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ERIC JANSEN: With news from Minnesota Public Radio, I'm Eric Jansen. Memorial Day services recognizing those who served in the US military are taking place across Minnesota today. This year, atomic veterans will be remembered as well. Minnesota Public Radio's Kathryn Herzog reports.

KATHRYN HERZOG: They're called the forgotten 216, the company of US servicemen who worked at the Nevada nuclear weapons test site in 1952. About 100 of the soldiers were from Minnesota. They were sent to measure radioactive fallout from eight atmospheric tests, often with minimal or no protective clothing. Many have suffered from radiation related illnesses since then but haven't been compensated by the US government. Smokey Parrish was in his early 20s when he served at the test site.

SMOKEY PARRISH: And I feel sorry that I know that some of my buddies have died in vain. And some of them, their children were in kindergarten when they passed away, early deaths and things like that. Parrish is working with Senator Wellstone to designate radiation related illnesses such as brain, lung, and colon cancers as eligible for VA compensation. In Collegeville, I'm Kathryn Herzog, Minnesota Public Radio.

ERIC JANSEN: Senator Paul Wellstone and Congress Member Bruce Vento are both calling for more funding for veterans' health care. They say the Department of Veterans Affairs budget is inadequate and needs a $3 billion boost above this year's budget.

Volunteers are out in force again today searching for clues in the disappearance of a Colleton County woman. Several busloads of volunteers are scouring fields and woods around Moose Lake, looking for 19-year-old convenience store clerk Katie Poirier or any clues in her abduction Wednesday night.

Mostly gray skies over Minnesota today with highs from the mid 50s in the North to around 80 degrees in the far Southeast. Isolated rain showers are possible. Forecasters predict at least some sunshine today in the Red River Valley. That's the latest from the Minnesota Public Radio newsroom. I'm Eric Jansen.

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MELANIE SOMMER: Welcome to midday. I'm Melanie Sommer sitting in this morning for Gary Eichten. We hope you'll stay tuned. We'll have a special Voices of Minnesota coming up in the next hour of midday and then at noon, a special one-hour look at Mississippi, River of Song, some special music selections from the state of Minnesota.

This hour on midday, we hear novelist Jon Hassler talk about a bad first day of kindergarten, how he overcame stage fright as a college professor. And of course, he talks about writing. The conversation with Hassler is part of our Voices of Minnesota interview series. Later in the hour, we'll hear from Carleton College Professor Ian Barbour, this year's winner of the Templeton Prize for religion.

Growing up in Staples and in Plainview, Minnesota supplied Jon Hassler with lots of raw material for his books, Staggerford, Grand Opening, and his nine other novels draw on life in small towns. Hassler is a Regents Professor at Saint John's University in Collegeville.

Besides writing, Hassler has spent most of his life teaching. He told Minnesota Public Radio's Leif Enger that as a child he had no intention of becoming a writer.

LEIF ENGER: What did you want to grow up to be?

JON HASSLER: I have the answer to that. I wanted to be a fuel oil deliverer. I wanted to drive a blue pure oil truck because there was a pure oil station next to the apartment we lived in Staples. And I just loved the truck. I wanted to deliver fuel oil with that truck. That was my first vocational aspiration.

LEIF ENGER: Not to be a soldier? You were a child in wartime.

JON HASSLER: During World War II, we played a lot of war games around the neighborhood. We were Marines. One day we were in the Army. The next day we were in the Navy. We shot each other and died violent and dramatic deaths all over the neighborhood.

We were doing what we were reading in the papers and seeing in the newsreels. Then occasionally, there will be an afternoon when nobody was around, and I would-- we had a hammock in our back yard. I would lie in the hammock and read.

I read the Hornblower series, Horatio Hornblower. It was about the Napoleonic wars and the first one. He was just a regular midshipman. And by the time he was done, he was an admiral. Each book, you see, took him up a rank in the Navy. And he led this fleet against the Napoleon's fleet.

And you could just smell the brine and you could hear the wind in the sails in those books. And I always imagined I wanted to be a sailor then. So those are two memories I have, war and reading, war and rest.

LEIF ENGER: Did those books make you want to be a writer?

JON HASSLER: I never wrote, and I never told anybody I wanted to write. My friends here at Saint John's were writing to beat the band. They were being published in the sketch book. That was the student literary publication.

But it was too precious to me, this idea of writing. I never told anybody about it. I never did it, actually. And they published in that thing left and right. Now they don't write anything. They haven't written any much since, I guess.

LEIF ENGER: Your father had a grocery store in Plainview that you said was kind of a training ground for you.

JON HASSLER: I began to see at the beginning of myself as a novelist in that grocery store, as I thought about it. These people came into the store year after year, day after day. I got to know them so well. I got to see the next chapter in their lives. I saw their lives played out. I knew everybody in town. I knew the big events in their lives, the wedding anniversaries, the new cars, the suicides. So that was part of my training as a novelist.

