subjects you had in mind? >> yes, i did not go to graduate school at this point but when i decided that was the next plan i applied it in five different steels. >> five different schools. i think it was english at columbia, art history and nyu, society in brandeis and [inaudible] you can do hinduism, buddhism, judaism and that is what i opted for. that sounded fascinating. >> why? pgh for someone who is so open to all these other possibilities?

>> well, because of the emotional power of that experience i was curious about what hit me for years earlier when i had that encounter with powerful religious base was it christianity or any religion and what was it about that? it's really so much about the music and poetry and the passion and the imagination, whatever drew me to painting and music and art and poetry. that was all part of it. >> this question of the title of the book that runs thought the book, "why religion" is there from the beginning and once you're in school and there especially when you meet the man who would become your husband was a scientist and he's the one who says to you why in the world religion? he says why religion? why not something that has an impact in the world? [laughter] and i thought why elementary

particle physicist? you can see them in any way. [laughter] but you believe in them. no, i'm just joking. we like each other very much quite apart from those subjects. but it was a challenge and the question i was asking myself because of not so much an advocate for religion not saying you should be that way for engage in it or not but so many people i know do fine without any connection with any religious tradition. per se. artists and poets and theater people and musicians and all kinds of people, scientists and people who work for the community and they may or may not be engaged but for me it was the emotional power of the language and like poetry it's powerful. i think about marianne moore, a poet, who says poems are

imaginary gardens with real tones in them. i think that is what religions are too. human realities in all of those imaginary gardens. >> so much in our society is about and i kept thinking about this in your book so much of it is about saying one can accept or if we put religion over here and we put music over here and put religion over here and science over here. they don't meet. but they clearly do for you. >> yes, they did. i realized going up in a family of scientists and having married one who is unusual that idea that there is identical to each other is so out of date. real 19th century stuff. they address completely different questions. for example -- maybe i should

not name names but someone lik like -- steven weinberg at the university of texas is famous in 18 nobel prize in physics and one of my husband's colleague says the more we know about the universe the more we find it pointless. quantum physics does not say that. einstein said the more we know about the universe the more we know about an intelligent ener energy. they are very different paradigms the people who try to jump from one to the other in some way like that just miss what they what science and religion are. as i said i'm not just an advocate for it because there's plenty of liabilities in these religious traditions, the way they can limit people in the way they harm people and i think we need to be aware of that, to. >> these kind of questions are running throughout the book but the core of the book and clearly the most personal part of it and

about the double tragedies that you suffered at a certain time at first, the death of your son followed by a year later the death of your husband who we have been talking about. the death of her son was -- he was born with a rare illness so from the moment he was born in a sense you had to deal with the possibility. >> of losing him. only biological child. ... from which people die, usually at the age of 6 to 7, or sometimes in their 20s, and they

said it's just, you know, there's no treatment and there's no cure. >> then he did die at the age of 6? >> yes, he was 6 years old. >> you write very powerfully and movingly about what that was like. i want to ask you what was it like to go back and write it? was it hard? >> it was nearly impossible. and it would have been impossible for about 25 years after it happened. this is more like 28 years. and then it became kind of necessary, which i didn't expect. and if i were to write about it, why publish it. that was something i wasn't sure i would ever do. >> you were thinking -- you mean you wrote without being sure whether you would put this out to the world? >> absolutely. it was too personal. but then sometimes as we get older, some things that you lived through and put behind you because they're too painful to

engage, you have to go back to and that's what happened. i had to go back to it. it was very, very hard. hardest thing i've ever written. but you know, doing that places a certain perspective on things that we think we can't survive. >> death of a child is not something we talk about much. >> what you discover if people know about it is they will tell you that it happened to them and i learned how many people who have had that experience don't talk about it or you know, it's to say oh, yes, my child died and people back away, i'm so sorry. and i would now say oh, what happened? because i can talk about it now and i think that's very helpful. so one of the things i was thinking about this book when i decided hey, why not?

