Pádraig Ó Tuama is a poet, theologian, and extraordinary healer in our world of fracture. He leads the Corrymeela community of Northern Ireland, a place that has offered refuge since the violent division that defined that country until the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. Ó Tuama and Corrymeela extend a quiet, generative, and joyful force far beyond their northern coast to people around the world. Over cups of tea and the experience of bringing people together, he says it becomes possible to talk with each other and be in the same room with the people we talk about.
Pádraig Ó Tuama is the community leader of Corrymeela, Northern Ireland’s oldest peace and reconciliation organization. He finishes his five-year term in 2019. His books include a prayer book, “Daily Prayer with the Corrymeela Community,” a book of poetry, “Sorry for Your Troubles,” and a memoir, “In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World.”
This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Pádraig Ó Tuama — Belonging Creates and Undoes Us.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Mary Oliver was one of our greatest and most beloved poets. She is often quoted by people across ages and backgrounds — and it’s fitting, since she described poetry as a sacred community ritual. “When you write a poem, you write it for anybody and everybody,” she said. Mary died on January 17, 2019, at the age of 83. She was a prolific and decorated poet, whose honors included the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. In this 2015 conversation — one of the rare interviews she granted during her lifetime — she discussed the wisdom of the world, the salvation of poetry, and the life behind her writing.
Mary Oliver published over 25 books of poetry and prose, including Dream Work, A Thousand Mornings, and A Poetry Handbook. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984 for her book American Primitive. Her final work, Devotions, is a curated collection of poetry from her more than 50-year career.
This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Mary Oliver — Listening to the World.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Sharon Salzberg is a meditation teacher and the cofounder of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts. She is the co-author of “Love Your Enemies.” Her other books include “Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation” and “Real Happiness at Work: Meditations for Accomplishment, Achievement, and Peace.” Robert Thurman is professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University. He’s also the president of the Tibet House U.S. He is the co-author of “Love Your Enemies.” His other books include “Infinite Life: Awakening to Bliss Within and Inner Revolution.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Sharon Salzberg and Robert Thurman — Embracing Our Enemies and Our Suffering.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>No conversation we’ve ever done has been more beloved than this one. This Irish poet, theologian, and philosopher insisted on beauty as a human calling. He had a very Celtic, lifelong fascination with the inner landscape of our lives and with what he called “the invisible world” that is constantly intertwining what we can know and see. This was one of the last interviews he gave before his unexpected death in 2008. But John O’Donohue’s voice and writings continue to bring ancient mystical wisdom to modern confusions and longings. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “John O’Donohue — The Inner Landscape of Beauty.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Thich Nhat Hanh is a Vietnamese Zen monk, poet, and peacemaker. He co-founded the An Quang Buddhist Institute, the Van Hanh Buddhist University in Vietnam, and Plum Village, a Buddhist training monastery in France. He is the author of many books, including “Being Peace,” “The Miracle of Mindfulness: A Manual on Meditation,” “The Art of Communicating,” “Fragrant Palm Leaves: Journals 1962–1966,” and “The Long Road Turns to Joy — A Guide to Walking Meditation.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Thich Nhat Hanh, Cheri Maples, and Larry Ward — Mindfulness, Suffering, and Engaged Buddhism.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Cheri Maples served in the criminal justice system for 25 years, including as an Assistant Attorney General in the Wisconsin Department of Justice, and as a police officer with the City of Madison Police Department. She is a licensed attorney, a clinical social worker, and co-founder of the Center for Mindfulness and Justice in Madison, Wisconsin. She was ordained as a dharma teacher by Thich Nhat Hanh in 2008. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Thich Nhat Hanh, Cheri Maples, and Larry Ward — Mindfulness, Suffering, and Engaged Buddhism.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Larry Ward is co-director of the Lotus Institute in Encinitas, California and an ordained Baptist minister. He also owned a management consultant firm for Fortune 500 companies. He co-authored a book with his wife, “Love’s Garden: A Guide to Mindful Relationships.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Thich Nhat Hanh, Cheri Maples, and Larry Ward — Mindfulness, Suffering, and Engaged Buddhism.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Desmond Tutu is an Anglican archbishop emeritus of Cape Town, South Africa and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. He has written many books, including, “Made for Goodness: And Why This Makes All the Difference,” and “The Book of Forgiving.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Desmond Tutu — A God of Surprises.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Gordon Hempton is founder and vice president of The One Square Inch of Silence Foundation, based in Joyce, Washington. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Gordon Hempton — Silence and the Presence of Everything.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Mike Rose is a research professor in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. He’s the author of several books, including “The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker,” “Why School?: Reclaiming Education for All of Us,” and more recently “Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Mike Rose — The Intelligence in All Kinds of Work, and the Human Core of All Education That Matters.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Béla Fleck is one of the greatest living banjo players in the world. He’s followed what many experience as this quintessential American roots instrument back to its roots in Africa, and he’s taken it where no banjo has gone before. Abigail Washburn is a celebrated banjo player and singer, both in English and Chinese. These two are partners in music and in life — recovering something ancient and deeply American all at once, bringing both beauty and meaning to what they play and how they live.
Béla Fleck has recorded over 40 albums, most famously with The Flecktones and New Grass Revival. His albums include Flight of the Cosmic Hippo, UFO Tofu, and Rocket Science. His first full album collaboration with Abigail Washburn, Béla Fleck and Abigail Washburn, was awarded the 2016 Grammy for Best Folk Album. Their most recent album is Echo in the Valley.
Abigail Washburn is a clawhammer banjo player and singer. Her albums include Song of the Traveling Daughter, City of Refuge, and The Sparrow Quartet EP. She is a Carolina Performing Arts DisTil Fellow, former TED Fellow, and was the first U.S.-China Fellow at Vanderbilt University.
This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Béla Fleck and Abigail Washburn — Truth, Beauty, Banjo.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>The wonderful writer Luis Alberto Urrea says that a deep truth of our time is that “we miss each other.” We have this drive to erect barriers between ourselves and yet this makes us a little crazy. He is singularly wise about the deep meaning and the problem of borders. The Mexican-American border, as he likes to say, ran straight through his parents’ Mexican-American marriage and divorce. His works of fiction and non-fiction confuse every dehumanizing caricature of Mexicans — and of U.S. border guards. The possibility of our time, as he lives and witnesses with his writing, is to evolve the old melting pot to the 21st-century richness of “us” — with all the mess and necessary humor required. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Luis Alberto Urrea — What Borders Are Really About, and What We Do With Them.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Kevin Kling is a performer and an advisory council member of Interact. His plays include “21A” and “Lloyd’s Prayer.” His books include “The Dog Says How.” The new PBS documentary about his life and work is called “Kevin Kling: Lost and Found.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Kevin Kling — The Losses and Laughter We Grow Into.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>The topic of the day was “courage,” with two singular, admired women (who happen to be married to each other): soccer icon Abby Wambach and writer/philanthropist Glennon Doyle. Abby is an Olympic gold medalist and World Cup champion. Glennon entered the American imagination with the label “Christian mommy blogger.” Now she ignites millions of followers through initiatives like “Love Flash Mobs,” as she says “to turn heartbreak into action.” What follows is a conversation about courage that is both serious and playful, as it turns up in their lives apart and together — from addiction to social activism to blended family parenting. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Glennon Doyle and Abby Wambach — Un-becoming” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Therapist Esther Perel has changed our discourse about sexuality and coupledom with her TED talks, books, and singular podcast, “Where Should We Begin?”, in which listeners are invited into emotionally raw therapy sessions she conducts with couples she’s never met before. For Perel, eroticism is a key ingredient to life — and it’s more than just a description of sexuality. “It is about how people connect to this quality of aliveness, of vibrancy, of vitality, of renewal,” she says. “It is actually a spiritual, mystical experience of life.”
Esther Perel has a private couples and family therapy practice in New York. She is executive producer and host of the podcast “Where Should We Begin?” She has also given two TED talks and is the author of the books “Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence” and “The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity.”
This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the “On Being” episode “Esther Perel — The Erotic Is an Antidote to Death.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>With his book “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” Daniel Kahneman emerged as one of the most intriguing voices on the complexity of human thought and behavior. He is a psychologist who won the Nobel Prize in economics for helping to create the field of behavioral economics — and is a self-described “constant worrier.” It’s fun, helpful, and more than a little unnerving to apply his insights into why we think and act the way we do in this moment of social and political tumult.
Daniel Kahneman is best known for his book “Thinking, Fast and Slow.” He’s the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Princeton University, professor of psychology and public affairs emeritus at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School, and a fellow of the Center for Rationality at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Daniel Kahneman — Why We Contradict Ourselves and Confound Each Other.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>The Oglala Lakota poet. “I wanted as much as possible to avoid this nostalgic portraiture of a Native life.” The reward and joy of patience. The difference between guilt, shame, and freedom from denial. When apologies are done well.
Layli Long Soldier is a writer, a mother, a citizen of the United States, and a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation. She has a way of opening up this part of her life, and of American life, to inspire self-searching and tenderness. Her award-winning first book of poetry, WHEREAS, is a response to the U.S. government’s official apology to Native peoples in 2009, which was done so quietly, with no ceremony, that it was practically a secret. Layli Long Soldier offers entry points for us all — to events that are not merely about the past, and to the freedom real apologies might bring.
Layli Long Soldier is the recipient of the 2015 Lannan Fellowship for Poetry and a 2015 National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation. Her first book of poetry, WHEREAS, is a winner of the multiple awards including the Whiting Award, and a finalist for the National Book Award. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.
]]>To reassert the liveliness of ordinary things, precisely in the face of what is hardest and most broken in life and society — this has been Michael Longley’s gift to Northern Ireland as one of its foremost living poets. He is a voice for all of us now, wise and winsome about the force of words in a society that has moved away from sectarianism in living memory. The Good Friday Agreement was signed 20 years ago this month, and social healing is ongoing work to this day. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “The Vitality of Ordinary Things.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>“When you’re in a very quiet place, when you’re remembering, when you’re savoring an image, when you’re allowing your mind calmly to leap from one thought to another, that’s a poem.” Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Kindness” has traveled around the world. She grew up between Ferguson, Missouri, Ramallah, and Jerusalem. She insists that language must be a way out of cycles of animosity. She’d have us notice “petite discoveries” that embolden us to choose human nourishment over division. “Before you know what kindness really is / you must lose things.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Naomi Shihab Nye — Your Life Is a Poem.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>What if the first question we asked on a date were, “How are you crazy? I’m crazy like this”? Philosopher and writer Alain de Botton’s essay “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person” was one of the most-read articles in The New York Times in recent years. As people and as a culture, he says, we would be much saner and happier if we reexamined our very view of love. Nowhere do we realistically teach ourselves and our children how love deepens and stumbles, survives and evolves over time, and how that process has much more to do with ourselves than with what is right or wrong about our partner. The real work of love is not in the falling, but in what comes after. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Alain de Botton — The True Hard Work of Love and Relationships.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>We’re fluent in the languages of psychology and medication, but the word “depression” does not do justice to this human experience. Depression is also spiritual territory. It is a shadow side of human vitality and as such teaches us about vitality. Is depression possible for the same reason that love is possible? This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “The Soul in Depression.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>We’re fluent in the languages of psychology and medication, but the word “depression” does not do justice to this human experience. Depression is also spiritual territory. It is a shadow side of human vitality and as such teaches us about vitality. Is depression possible for the same reason that love is possible? This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “The Soul in Depression.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>We’re fluent in the languages of psychology and medication, but the word “depression” does not do justice to this human experience. Depression is also spiritual territory. It is a shadow side of human vitality and as such teaches us about vitality. Is depression possible for the same reason that love is possible? This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “The Soul in Depression.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>In the 1960s, Nikki Giovanni was a revolutionary poet of the Black Arts Movement that nourished civil rights. She had a famous dialogue with James Baldwin in Paris in 1971. As a professor at Virginia Tech, she brought beauty and courage by the way of poetry after the shooting there. Today, she is a self-proclaimed space freak and a delighted elder — an adored voice to hip-hop artists and the new forms of social change this generation is creating. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Nikki Giovanni — Soul Food, Sex, and Space.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Nobel physicist Frank Wilczek sees beauty as a compass for truth, discovery, and meaning. His book “A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design” is a long meditation on the question: “Does the world embody beautiful ideas?” He’s the unusual scientist willing to analogize his discoveries about the deep structure of reality with deep meaning in the human everyday. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Frank Wilczek — Why Is the World So Beautiful?” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Life as an improvisational art, at every age. This idea animates the wise linguist and anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson, whose book “Composing a Life” has touched many. Since her childhood as the daughter of the iconic anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, she’s had an ability to move through the world as both an original observer and a joyful participant. Now in her 70s, she’s pondering — and living — what she calls the age of “active wisdom.” She sees longer life spans creating a new developmental stage for our species. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Mary Catherine Bateson — Composing A Life.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Jennifer Michael Hecht is a poet, philosopher, and historian. Her books include “Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It,” “Doubt: A History,” and “Who Said.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Jennifer Michael Hecht — Suicide, and Hope for Our Future Selves.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Jonathan Sacks was Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Commonwealth for 22 years. He is now the Ingeborg and Ira Rennert Global Distinguished Professor of Judaic Thought at New York University and the Kressel and Ephrat Family University Professor of Jewish Thought at Yeshiva University. He is also Professor of Law, Ethics and the Bible at King’s College London. His books include “The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning,” “The Dignity of Difference,” and his latest, “Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Jonathan Sacks — The Dignity of Difference.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>A creator of the field of the sociology of emotion. Treating emotion seriously in our life together. “I could see what they couldn’t see but not what I couldn’t see.” Our stories as “felt” not merely factual. Caring is not the same as capitulating.
One of the voices many have been turning to in recent years is Arlie Hochschild. She helped create the field of the sociology of emotion — our stories as “felt” rather than merely factual. When she published her book, “Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right,” in the fall of 2016, it felt like she had chronicled the human dynamics that have now come to upend American culture. It was based on five years of friendship and research in Tea Party country at that movement’s height, far from her home in Berkeley, California. Her understanding of emotion in society and politics feels even more important at this juncture. So does the reflective, self-critical sensibility this experience gave Arlie Hochschild on her own liberal instincts. Caring, she says, is not the same as capitulating.
Arlie Hochschild is professor emerita in the Sociology Department at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of nine books including “The Managed Heart,” “The Second Shift,” and “Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right,” a finalist for the National Book Award.
This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Arlie Hochschild — Arlie Hochschild — On the Deep Story of Our Time.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>The poet Jericho Brown reminds us to bear witness to the complexity of the human experience, to interrogate the proximity of violence to love, and to look and listen closer so that we might uncover the small truths and surprises in life. His presence is irreverent and magnetic, as the high school students who joined us for this conversation experienced firsthand at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival.
Editor’s note: This interview discusses sexual violence and rape.
