David Brooks: “Found By Faith” (How God Works: The Science Behind Spirituality)

People find faith or change faiths for many reasons: marriage, raising a family, dealing with grief or crisis. But sometimes it happens the other way around… faith finds you. A believing takes hold, a sense that something divine is there. And maybe not in the way or role that you might have expected.

It’s not uncommon. Data show that these types of experiences happen to about 30% of people. On this episode we’ll talk to one of these people — New York Times columnist and best-selling author David Brooks — about his unexpected encounter with faith and what came after.

Find out more about Weave: The Social Fabric Project, the non-profit David founded at the Aspen Institute.

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We will discuss the episode “Found By Faith” from the How God Works: The Science Behind Spirituality podcast at this meetup. Please listen to the episode in advance (35 minutes) and bring your thoughts, reactions, and queries to share with us at the conversation. The sound on this episode (specifically David Brooks' mic) isn't great so you may want to slow down the playback speed a bit.

Listen here: Spotify | Apple | The How God Works website

ADDITIONAL listening (OPTIONAL but highly recommended):

• "What Is Faith?" (15 minutes) on Bishop Barron’s Word On Fire podcast — Spotify | Apple | The Word On Fire website
• "This Pastor Thought Being Gay Was a Sin. Then His 15-Year-Old Came Out" (19 minutes) on The Opinions podcast — Spotify | Apple | The New York Times Opinions website

About the podcast:

David DeSteno is a professor of psychology at Northeastern University, where he directs the Social Emotions Lab, and the host of the popular podcast How God Works. David studies the ways emotions guide decisions and behaviors fundamental to social living. By examining moral and economic behaviors such as compassion and trust, cooperation and resilience, and dishonesty and prejudice, his work tries to illuminate how emotions can optimize our actions in favor of the greater good or, by virtue of bugs in the system, lead to suboptimal or biased outcomes. His research continually demonstrates the variability of moral behavior and aims to develop strategies to improve it. These efforts include working with public and private sector partners to design strategies meant to enhance individual and collective wellbeing.

David is a best-selling author of the books Out of Character: The Surprising Truths About the Liar, Cheat, Sinner (and Saint) Lurking in All of Us (2013), How God Works: The Science Behind the Benefits of Religion (2021), Emotional Success (2018), and The Truth About Trust (2014). He frequently writes about his work for major publications including The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and Harvard Business Review. David is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the American Psychological Association, for which he served as editor-in-chief of the journal Emotion. His work has been funded by the National Science Foundation.

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Future topics for this discussion series:

If you'd like to suggest a podcast episode for us to discuss at a future meetup, please send me a message or leave a comment below.

This link here is my own (frequently updated) playlist of listening recommendations and potential fodder for future discussions (by default it's sorted from oldest to newest but you can reverse it with the "sort by" button.)

Podcast episodes we've previously discussed:

• Why Cynicism Is Bad For You (and The Surprising Science of Human Goodness) from The Gray Area
• The Culture Map: Decoding Cross-Cultural Communication from ReThinking
• The Price of Neutrality: Why “Staying Out of It” Backfires in Moral Disagreement from The Stanford Psychology Podcast
• Human Nature and The Impossibility of Utopia from Philosophy For Our Times