In conversation with award-winning journalist, Tracey Matisak

One of the most esteemed religious scholars of our time, Elaine Pagels is the author of Revelations, Beyond Belief, and The Gnostic Gospels. Her many honors include Rockefeller, Guggenheim, and MacArthur fellowships. Her new book draws upon the perspectives of science, history, and her own research, as well as the insight she gleaned from the shocking loss of both her son and husband in the same year. Lauded by Joyce Carol Oates as “an extraordinary memoir of loss, spiritual struggle, illumination and insight,” Why Religion? contemplates some of the modern world’s most important questions about why so many still believe and how we reconcile faith with contemporary ideas of sex and culture.