Last week was the premiere of On The Fly, a new series of audio interviews conducted by Guernica editor-at-large Mark Dowie for Talking Point Radio. Today the show features Michael Krasny, public radio host of KQED’s Forum and author of Spiritual Envy: An Agnostic’s Quest, an exploration of what we lose when we no longer believe in God. Krasny says, “It’s not that I’m a defender of religion. I mean, one doesn’t have to look far to see all the inequities and all the tragedies that have been done in the name of religion — Crusades, Inquisition, 9/11…but I also began to think that religion has also fostered a lot of meaning into people’s lives.” Krasny’s book explores his faith — and his “lost faith” — through topics as wide-ranging as biology, literature, religion, and philosophy. “We can’t be certain of uncertainty,” Krasny points out, “but we can’t necessarily be uncertain of uncertainty either.” The interview is broken up into three parts below.

Part One:

Part Two:

Part Three:

________________________________________________________________________

Mark Dowie is an editor-at-large at Guernica, an investigative historian and the author of seven books, including Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century, American Foundations: An Investigative History, and, most recently, Conservation Refugees: The Hundred-Year Conflict between Global Conservation and Native Peoples. During his thirty-five years in journalism Dowie has won nineteen journalism awards and been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.