Jericho Brown is Winship Research Professor in Creative Writing at Emory University and the director of Emory’s creative writing program. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His first book, “Please,” won the American Book Award, and his second book, “The New Testament,” won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His new collection of poetry is “The Tradition.”
This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Jericho Brown — Small Truths and Other Surprises.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>The band Cloud Cult is hard to categorize — both musically and lyrically — though it’s been called an “orchestral indie rock collective.” Less in question is the profound and life-giving force of its music. Cloud Cult’s trajectory was altered the day its co-founder and singer-songwriter, Craig Minowa, and his wife woke up to find that their two-year-old son had mysteriously died in his sleep. Live from our studios on Loring Park, we explore the art that has emerged ever since — spanning the human experience from the rawest grief to the fiercest hope. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Cloud Cult — Music Is Medicine.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>“The sudden passionate happiness which the natural world can occasionally trigger in us,” Michael McCarthy writes, “may well be the most serious business of all.” He is a naturalist and journalist, and this is his delightful and galvanizing call — that we can stop relying on the immobilizing language of statistics and take up our joy in the natural world as our civilizational defense of it. With a perspective equally infused by science, reportage, and poetry, he reminds us that the natural world is where we evolved, where we found our metaphors and similes, and it is the resting place for our psyches. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Nature, Joy, and Human Becoming.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Dario Robleto is a sculptural artist who lives and works in Houston, Texas. His most recent exhibit, “The Boundary of Life is Quietly Crossed,” is at the Menil Collection in Houston. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Dario Robleto — Sculptor of Memory.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Marilyn Nelson has taught poetry and contemplative practice to college students and to West Point cadets. She gives winsome voice to forgotten people from history, shining a light on the complicated ancestry that can help us in what she calls “communal pondering.” To sit with Marilyn Nelson is to gain a newly spacious perspective on what that might mean — and on why, in this troubled moment, Americans young and old are turning to poetry with urgency. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Marilyn Nelson — Communal Pondering in a Noisy World.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>The extraordinary wisdom of Congressman John Lewis. A rare look inside the civil rights leaders’ spiritual confrontation with themselves – and their intricate art of “love in action.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “John Lewis – Love In Action.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>You could say of the present that we are suddenly in a world of “ambiguous loss.” Family therapist and clinical psychologist Pauline Boss coined this term, and invented a new field within psychology, to name the reality that every loss does not hold a promise of anything like resolution. There are “complicated griefs” that shift the world on its axis from one day to the next, with no going back to the world of before and no time to set things in order. This conversation is full of practical intelligence for shedding assumptions about how we should be feeling and acting that deepen stress precisely in a moment like this. It offers wisdom and concrete tools for becoming more meaningfully present to what is actually going on inside ourselves and for others.
Pauline Boss is professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of “Loss, Trauma, and Resilience: Therapeutic Work with Ambiguous Loss,” “Loving Someone Who Has Dementia,” and “Ambiguous Loss.” She has also pioneered a global online course with the University of Minnesota called “Ambiguous Loss: Its Meaning and Application.”
Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.
]]>The late civil rights elder Vincent Harding was chairperson of the Veterans of Hope project at Iliff School of Theology in Denver, where he was professor of Religion and Transformation. He posed and lived a question that is freshly in our midst: Is America possible? This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Vincent Harding — Is America Possible?” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Go to the doctor and they won’t begin to treat you without taking your history — and not just yours, but that of your parents and grandparents before you. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson points this out as she reflects on her epic work of narrative non-fiction, The Warmth of Other Suns. She’s immersed herself in the stories of the Great Migration, the diaspora of six million African Americans to the north of the U.S. in the 20th century. It’s a carrier of untold histories and truths that help make sense of human and social challenges newly visible at the heart of our life together. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Isabel Wilkerson — The Heart Is the Last Frontier.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>“If you can’t talk about something, you can’t think about something. I’ve worked with students who could barely let themselves think, they were so scared of thinking the wrong thing.”
This conversation was inspired by Eula Biss’s stunning New York Times essay “White Debt,” which had this metaphor at its core: ”The state of white life is that we’re living in a house we believe we own but that we’ve never paid off.” She spoke with us in 2016 and we aired this last year, but we might just put this conversation out every year, as we’re all novices on this territory. Eula Biss had been thinking and writing about being white and raising white children in a multi-racial world for a long time. She helpfully opens up words and ideas like “complacence,” “guilt,” and something related to privilege called “opportunity hoarding.” To be in this uncomfortable conversation is to realize how these words alone, taken seriously, can shake us up in necessary ways — and how the limits of words make these conversations at once more messy and more urgent.
Eula Biss teaches writing at Northwestern University. Her books include “On Immunity: An Inoculation” and “Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays.”
This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Eula Biss — Let’s Talk About Whiteness.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>There are places in the human experience where ordinary language falls short but where poetry can find a way in. Gregory Orr has used lyric poetry to wrest gentle, healing, life-giving words from one of the most terrible traumas imaginable. On a hunting trip with his father at the age of 12, he accidentally shot and killed his younger brother. Since then, he says he has found consolation in words and story. “What’s beautiful about a poem is that you take on this chaos and this responsibility, and you shape it into order and make something of it,” he says.
Gregory Orr taught English at the University of Virginia from 1975 to 2019 and founded its Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing. His books of prose include “The Blessing,” “Poetry as Survival,” and “A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry.” He is the author of over 10 books of poetry including “How Beautiful the Beloved” and a forthcoming collection, “The Last Love Poem I Will Ever Write.”
This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Gregory Orr — Shaping Grief With Language.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Mysticism is the birthright of every human being, says Br. David Steindl-Rast. He speaks of the anatomy and practice of gratitude as full-blooded, reality-based, and redeeming. Now in his 90s, he has lived through a world war, the end of an empire, and the fascist takeover of his country. He was an early pioneer, together with Thomas Merton, of dialogue between Christian and Buddhist monastics. He’s also given a TED talk, viewed over six million times, on the subject of gratitude — a practice increasingly interrogated by scientists and physicians as a key to human well-being.This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “David Steindl-Rast — Anatomy of Gratitude.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Forms of religious devotion are shifting — and there’s a new world of creativity toward crafting spiritual life while exploring the depths of tradition. Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie is a fun and forceful embodiment of this evolution. Born into an eminent and ancient rabbinical lineage, as a young adult he moved away from religion towards storytelling, theater, and drag. Today he leads a pop-up synagogue in New York City that takes as its tagline “everybody-friendly, artist-driven, God-optional.” It’s not merely about spiritual community but about recovering the sacred and reinventing the very meaning of “we.”
Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie is a rabbi and founding spiritual leader of Lab/Shul in New York City. He’s also the founding director of Storahtelling.
This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Amichai Lau-Lavie — First Aid for Spiritual Seekers.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Applied philosopher Jonathan Rowson insists on holding a deeper appreciation for how our inner worlds influence our outer worlds. His research organization, Perspectiva, examines how social change happens across “systems, souls, and society.” “If we can get better and more nimble and more generous about how we move between those worlds, then the chance of creating a hope that makes sense for all of us is all the greater,” he says. We engage his broad spiritual lens on the great dynamics of our time, from social life to the economy to the climate.
Jonathan Rowson is co-founder and director of the research institute Perspectiva based in London. He is also the former director of the Social Brain Centre at the Royal Society of Arts and is a chess grandmaster and three-time British Chess Champion. His books include “The Seven Deadly Chess Sins,” “Chess for Zebras,” and, most recently, “Spiritualize: Cultivating Spiritual Sensibility to Address 21st Century Challenges.” His forthcoming book, “The Moves that Matter: A Chess Grandmaster on the Game of Life,” will be published in November 2019.
This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Jonathan Rowson — Integrating Our Souls, Systems, and Society.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>We must shine a light on the past to live more abundantly now. Historian Annette Gordon-Reed and painter Titus Kaphar lead us in an exploration of that as a public adventure in this conversation at the Citizen University annual conference. Gordon-Reed is the historian who introduced the world to Sally Hemings and the children she had with President Thomas Jefferson, and so realigned a primary chapter of the American story with the deeper, more complicated truth. Kaphar collapses historical timelines on canvas and created iconic images after the protests in Ferguson. Both are reckoning with history in order to repair the present.
Titus Kaphar is an artist whose work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions from the Savannah College of Art and Design and the Seattle Art Museum to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His 2014 painting of Ferguson protesters was commissioned by “TIME” magazine. He has received numerous awards including the Artist as Activist Fellowship from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and the 2018 Rappaport Prize.
Annette Gordon-Reed is the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School and a professor of history in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. Her books include “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family,” for which she won the Pulitzer Prize, and “‘Most Blessed of the Patriarchs’: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination.”
This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Annette Gordon-Reed and Titus Kaphar — Are We Actually Citizens Here?” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>The folk-rock duo Amy Ray and Emily Saliers have been making music for over 25 years. They’re known for their social activism on-stage and off, but long before they became the Indigo Girls, they were singing in church choirs. They see music as a continuum of human existence, intertwined with spiritual life in a way that can’t be pinned down.
Amy Ray is a singer-songwriter who is one half of the folk-rock duo Indigo Girls. Her latest solo album, “Holler,” was released in September 2018.
Emily Saliers is a singer-songwriter who is one half of the folk-rock duo Indigo Girls. She is also the co-author of “A Song to Sing, A Life to Live: Reflections on Music as a Spiritual Practice.” Her debut album, “Murmuration Nation,” was released in 2017.
This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Indigo Girls — No Separation: On Music and Transcendence” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>We still work with the old idea that we should check the messy parts of ourselves at the door of our professional lives. But Jerry Colonna says doing so cuts us off from the source of our creativity. “The result is that our organizations are actually less productive, less imaginative; not just poor workplaces for individuals to be, but poor places for collaboration … and spontaneity and laughter and humor.” Colonna is a former venture capitalist who now coaches CEOs. He says undoing the old model starts with radical self-inquiry and asking ourselves questions like “Who is the person I’ve been all my life?” — and that it’s only after we sort through the material of our personal lives that we can become better leaders.
Jerry Colonna is the co-founder and CEO of Reboot, an executive coaching and leadership development firm. He also hosts the “Reboot” podcast and is the author of “Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up.” And if you want to hear Jerry in action, he’s featured in several episodes of Gimlet media’s podcast “StartUp.”
This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Jerry Colonna — Can You Really Bring Your Whole Self to Work?” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Men of all ages say Richard Rohr has given them a new way into spiritual depth and religious thought through his writing and retreats. This conversation with the Franciscan spiritual teacher delves into the expansive scope of his ideas: from male formation and what he calls “father hunger” to why contemplation is as magnetic to people now, including millennials, as it’s ever been.
Richard Rohr is a Franciscan writer, teacher, and the founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His many books include “Falling Upward,” “Divine Dance,” and most recently, “The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe.”
This interview originally aired in April 2017. It is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Richard Rohr — Growing Up Men.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Today young people are trying to balance the question of “What do I want to do when I grow up?” with the question of “Who and how do I want to be in the world?” Physician and writer Abraham Verghese and education researcher Denise Pope argue that’s because the way we educate for success doesn’t support the creation of full, well-rounded humans. And they see the next generation challenging our cultural view of success by insisting that a deeply satisfying life is one filled with presence, vulnerability, and care for others.
Abraham Verghese is a professor of medicine, vice chair of the Department of Medicine, and Linda R. Meier and Joan F. Lane Provostial Professor at Stanford University. His books of fiction and non-fiction include “My Own Country,” “The Tennis Partner,” and the novel “Cutting for Stone.” He received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama in 2016.
Denise Pope is a senior lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Education and the co-founder of the non-profit organization Challenge Success. She’s the author of “Doing School: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed-Out, Materialistic, and Miseducated Students;” and a co-author of “Overloaded and Underprepared: Strategies for Stronger Schools and Healthy, Successful Kids.”
This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Abraham Verghese and Denise Pope — How Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Community organizers Rami Nashashibi and Lucas Johnson have much to teach us about using love — the most reliable muscle of human transformation — as a practical public good. Nashashibi is the founder of the Inner-City Muslim Action Network, a force for social healing on Chicago’s South Side. Johnson is the newly-named executive director of The On Being Project’s Civil Conversations Project. In a world of division, they say despair is not an option — and that the work of social healing requires us to get “proximate to pain.”
Rami Nashashibi is founder and executive director of the Inner-City Muslim Action Network (IMAN) in Chicago. He was named a MacArthur fellow in 2017 and an Opus Prize laureate in 2018.
Lucas Johnson is the executive director of The On Being Project’s Civil Conversations Project. He was previously international coordinator for the International Fellowship of Reconciliation, a century-old peace-building organization. Lucas is also a community organizer, writer, and a minister in the American Baptist Churches.
This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Rami Nashashibi and Lucas Johnson — Community Organizing as a Spiritual Practice.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>“What does a good day look like?” That question — when asked of both terminally-ill and healthy people — has transformed Atul Gawande’s practice of medicine. A citizen physician and writer, Gawande is on the frontiers of human agency and meaning in light of what modern medicine makes possible. For the millions of people who have read his book “Being Mortal,” he’s also opened new conversations about the ancient human question of death and what it might have to do with life.
Atul Gawande practices general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. He’s also Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Samuel O. Thier Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. He was recently named the CEO of Haven, a healthcare venture spearheaded by the leaders of Amazon, JP Morgan, and Berkshire Hathaway. He’s been a staff writer for “The New Yorker” magazine since 1998 and is the author of four books, including “The Checklist Manifesto” and “Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End.”
This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Atul Gawande — What Matters in the End” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>A Buddhist philosopher of ecology, Joanna Macy says we are at a pivotal moment in history with the possibility to unravel or create a life-sustaining human society. Now entering her 90s, Macy has lived adventurously by any definition. She worked with the CIA in Cold War Europe and the Peace Corps in post-colonial India and was an early environmental activist. She brings a poetic and spiritual sensibility to her work that’s reflected in her translations of the early-20th-century poet Rainer Maria Rilke. We take that poetry as a lens on her wisdom on the great dramas of our time: ecological, political, personal.
Joanna Macy is an activist, author, and a scholar of Buddhism, systems thinking, and deep ecology. Her 13 books include translations of Rilke’s “Book of Hours: Love Poems to God,” “A Year with Rilke,” and “In Praise of Mortality.” She is the root teacher of the Work That Reconnects, a framework and workshop for personal and social change. Her new translation of Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet,” together with Anita Barrows, is upcoming in 2020.
This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Joanna Macy — A Wild Love for the World.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>The late Wangari Maathai was a biologist, environmentalist, and the first African woman to win a Nobel Peace Prize. She was born under British colonial occupation and schooled by Catholic missionaries. But when she looked back on her childhood near the end of her life, she realized her family’s Kikuyu culture had imparted her with an intuitive sense of environmental balance. Maathai was steadfast in her determination to fight for the twin issues of conservation and human rights — and planting trees was a symbol of defiance.