My father was very hard working man. I think he gave me this work ethic that keeps me writing every morning. My mother she loved describing people. She'd always be pointing out eccentrics to me. I think that helped me. But I love that town. And I think I idealized it in my memory. I have a lot of notes about it in my journal, which I used in writing the novel the Grand Opening.

And it's strange the way Grand Opening turned out, it isn't idealized at all. It's the dark side of small town living that book is. It's as though I were compensating for this ideal picture I had all these years.

LEIF ENGER: Were your parents much involved in your day to day life? Were you a close family?

JON HASSLER: Yeah, I was doted upon. You see, I was an only child. We were very close, the three of us. My parents lived to be very old, too. My dad died at 87, my mother at 91. And so we were close for a long time.

LEIF ENGER: Were you a church-going family? Your books often concern faith, forgiveness.

JON HASSLER: Yeah, we sure were. We had our Catholicism. My father's brand of Catholicism came from Bavaria and my mother's from Ireland. And they're both very strong and rigid and rather conservative. And I guess I picked up on that.

LEIF ENGER: How did you regard faith when you were a little boy?

JON HASSLER: I did what the sisters told me to do. That was my faith. I went to Catholic school for four years, actually, and then we moved to Plainview where there wasn't a Catholic school.

In Plainview they had a system where the nuns would come in for two weeks in the summer time and give a summer school, give us a big dose of Catholicism there in the summertime. I remember those days, those beautiful June days, the lilacs. I could smell the lilacs in the chapel as we sat there memorizing these dull answers in the Catechism.

Then at the age of 14, I was confirmed. I remember the bishop came to town. And we'd all been told we were going to have to answer Catechism questions. He was going to ask that. So we were all very nervous.

And he didn't ask. He asked only one kid a question. And he picked out the idiot among us. This kid didn't know anything. The bishop asked him a question. Kid just smiled at him, gave him a great big smile. I guess it was good enough. He confirmed us all. It was pretty impressive, that smile.

Anyhow, in Plainview, we had this old priest, Father O'Connor, who was so ascetic, and he didn't care anything about the lives going on around him until they ended. Then he'd go to the deathbed. That was about his main interest in us. And I remember I got the job of cutting the parish grass around the rectory of the church and then out in the country. I'd go out there once, once every two weeks and cut the cemetery grass.

Every second week, I'd go to the rectory to collect my pay. I'd knock on the door. He looked at me and he'd say, yes. I'd say, I've come for my pay, Father. He'd say, come in. I'd follow him into his office. He'd open his checkbook. He'd take up his pen. And every week he asked me the same question. I swear to god, he asked me every week, what's your name?

I like the guy, though, for some reason. And he liked me because he took me to the bishop's funeral. That was the sign of his love, I think. We got into his 1936 Oldsmobile. And he was an awful driver. I thought he wanted me to drive by that time I had my driver's license. But no, he didn't want me to drive. He wanted me to sit there and just be afraid.

We got going down Highway 61 through Minneiska, which doesn't exist anymore. It said 40 miles an hour. And so he put it up to about 50, and then it said 30 miles an hour. He had it up to about 60. And there was a sharp curve right in the middle of the town with a road leading down to the river.

Off that road, and he didn't make the turn, he just bounced down that road towards the river. I remember dust flying. And then he just turned around and went back, and we got to Winona, and I got home safely. It was a terrible ride, though.

I always thought he might give me that car because he retired. He retired from Plainview. I loved the car. He'd have me simonize it every Saturday or some damn thing. I thought he might give it to me, but he never did.

LEIF ENGER: You've been at work lately on your memoir. Would you read this section that you brought along about starting school as a boy.

JON HASSLER: I started kindergarten three days late because I had chickenpox. My mother took me to the door of the classroom, pointed out Johnny Reid and other children milling about at the far end of the long room and kissed me goodbye. I was horrified to think of leaving her for the rest of the morning, but I held back my tears. I stepped through the door into 18 years of education.

I was halfway down the room when two boys came at me with a pair of dime store handcuffs, and they led me manacled and terrified over to a dark closet and closed me inside. I have come to think of that event as emblematic of my schooling.

From that point through graduate school, with very few exceptions, I never entered a classroom with anything but the heavy heart of a prisoner dreading the hour of stultifying TDM that lay ahead.

LEIF ENGER: How does a child who has that experience and who forms a dread of going to school grow up and become a teacher?

JON HASSLER: He majors in English, and he doesn't know what to do what else to do with his life. I never intended to be a teacher, but I loved reading, you see. So I majored in English so I could read. And I read. And I read. And I read. When I graduated, I became a senior in college. And I thought, well, what do I do with this?

I could go home and work at my father's grocery store, or I could become an English teacher. I didn't like teachers as a student very much. I didn't have very good teachers, actually. And I'd see them out in their picnics and things, their fall workshop, and they'd gather for their picnics out in the park. And I thought, jeez, wouldn't it be awful to be one of those people.

