At a lull of conversation in class, the poet Robert Creeley would ask his students, “Any more deathless questions?” It is no easy invitation to follow; doing so might seem to imply that one’s question is weighty enough to be immortal, or challenging enough that it could never be met with an answer. Yet Creeley—as much a poet of “the things themselves” as anyone—wouldn’t be disappointed with the apparently ordinary. Those questions too, he meant to say, carry within themselves the infinite.

This TIF interview series presents conversations with some of the leading scholars, activists, and public intellectuals who are changing how we think about the lines between sacred and secular. Like Creeley’s invitation, their work is a challenge to reconfigure familiar categories, to take old questions of meaning, politics, and conflict, and ask them again in new ways.

Read Nathan Schneider’s interviews with Mark Lilla and David Kyuman Kim at ssrc.org.