Wangari Maathai founded the global Green Belt Movement, which has contributed today to the planting of over 52 million trees. She was the 2004 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Her books include the memoir “Unbowed” and “Replenishing the Earth: Spiritual Values for Healing Ourselves and the World.” She’s also one of the 100 heroic women featured in the book “Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls.” She died in 2011 at the age of 71.
This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Wangari Maathai — Marching with Trees.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>A prolific writer on sociology, history, economics, and politics, W.E.B. Du Bois was one of the most extraordinary minds of American and global history. His life traced an incredible arc; he was born three years after the end of the Civil War and died on the eve of the March on Washington. In 1903, he penned the famous line that “the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line.” Du Bois was a formative voice for many of the people who gave us the Civil Rights Movement and for all of us navigating the still-unfolding, unfinished business of civil rights now. We bring his life and ideas into relief through three conversations with people who were inspired by him.
Maya Angelou was a poet, educator, and activist. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Arts in 2000 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011. She is most well-known for her series of seven autobiographies, including “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.”
This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Maya Angelou, Elizabeth Alexander, and Arnold Rampersad — W.E.B. Du Bois and the American Soul.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>A prolific writer on sociology, history, economics, and politics, W.E.B. Du Bois was one of the most extraordinary minds of American and global history. His life traced an incredible arc; he was born three years after the end of the Civil War and died on the eve of the March on Washington. In 1903, he penned the famous line that “the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line.” Du Bois was a formative voice for many of the people who gave us the Civil Rights Movement and for all of us navigating the still-unfolding, unfinished business of civil rights now. We bring his life and ideas into relief through three conversations with people who were inspired by him.
Elizabeth Alexander is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and president of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Her books include “Crave Radiance” and her memoir, “The Light of the World.”
This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Maya Angelou, Elizabeth Alexander, and Arnold Rampersad — W.E.B. Du Bois and the American Soul.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>A prolific writer on sociology, history, economics, and politics, W.E.B. Du Bois was one of the most extraordinary minds of American and global history. His life traced an incredible arc; he was born three years after the end of the Civil War and died on the eve of the March on Washington. In 1903, he penned the famous line that “the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line.” Du Bois was a formative voice for many of the people who gave us the Civil Rights Movement and for all of us navigating the still-unfolding, unfinished business of civil rights now. We bring his life and ideas into relief through three conversations with people who were inspired by him.
Arnold Rampersad is emeritus professor of English at Stanford University and author of “The Art and Imagination of W.E.B. Du Bois.” He was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2010.
This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Maya Angelou, Elizabeth Alexander, and Arnold Rampersad — W.E.B. Du Bois and the American Soul.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>This interview accompanies the On Being episode “Maya Angelou, Elizabeth Alexander, and Arnold Rampersad — W.E.B. Du Bois & the American Soul.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Rabbi Lawrence Kushner is a long-time student and articulator of the mysteries and messages of Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition. Kushner says mysticism tends to appear when religion — whatever the tradition — becomes too formal and logical. “The minute mysticism becomes permissible, acceptable, possible, it’s an immediate threat to organized religious structures,” he says. “Because what mysticism does is it gives everybody direct unmediated personal access to God.” He is influenced by the Jewish historian Gershom Scholem, who resurrected Kabbalah from obscurity in the 20th century and made it accessible to modern people.
Lawrence Kushner is the Emanu-El Scholar at Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco. He served for 28 years as the rabbi of Congregation Beth El in Sudbury, Massachusetts. He has been an adjunct faculty member at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles and also a commentator for NPR’s All Things Considered. His many books include God Was in This Place & I, i Did Not Know, Kabbalah: A Love Story, and I’m God; You’re Not: Observations on Organized Religion & Other Disguises of the Ego.
This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Lawrence Kushner — Kabbalah and Everyday Mysticism.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>When the wise and whimsical Sharon Olds started writing poetry over 40 years ago, she explored the subjects that interested her most — like diaphragms. “The politeness and the prudity of the world I grew up in meant that there were things that were important to me and interesting to me, [but] I had never read a poem about,” she once said. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 2013 for her collection Stag’s Leap about walking through the end of a long marriage. Her most recent book, Odes, pays homage to the human body and experience.
Sharon Olds is the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing at New York University. She is the author of Satan Says, The Dead and the Living, Odes, and Stag’s Leap — for which she also won the T.S. Eliot Prize. She helped found NYU’s outreach program for residents of Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island and for veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Sharon Olds — Odes to the *****.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Editor’s note: In February 2020, L’Arche International released the results of an independent investigation that it commissioned into Jean Vanier, who died in 2019. The investigation determined that the L’Arche founder, Catholic philosopher and humanitarian engaged in manipulative sexual relationships with at least six women from 1970-2005. None of the women had disabilities. The report also concluded that Vanier was complicit in covering up similar sexual abuse by his mentor, the late Father Thomas Philippe. In this response, Krista reflects on the moral questions and meaning raised by these discoveries.
A philosopher and Catholic social innovator, Jean Vanier is one of the great elders in our world today. The L’Arche movement, which he founded, centers around people with mental disabilities. The dozens of L’Arche communities around the world have become places of pilgrimage and are transformative for those involved and for the world around them. He has devoted his life to the practical application of Christianity’s most paradoxical teachings — that there’s power in humility, strength in weakness, and light in the darkness of human existence.
Jean Vanier is a philosopher and the founder of L’Arche. He lives full-time in the original community in Trosly-Breuil, France. He’s also the recipient of the 2015 Templeton Prize. His books include Befriending the Stranger, An Ark for the Poor, and A Cry is Heard: My Path to Peace.
This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Jean Vanier — The Wisdom of Tenderness.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Writer and photographer Teju Cole says he is “intrigued by the continuity of places, by the singing line that connects them all.” He attends to the border, overlap and interplay of things — from Brahms and Baldwin to daily technologies like Google. To delve into his mind and his multiple arts is to meet this world with creative raw materials for enduring truth and quiet hope.
Teju Cole is a photography critic for The New York Times and the Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing at Harvard. His books are Blind Spot, a book of photography and writing; a collection of essays, Known and Strange Things; and two novels: Open City and Every Day Is for the Thief.
This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Teju Cole — Sitting Together in the Dark.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Neuroscientist Richard Davidson is one of the central people who’s helped us begin to see inside our brains. His work has illuminated the rich interplay between things we saw as separate not that long ago: body, mind, spirit, emotion, behavior and genetics. He is applying what he’s learning about imparting qualities of character — like kindness and practical love — in lives and in classrooms. This live conversation was recorded at the Orange County Department of Education in Costa Mesa, California.
Richard Davidson is the William James and Vilas Research Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He founded and directs the Center for Healthy Minds there. He is the co-author of The Emotional Life of Your Brain and Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body. He was inducted into the National Academy of Medicine in 2017.
This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Richard Davidson — A Neuroscientist on Love and Learning.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>She has called Brain Pickings, her invention and labor of love, a “human-powered discovery engine for interestingness.” What Maria Popova really delivers, to hundreds of thousands of people each day, is wisdom of the old-fashioned sort, presented in new-fashioned digital ways. She cross-pollinates — between philosophy and design, physics and poetry, the intellectual and the experiential. We explore her gleanings on what it means to lead a good life — intellectually, creatively, and spiritually.
Maria Popova is the creator and presence behind BrainPickings.org, which is included in the Library of Congress’s permanent digital archive of culturally valuable materials. She is the author of Figuring and hosts “The Universe in Verse” — an annual celebration of science through poetry — at the interdisciplinary cultural institute Pioneer Works in Brooklyn.
This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Maria Popova — Cartographer of Meaning in a Digital Age.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>The poet, essayist, and playwright Claudia Rankine says every conversation about race doesn’t need to be about racism. But she says all of us — and especially white people — need to find a way to talk about it, even when it gets uncomfortable. Her bestselling book, “Citizen: An American Lyric,” catalogued the painful daily experiences of lived racism for people of color. Claudia models how it’s possible to bring that reality into the open — not to fight, but to draw closer. And she shows how we can do this with everyone, from our intimate friends to strangers on airplanes.
Claudia Rankine is the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University and founder of The Racial Imaginary Institute. She is the author of five collections of poetry including “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely.” Her plays include “The Provenance of Beauty” and “The White Card.”
This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Claudia Rankine — How Can I Say This so We Can Stay in This Car Together?” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>To be in conversation with Maira Kalman is like wandering into one of her cartoons in The New Yorker. Millions have been prompted to smile and think by her illustrated revision of Strunk and White’s “Elements of Style” or a “New York Times” blog or her lovely books and her drawings about dogs. Her words and pictures bring life’s whimsy and quirkiness into relief right alongside its intrinsic seriousness, its most curious truths.
Maira Kalman is the author and illustrator of over 20 books for adults and children. She is well known for her “New York Times” blogs that have become books like “And the Pursuit of Happiness” and “The Principles of Uncertainty.”
This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Maira Kalman — Daily Things to Fall in Love With.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>The great scholar and preacher. “Reframing so that we can re-experience the social realities that are right in front of us, from a different angle.” The disarming use of language. “A society finally cannot live without the quality of mercy.”
Walter Brueggemann is one of the world’s great teachers about the prophets who both anchor the Hebrew Bible and have transcended it across history. He translates their imagination from the chaos of ancient times to our own. He somehow also embodies this tradition’s fearless truth-telling together with fierce hope – and how it conveys ideas with disarming language. “The task is reframing,” he says, “so that we can re-experience the social realities that are right in front of us, from a different angle.”
Walter Brueggemann is William Marcellus McPheeters Professor Emeritus at Columbia Theological Seminary in Georgia. He is the author of “The Prophetic Imagination,” “Collected Sermons of Walter Brueggemann,” and “Tenacious Solidarity: Biblical Provocations on Race, Religion, Climate, and the Economy.”
This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Walter Brueggemann — The Prophetic Imagination.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>The feminist journalist and the psychotherapist. “It’s partners and lovers and spouses…fathers and brothers and sons and friends.” The difference between apology and forgiveness. “Men are used to trying to fix things.” Trauma, and also healing.
What we are naming with the impetus of #MeToo is, at best, an opening to a long-term cultural reckoning to grow up humanity; to make our society more whole. We explore this with psychotherapist Avi Klein, who works with men and couples, and feminist journalist Rebecca Traister. In a room full of journalists, at the invitation of the Solutions Journalism Network, we explored how to build the spaces, the imaginative muscle, and the pragmatic forms to support healing for women and men, now and in time.
Rebecca Traister is a writer for “New York Magazine” and a contributing editor at “Elle.” She is the author of “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” “All the Single Ladies,” and “Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger.”
Avi Klein is a psychotherapist and licensed clinical social worker. He practices in Manhattan. His 2018 “New York Times” Op-Ed piece is titled “What Men Say About #MeToo in Therapy.”
This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Rebecca Traister and Avi Klein — #MeToo Through a Solutions Lens.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Absorption as a definition of happiness. “To bring that calm into the motion, the commotion of the world.” Traveling not in order to move around but in order to be moved. His friend Leonard Cohen. Stillness & silence as a recharging station for the soul.
Pico Iyer is one of our most eloquent explorers of what he calls the “inner world” — in himself and in the 21st century world at large. The journalist and novelist travels the globe from Ethiopia to North Korea and lives in Japan. But he also experiences a remote Benedictine hermitage as his second home, retreating there many times each year. In this intimate conversation, we explore the discoveries he’s making and his practice of “the art of stillness.”
Pico Iyer is a journalist and writer. He’s written over a dozen books including “The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home,” “The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama,” and “The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere.” He has two books on Japan upcoming in 2019: “Autumn Light” and “A Beginner’s Guide to Japan.”
This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Pico Iyer — The Urgency of Slowing Down.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>We Americans revere the creation of wealth. Anand Giridharadas wants us to examine this and how it shapes our life together. This is a challenging conversation but a generative one: about the implicit moral equations behind a notion like “win-win” — and the moral compromises in a cultural consensus we’ve reached, without reflecting on it, about what and who can save us.
Anand Giridharadas is a journalist and writer. He is a former columnist and foreign correspondent for “The New York Times” and a visiting scholar at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. He is the author of “India Calling,” “The True American,” and “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World.”
This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Anand Giridharadas — When the Market Is Our Only Language.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>A brain surgeon. “The brain is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen.” The science of compassion. The baggage of evolution. The two way street of “neural innovation that comes from the brain stem into the heart.”
Brain surgeon James Doty is on the cutting edge of our knowledge of the brain and the heart: how they talk to each other; what compassion means in the body and in action; and how we can reshape our lives and perhaps our species through the scientific and human understanding we are now gaining.
James Doty is a clinical professor of neurosurgery at Stanford University and founding director of CCARE, the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education. His book is “Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon’s Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the Heart.” He is also the senior editor of the “Oxford Handbook of Compassion Science.”
Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.
]]>The U.S. Poet Laureate. “There’s this whole other narrative unfolding.” How history “which once felt so remote, feels closer and active and unresolved.” Listening for the spaces that are under-imagined. “Little leaps of imagination” that can restore us.
Tracy K. Smith has a deep interest in “the kind of silence that yields clarity” and “the way our voices sound when we dip below the decibel level of politics.” She’s a welcome voice on the little leaps of the imagination that can restore us. She’s spent the past year traversing our country, listening for all of this and drawing it forth as the U.S. poet laureate. Krista spoke with her at the invitation of New York’s B’nai Jeshurun synagogue, which has been in communal exploration on creating a just and redeemed social fabric.
Tracy K. Smith is the 22nd United States Poet Laureate and the director of Princeton University’s creative writing program. Her works of poetry include include “Wade in the Water,” “Life on Mars,” and “Duende.” Her memoir is “Ordinary Light.” She’s written the introduction to a new book, “American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time,” and she’s launching a new podcast called The Slowdown.
This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Tracy K. Smith — love is a language / Few practice, but all, or near all speak.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Co-creator of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society. “There is a calming, quieting, centering practice that leads to insight in every tradition.” Contemplative practice and social change. Mindful emailing. Creative, relational, ritual, cyclical.
Mirabai Bush works at an emerging 21st century intersection of industry, social healing, and diverse contemplative practices. Raised Catholic with Joan of Arc as her hero, she is one of the people who brought Buddhism to the West from India in the 1970s. She is called in to work with educators and judges, social activists and soldiers. She helped create Google’s popular employee program, Search Inside Yourself. Mirabai Bush’s life tells a fascinating narrative of our time: the rediscovery of contemplative practices, in many forms and from many traditions, in the secular thick of modern culture.
Mirabai Bush co-founded the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society. She is the author of Contemplative Practices in Higher Education and has written two books with Ram Dass: Compassion in Action and Walking Each Other Home: Conversations on Loving and Dying.
