Religion

Smith, who died on Friday, was a Methodist minister who traveled the world studying Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism and other religions. Originally broadcast in 1996.

Hesburgh died Thursday. He was 97. He was an author, theologian and activist who took on the Vatican over issues of academic freedom. Hesburgh spoke with Terry Gross in 1990.

Reynolds Price, the acclaimed writer known for his evocative novels and stories about rural North Carolina, died in Durham on Thursday. He was 77. Fresh Air remembers the writer with excerpts taken from several interviews he gave over the past 20 years.

The historian and author died Friday from complications of Lou Gehrig's disease. Judt discussed his diagnosis on Fresh Air in March 2010, explaining what he'd learned living with ALS -- and how he hoped his family would remember him.

Unitarian minister Forrest Church believed that the knowledge that we must die makes us question what life means. Church, who died Sept. 24, 2009 after a long battle with cancer of the esophagus, was the author of Love and Death: My Journey through the Valley of the Shadow.

Activist Paul Weyrich, who died Dec. 18, helped turn social conservatives into a powerful force in the Republican party.

The evangelist minister and broadcaster played a critical role in the rise of conservative Christianity. Kennedy founded the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Florida, which now has 10,000 members. His radio and TV shows were broadcast around the world. Kennedy stated that one of his goals was to "reclaim America for Christ," closing the gap between church and state.

We listen back to an interview with Kennedy from May, 2005.

Tammy Faye Messner, the onetime first lady of TV evangelism, died Friday at the age of 65; she had battled cancer for years. Terry Gross interviewed the former Tammy Faye Bakker on January 15, 2004, about the rise and fall of the ministry she led with ex-husband Jim Bakker, the puppet show that gave them their start, and her surprising later life as a gay icon.

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.

Richard Gilman, who died Saturday at age 83, was a writer and professor at the Yale School of Drama. Ben Brantley of The New York Times writes, "Mr. Gilman was one of a breed of philosopher-critics... who came to prominence in the 1950s and 1960s. They located in modern drama the elements of abstraction, alienation and absurdity that had long been at the core of discussions of other forms of art and literature." In this archive interview from 1987, Gilman recounts his conversion from Judaism to Catholicism and then to atheism.