Shane Claiborne is a leading spirit in a gathering movement of young people known as the New Monastics. Emerging from the edges of Evangelical Christianity, they are patterning their lives in response to the needs of the poor — and the detachment they see in our culture’s vision of adulthood.

We’ll take a fresh and thought-provoking look at Darwin’s life and ideas. He did not argue against God but against a simple understanding of the world — its beauty, its brutality, and its unfolding creation.

The current U.S. presidential election has illustrated how gender, race, and religion can become lightning rods, and may be seen as potential stumbling blocks to leadership. Vashti McKenzie is a pioneering figure on all these fronts. When she became the first woman bishop of the oldest historic black church in America, she declared, “The stained glass ceiling has been pierced and broken.” We offer her story, her wisdom, and her good humor as an edifying lens on the American past, present, and future.

The birth of the Pentecostal movement began 100 years ago on Azusa Street in Los Angeles. We’ll be taking our show on the road to cover this global gathering and revival that is reshaping Christianity, culture, and politics worldwide.

In this program we revisit a 2007 conversation with evangelical leaders Rick and Kay Warren — exploring where they came from and what motivates them. Rick Warren hosted the first post-primary joint appearance of Barack Obama and John McCain at his Saddleback Church in southern California, one of the largest churches in the U.S. This two hour event, broadcast live on CNN, is just one sign of the cross-cultural authority he and Kay have achieved in a handful of years.

We received hundreds of essays in response to our query about what anchors and unsettles our Catholic audience. So we asked some of you to speak about your tradition. The moving reflections we heard prompted us to depart from our usual format and bring you a fabric of voices from the Church itself.

Americans have been hearing a lot about Mormonism in the context of Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign. But much of the public discussion of this faith of 13 million people has focused on controversies in the church’s history. We’ll avoid well-trodden ground to seek an understanding of the lived beliefs and spirituality of Latter Day Saints, with a leading scholar of the church and a lifelong practitioner. Robert Millet describes a developing young religion with distinct mystical and practical interpretations of the nature of God, family, and eternity.

The second program in our series on guiding figures in what some are calling the “post Religious Right era.” This program’s guests are conservative Evangelicals who are increasingly being watched by a new generation of Christian and secular leaders. They want to move beyond the partisan and cultural divides of recent years to fight poverty, AIDS, and homelessness.

The first in a two-part series on influential leaders who are reshaping Evangelical Christianity from within progressive and conservative circles. Jim Wallis founded “Sojourners” and now advises presidential candidates and world leaders in what he calls the “post-Religious Right” era. He is determined to put poverty at the top of America’s “moral values” agenda.

We explore the ideas and present-day relevance of 20th century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, an influential, boundary-crossing voice in American public life. Niebuhr created the term “Christian realism:” a middle path between religious idealism and arrogance. Exploring his wide appeal, three distinctive voices describe Niebuhr’s legacy and ask what insights he brings to the political and religious dynamics of the early 21st century.

Last month, conservative Christian leaders demanded that Richard Cizik be silenced or removed from his post. They charged that his concerns about climate change and torture have shifted attention away from moral issues such as gay marriage and abortion. But for Cizik, poverty, war, and the environment are moral issues too. We revisit Krista’s 2006 conversation with Cizik that took many listeners by surprise.

A great public theologian and historian, Martin Marty offers personal and historical perspective on religion in modern life — including the nature of fundamentalism, and the decline of America’s mainline Protestant majority as Evangelical Christianity gains in influence.

Hurricane Katrina brought urban poverty in America into all of our living rooms. In this program, David Hilfiker tells the story of how poverty and racial isolation came to be in cities across America. He lives creatively and realistically with questions many of us began to ask in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

What are the origins of communion, and what is its deepest social relevance? Two leading theologians of communion describe a ritual that is not just personally meaningful for the believer, but also collectively and ethically challenging for Christians.

Stereotypes tell us this: Evangelical Christians are politically conservative, closed-minded, morally judgmental, and anti-science. We speak with two creative members of a new generation of Evangelical thinkers and teachers, who defy stereotypes and reveal an evolving character for this vast movement that describes 40 percent of Americans.

Pentecostalism began on the American frontier, and it has become one of the largest expressions of global Christianity. In less than a century, it has grown to hundreds of millions of adherents. Today, Pentecostalism is pan-denominational. There are charismatic Catholics and Lutherans, unaffiliated Pentecostal communities, and established Pentecostal traditions, most prominently the Assemblies of God.

Krista Tippett speaks with a theologian about the rise of Pentecostal worship among African-Americans in every denomination and a sociologist on her study of modern day Pentecostals — whom she sees as mystics among us.