Christianity

Bob Hunter, a member of the secretive religious group The Family, responds to a November Fresh Air interview about the group's role in both U.S. and Ugandan politics. Hunter is credited as the liaison between the Family and leaders of the current Ugandan administration, which has proposed a brutal anti-gay law.

Investigative journalist Jeff Sharlet traveled to Uganda to meet with the man who wrote an anti-homosexuality bill that calls for life imprisonment and the death penalty for gay Ugandans. Sharlet explains how U.S. religious leaders have encouraged the anti-gay sentiment in Uganda.

The evangelical radio host recently made national news for leading an attack against Mitt Romney's openly gay national security spokesman, who later resigned. But Fischer's viewpoints on abortion, gay marriage, education and taxes have been influencing his listeners long before this.

The author's What Happened to Sophie Wilder features a convert to Catholicism and another character who struggles to understand her faith. Beta talks about his Catholic upbringing, iron's place in fiction and literature's therapeutic aspects.

In his new novel, The Testament of Mary, Irish author Colm Toibin imagines Mary's life 20 years after the crucifixion, as she wonders what she might have done differently to ease her son's suffering. "I felt that I was Mary," he says. "I was her consciousness, watching the thing happening."

Kevin Kruse's book looks at how industrialists in the '30s and '40s recruited clergy to preach free enterprise. And under the Eisenhower administration, Christianity and capitalism moved center stage.

Comic Pete Holmes grew up a devout Christian so when he started doing standup he had to find out how he fit in. His new TV series Crashing is based on those experiences.

Barbara Brown Taylor is an ordained Episcopal priest who left the pulpit to become a professor of religion. She is also the author of a couple of best selling books. Her new book is about how teaching the religions of the world changed her understanding of her own faith, and how her Christian students responded when she took them to mosques, synagogues, and buddhist temples.

Bart Ehrman says the ideas of eternal rewards and punishments aren't found in the Old Testament or in the teachings of Jesus. His new book is Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife.

In 1977, Spong became one of the first American bishops to ordain a woman into the clergy. In 1989, he was the first to ordain an openly gay man. Spong died Sept. 12. Originally broadcast in 1996.

Bible scholar Bart Ehrman says interpretations of the Book of Revelation have created disastrous problems — from personal psychological damage to consequences for foreign policy and the environment.