[Music]

Krista Tippett: I start most of my interviews with a question just wondering about the religious or spiritual background of someone's childhood.

I find that is a very fertile place in everybody's imagination. Whatever their story is, it's full of questions, and searching, and softness.

Esther Perel: I don't know where to start actually. I grew up pretty confused.

Yo-Yo Ma: Well, I would say that even before I was born, I was a pagan dancer.

Sharon Olds: The first thing I think about is an absence of it, and it was so absent in my house.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Well, I know I didn't feel like I had any kind of religious or spiritual thing going on as I grew up. And I think I was looking for something when the banjo turned up.

Béla Fleck: What really drew me to Judaism was that, like many trans kids, I had an intense sense of God as a real, living, constant presence. I guess, if I were to follow the first

Joy Ladin: root back, it would take me into the mountains of the Cairngorms in the northeast of Scotland. Where my grandparents lived for many decades.

Robert Macfarlane: I don't know why, but I've always been God crazy.

Luis Alberto Urrea: You know I have been drawn toward whatever the cosmic mysteries are, from boyhood on. All that to say, that's how I sort of lived my life.

Darnell Moore: I live my life as a sort of dreamer, always thinking about how I would, and could, pull from whatever sort of resources or love that I had, to make something of a life.