The Life of Meaning: Reflections on Faith, Doubt and Repairing the World

Extraordinary people will say extraordinary things, especially when it is Bob Abernethy and his team at PBS’ Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly doing the asking. The Life of Meaning presents fifty-nine contributors speaking candidly about their search for meaning in their own personal lives, their experience of God, and for some, the struggle to reconcile faith and doubt. They include Jimmy Carter, Francis Collins, the Dalai Lama, Robert Franklin, Irving Greenberg, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Harold Kushner, Anne Lamott, Madeleine L'Engle, Thomas Lynch, Martin Marty, Mark Noll, Rachel Remen, Marilynne Robinson, Barbara Brown Taylor, Studs Terkel, Thich Nhat Hanh, Phyllis Tickle, Desmond Tutu, Jean Vanier, Marianne Williamson, and many others.

Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, which Bob Abernethy conceived for PBS in 1997 and anchors, has been described as the best spot on the television landscape to take in the broad view of the spiritual dimension of American life by The Christian Science Monitor. In The Life of Meaning, Abernethy, co-author William Bole, and the staff of Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly turn their attention to making a book that asks all the big questions–and elicit the most surprising answers from a who’s-who of today’s serious religious and spiritual thinkers from across a spectrum of faiths and denominations.

Bob Abernethy is the executive editor and host of Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly. Before launching the series, he had served as a correspondent for NBC News for more than four decades.

William Bole’s articles have appeared in The Washington Post,
Los Angeles Times, and Commonweal magazines.