Religion

The Rev. Jerry Falwell, founder and pastor of Lynchburg, Va.,'s Thomas Road Baptist Church and an outspoken leader of the religious right, died yesterday at age 73; we remember him with an interview recorded in the early days of Fresh Air's national broadcast. In 1979, Falwell founded a movement he called the Moral Majority and helped return the Republican Party to power with the election of President Ronald Reagan. Falwell also founded Liberty University, an evangelical institution believed to be the largest of its kind. Rebroadcast from March 14, 1986.

The man in charge of Regent Law is a graduate of the University of Chicago's law school and the author of a 1999 book titled Is Higher Law Common Law? Readings on the Influence of Christianity in Anglo-American Law. Brauch talks to Terry Gross about Regent Law and about Savage's reporting.

Geneticist Francis Collins is director of the National Human Genome Research Project. He is also an evangelical Christian, and author of the book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.

In his most recent book, British scientist Richard Dawkins writes about the irrationality of a belief in God, examines God in all his forms and sets down his arguments for atheism. The book is The God Delusion.

Dawkins is a professor of "the public understanding of science" at Oxford University.

The New York Times Book Review has hailed him as a writer who "understands the issues so clearly that he forces his reader to understand them too."

Religion scholars Elaine Pagels and Karen King's new book, Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity, interprets and translates the recently discovered gnostic gospel of Judas.

Pagels' previous books include, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas and The Gnostic Gospels.

King's previous book is The Gospel of Mary of Magdala: Jesus and the First Woman Apostle.

Journalist Dan Gilgoff is the author of the new book The Jesus Machine: How James Dobson, Focus on the Family, and Evangelical America Are Winning the Culture War.

Gilgoff — a senior writer at U.S. News & World Report — gained rare access for a reporter to the Focus on the Family organization. He writes about how Dobson's group became the most powerful group in the Christian Right.

Producer Zarqa Nawaz is the creator of Little Mosque on the Prairie, a new Canadian Broadcasting Corporation sitcom about a group of Muslims living in a prairie town in Saskatchewan. She is head of the production company FUNdamentalist Films, which produced her 2005 documentary Me and the Mosque, about the relationship of women to Islam.

Richard Cizik is the vice president for governmental affairs of the National Association of Evangelicals, a lobbying organization that represents 45,000 churches. He is a conservative Christian who preaches the message of environmentalism from a pro-life perspective. He talks about creation care in relation to the threat of global warming.

In his new book, Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine, Richard Sloan examines the claim that prayer and religion can heal the sick. Using the scientific method, he shows that there is no compelling evidence that religion can actually cure medical ailments.

Musician, composer and bandleader Don Byron has a new album out, Do the Boomerang. It's a collection of songs associated with the great Motown saxophonist and singer Autry "Junior Walker" DeWalt. Tracks include Shotgun and Roadrunner. While Byron is usually associated with the clarinet, he plays tenor sax on this new CD.