A few years ago I began a project called "People of Faith," where I interviewed and photographed people about their faith traditions and stories. Here is another installment -- you can read some others here.

Steve Ervin was a tough, drug-dealing outlaw biker who didn't give a lick about society.
And then one day something happened.

"My grandmother took me to church as a little boy, but we didn't attend church on a regular basis. At a very young age I began to get into some trouble and I left home. I got involved in motorcycles and was involved in that type of lifestyle. I joined the Outlaws, a motorcycle gang which is one of the largest -- the Hell's Angels are their rivals. I became very, very hard and cold. I hated everyone and I began to turn my back on society. I didn't care if I lived or died, so I didn't care if anyone else did. I just hated society. I sold drugs, I sold women -- I was part of a lifestyle that was very abusive to women.

But all that time, my grandmother had never quit praying for me, and God answers prayer. My mother had went to her church, too, and told the ladies about me, so they formed a little group and they met on Tuesday night for eight years just to pray for me. And on Friday the 13th, 1987, He answered their prayers. That morning, my wife and I knelt beside our bed and we just started saying "Jesus." This feeling came over me that day that I'd never had before. Somehow I just knew I had to talk to God. Every time I would say "Jesus" all this hate and coldness in me began to come out. It just changed.

My wife and I started going to the church where Mama and the group of ladies had been praying all those years and we began to just seek the Lord and church was good, but it just seemed like there was something else. One day I came home from church and I just felt so empty. I cried to the Lord and I said, "Lord, there's gotta be more, is this all there is to Christianity?" and He said, "No, put your leathers back on, go back to the streets, and go tell 'em I love 'em." And that's how the ministry was formed.

I've still got a beard, still got long hair, still got tattoos, but my heart has changed. I have Jesus Christ inside and that changes everything. I know what I used to be and I know who I am now and it's because of God, not because of anything I've done, it's because of the day that I cried out "Jesus" it changed my life."

Here is another installment in my Believers series, photographs and interviews of people talking about faith.

I met Brian a few years ago through my sister Liz, who has done a lot of work in the activist community in and around North Carolina. I thought it would be interesting to hear what he had to say on the subject of faith, and indeed it is. Enjoy:

"I call myself an anarchist, and there are some misunderstandings that anarchism means not believing in anything -- on the contrary -- it means believing in everything. It's not that I don't hold things sacred. I think that everything is sacred.

Being an anarchist means not wanting to draw distinctions of hierarchy between different people. I think being able to see beauty is being able to learn the private language of meaning in which each individual's life is written.

It's intensely important for me to figure out what works. What works to have people be able to live together, to be able to cooperate together in a way that is good for everybody. I don't think that we need to do that at the end of a gun. I think it's worth doing just for its own sake.

Questions of morality and ethics are very important to me. I don't necessarily think that there is a tablet of rules carved in the sky that we have to abide by. I think that we are all individually responsible for coming up with the values that we live by and believe in. Even if you claim that those values are proceeding from a supreme being you're still responsible yourself for the decision to abide by them. And I think people have to take responsibility for what they believe and for making that work with other people. I'm not a big fan of the kind of spirituality that makes people able to absolve themselves of responsibility for what happens between them and other people.

I take the question of what is sacred, what is holy, very seriously. Being able to be in the world in a way that connects you to what is beautiful is really important to me. I'm a musician, among other things, and playing music is a way for me to focus on what is in the world. It is a kind of prayer for me, a way to be connected to what is sacred and beautiful.

I try to pay attention to everything, because everything is meaningful. Whatever it takes to get connected to that is good."

-Brian Dee
Greensboro, NC

A few years ago I began a personal project of photographing and interviewing people with unusual faith stories. I wanted to use a portable, simple backdrop, and needed to be able to shoot on location to make it easier for my subjects to participate. A producer friend at NPR guided me toward recording equipment that would have broadcast-quality sound. So, after researching and contacting willing participants, I traveled to wherever they were, then spent about an hour interviewing them about their lives, their thoughts, their beliefs.