And then I became one. Yeah, they were fine, good people. They were the heroes of our time, public school teachers, parochial school teachers. Teachers from grades 1 through 12 are the heroes of our time, in my opinion. They were working against the dark ages, which are closing down on us.

Jon Hassler. You're listening to our Voices of Minnesota interview series on midday. Later in the hour, we'll hear a conversation with Carleton College Professor Ian Barbour, this year's winner of the Templeton Prize in religion.

Jon Hassler confesses that until a few years ago, he had a pretty serious case of stage fright whenever he had to speak, even in front of his students. He says he didn't start writing until age 37 while teaching at Brainerd Community College. Let's return to his conversation with Leif Enger.

LEIF ENGER: What goes through a person's mind when they're grading papers?

JON HASSLER: Pity, a lot of pity, and empathy. I was never good at marking papers. I was never good at turning out those grades at the end of the six or nine-week period. My strength in teaching has always been to get people excited about writing, to get them excited about literature. I have to say I've been able to do that.

You see, there was a girl at Saint Ben's told me one time as she graduated from college. We've had to read so much in college. I forgot how much I love literature. We've studied it so hard, I forgot how much I loved it.

And I thought, OK, we're going to get back to this liking, reading for pleasure. I wanted the kids to read for pleasure again, because in college, you're given so many assignments. And you say literary criticism and that stuff, it takes the fun out of a good book. So that's why it was-- that's been my mission.

LEIF ENGER: In your two most recent books, Rookery Blues and The Dean's List, I noticed that the last thing on the minds of most students is pleasing their instructors. And the last thing on the minds of many of the instructors is being somehow responsible to their students. Is that reality?

JON HASSLER: I think it's reality pretty much on the side of the students. I don't think it's reality among teachers generally. I think we got into some jaded teachers in that book. Leland, after all his 58 years old, he's been teaching all his life. And I think he's getting a little jaded. And then he's struggling with these burnouts on his faculty.

I put those people in there to be funny. Yeah, the teachers don't look good in those books, do they? I have to say they don't. Teachers are better than that, generally.

LEIF ENGER: The narrator of The Dean's List, Leland Edwards, is still nervous at the beginning of each term after all these years. Were you?

JON HASSLER: I've always had stage fright in front of a group until just recently from going on book tours often enough. I finally got over it. But that's only in the last few years. I spent most of my life being very nervous before I faced a class for the first few days of that class. I remember the first few years, I'd throw up on the way to school. In fact, in the morning it was that extreme.

LEIF ENGER: I know that you started writing seriously when you were 37 years old. Most people don't just wake up one morning in midlife and say, here is my mission. What made you actually pick up the pencil that day and go to work?

JON HASSLER: All I can say is that the desire was so strong, I couldn't do anything else. I remember the day very well. It was September something, let's say September 10, 1970, I grabbed this notebook, and I went to school, and I taught my 8 o'clock class.

At 9 o'clock, I went into the library and I began to write. I began to write a story called a story worth hearing. These four or five old men sitting on a bench in front of the post office in a small town. They begin reminiscing about their love lives and their youth.

And it turns out that this one man was in love with a woman who is now married to a man at the end of the bench. So I wrote that story, and I polished it, and I got it finished in two weeks. And then I wrote another one. And I wrote that in two weeks. I gave myself two weeks to write a short story. I remember writing Saturdays. I remember writing evenings. I turned out 14 stories in 28 weeks.

LEIF ENGER: That was on a bet?

JON HASSLER: Yeah. I had a friend who was writing at the same time And we decided we would write a story every two weeks, and the guy who didn't write one every two weeks would owe the other one $0.50. That was the last money I made on writing for a long time.

I taught myself to write. I never had a writing course. So it meant making a lot of mistakes and reading other people and taking stories apart and putting them back together. I don't know how I had the energy then. I don't have it now anymore because I'm older. Now that I don't have so much energy, I write as long each day, but I produce more readable prose, I think per minute than I did then.

LEIF ENGER: What are the common mistakes that you made when you were starting out? You've talked often about getting a lot of rejection slips.

JON HASSLER: I got 85 rejection slips in the process of publishing six stories. And I guess I deserved them, although some became publishable after I published novels, which makes you a little cynical.

LEIF ENGER: Do you remember the first story that you published and what your reaction was when, instead of a rejection slip, you got an acceptance?

JON HASSLER: Of course, it was joy. It was sheer joy. And the story-- I tell you what the story was. It was called Smalleye's Last Hunt. It took place in a nursing home. This aged Indian crawled up on the roof to shoot a goose. The geese were flying over the house every night, and then the chimney crumbled and he fell down. And I don't know if he got a goose or not.