This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Mirabai Bush — Contemplation, Life, and Work.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>“People believe things that are mutually contradictory; I think we all do. I know I do.” — Erick Erickson
Earlier this year, the University of Montana invited On Being to attempt an outside the box civil conversation between two political pundits on contrasting ends of the U.S. political spectrum. It became a sold-out, public event in the spirit of Montana’s Senator Mike Mansfield, who famously modeled integrity, courage, and humility across the partisan aisle in the tumult of 1960s and 70s. Sally Kohn and Erick Erickson are both controversial, lightning-rod figures, yet neither of them fits neatly into a partisan mold. The reaction of the youngest people in the room is what compelled us to put this on the air. They said they had not witnessed or imagined a political conversation like this possible: one marked at once by bedrock difference — and good will, humor, and a willingness to bring our questions as well as our arguments, our humanity as well as our positions, into the room, if only for an evening. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Sally Kohn and Erick Erickson — Relationship Across Rupture.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>From abortion activist to bridge person. Questions to break out of intractable polarization. Wisdom beyond the news cycle. “What is it in your own position that gives you trouble? What is it in the position of the other that you are attracted to?”
The focus of our national fight over abortion may change, but this hasn’t changed for decades: we collapse this most intimate and complex of human dilemmas to two sides. We’ve been looking yet again for wisdom away from the turbulent news cycle and keep returning to this conversation Krista had with Frances Kissling. She is a “bridge person” in the abortion debate: a long-time pro-choice activist who has sought to come into relationship with her political opposites. Now she’s controversial on both sides, but speaks from a place that many of us would like to map out between the poles. She has experienced something more powerful, as she tells it, than defining common ground — and this has lessons for other issues in our common life and our struggles with people with whom we disagree the most.
Frances Kissling is president of the Center for Health, Ethics and Social Policy. She was the president of Catholics for Choice from 1982 until 2007.
This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Frances Kissling — What Is Good in the Position of the Other.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>“We are flying too low. We built this universe, this technology, these connections, this society, and all we can do with it is make junk? All we can do with it is put on stupid entertainments? I’m not buying it.”
Seth Godin is wise and infectiously curious about life, the internet, and everything. He was one of the first people to name the “connection economy.” And even as we’re seeing its dark side, he helps us hold on to the highest human potential the digital age still calls us to. His daily blog is indispensable reading for many of us. He’s a long-time mentor to Krista. This interview happened in 2012. Seth now has a new podcast, “Akimbo,” and a new book coming out, “This Is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn to See.”
Seth Godin writes the wildly popular daily, Seth’s Blog. He’s the author of many best-selling books, online and in print, including “Purple Cow,” “The Dip,” and “Linchpin.” In 2018 he was inducted into the Marketing Hall of Fame.
This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Seth Godin — Life, the Internet, and Everything.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>The science of implicit bias is one of the most promising fields for animating the human change that makes social change possible. The social psychologist Mahzarin Banaji is one of its primary architects. She understands the mind as a “difference-seeking machine” that helps us order and navigate the overwhelming complexity of reality. But this gift also creates blind spots and biases as we fill in what we don’t know with the limits of what we do know. This is science that takes our grappling with difference out of the realm of guilt and into the realm of transformative good. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Mahzarin Banaji — The Mind Is a Difference-Seeking Machine.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>How to get to the heart of the human experience without speaking? This question drove Alan Rabinowitz, after a childhood with a severe stutter, to become a wildlife biologist and explorer — “the Indiana Jones of wildlife conservation.” He died this month at age 64. He was known for his work with big cats, his discovery of new animal species, and for documenting human cultures believed to be lost. Alan Rabinowitz took our understanding of the animal-human bond to new places, while also being wise about the wilderness of the human experience. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Alan Rabinowitz — We Are All Wildlife.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>An exuberant experience of conversation and singing. There are nearly 5,000 spirituals in existence. Their organizing concept is not the melody of Europe, but the rhythm of Africa. They were composed by slaves, bards whose names we will never know, and yet gave rise to gospel, jazz, blues, and hip-hop. Joe Carter lived and breathed the universal appeal and hidden stories, meanings, and hope in what were originally called “sorrow songs.” This was one of our first weekly shows, and it’s still one of our most beloved. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Joe Carter — The Spirituals.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>We don’t really reward or allow our politicians, good or bad, to be searching, or to change their minds and grow — to admit their human frailty. So it’s surprising to hear Cory Booker say that the best thing that’s happened to him is “being broken, time and time again.” He’s taken flack for talking about politics as “manifesting love.” He speaks with Krista about the inadequacy of tolerance, strengthening the “muscle” of hope, and making your bed as a spiritual practice. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Cory Booker — Civic Spiritual Evolution.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>The great cellist Yo-Yo Ma is a citizen artist and a forensic musicologist, decoding the work of musical creators across time and space. In his art, Yo-Yo Ma resists fixed boundaries, and would like to rename classical music just “music” — born in improvisation, and traversing territory as vast and fluid as the world we inhabit. In this generous and intimate conversation, he shares his philosophy of curiosity about life, and of performance as hospitality. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Yo-Yo Ma — Music Happens Between the Notes.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Nothing is helping us more right now, as we watch human tragedies unfold on the U.S.-Mexican border and elsewhere, than a conversation Krista had last year with literary historian Lyndsey Stonebridge — on thinking and friendship in dark times. She applies the moral clarity of the 20th-century philosopher Hannah Arendt to now — an invitation to dwell on the human essence of events we analyze as political and economic. Our dramas of exile and displacement are existential, she says — about who we will all be as people and political community. What Arendt called the “banality of evil” was at root an inability to hear another voice. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “The Moral World in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt for Now — Lyndsey Stonebridge.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Maria Shriver’s life is often summarized in fairy tale terms. A child of the Kennedy clan in the Camelot aura of the early 1960s. Daughter of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, who founded the Special Olympics, and Sargent Shriver, who founded the Peace Corps. An esteemed broadcast journalist. First lady of California. This hour, she opens up about having a personal history that is also public history — and how deceptive the appearance of glamour can be. We experience the legendary toughness of the women in Maria Shriver’s family — but also the hard-won tenderness and wisdom with which she has come to raise her own voice. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Maria Shriver — Finding My ‘I Am'”. Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Her name is synonymous with her fantastically best-selling memoir “Eat Pray Love.” But through the disorienting process of becoming a celebrity, Elizabeth Gilbert has also reflected deeply on the gift and challenge of inhabiting a creative life. Creativity, as she defines it, is about choosing curiosity over fear — not to be confused with the more familiar trope to “follow your passion,” but rather as something accessible to us all and good for our life together. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Elizabeth Gilbert — Choosing Curiosity Over Fear.” Find more at onbeing.org
]]>“Race is a little bit like gravity,” john powell says: experienced by all, understood by few. He is a refreshing, redemptive thinker who counsels all kinds of people and projects on the front lines of our present racial longings. Race is relational, he reminds us. It’s as much about whiteness as about color. He takes new learnings from the science of the brain as forms of everyday power. “We don’t have to imagine doing things one at a time,” he says. “It’s not, ‘how do we get there?’ It’s, ‘how do we live?’” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “john a. powell — Opening to the Question of Belonging.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Anthropologist Helen Fisher explores the biological workings of our intimate passions, the brew of chemicals, hormones, and neurotransmitters that make the thrilling and sometimes treacherous realms of love and sex. In the research she does for match.com and her TED Talks that have been viewed by millions of people, she wields science as an entertaining, if sobering, lens on what feel like the most meaningful encounters of our lives. In this deeply personal conversation, she shows how it is possible to take on this knowledge as a form of wisdom and power. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “This Is Your Brain on Sex.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>A literary thinker with a “telescopic view of time”; an astrophysicist with an eye to “cultural evolution towards good.” What unfolds between these two is joyous, dynamic, and unexpectedly vulnerable — rich with cosmic imagining, civic pondering, and even some fresh definitions of the soul. A live taping from the inaugural On Being Gathering at the 1440 Multiversity in California. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Maria Popova and Natalie Batalha — Cosmic Imagining, Civic Pondering.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Flutist and vocalist Nathalie Joachim is a magnetic voice of one of the unexpected aspects of our globalized world — new generations reclaiming and falling in love anew with the places their parents left. In an odyssey through the songs of women, Nathalie Joachim is immersing in Haiti’s ecological and political traumas, as well as its beauty and its promise. She is co-founder of the urban art pop duo Flutronix and is based in Brooklyn. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Nathalie Joachim — Song of Haiti’s Women.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Stephen Batchelor’s secular Buddhism speaks to the mystery and vitality of spiritual life in every form. For him, secularism opens to doubt and questioning as a radical basis for spiritual life. Above all, he understands Buddhism without transcendent beliefs like karma or reincarnation to become something urgent to do, not to believe in. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Stephen Batchelor — Wondrous Doubt.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Oceanographer Sylvia Earle was the first person to walk solo on the bottom of the sea, under a quarter mile of water. She has watched humanity’s enduring fascination with “outer space” while she has delighted in “inner space” — the alien and increasingly endangered worlds beneath earth’s waters. These frontiers, as Sylvia Earle points out, are our very life-support system. She takes us inside the knowledge she’s gathered from a lifetime of research and literally swimming with sharks. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Sylvia Earle — Her Deepness.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>The tensions of our time are well-known. But there are stories that are not being told, because they are not violent and not shouting to be heard. One of them is that all over this country, synagogues and mosques, Muslims and Jews, have been coming to know one another. There is friendship. There are initiatives that are patiently, and at human scale, planting the seeds for new realities across generational time. As part of the Civil Conversations Project, a live conversation at the Union for Reform Judaism’s General Assembly in Boston between Imam Abdullah Antepli and Rabbi Sarah Bassin. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Sarah Bassin and Abdullah Antepli — Holy Envy.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>“A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.” Mary Karr has a captivating ability to give voice to what is funny in life’s most heartbreaking moments. She is beloved for her salty memoirs in which she traces her harrowing childhood in southeast Texas — with a mother who once tried to kill her with a butcher’s knife and her own adult struggles with alcoholism and breakdown. Mary Karr embodies this wryness and wildness in her lesser-known spiritual practice as a devout Catholic — an unexpected move she made in mid-life. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Mary Karr — Astonished by the Human Comedy.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>“It’s very likely that the universe is really a kind of a question, rather than the answer to anything,” says philosopher technologist Kevin Kelly. He was the founding editor of WIRED and is an original thinker on shaping the character and spiritual meaning of technology. He says our role as good askers of questions will remain the most important contribution of our species in a coming world of AI. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Kevin Kelly — The Universe Is a Question.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>The poet Christian Wiman is giving voice to the hunger and challenge of being religious now. He had a charismatic Texas Christian upbringing, and was later agnostic. He became actively religious again as he found love in his mid 30s, and was diagnosed with cancer. He’s written, “How does one remember God, reach for God, realize God in the midst of one’s life if one is constantly being overwhelmed by that life?” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Christian Wiman — How Does One Remember God?” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>The wise and lyrical writer Adam Gopnik muses on the ironies of spiritual life in a secular age through the lens of his many fascinations — from parenting, to the arts, to Darwin. He touches on all these things in a conversation inspired by his foreword to “The Good Book,” in which novelists, essayists, and activists who are not known as religious thinkers write about their favorite biblical passages. Our ancestors acknowledged doubt while practicing faith, he says; we moderns are drawn to faith while practicing doubt. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Adam Gopnik — Practicing Doubt, Redrawing Faith.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>No challenge before us is more important — and more potentially life-giving — than that we come to see and know our fellow citizens, our neighbors, who have become strangers. Journalist Anand Giridharadas and Whitney Kimball Coe of the Rural Assembly have two very different histories and places in our life together. But they are both stitching relationship across the ruptures that have made politics thin veneers over human dramas of power and frailty, fear and hope. We spoke at the Obama Foundation’s inaugural summit in Chicago. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Anand Giridharadas and Whitney Kimball Coe —The Call to Community in a Changed World.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>The new field of epigenetics sees that genes can be turned on and off and expressed differently through changes in environment and behavior. Rachel Yehuda is a pioneer in understanding how the effects of stress and trauma can transmit biologically, beyond cataclysmic events, to the next generation. She has studied the children of Holocaust survivors and of pregnant women who survived the 9/11 attacks. But her science is a form of power for flourishing beyond the traumas large and small that mark each of our lives and those of our families and communities. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Rachel Yehuda — How Trauma and Resilience Cross Generations.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Her unconventional studies have long suggested what neuroscience is now revealing: our experiences are formed by the words and ideas we attach to them. Naming something play rather than work — or exercise rather than labor — can mean the difference between delight and drudgery, fatigue or weight loss. What makes a vacation a vacation is not only a change of scenery, but the fact that we let go of the mindless everyday illusion that we are in control. Ellen Langer says mindfulness is achievable without meditation or yoga. She defines it as “the simple act of actively noticing things.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Ellen Langer — Science of Mindlessness and Mindfulness.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>“When it comes to moral judgments, we think we are scientists discovering the truth, but actually we are lawyers arguing for positions we arrived at by other means.” The surprising psychology behind morality is at the heart of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s research. He explains “liberal” and “conservative” not narrowly or necessarily as political affiliations, but as personality types — ways of moving through the world. His self-described “conservative-hating, religion-hating, secular liberal instincts” have been challenged by his own studies. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Jonathan Haidt — The Psychology of Self-Righteousness.” Find onbeing.org.
]]>It’s easy to despair at all the bad news and horrific pictures that come at us daily. But Roshi Joan Halifax say this is a form of empathy that works against us. There’s such a thing as pathological altruism. This zen abbot and medical anthropologist has nourishing wisdom as we face suffering in the world. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Joan Halifax — Finding Buoyancy Amidst Despair.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>“When it comes to the world around us,” Lisa Randall has written, “is there any choice but to explore?” As one of the most influential theoretical physicists working today, she’s interested in the interconnectedness between fields that have previously operated more autonomously: astronomy, biology, and paleontology. She’s pursuing a theory that “dark matter” might have created the cosmic event that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs — and hence humanity’s rise as a species. We learn what she’s discovering, as well as the human questions and takeaways her work throws into relief. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Lisa Randall — Dark Matter, Dinosaurs, and Extra Dimensions.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>“In a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.” A mystic, a 20th-century religious intellectual, a social change agent, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marched alongside Martin Luther King, Jr., famously saying afterwards that he felt his legs were praying. Heschel’s poetic theological writings are still read and widely studied today. His faith was as much about “radical amazement” as it was about certainty. And he embodied the passionate social engagement of the prophets, drawing on wisdom at once provocative and nourishing.
]]>“From the bottom will the genius come that makes our ability to live with each other possible. I believe that with all my heart.” These are the words of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Dominican-American writer Junot Díaz. His hope is fiercely reality-based, a product of centuries lodged in his body of African-Caribbean suffering, survival, and genius.
