I'm Chris DeTippet.

Today, for the first time, we feature a wide-ranging conversation I had with child psychiatrist and

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Coles in his Boston living room in the year 2000.

He says that our children can teach us about living searchingly and gracefully even in

hardship if we will let them.

We explore what he's learned across a lifetime of listening to children and how that's

formed his sense of the deepest meaning of religion and of humanity at every age.

The spirit of religion, I think, is what children connect with, the questions, the inquiry,

the enormous curiosity about this universe, and the hope that somehow those answers will

come about.

This is Speaking of Faith, stay with us.

This public radio podcast is supported by the Fetzer Institute as part of its campaign

for Love and Forgiveness online at loveandforgive.org.

I'm Chris DeTippet.

In the early days of Speaking of Faith, I sat down for a wide-ranging conversation with

Harvard psychiatrist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Coles in the living room of

his Boston home.

He is best known for his unparalleled research on the inner lives of children.

This year, my producers and I listened again to that interview with Robert Coles, most

of which had never been aired, and we found it enduringly resonant.

It was a different world in which I spoke with him, the summer of 2000, a period of relative

peace and prosperity in the US.

...