But anyway, that was the first story I published, and I published it in prairie schooner, and that was very good. Of those 14 short stories I wrote, it was number 14. Then I published-- my second story was called The undistinguished Poet, published in the South Dakota Review about this hippie poet that came to the spinster schoolteachers classroom and read his toilet poems. And she solved the problem by pressing the fire alarm and emptying the school in 45 seconds. And I used that as a chapter in Staggerford.

LEIF ENGER: Do you read reviews?

JON HASSLER: I read reviews because I can't help it. If somebody is writing about my work, I want to know what they're saying. And they're pretty important if they're favorable. And they're not very important if they're unfavorable. That's why I have to look at it.

It takes so little time to destroy a book. You can turn out a review in 20 minutes and destroy something somebody's worked on for two years. It doesn't seem quite fair. My reviews have been favorable over the years, I have to say, except there's always one bad review with each book.

With Rookery Blues, it was Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post who said he hated the book. I really struck a chord with that guy. With this one, it was in the New York Times, a bad review of this book saying, referring to my diminishing powers.

Now, I didn't believe that because when I finished this book, The Dean's List, I thought, this book is so good. I don't think any reviewer is going to discourage me. I still think it's a good book. I just love this book. I've written this last one. It seems just right to me, the tone and everything. So I don't believe them. But it's too bad to have a review like that in such a prominent place, you see.

LEIF ENGER: A lot of your characters have physical difficulties. In The Love Hunter, it was MS, as I remember. In other books, it's been dementia, often just old age aches and pains. Has that somehow made your readers draw close to you?

JON HASSLER: It's true. I hear from quite a few people. I get three or four letters a week from strangers year in, year out. A quite a few of those people are people who are facing some kind of problem in life, physical or otherwise, or their mothers are facing it or their fathers or their kids. And they tell me that reading my books is somehow invigorating for them.

I don't know exactly how this works, and it isn't something I set out to do, but I seem to have hit a chord here with that sort of person who's in trouble and needs a little bit of encouragement. It's almost as though I were doing God's work here. I didn't set out to do that. I just set out to tell a story. With each novel I begin, I just want to tell a story and yet they turn out to be inspiring to some people. So that's very gratifying.

LEIF ENGER: Your own experience with Parkinson's disease has been because of your profile, very public. Has that made it more difficult or easier to cope with Parkinson's itself?

JON HASSLER: It's made it much easier, actually. I don't have to tell people what's wrong with me when I can't get up out of a chair. People seem to know what's wrong with me. I don't have to explain it everywhere I go. That's an easier part.

Somebody asked me why would I want to write about it, and why would I want to be so meticulous about describing Parkinson's disease. And I thought of a trip I took one time with several companions. One of these companions are very irksome.

The way I could stand being with that companion over the two weeks was to write about her. I described her in great detail. And that sort of took the bad part away from being with her. This disease is an irksome companion I have, and I'm dealing with it by looking at it closely and describing it.

LEIF ENGER: You have been described as Sinclair Lewis without the bitterness. Is that a good description?

JON HASSLER: I guess it is in that I'm writing about Minnesota. I'm writing in Stearns County, where he wrote. And I don't find his bitterness very attractive, his broad satire. I satirize things, but I think I do it in a different way, probably more gently. I think I like my characters better than he did.

LEIF ENGER: Has your experience as the book promoter not been what you thought it would be the first time you went on tour?

JON HASSLER: It's exactly what I thought it was going to be. That's why I resisted from the start. When I published my first novels, I couldn't have had a book tour if I wanted one. And then beginning in 1990 with North of Hope, I was asked to go on tour.

And that's very discouraging actually. You go to-- you're flown into Dayton, Ohio, and you're picked up at the airport by a limo and you're taken to your hotel. And I shouldn't say Dayton, because Dayton's always been good to me. Let's say Louisville, let's say Memphis.

You talk to a radio person for half an hour. You talk to a newspaper reporter for 45 minutes. You say the same thing you said yesterday and the day before. And you ready for your evening autographing. You're taken to the bookstore, and there's eight people there. One is your driver, two are people work there. Somebody else just wandered in the store. There's about four people that came to see you.

That's so disappointing to somebody like me who comes from the hungry mind, for example, where I have 400 people because my fans around the Twin Cities are so zealous. I'll go anywhere in the Twin Cities, and I'll have this great big crowd. And I'll walk into a bookstore in Memphis and I'll see eight people. I'll think, jeez, my books aren't going very far afield. Anyway, that's part of the discouragement.

And the other part is television interviews. I tell you, I can't stand that anymore. The television interviewer is so interested in how he looks and what the television camera is doing. He doesn't pay any attention to what you're saying anyway.

The dark ages, the book is going to die eventually, and we'll be reading the stuff on computers. I wouldn't mind if we listen to books. But when I listen to a book read on a tape or somebody reads it to me, it's a good way to appreciate the language even more than reading it silently, I think. But to have it on CD, I don't know how that's going to work, CD-ROM.

LEIF ENGER: Jon Hassler, what's next for you?

