Religion & Spirituality

The evangelist minister and broadcaster played a critical role in the rise of conservative Christianity. Kennedy founded the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Florida, which now has 10,000 members. His radio and TV shows were broadcast around the world. Kennedy stated that one of his goals was to "reclaim America for Christ," closing the gap between church and state.

We listen back to an interview with Kennedy from May, 2005.

In The Deadliest Lies, Anti-Defamation League national director Abraham Foxman responds to The Israel Lobby, arguing that Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer's work "serves merely as an attractive new package for disseminating a series of familiar but false beliefs" about Jews and Israel.

Tammy Faye Messner, the onetime first lady of TV evangelism, died Friday at the age of 65; she had battled cancer for years. Terry Gross interviewed the former Tammy Faye Bakker on January 15, 2004, about the rise and fall of the ministry she led with ex-husband Jim Bakker, the puppet show that gave them their start, and her surprising later life as a gay icon.

The cross-cultural crew that is the New York band Balkan Beat Box came together around two Israeli musicians, Tamir Muskat and Ori Kaplan.

Their latest album is called Nu Med; world music critic Milo Miles has a review

The Rev. Jerry Falwell, founder and pastor of Lynchburg, Va.,'s Thomas Road Baptist Church and an outspoken leader of the religious right, died yesterday at age 73; we remember him with an interview recorded in the early days of Fresh Air's national broadcast. In 1979, Falwell founded a movement he called the Moral Majority and helped return the Republican Party to power with the election of President Ronald Reagan. Falwell also founded Liberty University, an evangelical institution believed to be the largest of its kind. Rebroadcast from March 14, 1986.

Maz Jobrani, Ahmed Ahmed and Aron Kader make up the Axis of Evil Comedy group. (They're of Iranian, Egyptian and Palestinian descent, respectively). Their special premiered on Comedy Central last month. It's out on DVD this week.

Geneticist Francis Collins is director of the National Human Genome Research Project. He is also an evangelical Christian, and author of the book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.

Journalist Dan Gilgoff is the author of the new book The Jesus Machine: How James Dobson, Focus on the Family, and Evangelical America Are Winning the Culture War.

Gilgoff — a senior writer at U.S. News & World Report — gained rare access for a reporter to the Focus on the Family organization. He writes about how Dobson's group became the most powerful group in the Christian Right.

Writer Stefan Kanfer. His new book is “Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Mishugas of the Yiddish Theater in America.” It’s about the glory days of Yiddish theater in the late 19th and early 20th century. Kanfer was a writer and editor at Time magazine for 20 years and is the author of many books including biographies of Lucille Ball and Groucho Marx.

Richard Cizik is the vice president for governmental affairs of the National Association of Evangelicals, a lobbying organization that represents 45,000 churches. He is a conservative Christian who preaches the message of environmentalism from a pro-life perspective. He talks about creation care in relation to the threat of global warming.

Robert Satloff is executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. His new book, Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust's Long Reach into Arab Lands, is about the Arabs who protected or aided Jews in North Africa during World War II.

Daniel Mendelsohn's new book is The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million. As a child, his old Jewish relatives told stories of family members killed in the Holocaust. Mendelsohn undertook a worldwide search for surviving members of his family's town. During his investigation, Mendelsohn discovered letters from the family begging their relatives in the United States to help them get out of their Ukrainian town.

Musician, composer and bandleader Don Byron has a new album out, Do the Boomerang. It's a collection of songs associated with the great Motown saxophonist and singer Autry "Junior Walker" DeWalt. Tracks include Shotgun and Roadrunner. While Byron is usually associated with the clarinet, he plays tenor sax on this new CD.

Richard Gilman, who died Saturday at age 83, was a writer and professor at the Yale School of Drama. Ben Brantley of The New York Times writes, "Mr. Gilman was one of a breed of philosopher-critics... who came to prominence in the 1950s and 1960s. They located in modern drama the elements of abstraction, alienation and absurdity that had long been at the core of discussions of other forms of art and literature." In this archive interview from 1987, Gilman recounts his conversion from Judaism to Catholicism and then to atheism.

In The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, author Daniel Mendelsohn unearths and reconstructs the lives of six people in his family who died in the Holocaust. Maureen Corrigan has a book review.

David Kuo is the former deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. He left in December 2003. He says he was disillusioned with the administration because they failed to actually fund faith-based charities, and they used compassion and religion for political ends. He is the author of the new memoir Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction.

H. James Towey is the former director of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. He is David Kuo's former boss. He responds to Kuo's criticisms of the Bush administration's follow through on the initiatives. Towey is now president of the Benedictine Saint Vincent College in Latrobe, Penn.

Playwright and filmmaker Neil LaBute has earned a reputation for writing characters who are selfish, mean, misanthropic and misogynistic. His films include In the Company of Men and Your Friends & Neighbors. His plays include "The Mercy Seat", "Some Girls" and "Fat Pig". The New Yorker's John Lahr says his plays are "complex and unnerving," and that "there's no playwright on the planet who is writing better." "Wrecks" is LaBute's new one-man play starring Ed Harris.

Tanya Erzen is the author of the new book, Straight to Jesus: Sexual and Christian Conversions in the Ex-Gay Movement. It's about New Hope Ministry, a residential program for evangelical Christian men in the San Francisco Bay area who are struggling with homosexuality. It's part of a larger movement to convert gays to the straight Christian life.