]]>Steeped in cutting edge research around the social lives of networked teens, danah boyd demystifies technology while being wise about the changes it’s making to life and relationship. She has intriguing advice on the technologically-fueled generation gaps of our age — that our children’s immersion in social media may offer a kind of respite from their over-structured, overscheduled analog lives. And that cyber-bullying is an online reflection of the offline world, and blaming technology is missing the point. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “danah boyd — The Internet of the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>A French-born Tibetan Buddhist monk and a central figure in the Dalai Lama’s dialogue with scientists, Matthieu Ricard was dubbed “The Happiest Man in the World” after his brain was imaged. But he resists this label. In his writing and in his life, he explores happiness not as a pleasurable feeling but as a way of being that gives you the resources to deal with the ups and downs of life and that encompasses many emotional states, including sadness. We take in Matthieu Ricard’s practical teachings for cultivating inner strength, joy, and direction. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Matthieu Ricard — Happiness As Human Flourishing.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>The renowned actor as you’ve never heard him before. He has appeared in over 100 films, including Apocalypse Now. He’s best known on television as President Bartlet in “The West Wing.” But Martin Sheen, born and still legally named Ramón Estévez, has had another lesser-known life as a spiritual seeker and activist. He returned to a deep and joyful Catholic faith after a crisis at the height of his fame in mid-life. He’s been arrested over 60 times in vigils and protests. “Piety is something you do alone,” he says. “True freedom, spirituality, can only be achieved in community.”This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Martin Sheen — Spirituality of Imagination.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>A philosopher’s questioning and a scientist’s eye shape Enrique Martínez Celaya’s original approach to art and to life. A world-renowned painter who trained as a physicist, he’s fascinated by the deeper order that “whispers” beneath the surface of things. Works of art that endure, he says, possess their own form of consciousness. And a quiet life of purpose is a particular form of prophecy. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Enrique Martínez Celaya — The Whisper of the Order of Things.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>A thrilling, mind-bending view of the cosmos and of the human adventure of modern science. In a conversation ranging from free will to the multiverse to the meaning of the Higgs boson particle, physicist Brian Greene suggests the deepest scientific realities are hidden from human senses and often defy our best intuition. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Brian Greene — Reimagining the Cosmos.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Black Lives Matter co-founder and artist Patrisse Cullors presents a luminous vision of the spiritual core of Black Lives Matter and a resilient world in the making. She joins Dr. Robert Ross, a physician and philanthropist on the cutting edge of learning how trauma can be healed in bodies and communities, on the evolving nature of social change. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Patrisse Cullors and Robert Ross — The Spiritual Work of Black Lives Matter.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>If we’re going to create the world we want our children to inhabit, we’re going to have to find ways to hold more complexity peaceably, and probably uncomfortably, just to soften what is possible between us. We need to be ready to let others surprise us, offer forgiveness, and ask hard questions of our own part in this moment. This doesn’t happen often in politics. But it is essential in life, and it must be part of common life, too. As part of our ongoing Civil Conversations Project, Krista draws out Glenn Beck in this generosity of spirit. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Glenn Beck — What You Do Will Be a Pivot Point.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>The moral life, Marie Howe says, is lived out in what we say as much as what we do. She became known for her poetry collection “What the Living Do,” about her brother’s death at 28 from AIDS. Now she has a new book, “Magdalene.” Poetry is her exuberant and open-hearted way into the words and the silences we live by. She works and plays with a Catholic upbringing, the universal drama of family, the ordinary rituals that sustain us — and how language, again and again, has a power to save us. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Marie Howe — The Power of Words to Save Us.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Sheryl Sandberg is synonymous with Facebook, and Silicon Valley success, and she’s the voice of “Lean In.” She joins us, frank and vulnerable, together with the psychologist Adam Grant. His friendship — and his research on resilience — helped her survive the shocking death of her husband while on vacation. They share what they’ve learned about planting deep resilience in ourselves and our children, and even reclaiming joy. There is so much learning here, on facing the unimaginable when it arrives in our lives and being more practically caring towards the losses woven into lives all around us. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant — Resilience After Unimaginable Loss.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>It’s hard to imagine honest, revelatory, even enjoyable conversation between people on distant points of American life right now. But in this public conversation at the Citizen University annual conference, Matt Kibbe and Heather McGhee show us how. He’s a libertarian who helped activate the Tea Party. She’s a millennial progressive leader. They are bridge people for this moment — holding passion and conviction together with an enthusiasm for engaging difference, and carrying questions as vigorously as they carry answers. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Matt Kibbe and Heather McGhee — Repairing the Breach.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>A passionate translator of the beauty and relevance of scientific questions, Margaret Wertheim is also wise about the limits of science to tell the whole story of the human self across history and culture. Her Institute for Figuring in Los Angeles reveals evocative, visceral connections between high mathematics, crochet and other folk arts, and our love for the planet. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Margaret Wertheim — The Grandeur and Limits of Science” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>This conversation about Christianity and politics with three generations of evangelical leaders — Shane Claiborne, Greg Boyd, and the late Chuck Colson – feels more relevant in the wake of the 2016 election than it did when we first taped it. White Evangelical Christians helped secure the election of President Trump. Many said that his views on abortion were decisive, overriding concerns they had on other matters. But to be Evangelical is not one thing, even on abortion. We offer this searching dialogue, which is alive anew, to a changed political landscape. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Chuck Colson, Greg Boyd, and Shane Claiborne — How to Be a Christian Citizen: Three Evangelicals Debate.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Anil Dash is the CEO of Fog Creek Software. He also founded Makerbase, Activate, and the non-profit Expert Labs, a research initiative backed by the MacArthur Foundation and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which collaborated with the Obama White House and federal agencies. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Anil Dash — Tech’s Moral Reckoning.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Alice Parker is the artistic director of the non-profit Melodious Accord and is the author of “Melodious Accord: Good Singing in Church.” She collaborated with the Robert Shaw Chorale for 20 years and has composed operas, cantatas and suites for chamber ensembles, as well as hundreds of anthems and songs. CDs of her compositions and arrangements include “My Love and I” and “Take Me to the Water.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Alice Parker — Singing Is the Most Companionable of Arts.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>James Martin is a Jesuit priest and editor at large of America magazine. His books include “The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything,” “Between Heaven and Mirth: Why Joy, Humor and Laughter are at the Heart of the Spiritual Life,” and most recently “Jesus: A Pilgrimage.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “James Martin — Finding God in All Things.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Natasha Trethewey was the 19th U.S. Poet Laureate. Her books include “Domestic Work,” “Native Guard,” and “Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.” Eboo Patel is the founder and president of Interfaith Youth Core. His books include “Sacred Ground: Pluralism, Prejudice, and the Promise of America” and “Interfaith Leadership: A Primer.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Natasha Trethewey and Eboo Patel — How to Live Beyond This Election.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>David Brooks is a columnist for The New York Times. His books include “The Social Animal” and “The Road to Character.” E.J. Dionne is a columnist for The Washington Post. His books include “Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith in Politics after the Religious Right” and “Why The Right Went Wrong.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Sinfulness, Hopefulness and the Possibility of Politics.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Leonard Mlodinow is a physicist, and the author of several books including “The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives” and “Feynman’s Rainbow: A Search for Beauty in Physics and in Life.” He’s also written for television, including “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Leonard Mlodinow — Randomness and Choice.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Alain de Botton is the founder and chairman of The School of Life. His books include “Religion for Atheists” and “How Proust Can Change Your Life.” His new book is a novel, “The Course of Love.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Alain de Botton — A School of Life for Atheists ” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Parker Palmer is founder and Senior Partner of the Center for Courage and Renewal. He’s the author of bestselling books including “Let Your Life Speak,” “The Courage to Teach,” “A Hidden Wholeness,” and “Healing the Heart of Democracy.” Courtney Martin is the co-founder of the Solutions Journalism Network and a strategist for the TED Prize. She’s the author of six books including “Do It Anyway: The New Generation of Activists” and most recently, “The New Better Off.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Parker Palmer and Courtney Martin — The Inner Life of Rebellion” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Jimmy Wales is the co-founder and promoter of Wikipedia and chair emeritus of the Wikimedia Foundation. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Jimmy Wales — The Sum of All Human Knowledge” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Gustavo Santaolalla has composed film scores for over a dozen features including “Amores Perros,” “The Motorcycle Diaries,” “Brokeback Mountain,” “Babel,” “On the Road,” and “Wild Tales.” His latest solo album is called “Camino.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Gustavo Santaolalla — How Movie Music Moves Us.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Paulo Coelho is the author of many books including “The Pilgrimage,” “Veronika Decides to Die” and “The Alchemist.” His new book is “Adultery.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Paulo Coelho — The Alchemy of Pilgrimage.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Xavier Le Pichon is Honorary Professor at Collège de France in Paris. He founded La Maison Thomas Philippe that provides retreats for families, including those struggling with mental illness. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Xavier Le Pichon — The Fragility at the Heart of Humanity.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Jonathan Haidt is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business. His books include “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion” and, forthcoming in 2017, “Three Stories about Capitalism: The moral psychology of economic life.” Melvin Konner is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Anthropology and of Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology at Emory University. His books include “The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit” and “The Evolution of Childhood.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Jonathan Haidt and Melvin Konner — Capitalism and Moral Evolution: A Civil Provocation.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>David Isay is the founder of StoryCorps and winner of the MacArthur Genius Grant and 2015 TED Prize. His new StoryCorps book is “Callings: The Purpose and Passion of Work”. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “David Isay — Listening as an Act of Love. Find more at http://onbeing.org/program/david-isay-listening-as-an-act-of-love/6268
]]>Krista Tippett is a journalist and host of On Being. She is the New York Times bestselling author of “Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living” and “Einstein’s God: Conversations About Science and the Human Spirit.” She won a Peabody Award and received the National Humanities Medal for “thoughtfully delving into the mysteries of human existence.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Krista Tippett — An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Michelle Alexander is an associate professor of law at the Moritz College of Law and the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University, and has served as the director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California. Her book is “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Michelle Alexander — Who We Want to Become: Beyond the New Jim Crow.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Tiffany Shlain is the founder of the Webby Awards and a co-founder of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. She has directed and co-written 28 films, some with accompanying books, including “The Science of Character,” “Brain Power: From Neurons to Networks,” and the feature-length documentary “Connected: An Autoblogography about Love, Death & Technology.” This interview is produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Tiffany Shlain — Growing Up the Internet.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Nathan Schneider is a scholar-in-residence of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is the author of “God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Internet” and “Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse.” He is a regular columnist for Vice magazine and America, the national Catholic weekly. He is currently co-editing a book on democratic business models for online platforms. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Nathan Schneider — The Wisdom of Millennials.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Jean Berko Gleason is Professor Emerita of psychology at Boston University. This interview was edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Jean Berko Gleason — Unfolding Language, Unfolding Life.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>B.J. Miller is executive director of the Zen Hospice Project, an Assistant Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and an attending specialist for the Symptom Management Service of the UCSF Helen Diller Comprehensive Cancer Center. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “B.J. Miller — Reframing Our Relationship to That We Don’t Control.” Find more at onbeing.org
]]>Carrie Newcomer is a singer-songwriter. Her albums include “Betty’s Diner,” “The Gathering of Spirits,” and “A Permeable Life,” which has an accompanying book of poetry and essays. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Carrie Newcomer — A Conversation with Music.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Paul Muldoon holds the Howard G.B. Clark chair in the Humanities at Princeton University. He has served as the poetry editor at the The New Yorker since 2007. He is the author of 12 major collections of poetry, including “Horse Latitudes,” “Hay,” and “One Thousand Things Worth Knowing.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Paul Muldoon — A Conversation with Verse.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Mark Hyman is the director of the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine. He is also the founder and medical director of the UltraWellness Center. He’s a practicing family physician and a best-selling author. James Gordon is the founder and executive director of the Center for Mind-Body Medicine and a clinical professor in the departments of Psychiatry and Family Medicine at Georgetown Medical School. Penny George is the board chair of the Penny George Institute Foundation, which supports the work of the Penny George Institute for Health and Healing at Allina Health in Minneapolis, the largest hospital-based integrative medicine program in the U.S. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Penny George, Mark Hyman, and James Gordon — The Evolution of Medicine.”