why not? write about it and publish it, because i do think there are many people who have had that experience for whom this could be useful, i hope. >> so a year later, your husband died in a rock climbing accident. you by that time had adopted two young children so you had to go on yourself, but you had to figure out how to do that. not only as a person, as anybody would, but you were someone who had looked at the teachings of grief and life and mortality, how people have dealt with that through the centuries. >> yes. i mean, after our son died, we thought i didn't want to go the rest of my life thinking your children are going to high school and getting married and

my child died when he was 6. we adopted two children because we needed children as much as those children needed parents, and that was very important part of my life. the book is dedicated to them. they are now in their late 20s. i lost that. >> where did you look to for coming to -- what is the term, is the coming to terms, coping with the grief? >> it's not even coming to terms with it. it's just allowing the experience to come out of a black hole that trauma can inflict. i mean, it's part of the way the brain protects itself, you know. it was like a place i could never look into. it was too dark. but then i had to, and you know, i do find that has helped a lot. yeah. >> but you went back to religious texts.

i mean, the ancient question of what kind of god allows this to happen. >> well, i don't think about -- i don't think god allows it or doesn't allow it. i mean, i just don't think about god that way. but i did wonder how people can go on and survive, and these traditions are partly designed to move us toward hope. that's what they do. they do that often very well with the music, poetry, rituals, practices, and so my work -- by the way, at the time these things happened, when our son died, and even more, the terrible loss of my husband, we had been 22 years inseparable, i wasn't sitting around thinking about god. i was devastated. absolutely devastated. it's only much later that i began thinking -- i thought

about satan. i thought satan, yeah, i could get mad at satan. i'm not angry at god. that doesn't make any sense. then i started to write a book about satan and turned into a book about the origins of christian anti-semitism. i wasn't looking for that. it just came right out and that was real surprising. i found that the work became a kind of yoga. sort of what keeps you going. and both being critical of it and being deeply engaged by it. >> what else did you learn about grief? does one get past it? do we have this idea of closure in our society, i can see where your response, but tell us. >> somebody said to me not too long ago how did you ever get over it and i said what makes you think i'm over it? you get through it.

and you can go on. you can go on to other relationships, you can go on to love other children and love other men, lovers and so forth. it's not that you can't move beyond it and this book is part of that process. part of speaking about that process of moving on. but you know, i think you can get through it. it's not ever over. i'm sure anybody here who has had that kind of experience knows that. >> you just said to us that it took you 25 plus years to write about it. >> yes. >> in the writing, did that help in the end or did it change the way you think about those -- that experience and the grief and the loss? >> it mostly changed the way i feel about it, because when the feelings are bottled up that long, it kind of released a lot of emotion. it was a very hard thing to do. it took seven years. it's a really short book but it took seven years to write it.

and yes, it helped more how i feel about it. i didn't think about it much, because you can't think much about those things. >> we were talking about divisions of science and religion, and you think about our culture today politically, all kinds of ways, so divided. sometimes around religion. people who believe and follow certain traditions and that affects the way they look at our politics, people who perhaps do not. what do you see? what role does religion play in our divided culture today? >> it's a good question. i don't think of it, you know, primarily as what do you believe because belief is particularly important to christians more than to muslims or people from other traditions. judaism is more a matter of to what degree do you practice. i don't think about what i believe very much.

but i do think that these stories, stories of adam and eve, which we don't, most of us here don't believe. i won't ask for a vote, but i don't believe that literally at all, but those stories carry the values of a culture. that's what i realized when my husband and i went to the southern sudan and were looking at the creation stories from a friend of mine who had written a book about the dinka creation stories and realized these are ways cultures transmit their attitudes about sexuality, about gender, about death, about work, about what's worth living for and how people die, and those values are so deep in the way we think about sexuality in terms of our laws, the way we think about politics, the way we think about the relationship of human beings and nature, are we separate from it, or are we part of it. those creation stories have all those messages encoded.

