Reformation historian, award-winning memoirist, and Cuban émigré Carlos Eire says reading the medieval devotional book "The Imitation of Christ" by Thomas à Kempis was, for him, "a conversion experience."

A journalist who has written extensively on the biblical and spiritual preoccupations of directors Joel and Ethan Coen says in "True Grit" they treat the Presbyterian moral code of fourteen-year-old narrator-heroine Mattie Ross with tenderness and empathy.

The US is the only Western democracy that still sentences youthful offenders to life in prison without parole for serious crimes. But there is growing resistance to that.

Read more from the interview about the Jewish High Holidays with Rabbi Dan Ehrenkrantz, president of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College.