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