i think we need to know what they are, those messages, and some of them we might accept still and some of them we would say no, i don't accept that anymore. it's a matter of cultural self-knowledge. >> but if i put -- if i push you further and say so what do you believe? >> i believe a lot of things. i believe my car will start but that's because it usually does. i mean, i think we believe on the basis of experience. i would say i believe that people can get through things that they can't imagine they could survive. at least that's what happened for me. and i think that's worth knowing. i'm glad i know it now. i don't mean i could get through anything. who knows? but that was a surprise. and the way that people have, and much worse things. i was never dealing with violence, you know, with a son or daughter killed by guns or

drunk drivers or war or any of the terrible things that happen to so many people. and yet, you know, there are twhas people, i will not say find meaning because we didn't just find it there on the ground, you know. i think people do create meaning by taking actions that matter to change circumstances. >> but then this is almost like going back to basics, given your title, but how do you define religion? >> i try not to, because it's so hard. what is religion? well, i guess i'm thinking about a whole -- i'm thinking kind of empirically about a collection of writings, of stories, ancient creation stories, poems, rituals, prayers, chants, music.

that's what i think of when i think of christian tradition, jewish tradition, buddhist tradition, muslim tradition. this huge collection. that's why you can't just say well, do you believe, are you a christian. somebody stood up and asked me at one point, i was talking about the other gospels, do you believe jesus is the son of god. i said i wasn't sure what he was getting at so i said what do you mean by that? he looked totally puzzled. i thought is he saying are you a member of my club or do you know the secret handshake? it becomes -- >> but people do define themselves as i'm a christian or i'm a jew or i'm a muslim. >> right. >> that means something very specific to them in terms of what they believe in. do they believe in god, do they believe in certain practices. >> yes. and i'm not claiming to be

neutral on that at all. i grew up in christian tradition and i find that very familiar. i participate in it. there are many things i love about it and some things i don't love about it. i feel rooted in that. that matters, particularly the values of it. after our son died, in the book "beyond belief" i said i don't think i believe in anything at that point. but there were deep values about the connectedness of human beings, the way we need to treat each other as a human species that are part of those traditions that i feel very deeply about. >> i'm going to ask you one more question, then open it up, so start thinking of your own questions, please. part of the story is this intellectual voyage and when you were first known, became known to the world, it was for looking at these what became known as

the nostic gospels which changed the story, right, and made it a whole history of religion, early christian religion, messier in some ways. >> much messier. >> much messier. you also write about how hard the reception was at the time, right, disdain in some ways among your peers. i'm wondering where does that stand now? in terms of in the academy or in the kind of -- among historians, is that story more accepted now? >> yes, and there are many stories there. that's a great question. see, i don't think it's a matter of just believing or not believing in something, but when you suddenly find a whole bunch of secret gospels that were censored 1600 years ago and burned, and they're wonderful, some of them, then you can think about it. a lot of people don't know you

can think about religion as well as feel about it. to me it's mostly a language of emotion but it's also, as you say, it contains values. it contains perceptions. it contains convictions. this enables us to really think about it very differently. yes, there are people today who will say those secret gospels are part of a much wider story. now we know so much for about christianity, the way the dead sea scrolls widely expanded our sense of jewish tradition. jewish tradition isn't just what rabbis think. it's weird apocolyptic traditions that jesus and john the baptist and others preached thousands of years ago. so i think most scholars that i know are very open to a much wider range of those traditions and there are some, mostly in departments of theology like at cambridge university in england, who will say these are basically

still garbage. they were garbage in the first entry, they are still garbage. we just stick to the ones the church endorses and we stand with the creed. i don't stand there anymore. >> why don't we open things up. i will ask if you have questions. there's a microphone here. please keep it to one actual question, if you could. thank you. >> we have lots of actual questions. >> i wish you would talk about the power of community from being a member of a religious organization. when i went through breast cancer, my temple, temple israel greater miami, was so supportive it was amazing. i don't think i could have done so well without them. >> that's a very good question. i'm really glad you brought that up because i don't mean to think, you know, i look in the abstract at this at all.