After the interview, I would then set up my PeoplePopper backdrop somewhere outside to get the most even light possible. I was still shooting film then, so I shot with Kodak BW400CN and used a 90mm TSE tilt and shift lens. (You can see some of the other images with shortened text by going to my PORTFOLIOS page.)

As you can imagine, I met the most fascinating people, including Maharha Dasi (below). I began to see that the subjects who were most eloquent about their faith stories (and who had the most interesting journeys) were those who had actively chosen their faith, usually by from turning away from something else. Sometimes they had turned away from addiction, sometimes from a family belief system that no longer fit them, and sometimes they just felt called to another way of life.

Since I now live in North Carolina, I began my search close to home -- as it turned out I never photographed anyone who wasn't here in North Carolina. Maharha lives in a Hare Krishna enclave called Prabhupada Village, in rural Stokes county NC, more closely associated with Baptist churches and tobacco fields than chanting devotees.

Her story is heartfelt and beautiful, and I hope you enjoy it! More "Believers" coming soon, so check back often:

I was raised Catholic, one of nine children, and I used to go to 5:30 mass every morning with my father. I wanted to know God very much. I wanted Him to be a part of my life. But when I was in church, I would always look around and I'd think, "These people are much more devotional than I am. I really wish I would feel love for God." Even though I would chant and pray on the rosary, I just didn't feel connected. Before I became a Hare Krishna I used to pray, "God, please help me find something, I want to know you; I'm sick of the way the world is, I'm sick of the way people live."

When I first came to Krishna consciousness it was hard for me to accept this religion, or this way of life. It was very strange to me, but I was attracted to it because it provided a safe environment where there would be no drugs, no illicit sex. I was a hippie and that's all that was going on in my life. I didn't want to be part of that anymore. I knew there was more to life than that. So I thought, "Well I've tried everything else, I might as well try this."

To continue reading, click HERE

A friend of mine gave me a book, the Bhagavad Gita, because he was also searching. At first I didn't understand it, but I felt like I knew it. Then I went to the temple. I felt so connected, although it was strange and the people were walking around chanting. That was really hard for me to accept. But I stayed, and the more I stayed and I chanted "Hare Krishna" I felt my heart opening up and I was awakening to something I never knew before. Knowledge was being revealed to me through the scripture and through chanting. It was purifying my heart. It was cleaning off the dust.

At the time, I asked my father if I could join the Hare Krishnas and he said, "No, definitely not. I don't want you to do that." I said, "Dad, I know I need to do this. I feel happiness there." And he finally said it was OK.

Then I didn't have much contact with my parents for a long time. I pretty much kept them out of my life because they didn't appreciate what I was doing. I didn't have a good relationship with my mother. But I was very close with my father. After about 15 years I started calling my father, and he was very happy to hear from me. We started to become very close again. We had nine kids in our family, and he said out of all them I proved to be the most spiritual. He was very proud of me for what I'm doing. He said that chanting on beads like we do was the same thing as praying to God. It didn't matter what way you did it, you're still praying to God.

At the very end of his life, I gave him a picture of my deities and he had them by his bed, and he said that they were very beautiful and he was happy that he could look at them before he passed away. I would read to him from scripture and he was very accepting of our philosophy and our way of life.

I think chanting has been a real important thing for me. It's helped me to understand the philosophy and to understand the world. I know it's the right thing. We have prasadam, a spiritual food that we offer to God. I've seen people change when they eat this food. I've seen their hearts change, I've seen their moods change. It looks just the same as any other food, but it's been offered to God with love and devotion and mantras -- and it changes people.

The marking on my forehead is tilak -- it's sacred clay from India, and it marks the body as a temple of God. We mark our body in different places with the names of God, Vishnu. And this just shows that God is sitting in our heart next to us.

We don't eat meat, fish, or eggs. By taking spiritual food, by purifying the body, we're going to come to a stage of loving each other and forgiving each other for our faults. Nobody's perfect in the world. This is the material world where there are always problems and nobody is perfect. If we can just focus on those good things then we'll all learn to live with each other in a happy state and we'll all be happy together. As long as we're finding fault and disliking someone for the way they act, we can't progress in spiritual life. It's a stumbling block on the path.

--Maharha Dasi
Sandy Ridge, North Carolina