]]>Ann Hamilton is a visual artist and self-described maker. She is Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Art at Ohio State University. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Ann Hamilton — Making, and the Spaces We Share.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Adam Grant is a professor of psychology at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is the youngest tenured and highest rated professor. He is a regular contributor to The New York Times. He has consulted for numerous organizations, including Google, the United Nations, and the U.S. Army. He became known to many through his popular book, “Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success.” His forthcoming book, “Originals,” will be published in February, 2016. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Adam Grant — Successful Givers, Toxic Takers, and the Life We Spend at Work.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Nancy Cantor is a social psychologist and the chancellor of Rutgers University–Newark, one of the most diverse institutions in the U.S. She is widely recognized for helping forge a new understanding of the role of universities in society that re-emphasizes their public mission. Christopher Howard is the first African-American president of Hampden–Sydney College in Virginia, an historically white all male school in the South. He is one of the youngest college presidents in the U.S., a distinguished graduate of the Air Force Academy, and a former Rhodes Scholar. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Nancy Cantor and Christopher Howard — Beyond the Ivory Tower.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Louis Newman is an Associate Dean of Carleton College and John M. and Elizabeth W. Musser Professor of Religious Studies. He is the author of several books on Jewish ethics and theology, including “Repentance: The Meaning and Practice of Teshuvah.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Louis Newman — The Refreshing Practice of Repentance.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Grace Lee Boggs was a philosopher and a civil rights leader and a founder of the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center. She authored the book “Living for Change: An Autobiography.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Grace Lee Boggs — A Century in the World.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Rex Jung is an Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. He’s a Distinguished Senior Advisor to the Positive Neuroscience Project, based at the University of Pennsylvania. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Rex Jung — Creativity and the Everyday Brain.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Elizabeth Alexander is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and the inaugural Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University. She’s the author of a new memoir, “The Light of the World.” She’s also the author of several books of essays and poetry including “Crave Radiance.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Elizabeth Alexander — Words That Shimmer.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Rami Nashashibi is founder and executive director of the Inner-City Muslim Action Network (IMAN). He is a visiting assistant professor of Sociology of Religion and Muslim Studies at Chicago Theological Seminary. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Rami Nashashibi — A New Coming Together.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Sr. Simone Campbell is the executive director of NETWORK. She is the author of “A Nun on the Bus: How All of Us Can Create Hope, Change, and Community.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Simone Campbell — How to Be Spiritually Bold.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Jane Gross is the creator of “The New Old Age” blog at The New York Times and author of “A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents — and Ourselves.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Jane Gross — The Far Shore of Aging.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Mohammed Fairouz is a composer whose opera and symphonies have been performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and The Kennedy Center. His 11 albums include “Native Informant,” “In The Shadow of No Towers,” “Poems and Prayers,” and, most recently, “Follow, Poet.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Mohammed Fairouz — The World in Counterpoint.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>David Blankenhorn is founder and president of the Institute of American Values. He’s also co-director of The Marriage Opportunity Council. His books include “The Future of Marriage.” Jonathan Rauch is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-director of The Marriage Opportunity Council. He’s a contributing editor to The Atlantic and National Journal, and the author of “Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “David Blankenhorn and Jonathan Rauch — The Future of Marriage.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Bruce Kramer was the creator of “The Dis Ease Diary” a blog about his life with ALS and “We Know How This Ends: Living While Dying.” He was the Dean of the College of Education, Leadership and Counseling at the University of St. Thomas, where he served on the faculty for over 19 years. He was a passionate music lover and was a choir conductor for most of his adult life. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Bruce Kramer — Forgiving the Body: Life with ALS.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Alan Dienstag is a clinical psychologist in private practice in New York City and Westchester County. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Alan Dienstag — Alzheimer’s and the Spiritual Terrain of Memory.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Arthur Zajonc is president of the Mind and Life Institute. He is emeritus professor of physics at Amherst College, where he taught from 1978 to 2012. His books include “Meditation as Contemplative Inquiry: When Knowing Becomes Love” and “The Heart of Higher Education: A Call to Renewal.” Michael McCullough is professor of psychology at the University of Miami, where he directs the Evolution and Human Behavior Laboratory. He’s the author of “Beyond Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Arthur Zajonc + Michael McCullough — Mind and Morality: A Dialogue.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Eve Ensler is a Tony Award-winning playwright, performer, and activist. She is the author of “The Vagina Monologues” and “The Good Body.” Her memoir is “In the Body of the World.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Eve Ensler — The Body After Cancer.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons is assistant professor of religion at the University of Florida. She is also a member of the National Council of Elders. Her account of her work as an activist in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) is featured in the book, “Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC.” Lucas Johnson is international coordinator of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation and an ordained Baptist minister. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons and Lucas Johnson — The Movement, Remembered Forward.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Brené Brown is Research Professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work. Her books include: “The Gifts of Imperfection” and “Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Brené Brown — The Courage to Be Vulnerable.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Reza Aslan is the founder of Aslan Media, a social media network for news and entertainment about the Middle East and the world. A scholar of religions, he is currently professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. His books include “Beyond Fundamentalism: Confronting Religious Extremism in the Age of Globalization,” “No God But God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam,” and “Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Reza Aslan — Islam’s Reformation.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Bernard Chazelle is Eugene Higgins Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University. He is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and a member of the European Academy of Sciences. He’s authored an extensive collection of essays on music for A Tiny Revolution. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Bernard Chazelle — Discovering the Cosmology of Bach.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Nadia Bolz-Weber is the pastor and founder of the Denver-based church the House for All Sinners and Saints. Her spiritual memoir is “Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner and Saint.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Nadia Bolz-Weber — Seeing the Underside and Seeing God: Tattoos, Tradition, and Grace.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Scott Atran is director of research at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, visiting professor at the University of Michigan, senior fellow at Harris Manchester College of Oxford University and research professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York. He’s the author of “Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood and the (Un)Making of Terrorists.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Scott Atran — Hopes and Dreams in a World of Fear.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Michel Martin is a journalist with NPR. She previously reported for The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and ABC’s “Nightline.” She was the creator and host of the NPR program Tell Me More, which ran from 2007-2014. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Michel Martin — The Fabric of Our Identity.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet is the exiled spiritual leader of Tibet. He is the author of many books, including “Ethics for a New Millennium.” Jonathan Sacks is the former Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Commonwealth. He is the Ingeborg and Ira Rennert Global Distinguished Professor of Judaic Thought at New York University and the Kressel and Ephrat Family University Professor of Jewish Thought at Yeshiva University. He has also been appointed as Professor of Law, Ethics and the Bible at King’s College London. He is the author of several books, including The “Dignity of Difference.” Seyyed Hossein Nasr is University Professor of Islamic Studies at George Washington University. He’s a prominent philosopher and scholar of Islam who has written many books, including “The Heart of Islam” and “Man and Nature.” Katharine Jefferts Schori is the 26th Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church. She holds a doctorate in oceanography. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet, Jonathan Sacks, Katharine Jefferts Schori, and Seyyed Hossein Nasr — Pursuing Happiness.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Richard Rodriguez is a journalist and essayist. He won a Peabody Award for his original commentary on The NewsHour and received the National Humanities Medal in 1993. His books include “Hunger Of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez,” “Brown: The Last Discovery Of America,” and “Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Richard Rodriguez — The Fabric of Our Identity.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Imani Perry is a professor of African-American Studies at Princeton University. Her scholarly books include “Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop” and “More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Imani Perry — The Fabric of Our Identity.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Dan Barber is chef and co-owner of Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns. He’s received James Beard Awards for best chef in 2006 and 2009, and was named one of the world’s most influential people by Time. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Dan Barber — Driven By Flavor.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Adele Diamond is a professor of developmental cognitive neuroscience at the University of British Columbia. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Adele Diamond — The Science of Attention.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Anita Desai is an Indian novelist of Bengali descent. Her novels include “Clear Light of Day,” “The Village by the Sea,” and “Fasting, Feasting.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Anita Desai and Andrew Robinson — The Modern Resonance of Rabindranath Tagore.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Andrew Robinson is a biographer and writer. He is the co-author of “The Myriad-Minded Man,” a biography of Rabindranath Tagore. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Anita Desai and Andrew Robinson — The Modern Resonance of Rabindranath Tagore.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Seane Corn is the National Yoga Ambassador for YouthAIDS and cofounder of “Off the Mat, Into the World.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Seane Corn — Yoga, Meditation in Action.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Steven Waldman is the author of “Founding Faith: How Our Founding Fathers Forged a Radical New Approach to Religious Liberty.” He is the founder and former editor of Beliefnet and now heads Daily Bridge Media. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Steven Waldman and Philip Hamburger — The Long Experiment of American Democracy.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Stuart Brown is founder and president of the National Institute for Play near Monterey, California. He is co-author of “Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Stuart Brown — Play, Spirit, and Character.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Rosanne Cash is a Grammy award-winning singer-songwriter and author of several books. Her latest album is “The River & the Thread.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Rosanne Cash — Time Traveler.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Maria Tatar is the John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, where she also chairs the Program in Folklore and Mythology. Her books include “Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood” and “The Annotated Brothers Grimm.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Maria Tatar — The Great Cauldron of Story: Why Fairy Tales Are for Adults Again.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Jaroslav Pelikan was professor of history at Yale University for four decades. He authored many books “Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine” and “Credo.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Jaroslav Pelikan — The Need for Creeds.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Janna Levin is an astrophysicist and writer. She has contributed to an understanding of black holes, the cosmology of extra dimensions, and gravitational waves in the shape of spacetime. She is the author of “A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines,” which won the PEN/Bingham prize. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Janna Levin — Mathematics, Purpose, and Truth.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Brian McLaren is a leading Evangelical pastor and author of several books including “A Generous Orthodoxy,” “Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road?,” and the forthcoming “We Make the Road by Walking.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Brian McLaren — The Equation of Change.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Sherwin Nuland was a clinical professor of surgery at Yale University, where he also taught bioethics and medical history. His books include “How We Die,” “Lost in America,” “Maimonides,” and “How We Live: The Wisdom of the Body.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Sherwin Nuland — The Biology of the Spirit.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Bobby McFerrin is a ten-time Grammy Award winner. He is one of the world’s best-known vocal innovators and improvisers, a world-renowned classical conductor, and a passionate spokesman for music education. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Bobby McFerrin — Catching Song.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Paul Elie is a senior fellow with the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and the director of the American Pilgrimage Project. His books include “The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage” and “Reinventing Bach.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Paul Elie — Faith Fired by Literature.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>David Hartman was an Orthodox rabbi and founder of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. He authored many books, including “A Heart of Many Rooms” and “The God Who Hates Lies.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “David Hartman — Hope in a Hopeless God.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Ursula King is Professor Emerita of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Bristol. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Ursula King, Andrew Revkin, and David Sloan Wilson — Teilhard de Chardin’s “Planetary Mind” and Our Spiritual Evolution.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Patrick Bellegarde-Smith is a professor at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee and author of many books about Vodou. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Patrick Bellegarde-Smith — Living Vodou.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>In this unedited interview, talk show pioneer Phil Donahue opens up on his remarkable perspective on the last half century of America and who we are now. He shares with Krista Tippett his personal transformations on race, gender roles, and parenting in the dramatic era he captured on television.
]]>This is the unedited version of On Being’s produced show, “Racial Identity in the Emerging Church and the World.” Emerging church elder Phyllis Tickle and civil rights veteran Vincent Harding in an honest and sometimes politically incorrect conversation on coming to terms with racial identity in the church and in the world.
]]>Some of the biggest philosophical and ethical questions of this century may be raised on scientific frontiers — as we gain a better understanding of the deep structure of space and time and the wilder “microworld.” Astrophysicist Martin Rees paints a fascinating picture of how we might be changed by what we do not yet know: “If science teaches me anything, it teaches me that even simple things like an atom are fairly hard to understand. And that makes me skeptical of anyone who claims to have the last word or complete understanding of any deep aspect of reality.” This is On Being’s complete, unedited interview with Lord Rees. See more at http://www.onbeing.org/program/cosmic-origami-and-what-we-dont-know/250
]]>What if we understand death as a developmental stage — like adolescence or mid-life? Dr. Ira Byock shares how we can understand dying as a time of learning, repair, and completion of our lives. Krista Tippett interviewed Dr. Ira Byock on March 2, 2012. This interview is included in the show “Contemplating Mortality.” Download the produced show at onbeing.org.
]]>Krista Tippett spoke with immunologist Esther Sternberg on March 30, 2012. This unedited interview is included in our show, “The Science of Healing Places.” Download the mp3 of the produced show at onbeing.org.
]]>David Sloan Wilson believes that evolution is not just a description of how we got here. He says it can also be a tool kit for improving how we live together. He’s taken what he’s learned in studying evolution in animals and is now applying it to the behavior of groups in his hometown of Binghamton, New York. His goal is to help people behave pro-socially — at their best, and for the good of the whole. This is Krista Tippett’s complete, unabridged conversation with David Sloan Wilson that’s included in the show “Evolving a City.” See more at onbeing.org/program/evolving-city/4720
]]>Keith Devlin is a mathematician and executive director of H-STAR at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. Krista Tippett spoke with him on July 11, 2013. This interview is included in our show “The Joy of Math.” Download the mp3 of the produced show at onbeing.org.
]]>What happens when you bring together science and poetry on something like color or light? Arthur Zajonc is a physicist and contemplative. And he says we can all investigate life as vigorously from the inside as from the outside. This is Krista Tippett’s unabridged conversation with Arthur Zajonc. See more at onbeing.org/program/arthur-za…e-consciously/109
]]>Natalie Batalha is a research astronomer at NASA Ames Research Center and a mission scientist with the Kepler Space Telescope. Krista Tippett spoke with her on December 13, 2012 via ISDN. This interview is included in our show “On Exoplanets and Love: Natalie Batalha on Science That Connects Us to One Another.” Download the mp3 of the produced show at onbeing.org.
]]>Krista Tippett’s unedited interview with Kwame Anthony Appiah was recorded in 2011 and is included in our show, “Kwame Anthony Appiah — Sidling Up to Difference.” See more at http://onbeing.org/program/sidling-difference/175
]]>Krista Tippett interviewed geologist David R. Montgomery on July 3, 2013. This interview is included in the show ‘Reading the Rocks.’ Download the mp3 of the produced show at onbeing.org.
]]>Krista Tippett spoke with Christian ethicist David P. Gushee and abortion-rights activist Frances Kissling on September 26, 2012 in front of a live, public audience at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs in Minneapolis, MN.
]]>Krista Tippett’s unedited interview with Meredith Monk, award-winning, composer, singer, director and choreographer. She spoke with her on January 11, 2012 from the studios of APM in St. Paul, Minnesota. Meredith Monk was in a private recording studio in New York City. This interview is included in the show “Meredith Monk’s Voice.” Download the produced show at onbeing.org.
]]>Krista Tippett interviewed spoken word poet Sarah Kay on April 12, 2012. This interview is included in the show ‘Sarah Kay’s Way with Words.’ Download the mp3 of the produced show at onbeing.org.
]]>Krista Tippett interviewed S. James Gates Jr., Toll Professor of Physics and Director of the Center for String and Particle Theory at the University of Maryland in College Park, on January 25, 2012 from the studios of APM in St. Paul, MN. Gates was in the studios of NPR in Washington, D.C. This interview is included in the show “Uncovering the Codes for Reality.” Download the mp3 of the produced show at onbeing.org.
]]>Krista Tippett interviewed entrepreneur Tami Simon on April 4, 2013 via ISDN. Ms. Simon is publisher, CEO, and founder of Sounds True. This interview is included in the show “Inner Life at Work: Tami Simon on Business, Meditation, and Technology.” Download the mp3 of the produced show at onbeing.org.
]]>This is Krista Tippett’s unabridged interview with physicist Lawrence Krauss. One of the values of science is to make us uncomfortable says Lawrence Krauss. The particle physicist explains why we should all care about dark energy and the Higgs Boson particle. Science literacy matters, and, more importantly, he suggests we should take joy in science – just as we cultivate enjoyment of arts we may not completely comprehend.
]]>Esoteric teachings on reincarnation and consciousness; simple teachings on compassion and ethics. Geshe Thupten Jinpa is a man who finishes the Dalai Lama’s English sentences. Meet this philosopher and former monk, now a husband and father of two daughters, and hear what happens when the ancient tradition embodied in the Dalai Lama meets science and life. This is Krista Tippett’s unedited, unabridged interview with Thupten Jinpa that took place at Emory University. See more at onbeing.org/program/translating-dalai-lama/235
]]>Jon Kabat-Zinn has learned, through science and experience, about mindfulness as a way of life. This is wisdom with immediate relevance to the ordinary and extreme stresses of our time — from economic peril, to parenting, to life in a digital age. See more at onbeing.org/program/opening-our-lives/138
]]>Kate Braestrup is a chaplain to game wardens, often on search and rescue missions, in the wilds of Maine. She works, as she puts it, at hinges of human experience when lives alter unexpectedly — where loss, disaster, decency and beauty intertwine. Hear her wise and unusual take on life and death, lost and found. See more at onbeing.org/program/presence-wild/144
]]>Robi Damelin is an Israeli who lives in Tel Aviv. She speaks with community groups about her experiences as part of the Parents Circle – Families Forum. Ali Abu Awwad is a Palestinian who lives in the West Bank. He is a spokesman and project manager for the Parents Circle – Families Forum.
]]>Each of us, in our everyday interactions, chooses between letting technology shape us and shaping it towards human purposes, even towards honoring what we hold dear. Sherry Turkle, director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, is full of usable ideas — from how to declare email bankruptcy to teaching our children the rewards of solitude. See more at http://onbeing.org/program/alive-enough-reflecting-our-technology/63
]]>A veteran Republican senator and Democratic economist are political bridge people who’ve brought differing approaches and shared love of country to generations of economic policy. In this tense political moment, they offer straight talk and wise perspective – and won’t let partisan gridlock have the last word. The final dialogue in our Civil Conversations Project.