the religious communities can be enormously powerful and some of them saved my life. the trappist community in colorado, though i'm not a roman catholic, i go to a wonderful church with an extraordinary man who's a priest who's remarkable. and other groups of many kinds. i'm so glad you brought that up. thank you. >> reincarnation is very commonly taught in the east. my understanding is that it was originally, well, at least at some point in christian tradition, it was part of the tradition. my question is, when did it start, when did it end and why? >> great question. i don't think we know the answer to all of it, but i wrote my doctoral dissertation on an egyptian christian from the third century, died in the year

250, and he speaks about being born in many galaxies and he uses the language of reincarnation. extraordinary powerful christian thinker but that teaching was declared heresy in the fifth century after his death, and as far as i know, most christian traditions just have, you know, jee rejected it. not sure why. >> i wonder, i wanted to know if you had any ideas on church membership or even the relationship of religion to churches. we see many traditional christian denominations and religions like, faith traditions like unitarian universalism shrinking in numbers and we see kind of prosperity churches growing in number.

if you had any ideas on that. >> it's a good question. you know, when i think about why religion, i'm not thinking about how many people go to churches, because so many people who are exploring different ways of coming to terms with their lives are not involved with churches at all. or other religious groups, either. so i'm probably not the best person to ask. i have colleagues who are sociologists of american religion but i would need to give that more thought. thank you. >> i would like to hear any comments you have about books by two academics. "why religion matters" and "human evolution."

>> the other one is? >> robert bella's "religion and human evolution." >> they are both very interesting writers. i haven't looked at that book. he was at the university of california, right? s sociologist as well. houston smith was somebody i learned a lot from. i don't know what else to say but appreciate those books. thank you. >> hello. would you say based on your training as a historian, any of the belief systems, any of the religions you would see as the most plausible? >> i'm sorry, can you speak a little louder? >> sure. would you say that based on your training as a historian that there would be any of the faith systems or any narratives that you have come across religiously speaking that would seem to be the most plausible based on historical inquiry, and if not, what would you say is an ideal,

if any? >> an ideal affinity? >> if any, as far as a meta narrative for humanity. >> i don't know if there is one, you know, because these cultures have very different religions. when i read certain -- i can speak specifically but i'm not sure there's one. i'm thinking when i look at the way certain people embody and articulate traditions, they make complete sense to me. one of them is james cohn's recent book, "the cross in the lynching tree," a christian theologian. i'm reading a book now by a buddhist llama who talks about his tradition in a way that's very powerful but i don't think we have one meta narrative for the human race. maybe when we get more unified as a global community, that might emerge. do you think so? >> that's a good question.

>> it's a question i think worth asking. yeah. >> yeah, and just looking at it from an objective standpoint or as best as possible, considering the fact that we're not omniscient, we didn't exist outside of the town we were born in. that's why i pointed back to the historic message to see if there's any validity based in the records, especially with regards to what you have stu studied, new testament ma manuscripts and things of that nature. >> i think they are so rooted in particular traditions. take jewish tradition. that story about the exodus. the story about passover. those traditions are so rooted in that history and muslim tradition is rooted in a very different history. i don't see how history -- as if it were abstract and not specific to this culture and not

culture -- can do the work that you're asking about. >> thank you. >> thank you. >> if i could just before we continue, just because i have to be the timekeeper, so we will go through the line here, then no more questions, okay? >> i was wondering after reading the gospel of thomas, i thought that a lot of the description in it had the kingdom of heaven described very much like buddhism, what they call nirvana. i can't name the passages right now but i was wondering if you could speak to that, it also being in gospel of thomas, a religion of experience rather than a faith. >> yes. that's a really interesting point that you raise. the gospel of thomas claims to be the secret teaching of jesus and when i read it first, half

of it is very much like what you find in the new testament and half of it is very different. it sounded to me a lot like buddhism. i thought it could be influenced by buddhism. i don't think a village rabbi like jesus went to india, but the tradition did and it came back influenced by that. then i also deeply connected with jewish mysticism. it could be the teaching of a first century rabbi like jesus. i don't know. but it's a really interesting question you raise. >> i lost my 26-year-old daughter last year and as an atheist myself, i'm wondering how you feel about the afterlife and how you feel about communicating with your son and your husband. >> that's an interesting question and a necessary one, i think, in those circumstances. i feel a mix about it.

