Before we start the podcast, I wonder if you've discovered the letter from

Loring Park, a weekly email bundle of goodness that lands in your inbox every Saturday morning.

We highlight what we're airing and writing and reading, along with news of upcoming events

and opportunities to be part of our wider conversations. To subscribe now, go to onbeing.org.

Most perplexing questions facing humankind. Who are we? Why are we here? And where are we going?

To learn more, please visit Templeton.org, the Templeton Foundation. Stay curious.

In the aftermath of America's cathartic 2016 election, the New Yorker collected a series of

16 reflections by varied authors. The one that most riveted me was by the Pulitzer Prize winning

Dominican American author, Juno Diaz. His essay was titled, Radical Hope Is Our Best Weapon.

Diaz's hope is fiercely reality-based, a product of centuries lodged in his body

of African-Caribbean suffering, survival, and genius. I can truly say that no conversation I've

had in all my years has felt more searing, important, and eloquent than this one.

I'm a child of blackness. Blackness was not meant to survive, and we have survived.

We have thrived, and we've given this world more genius than we have ever received.

I'm Christa Tiffett, and this is onbeing.

Juno Diaz is a professor of writing at MIT, and he's the fiction editor of Boston Review.

His books include, Drown, The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wow, and this is how you lose her.

Your family came from the Dominican Republic when you were six years old,

and that place and the New Jersey-Ulanded Inter both hugely formative, and that'll come

through all the way through your writing and your work. I always ask this question when I start

my interviews, whoever I'm talking with, about the religious or spiritual background of their

childhood. I'm really curious. I've never heard you speak overtly about this, and I do understand

...