]]>Jim Daly is president of Focus on the Family. He’s also a Christian radio broadcaster and author of several books, including ReFocus: Living a Life that Reflects God’s Heart. Gabe Lyons is founder of Q: Ideas for Common Good and author of The Next Christians: Seven Ways You Can Live the Gospel and Restore the World and unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity… and Why It Matters.
]]>Joanna Brooks is chair and associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University. She’s also blogs at Religion Dispatches and Ask Mormon Girl.
]]>Fr. Alberto Ambrosio is a Dominican friar and scholar of Sufism. Metropolitan Elpidophoros Lambriniadis is the Metropolitan of Bursa in the Ecumenical Patriarchate of the Eastern Orthodox Church.
]]>Terry Tempest Williams is a naturalist and writer, a biologist by training with a literary mind, who comes from a long Mormon lineage in Utah. She draws political, spiritual, and creative inspiration from her experience of the interior American West. She offers stories of neighborly collaboration that turns into environmental protection, and the value that comes from vitriolic disagreement inside families. See more at: onbeing.org/program/vitality-struggle/233
]]>Mustafa Akyol is a Turkish columnist for the English-language Hürriyet Daily News. He’s also the author of “Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case For Liberty.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Mustafa Akyol — Religion, Democracy, and the New Turkey.” Find more at onbeing.org.
]]>Krista Tippett speaks with philosopher Jacob Needleman. As new democracies are struggling around the world, it’s easy to forget that U.S. democracy was shaped by trial and error. A conversation about the “inward work” of democracy — the conscience that shaped the American experiment. See more at http://onbeing.org/program/inward-work-democracy-jacob-needleman/222#sthash.uEEZSvS1.dpuf
]]>Neuroscientist Richard Davidson is revealing that the choices we make can actually “rewire” our brains. He’s studied the brains of meditating Buddhist monks, and now he’s using his research with children and adolescents to look at things like ADHD, autism, and kindness. See more at http://onbeing.org/program/investigating-healthy-minds-richard-davidson/251
]]>Michael McCullough describes science that helps us comprehend how revenge came to have a purpose in human life. At the same time, he stresses, science is also revealing that human beings are more instinctively equipped for forgiveness than we’ve perhaps given ourselves credit for. Knowing this suggests ways to calm the revenge instinct in ourselves and others and embolden the forgiveness intuition. Krista’s unedited conversation with Michael McCullough, author of “Beyond Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct.” Krista spoke with him on August 29, 2008 from the studios of American Public Media in St. Paul, Minnesota, and he was in the studios of WLRN in Miami, Florida. This interview is included in our program “Getting Revenge and Forgiveness.” See more at onbeing.org/program/getting-revenge-and-forgiveness/104
]]>As some Lakota make an annual pilgrimage on horseback to Wounded Knee in memory of Sitting Bull’s death, we’ll pull out some of the lesser known threads of the legacy of this complex leader and American icon. And we’ll explore why his spiritual character has animated his own people in the last three decades more openly than at any time since his death in 1890. Krista Tippett interviewed Ernie LaPointe, great-grandson of Sitting Bull, on October 20, 2009. This interview is included in the show “Tatanka Iyotake: Reimagining Sitting Bull.” See more at http onbeing.org/program/reimagining-sitting-bull-tatanka-iyotake/152
]]>An understanding of Easter from inside the Armenian Orthodox tradition that is at once mystical and literally down to earth. Vigen Guroian is a theologian who experiences Easter as a call to our senses. He is passionate about the meaning of grand ideas like incarnation, death, and eternity as revealed in life and in his garden. Krista Tippett interviewed Armenian Orthodox theologian Vigen Guorian on February 22, 2007. This interview is included in the show “Restoring the Senses: Gardening and an Orthodox Easter.” See more at: onbeing.org/program/restoring-senses-gardening-and-orthodox-easter/164
]]>The 13th-century Muslim mystic and poet Rumi has long shaped Muslims around the world and has now become popular in the West. Rumi created a new language of love within the Islamic mystical tradition of Sufism. We hear his poetry as we delve into his world and listen for its echoes in our own. Krista Tippett interviewed Fatemeh Keshavarz on January 17, 2007. This interview is included in the show “The Ecstatic Faith of Rumi.” See more at onbeing.org/program/ecstatic-faith-rumi/189
]]>Can journalism be a humanitarian art? New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has learned that reportage can deaden rather than awaken the consciousness, much less the hearts, of his readers. He shares his wide ethical lens he’s gained on human life in our time — both personal and global. Krista Tippett’s unedited interview with Nicholas Kristof, op-ed columnist for the New York Times. She spoke with him on September 3, 2010 from the studios of APM in St. Paul, Minnesota. Nicholas Kristof was in a private recording studio in New York City. This interview is included in the show “Journalism and Compassion.” See more at onbeing.org/program/journalism-and-compassion/114
]]>Krista Tippett’s unedited interview with Tiya Miles, Chair and Professor in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She spoke with her on November 16, 2011 from the studios of APM in St. Paul, MN. Tiya Miles was in studio at Michigan Radio at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This interview is included in the show “Toward Living Memory.” Download the produced show at onbeing.org.
]]>What happens when people transcend violence while living in it? John Paul Lederach has spent three decades mediating peace and change in 25 countries — from Nepal to Colombia and Sierra Leone.. He shifts the language and lens of the very notion of conflict resolution. He says, for example, that enduring progress takes root not with large numbers of people, but with relationships between unlikely people. John Paul Lederach is Professor of International Peacebuilding at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Krista Tippett spoke with him on June 22, 2010 from the studios of APM in Saint Paul, Minnesota. John Paul Lederach was in the studios of KGNU in Boulder, Colorado. This interview is included in our show “John Paul Lederach on The Art of Peace.” See more at onbeing.org/program/art-peace/182
]]>Scott-Martin Kosofsky is a book composer, typographer, and author of “The Book of Customs.” Krista Tippett spoke with him on November 2, 2004 from the studios of APM in Saint Paul, Minnesota; Mr. Kosofsky was in a studio of WGBH in Boston. This interview is included in our show “Legends To Live By.” Download the mp3 of the produced show at onbeing.org.
]]>Diane Winston is the Knight Chair in Media and Religion at the Annenberg School for Communication + Journalism at the University of Southern California. Krista Tippett spoke with her on November 2, 2011 from the studios of APM in Saint Paul, Minnesota; Diane Winston was in a studio at NPR West in Culver City, California. This interview is included in our show “Monsters We Love: TV’s Pop Culture Theodicy.” Download the mp3 of the produced show at onbeing.org.
]]>Paul Brandeis Raushenbush is the Senior Religion Editor for the Huffington Post. Krista Tippett spoke with him on October 5, 2011 from the studios of APM in Saint Paul, Minnesota; Paul Brandeis Raushenbush was in the Argot Studios in New York City. This interview is included in our show “Occupying the Gospel.” Download the produced show at onbeing.org.
]]>Avivah Zornberg is a celebrated, literary teacher of the Torah. We spoke with her on April 7, 2005, from the studios of American Public Media in St. Paul, Minnesota. She was in a private recording studio in Jerusalem. This interview is included in our show “Exodus, Cargo of Hidden Stories.” Download the produced show at onbeing.org.
]]>We experience a vision of caution and hope planted in a long view of Arab and Palestinian history, culture, and time in Palestinian philosopher Sari Nusseibeh. His personal story is steeped in layers of identity and, as he says, living legend, which shape history in the making today. See more at onbeing.org/program/evolution-change/15
]]>In the days and months after 9/11, St. Paul’s Chapel became the hub where thousands of volunteers and rescue workers received round-the-clock care. It was a moving setting to explore how 9/11 changed us as a people — and to ponder the inward work of living with enduring grief and unfolding understanding. See more at: http://onbeing.org/program/who-do-we-want-become-remembering-forward-decade-after-911/257
]]>Richard Mouw challenges his fellow conservative Christians to civility in public discourse. He offers historical as well as spiritual perspective on American Evangelicals’ navigation of disagreement, fear, and truth. See more at http://onbeing.org/program/restoring-political-civility-evangelical-view/163
]]>One child in every 110 in the U.S. is now diagnosed to be somewhere on the spectrum of autism. We step back from public controversies over causes and cures and explore the mystery and meaning of autism in one family’s life, and in history and society. Our guests say that life with their child with autism has deepened their understanding of human nature — of disability, and of creativity, intelligence, and accomplishment. See more at: onbeing.org/program/autism-and-humanity/70
]]>Did you know that the sacred city of Bethlehem lies within the West Bank? And, inside its borders, you’ll find something unexpected — a close-knit neighborhood where generations of people have created a new life for themselves. Amahl Bishara and Nidal Al-Azraq show us something rare that we don’t see in the news about refugee camps — the quiet cycles of everyday life. See more at onbeing.org/program/pleasure-more-hope/13
]]>Did you know that the sacred city of Bethlehem lies within the West Bank? And, inside its borders, you’ll find something unexpected — a close-knit neighborhood where generations of people have created a new life for themselves. Amahl Bishara and Nidal Al-Azraq show us something rare that we don’t see in the news about refugee camps — the quiet cycles of everyday life. See more at onbeing.org/program/pleasure-more-hope/13
]]>A look back at the closest thing the early 20th century may have had to Oprah Winfrey. The flamboyant Pentecostal preacher Aimee Semple McPherson was a multimedia sensation and a powerful female religious leader long before most of Christianity considered such a thing. The contradictions and passions of her life are a window into the world of global Pentecostalism that touches as many as half a billion lives today. Anthea Butler is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Graduate Chair of Religion at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA. Krista Tippett spoke with her on June 22, 2007 from the studios of APM in St. Paul, Minnesota. Ms. Butler was in a recording studio at public radio station WKNO in Memphis, TN. This interview is included in our show “Reviving Sister Aimee.” See more at onbeing.org/program/reviving-sister-aimee/166
]]>A look back at the closest thing the early 20th century may have had to Oprah Winfrey. The flamboyant Pentecostal preacher Aimee Semple McPherson was a multimedia sensation and a powerful female religious leader long before most of Christianity considered such a thing. The contradictions and passions of her life are a window into the world of global Pentecostalism that touches as many as half a billion lives today. Arlene Sanchez-Walsh is Associate Professor of Latino Church Studies at Azusa Pacific University. Krista Tippett spoke with her on June 22, 2007 from the studios of APM in St. Paul, Minnesota. Ms. Sanchez-Walsh was in a recording studio at public radio station KPCC in Pasadena, CA. This interview is included in our show “Reviving Sister Aimee.” See more at onbeing.org/program/reviving-sister-aimee/166
]]>A look back at the closest thing the early 20th century may have had to Oprah Winfrey. The flamboyant Pentecostal preacher Aimee Semple McPherson was a multimedia sensation and a powerful female religious leader long before most of Christianity considered such a thing. The contradictions and passions of her life are a window into the world of global Pentecostalism that touches as many as half a billion lives today. Margaret Paloma is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at University of Akron in Ohio. Krista Tippett spoke with her on June 19, 2007 from the studios of APM in St. Paul, Minnesota. This interview is included in our show “Reviving Sister Aimee.” See more at onbeing.org/program/reviving-sister-aimee/166
]]>A new show from Jerusalem with American-Israeli journalist Yossi Klein Halevi, who says Jerusalem is a place where the essential human story plays itself out with particular intensity. This is the unedited interview of the produced show “Thin Places, Thick Realities.” See more at http://onbeing.org/program/thin-places-thick-realities/14
]]>Mohammad Darawshe is Arab with an Israeli passport — a Muslim Palestinian citizen of the Jewish state. Like 20 percent of Israel’s population, he is, as he puts it, a child of both identities. He brings an unexpected way of seeing inside the Middle Eastern present and future. Darawshe is co-executive director of The Abraham Fund Initiatives in Israel. Krista Tippett spoke with him on March 17, 2011 at his office outside of Jerusalem. This interview is included in our show “Children of Both Identities.” See more at http://onbeing.org/program/children-both-identities/12
]]>This unedited interview with John Polkinghorne was recorded in 2005 and is included in our show, “Quarks and Creation.” Science and religion are often pitted against one another; but how do they complement, rather than contradict, one another? Physicist and theologian John Polkinghorne applies the deepest insights of modern physics to think about how the world fundamentally works, and how the universe might make space for prayer. See more at onbeing.org/program/quarks-and-creation/148
]]>One of the world’s leading experts on torture, Iranian-American political scientist Darius Rejali discusses, in particular, how democracies change torture and are changed by it. In the wake of Wikileaks revelations about torture in U.S.-occupied Iraq, we explore how his knowledge might deepen our public discourse about such practices — and inform our collective reckoning with consequences yet to unfold. See more at onbeing.org/program/long-shadow-torture/206
]]>Using stem cells, Doris Taylor brought the heart of a dead animal back to life and might one day revolutionize human organ transplantation. She takes us beyond lightning rod issues and into an unfolding frontier where science is learning how stem cells work reparatively in every body at every age. In this unedited conversation, Krista speaks with Doris Taylor, the director of the Center for Cardiovascular Repair at the University of Minnesota. They speak about the science of stem cells and their regenerative/reparative potential, and the ethics surrounding such work. This entire, unedited interview is included in the program, “Stem Cells, Untold Stories.” See more at onbeing.org/program/stem-cells-untold-stories/178
]]>We’ll delve into the world and meaning of the approaching Jewish High Holy Days — ten days that span the new year of Rosh Hashanah through Yom Kippur’s rituals of atonement. Sharon Brous, a young rabbi in L.A., is one voice in a Jewish spiritual renaissance that is taking many forms across the U.S. The vast majority of her congregation are people in their 20s and 30s, who, she says, are making life-giving connections between ritual, personal transformation, and relevance in the world. In this unedited conversation, Krista interviewed Sharon Brous, a Conservative rabbi in Los Angeles who is part of a Jewish spiritual renaissance. See more at onbeing.org/program/days-awe/82
]]>The devastation of the Haiti earthquakes and the lack of infrastructure for responding to the disaster have deepened an ongoing debate over foreign aid, international development, and helping the poorest of the world’s poor. Jacqueline Novogratz, whose Acumen Fund is reinventing that landscape with what it calls “patient capitalism,” is charting a third way between investment for profit and aid for free. Krista’s unedited conversation with Jacqueline Novogratz. She’s the founder and CEO of the Acumen Fund and author of the memoir, “The Blue Sweater.” Krista spoke with her on January 8, 2010, from the studios of American Public Media in St. Paul, Minnesota. She was in a private recording studio in New York City. This interview is included in our program “A Different Kind of Capitalism – Jacqueline Novogratz and the Reinvention of Aid.” See more at http://onbeing.org/program/different-kind-capitalism/50
]]>We had to cut some great segments from Krista’s conversation with Bill McKibben. Here you can listen to it all, and tell us what you think of our edits from our produced show “Bill McKibben on The Moral Math of Climate Change.” A conversation about climate change and moral imagination with a leading environmentalist and writer who has been ahead of the curve on this issue since he wrote The End of Nature in 1989. We explore his evolving perspective on human responsibility in a changing natural world. See more at onbeing.org/program/moral-math-climate-change/209
]]>Barbara Kingsolver describes an adventure her family undertook to spend one year eating primarily what they could grow or raise themselves. As a citizen and mother more than an expert, she turned her life towards questions many of us are asking. Food, she says, is a “rare moral arena” in which the ethical choice is often the pleasurable choice. This unedited interview with Barbara Kingsolver is included in our program “Barbara Kingsolver on The Ethics of Eating.” See more at onbeing.org/program/ethics-eating/191
]]>Shane Claiborne is a leading spirit in a gathering movement of young people known as the New Monastics. Emerging from the edges of Evangelical Christianity, they are patterning their lives in response to the needs of the poor — and the detachment they see in our culture’s vision of adulthood. This unedited interview with Shane Claiborne is included in our program “Shane Claiborne on A Monastic Revolution.” See more at onbeing.org/program/monastic-revolution/53
]]>More and more people in our time are disconnected from religious institutions, or find themselves creating a family with a spouse from another tradition or no tradition at all. We sense that there is a spiritual aspect to our children’s natures and wonder how to support and nurture that. Our guest, Rabbi Sandy Sasso, says the spiritual life begins not in abstractions, but in concrete everyday experiences. And children need our questions as much as our answers. This unedited interview is included in our program “Sandy Eisenberg Sasso on The Spirituality of Parenting.” See more at onbeing.org/program/spirituality-parenting/230
]]>Auburn’s Rural Studio in western Alabama draws architectural students into the design and construction of homes and public spaces in some of the poorest counties. They’re creating beautiful and economical structures that are not only unique but nurture sustainability of the natural world as of human dignity. In this edition, Krista interviewed Andrew Freear, director of Auburn University’s Rural Studio in western Alabama. Here’s your chance to listen to their entire, unedited conversation and observe the editorial process. And let us know what you think. See more at onbeing.org/program/architecture-decency/66
]]>Columba Stewart is the executive director of the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library at Saint John’s Abbey and University. Getatchew Haile is a MacArthur Fellow and the curator of the Ethiopian Study Center at the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library at Saint John’s Abbey and University.