JON HASSLER: My wife and I are going to put together a book called Stories Teachers Tell. Well, I'm very pleased at the response. We're getting quite a few entries. This is going to be a good book. You see, my wife and I between us, we have about 70 years of teaching. And we wanted to somehow portray the teacher in the 20th century, and we thought this might be a good way to do it.

Yesterday, I got a story from a woman who was talking about octopuses in her class. And she's reading an Ogden Nash poem that says, is they arms, or is they legs? And some kid in your class raises his hand, and he said, they're called testicles. He was almost correct, you see.

MELANIE SOMMER: Novelist Jon Hassler talking with Minnesota Public Radio's Leif Enger. You're listening to our Voices of Minnesota interview series here on midday. I'm Melanie Sommer, sitting in today for Gary Eichten.

Ian Barbour says religious beliefs and scientific knowledge shouldn't be treated as separate entities. He wants people to ask more questions about the ethical consequences of scientific advances. For the remainder of this hour, we'll hear Barbour talk about his views.

He's a physicist and a theologian and a professor at Carleton College in Northfield. This spring, he won the $1.2 million Templeton Prize created by investor John Templeton. Ever since writing Issues in Science and Religion in 1965, the 76-year-old Barbour is credited with helping fuel the discussion of ethics in science. Barbour talked with Minnesota Public Radio's Dan Olson.

DAN OLSON: What started you thinking about how science and religion get along or don't get along?

IAN BARBOUR: I'd done this work in straight physics and then in straight theology, but I'd kept them in watertight compartments, I think. I didn't feel a conflict between them, but I saw them in as separate domains, separate areas of my life and wanted to relate them to each other, first of all, for my own sake, for my own integrity and wholeness, and not to live a more fragmented life.

But then as I started to teach and then to write, I came to realize this was something that could be a contribution to other people. And it was that first book I wrote in 1965, Issues in Science and Religion, that really seemed to hit a chord. It was widely used. Harper put it out in a nice paperback.

And I came to realize that this could be a very distinctive contribution. And I think I decided about that point I don't want to be either a physicist or a theologian. I want to relate these two to each other, and that's where my career has gone since then.

DAN OLSON: How were you welcomed not only by your hard science colleagues when they heard about this interesting path that you wanted to follow, but by what can be protective environment of the theologians? After all, they know theology and sometimes they think outsiders don't. What was your reception?

IAN BARBOUR: Well, I think increasingly, there are groups within both professional communities that are more humble, that don't claim to have all the answers. I think there's some truth to the stereotyped picture of the warfare of science and religion here. The atheistic scientist on the one hand and the biblical conservative on the other.

And one side says they believe in evolution but not God. The other side says God but not evolution. And my project has been to try to hold up the possibility that you can believe in both God and evolution. Let's say that evolution is God's way of creating. And that kind of openness, I think at the beginning, it was only-- there were only some signs of it. But more recently, I think there has been a greater humility that neither side is as quick to claim to have all the answers.

DAN OLSON: Well, let's take the Big Bang Theory and the creation of the universe apparently totally at odds with the literal Bible description of how God created the world. What interests you about the religious implications of the Big Bang?

IAN BARBOUR: Well, interestingly, it's not totally at odds. I don't think you can look at the Bible and expect to find a textbook in science that obviously reflected the science of its day, which we now know we can't accept. We don't have a flat Earth. We don't have a three-decker universe with heaven above and hell below.

And we don't have seven days. We have a 15-billion-year process, which perhaps at some points resembles the seven days, might be interpreted as seven epochs or something. But I'm more interested in saying, what is the central message of the bible, which is about the human dependence on God, about its being an orderly world, a good world.

And within that context, to be as open-minded to science as we can be, and yet to realize that it doesn't answer all the questions. Why is there a world at all? That's something that the scientists-- it's sort of at the margins of science.

You don't do research on that within your science yet it's a question raised by science. Why does it have the order that it does? How is it that it could have led to these very amazing levels of complexity? And finally, to consciousness and human love, I think this is the direction I would go.

DAN OLSON: I gather you don't like this too much, this idea that, all right, we can find some middle ground then between science and religion by saying, we look at the beauty of molecular structure. We look at the beauty of the cosmos. We see a design. That's a sign of God.

IAN BARBOUR: That certainly is impressive. I don't think it's a conclusive argument. You can still say it's all a matter of chance. It turns out that the constants at the beginning of the Big Bang had to be very, very finely adjusted for the world to expand at the right rate for life to be possible.

Now, some scientists postulate that there are trillions of universes, and we just happen to live in one where the constants are right. It's like a Las Vegas slot machine. Our combination came up by chance. That stretches credulity a little bit. And of course, you can't have any contact with these other universes because they're not within the possibility of observation, but that's a possibility.

So I don't think this is a conclusive argument. It is very suggestive. This is the kind of world one would expect if a god were interested in personality, in consciousness, in the levels of human activity that go beyond anything else that we know of in the universe.

