More than half of all Americans believe that they have had a life-altering experience of God. NPR religion writer Barbara Bradley Hagerty is one of them. After an intensely powerful spiritual experience in 1995 she wondered whether this event was proof of God or merely proof of the brain’s intricate physiology. In her new book Fingerprints of God, Barbara Hagerty asks if science can explain God and if the neuroscience of spirituality affirms God’s existence, refutes it or leads us to an entirely different conclusion.
Barbara Bradley Hagerty, author Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality (Riverhead Books, 2009) is the award-winning religion correspondent for National Public Radio. She’s the recipient of the Templeton Foundation-Cambridge University Journalism Fellowship in Science and Religion, and a Knight Fellowship at Yale Law School. Before joining NPR, she was a reporter at The Christian Science Monitor for 11 years.