i had experiences, i will call them experiences i can't explain. i assumed when my son died, i was brought up as a rationalist to think it's what steve jobs called lights out, right? but that's not the way it felt when he died. other things happened that surprised me. i write about them because i thought hey, i don't know, i can't explain them. but they happened and they happen to a lot of people. so i find myself open to that question. i don't know how to answer it, but i'm still sort of hoping that there's something wonderful and that we can see them again, but i don't know. i hope so. >> thanks for coming. my question's real personal. you talked about the increment of time before you were able to write this book and also that you needed to, i think it was a

necessity, you said. >> right. >> i wanted to know what was the thing that happened at that time in your life that made you say or that it organically came about, if you know? what was it that did that? >> you mean to write at that point? >> yeah. >> i think both of my children were out of the house, for one thing. >> great time. >> and i was teaching. but there was finally time to reflect, you know. and sometimes when you have had events in the past that you just blunted out of your mind, because they are too painful to encounter at the time, they come back. and they did. so without a lot of hard emot n emotional work, i couldn't keep just shoving them down. so when i had more time to explore them and enough distance, i would say, from it, more than 20 years, it was possible to engage it without as much terror.

>> thank you. >> hello. thank you so much for being here. i have a million questions i could ask you but i'm going to do my best to bring it down to just one. i have always been, and both my parents are ministers, raised in the church. i lost my religion after college. then i found it again a few years ago. i literally went through a moment of grief in my life that brought me back on a spiritual journey. along the way, i found your book and i started learning about your work through another friend of mine and it completely changed my perspective and widened it. so my question to you is when i think about the experience of early christians, the multiplicity, the diversity, the mysteries that were part of that experience, and how over time, dogma, doctrine,

institutionalization of religion has stepped out like from, i think of someone like campbell when he talks about the larger, the mysteries or mythologies or little stories and impact our lives. i'm a millenial and i'm finding others like myself, we are looking for meaning and answers outside of religion as we know it in terms of institutional structures, but are asking different questions, whether it's through people doing more yoga or these type of experiences. what is your perspective about the shifts that are happening right now in this moment in history, as we think about how do we do spirituality, do religion, in a way that makes sense for our reality right now? >> that's a great question. a big one. you know, what strikes me is when i look at the history of christianity, i write in this book a lot about the gospels. and the one that i came down

really liking best in the new testament is mark. because it has no easy answers. it sounds like the world that we live in, much more than the others. and there was a christian movement for 300 years before there was a creed. i think the stories you talk about are much more important than the doctrine. you know, when christianity becomes a set of doctrines in the nicine creed, that's useful to construct a church that claims to have a monopoly on divine power, but it doesn't speak to the issues you're raising and it didn't speak to mine. thank you. >> you talked about being in that place where you couldn't look into the black hole and then you got to the place where you could, and you said, you described how you couldn't push it down any longer.

do you think it's the same for everyone, that it's like part of a spiritual process, or is it only just the i can't push it down any longer? i know plenty of people who seem like they can push it down forever. >> yes, absolutely. i don't think anything is the same for all people. that's why there are so many different traditions and variations. i think some of us can push it down our whole lives. after these losses, i saw my husband's mother, who was a wonderful woman, just go into pain and despair and i didn't want to go that way. i mean, i think that's another way to go, but it's not a way i wanted to go so i thought is there an alternative to that. how do we maintain hope. >> one more. >> i just have a simple question.

why religion? >> great question. i don't know. i wrote a book. >> yeah, the answer is read the book, right? >> if i could answer that in ten words, i wouldn't have written this book. because i think when we talk about religion, it's not one thing, of course, it's a huge range of traditions and beliefs and experiences. so that's why i can't answer it. in a simple way. >> thank you for all of those questions and for your attention. elaine pagels, "why religion." i'm just going to mention that elaine will be signing her book across the hall at the elevator if you want to pick up a copy.