Now, there may be life on other planets, and that's not certainly ruled out. God's ways may be very varied. But I think the argument is impressive. But my own approach is to say my religious faith is based primarily in other areas at the start, in my understanding of a community of worship and the experience of forgiveness in my life in the kinds of religious experience and interaction with other people within a community that's been important to me. That's where I start.

And then I ask, how do I need to reformulate this in the light of science? Where may the theological ideas need to be expressed in new ways in a scientific age? So I don't myself think we want to start with just science and say, you can prove God by looking just at science, nor do I want to say religion has all the answers, and it's the only.

I think the kinds of things that are important in a religious community, like how we treat our neighbor and what kinds of wholeness and renewal and healing in our own personal life. Religion is primarily a personal question, but it has all these wider implications. And it's set in a cosmic context. It isn't just personal. It isn't a matter of saying religion has only to do with, let's say, the private world, and science deals with the public world. That's too simple.

DAN OLSON: We're hearing that it could be really a matter of five, well, perhaps 10 years before there's human cloning. I guess some people look at that and say, well, that's an inevitable consequence of where the research is taking us. Do you fear this prospect, or put another way, what do you think are the serious ethical questions posed by human cloning?

IAN BARBOUR: Yes, I would myself draw a line between animal cloning and human cloning. I think, here again, one extreme says, do anything you can. And the other extreme says, don't touch any kind of cloning. That's playing God or something. I don't agree with that.

And when Dolly, the sheep was cloned in Scotland for medical research purposes, I don't see any great objection to that. But when you turn to human cloning, I find this raises much more complex questions. What are the motives? A father wants exact clone of himself?

DAN OLSON: Maybe we get another Ian Barbour out of the deal? That's not bad.

IAN BARBOUR: I hope not, because I think what kind of a burden does it lay on a child to expect to be a clone of a father. And, in fact, he won't be exactly the same because he'll be growing up a generation later and in a different environment.

But the motives of trying to perpetuate oneself or the mother who wants to replace a child that has died with a clone, that's putting a terrible burden on the individual, not valuing them for their own sake, but valuing them for what they can do for the person who's being cloned.

DAN OLSON: You think it's greedy. You think it's self-centered, egotistical?

IAN BARBOUR: I think it's a bit self-centered because it's laying expectations of more heavy than anything that we now lay on it. Of course, we lay expectations now. It also is more of a break with the family in that a father who clones himself, has himself cloned this, this clone is both a twin brother a generation later, but is also a son without any mother being involved. So it's really carrying reproduction totally independent of any family context.

Those are the kinds of ways that I would approach cloning, bringing what I hope are biblical values to bear without any kind of biblical literalism. Obviously, there's nothing in the Bible that says thou shalt clone or thou shalt not clone. It's a totally new problem.

So you can't expect any simple formula in the Bible, but you can look to the values that are upheld. And in this case, I would say human dignity, the value of the individual, the value of the family, human relationships. That's the ballpark.

DAN OLSON: So play that out for us. Does that mean using, in Barbour approach, to ethically questioning human cloning that, what would we do? Would we stop and say, well, let's think about this for just a moment now. All right, then let's go ahead with it. Is that the fact?

IAN BARBOUR: I think it is something that has to be debated in the public arena. It's not something you can just say, let the scientists decide. You sometimes do get a kind of sense of inevitability that anything that's going to be discovered is going to be applied. I don't think that's necessary.

And I think, in fact, we make decisions all the time as to what kinds of applications we will seek. We do it by what we fund. We will do it by government funding. We will do it by what kinds of research we encourage in institutions. We'll also do it by legislation in some cases. We'll say that this is something in which the public has a stake.

And while in general, I think when the use of funds by encouraging directions rather than by prohibiting them is better. But it seems to me this is a case where we are all involved, where the future of humanity is involved, and in which the preservation of family structures and human dignity.

All citizens have a legitimate voice. And the church community, as part of that process of discussion, has both an obligation to encourage discussion, but also a responsibility at some points through democratic processes to set the directions of policy.

MELANIE SOMMER: Carleton College Professor Ian Barbour, this year's winner of the Templeton Prize in religion. You're listening to our Voices of Minnesota interview series on midday. I'm Melanie Sommer, sitting in today for Gary Eichten.

Ian Barbour joins quite a stellar list of former Templeton Prize winners. The Reverend Billy Graham, Mother Teresa, Alexander Solzhenitsyn are all former winners. Now we return to Barbour's conversation with Dan Olson.

DAN OLSON: You've said technology has not brought people the fulfillment and well-being it promised. And there's no question that can be supported by pointing out that science brought us atom splitting, which eventually led to nuclear weapons and the threat of annihilation.

But science also brought us public health, one of humanity's most enduring revolutions, clean drinking water, medicines to prevent and fight disease. So on balance, acknowledging that human suffering still exists, wouldn't you say actually that science is serving us pretty well, and that we've come out on the long end of it?

IAN BARBOUR: I think in many ways it has, and it's very exciting. And as we get near the new millennium and think of what's ahead, we, I think, rightly have a sense of excitement about the new possibilities, the information age that's been moving so rapidly, all kinds of communication and information processing and all kinds of things we could barely dream about.

And the same with molecular biology and biotechnology, genetic engineering, all kinds of new possibilities. And I find these very important. But the problem that-- I think with such rapid change, the problem is, can we try to look ahead a little bit at what is happening, and can we, to some extent at least, direct technology.

By the way, we assign funds by the policies that we make so that we don't just sort of sit back and say this is a steamroller that's taking its own course because it does have. We're more aware, not just mentioning atomic weapons and the prospect of nuclear annihilation, but the whole environmental impact.

And I'm also concerned about the social impact because there is a tendency of technology to increase the gaps between the rich and the poor within a country and between the rich countries and the poor countries. Technology takes a lot of money. So if you've got lots of money, you can develop the technology.

And I think we've got to always keep in mind who will get the benefits, how are the benefits distributed. So we not only want to develop wonderful kinds of health care, but we want to be sure they're available to people. And I do think that we can get so carried away that we forget about the people that get left behind.

These very expensive treatments for quite rare diseases, well, there are people dying around the world for lack of a $1 vaccination shot, people who are dying of hunger and malnutrition. We easily get carried forward to this wonderful 275 channels of television that maybe we'll get before long. Meanwhile, there are people that don't have electricity.

It seems to me that we've got to keep. And as a Christian, I feel this is part of the biblical mandate that the people who tend to get left behind, which I think technology tends to accelerate, have to be part of our concern. How is the technology distributed? And those are policy questions. Those are things that we can do something about.

And as we enter a new millennium, I want to keep in our focus not just wonderful advances, but who's benefiting, what kinds of advances, what are the impacts. And if you have 275 television channels, how many of them are really worth looking at?

What kind of image of the good life are all these ads throwing at us? Is that really human fulfillment that we're having pictured by the people that can afford to pay the ads? That's the wider context. That's a long answer, but I think it's a way of saying, I'm not opposed to technology or the applications of science. But I think we have to think how we are applying it.

DAN OLSON: I wonder if your efforts to create a dialogue between science and religion, as productive as they are and have been, would find an even more productive avenue trying to establish a conversation between business and religion since it seems to me it's so much about business that actually drives the science.

IAN BARBOUR: That is an important area. And Sir John Templeton, who endowed this prize, has had a concern. He's a global investor. And I do think the business community has had its context of decisions somewhat broadened. Environmental concerns, at least occasionally crop up.

I tend to think that it's through the public channels of discussion, through congressional legislation, through voluntary groups like churches and unions and environmental groups, neighborhood groups, community, environmental groups, and the churches are entering into this.

I tend to think more in terms of voluntary or political organizations more than directly with business groups because, after all, they to some extent are caught in a system where the bottom line is what's most important. But I think there are thoughtful people. And I think that the public pressure to take broader goals into account can, to some extent, modify.

And there are certainly outstanding examples of industries that have taken both the public welfare and the environment into account. But that one can't expect too much if your competitor is undercutting your prices. I think this is a problem for society.

If a company is polluting a river, if that's the cheapest way of getting rid of its produce, and if all its competitors are, it's likely to continue to do so. I think only through the society saying, these indirect consequences that don't enter directly into the dollar value need to be taken into account in other ways.

There can be structures of tax credits, of penalties, of laws because otherwise your competitor is going to undercut you. But if the competitor faces the same set of circumstances, then-- and that's not to say that some companies haven't done a very good job.

But I think the pressure of a marketplace that takes a very short term view, it doesn't really consider much beyond next year or two, and that puts its stockholders at the top of its priorities, has to work within a context in which other factors which the public.

And I do think the church has a legitimate voice here. I think the church has a concern for nature as well as for humanity as they're affected by industry. I think we have at least some tradition that we can recover of the value of nature and the celebration of nature, the sacred in nature.

This is not all just for our benefit, and that the churches are beginning to recover that and a green voice is being heard in many churches, and in the public. Labor unions are beginning to see all kinds of issues, safety in the workplace, as well as environmental issues do affect the public and the quality of life that we're all involved in.

DAN OLSON: What should parents do? You and your wife are the parents of four children. How did you prepare them for the ethical questions that they would inevitably face?

IAN BARBOUR: That's a tough one. I hope by a reasonably stable home. We celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary a couple of years ago. And I hope by not controlling their lives totally but by perhaps holding up indirectly the values that--

I've always been a little hesitant to preach to them too directly. So they've got to pick it up on their own. And they've gone in different directions, which I greatly admire. But I think they-- I hope they've all acquired the ability to enjoy life and to enjoy the benefits of our wonderful civilization, but also to be critical and to ask themselves, is this what I really want, and where can I make choices.

DAN OLSON: So you weren't a heavy handed father. You didn't deny them certain popular culture privilege. I suppose they got to listen to some rock and roll every now and again. And a few others maybe watched a little TV.

IAN BARBOUR: Well, I appreciated their music when they were young. It was an age when there were a lot of good people on that I wouldn't have otherwise got to hear on the musical stage. But I think it's a matter of not of either being a sort of ascetic who wants to retire to a simple country, idyllic existence, which I've never been that much tempted by, but it's not a denial of the world.

I think it's really a question not of denying the world, but of saying what is true fulfillment. And to me that means living with some care and living with a concern for overconsumption, with a concern to spend on what one thinks is most important, and to value human relationships, and not to be totally taken in by the consumerism that bombards us.

What is it? 375,000 ads a person has seen by the time they get to be 18 and the kinds of images of the good life that is thrown at us there is OK. But I think it leaves out a lot. And so the kinds of spiritual growth and the kinds of personal stability and the kinds of human relationships that I treasure, I think are hopefully part of what the new generation is finding.

DAN OLSON: Professor Ian Barbour a pleasure talking to you. Thank you for your time.

IAN BARBOUR: Thank you. You've asked some fascinating questions.

MELANIE SOMMER: Carleton College Professor Ian Barbour, this year's winner of the Templeton Prize in religion. You've been listening to Voices of Minnesota on midday on Minnesota Public Radio.

IRA FLATOW: I'm Ira Flatow. You're probably making plans for summer, maybe getting in shape so you can look great on the beach. But don't forget to exercise the brain too. It's time to plan your summer reading. And with so many books and so little time, we're here to help. Join Ray Suarez and guests for some inspiration in putting together that summer reading list on the next talk of the nation from NPR News.

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MELANIE SOMMER: And you can listen to Talk of the Nation this afternoon at 1 o'clock here on Minnesota Public Radio. Now it's time for today's Writer's Almanac.

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SPEAKER 1: And here is the Writer's Almanac for Monday, the 31st of May, 1999.

It's the anniversary of the British raid on Cologne in 1942. The Royal Air Force sent about 1,000 bombers to hit the German city of Cologne. They caught the Germans off guard. And for about an hour and a half straight, one plane every six seconds dropped its bombs, flattening the city with the exception of the Cologne Cathedral with its big Twin Towers.

It's the birthday in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1894 of comedian Fred Allen. His name was John Florence Sullivan. He took the name Fred Allen when he got into vaudeville after the American Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen, who he said was no longer using it. So he was free to. He was on the radio in the '30s and '40s and had a show called Allen's Alley with his characters the poet Falstaff Openshaw, Pansy Nussbaum and Senator Claghorn.

It's the birthday in Buffalo, 1893, of the children's author Elizabeth Coatsworth, author of The cat. Who Went to Heaven, Enchanted, and Under the Green Willow.

And today is the birthday in West Hills, Long Island, 1819, of Walt Whitman, who worked as a printer, journalist, editor, carpenter, realtor, teacher, failed at most of these jobs before he came out with a little book of poems called Leaves of Grass in 1855.

He couldn't find a publisher, so he printed it himself. No name on the cover, just a picture of Whitman himself standing with a cocked hat and his hand in his trouser pocket. Here are some lines from Whitman for his birthday from song of the open road.

A foot and lighthearted, I take to the open road. Healthy, free, the world before me, the long brown path before me leading wherever I choose. Henceforth, I ask not good fortune. I myself am good fortune. Henceforth, I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing, done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms.

Strong and content, I travel the open road. The Earth that is sufficient. I do not want the constellations any nearer. I know they are very well where they are. I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

Still here, I carry my old delicious burdens. I carry them. Men and women, I carry them with me wherever I go. I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them. I am filled with them, and I will fill them in return.

From this hour, I ordain myself loosed of limits and imaginary lines going where I list my own master total and absolute. Listening to others considering well what they say, pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating gently but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me.

I Inhale great drafts of space. The East and the West are mine and the North and the South are mine. I am larger, better than I thought. I did not know I held so much goodness. All seems beautiful to me. I can repeat over to men and women. You have done such good to me. I would do the same to you.

I will recruit for myself and you as I go. I will scatter myself among men and women as I go. I will toss a new gladness and roughness among them. Whoever denies me it shall not trouble me. Whoever accepts me, he or she shall be blessed and shall bless me.

Poems from Walt Whitman's Song of the Open Road.

That's the Writer's Almanac for Monday, May 31st, made possible by Channel 1 Network, the Peabody Award winning provider of news and information to America's teens. Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

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MELANIE SOMMER: Regional broadcasts of the Writer's Almanac on NPR are supported by the University of Minnesota Alumni Association, members advocating for educational excellence through service, pride, and lifelong connection. One 800-UM-ALUMS.

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