]]>Columba Stewart is the executive director of the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library at Saint John’s Abbey and University. Getatchew Haile is a MacArthur Fellow and the curator of the Ethiopian Study Center at the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library at Saint John’s Abbey and University.
]]>Mercedes Doretti is co-founder and senior researcher of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF). She received a MacArthur “genius” grant for her work in 2007.
]]>Mayfair Yang is Director of the East Asia Center at the University of California in Santa Barbara. She has produced two films about China and is the author of Chinese Religiosities: Afflictions of Modernity and State Formation.
]]>The word “healing” means “to make whole.” But historically, Western medicine has taken a divided view of human health. It has stressed medical treatments of biological ailments. That may be changing — Mehmet Oz, a cardiovascular surgeon, is part of a new generation of doctors who are taking medicine to new technological and spiritual frontiers. Krista’s interview with cardiovascular surgeon Mehmet Oz for “Heart and Soul” underwent some merciless editing in order to fit our hour-long radio format. Here’s your chance to listen to their entire, unedited conversation and observe the editorial process. And let us know what you think. http://onbeing.org/program/heart-and-soul-mehmet-oz/108
]]>Robert Wright charts an intellectual path beyond the faith versus reason debate. He takes a relentlessly logical look at the history of religion, exposing its contradictions. Yet Wright also traces something “revelatory” moving through human history. In this public conversation — recorded before a live audience — we explore the story he tells, the import he sees in it for our culture, and where it has personally taken him. Our unedited conversation with journalist and scholar Robert Wright. This interview is included in our program “Robert Wright on The Evolution of God” and was recorded on February 2, 2010 in front of a live audience at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. See more at onbeing.org/program/evolution-god/193
]]>Albert Einstein’s quip that “God does not play dice with the universe,” was about quantum physics, not a statement of faith. But he did ponder the relationship between science and religion and his sense of “the order deeply hidden behind everything.” With guests Freeman Dyson and Paul Davies we explore Einstein’s wisdom on mystery, eternity, and the mind of God. See more at onbeing.org/program/einsteins-god/90
]]>Albert Einstein’s quip that “God does not play dice with the universe,” was about quantum physics, not a statement of faith. But he did ponder the relationship between science and religion and his sense of “the order deeply hidden behind everything.” With guests Freeman Dyson and Paul Davies we explore Einstein’s wisdom on mystery, eternity, and the mind of God. See more at onbeing.org/program/einsteins-god/90
]]>Albert Einstein’s quip that “God does not play dice with the universe,” was about quantum physics, not a statement of faith. But he did ponder the relationship between science and religion and his sense of “the order deeply hidden behind everything.” With guests Freeman Dyson and Paul Davies we explore Einstein’s wisdom on mystery, eternity, and the mind of God. See more at onbeing.org/program/einsteins-god/90
]]>A poet and self-described literary activist, E. Ethelbert Miller attended Howard University in 1968 — the age in which Black Power was finding its voice. He has remained there ever since, observing and making sense of the trajectory of black history and culture. He pushes at the parameters within which mainstream America routinely sees what he calls “blackness.” Krista’s unedited conversation with E. Ethelbert Miller. He is a poet and literary activist. Krista spoke with him on January 22, 2010, from the studios of American Public Media in St. Paul, Minnesota. He was in the studios of National Public Radio in Washington, DC. This interview is included in our program “Black & Universal — Meeting E. Ethelbert Miller.” See more at onbeing.org/program/black-universal/73
]]>British activist Ed Husain was seduced, at the age of 16, by revolutionary Islamist ideals that flourished at the heart of educated British culture. Yet he later shrank back from radicalism after coming close to a murder and watching people he loved become suicide bombers. He dug deeper into Islamic spirituality, and now offers a fresh and daring perspective on the way forward. Krista Tippett’s unedited conversation with Ed Husain. He’s the author of “The Islamist: Why I Became an Islamic Fundamentalist, What I Saw Inside, and Why I Left.” Krista spoke with him on December 7, 2007, from the studios of American Public Media in St. Paul, Minnesota. He was in the studios of the BBC in London. This interview is included in our program “Reflections of a Former Islamist Extremist.” http://onbeing.org/program/reflections-former-islamist-extremist/150
]]>In this Unheard Cut, Krista speaks with musician Anoushka Shankar from a Minneapolis hotel while she was touring in 2002. This interview is included in our program Approaching Prayer. Americans are religious and non-religious, devout and irreverent. But in astonishing numbers, across that spectrum, most of us say that we pray. We explore the subject of prayer, how it sounds, and what it means in three different traditions and lives. See more at onbeing.org/program/approaching-prayer/67
]]>In this Unheard Cut, Krista speaks with Roberta Bondi, a professor of Church History Emeritus at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University. Krista interviewed her in April 2002 in a New York City hotel where they were both attending a conference. This interview is included in our program Approaching Prayer. Americans are religious and non-religious, devout and irreverent. But in astonishing numbers, across that spectrum, most of us say that we pray. We explore the subject of prayer, how it sounds, and what it means in three different traditions and lives. See more at onbeing.org/program/approaching-prayer/67
]]>In this Unheard Cut, Krista speaks with author and translator Stephen Mitchell. She interviewed him on April 22, 2002 from the studios of American Public Media in St. Paul, Minnesota; he was at his home in California. This interview is included in our program Approaching Prayer. Americans are religious and non-religious, devout and irreverent. But in astonishing numbers, across that spectrum, most of us say that we pray. We explore the subject of prayer, how it sounds, and what it means in three different traditions and lives. See more at onbeing.org/program/approaching-prayer/67
]]>In this unedited conversation, Krista speaks with Karen Armstrong, a best-selling author, scholar, and Catholic nun. Hear their complete conversation as Armstrong tells the story behind her developing ideas about God. Karen Armstrong speaks about her progression from a disillusioned and damaged young nun into, in her words, a “freelance monotheist.” She’s a formidable thinker and scholar, but as a theologian she calls herself an amateur — noting that the Latin root of the word “amateur” means a love of one’s subject. Seven years in a strict religious order nearly snuffed out her ability to think about faith at all. Here, we hear the story behind Armstrong’s developing ideas about God. See more at onbeing.org/program/freelance…ren-armstrong/197
]]>We shine a light on two young leaders of a new generation of grassroots Muslim-Jewish encounter in Los Angeles. They’re innovating templates of practical relationship that work with reality, acknowledge questions and conflict, yet resolve not to be enemies — whatever the political future of the Middle East may hold. See more at onbeing.org/program/curiosity-over-assumptions-interreligiosity-meets-new-generation/81
]]>This unedited conversation with Eckhart Tolle comes from our produced show “Eckhart Tolle on the Power of Now.” One of today’s most influential spiritual teachers shares his youthful experience of depression and despair — suffering that led him to his own spiritual breakthrough, and ultimately, freedom and peace of mind. He also explicates his view of what he calls “the pain body” — the accumulated emotional pain that may influence us and our relationships in negative ways. And Tolle talks about spirit and God, and what those concepts mean to him. See more at onbeing.org/program/power-eckhart-tolles-now/217
]]>We explore the complex ethics of global aid with a young writer from Kenya, Binyavanga Wainaina. He is among a rising generation of African voices who bring a cautionary perspective to the morality and efficacy behind many Western initiatives to abolish poverty and speed development in Africa. See more at www.onbeing.org/program/ethics-aid-one-kenyans-perspective/190
]]>This unedited conversation with Mary Doria Russell comes from our produced show “Mary Doria Russell on the Novelist as God.” Mary Doria Russell has grappled with large moral and religious questions on and off the page. We discover what she discerned — in the act of creating a new universe — about God and about dilemmas of evil, doubt, and free will. The ultimate moral of any life and any event, she believes, only shows itself across generations. And so the novelist, like God, she says, paints with the brush of time. See more at onbeing.org/program/novelist-god/215
]]>This unedited conversation with David Brooks and E.J. Dionne comes from our produced show “David Brooks and E. J. Dionne on Obama’s Theologian: Neibuhr and the American Present.” President Obama has cited Reinhold Niebuhr’s teachings as significant in shaping his ideas about politics and governance. In a public conversation, we discuss the great public theologian’s legacy and ideas — and what influence they may play in the future of American politics. See more at www.onbeing.org/program/obamas-theologian-david-brooks-and-ej-dionne-reinhold-niebuhr-and-american-present/136/audio
]]>This unedited conversation is part of the radio program, “James Prosek on Fishing with Mystery.” James Prosek is an artist, fly-fisher, author, and environmental activist who has always, as he puts it, found God “through the theater of nature.” From a young age he has been fascinated by trout and now eel — which he sees as “mystical creatures” — and he’s captured them literally and artistically, by way of both angling and paint. We explore the sense of meaning and mystery he has developed along the way, including his concern with how we humans limit our sense of other creatures by the names we give them. See more at onbeing.org/program/fishing-mystery/100
]]>Our SOF First Person series continues with physician Rachel Naomi Remen, author of “Kitchen Table Wisdom.” She sees these fiscally hard times as an opportunity to find our way back to the largeness of our collective story, which is part of the spiritual path we are on as we ask ourselves questions during this economic crisis: What do I trust? What do I really need? Last fall we began to conduct an online conversation parallel to but distinct from our culture’s more sustained focus on economic scenarios. For in each of our lives, whoever we are, very personal scenarios are unfolding that confront us with core questions of what matters to us and what sustains us. We made a list of our guests across the years who we thought might speak to this in fresh and compelling ways. See more at onbeing.org/program/repossessing-virtue-wise-voices-religion-science-industry-and-arts/162
]]>As promised, we continue our SOF First Person project by turning to Swiss banking expert, Prabhu Guptara. Several years ago, Krista spoke with Guptara when the fallout of the Enron scandal was wreaking havoc on the U.S. economy and shaking investor confidence in corporate practices and business fundamentals. His message was simple but challenging, and also quite liberating for much of our audience — bring your personal values into the workplace. For Guptara, doing this is one of the best ways of making ethical decisions that will lead to moral integrity — and less corruption and scandal. Last fall we began to conduct an online conversation parallel to but distinct from our culture’s more sustained focus on economic scenarios. For in each of our lives, whoever we are, very personal scenarios are unfolding that confront us with core questions of what matters to us and what sustains us. We made a list of our guests across the years who we thought might speak to this in fresh and compelling ways. See more at onbeing.org/program/repossessing-virtue-wise-voices-religion-science-industry-and-arts/162
]]>The Buddhist teacher and author Sharon Salzberg reflects on our current culture and its inability to acknowledge the inevitability of suffering. We hide from it, and hide it from others. She argues that we need not fear this, but look to others for compassion and wisdom and generosity as well as being touch with ourselves. Last fall we began to conduct an online conversation parallel to but distinct from our culture’s more sustained focus on economic scenarios. For in each of our lives, whoever we are, very personal scenarios are unfolding that confront us with core questions of what matters to us and what sustains us. We made a list of our guests across the years who we thought might speak to this in fresh and compelling ways. See more at onbeing.org/program/repossessing-virtue-wise-voices-religion-science-industry-and-arts/162
]]>The SOF First Person project kicks off with our search for fresh ways to talk about the current economic crisis — beginning with reflections from an acclaimed historian and theologian. He shares a good deal of his “lived theology” — the personal, daily acts of faith that preserve sanity and restore trust even at the most uncertain times. Last fall we began to conduct an online conversation parallel to but distinct from our culture’s more sustained focus on economic scenarios. For in each of our lives, whoever we are, very personal scenarios are unfolding that confront us with core questions of what matters to us and what sustains us. We made a list of our guests across the years who we thought might speak to this in fresh and compelling ways. See more at onbeing.org/program/repossessing-virtue-wise-voices-religion-science-industry-and-arts/162
]]>SOF First Person continues its series on the economic downturn with Dr. Esther Sternberg, a rheumatologist and stress researcher. She doesn’t see the financial crisis in moral terms in so much as biological ones. She elaborates on these scientific points and then relates them on a personal level, often by looking inward and exposing the frailty of her own humanity. Last fall we began to conduct an online conversation parallel to but distinct from our culture’s more sustained focus on economic scenarios. For in each of our lives, whoever we are, very personal scenarios are unfolding that confront us with core questions of what matters to us and what sustains us. We made a list of our guests across the years who we thought might speak to this in fresh and compelling ways. See more at onbeing.org/program/repossessing-virtue-wise-voices-religion-science-industry-and-arts/162
]]>Novelist Anchee Min grew up during the Cultural Revolution in Mao’s China. Living in the United States for several decades, she offers a challenging assessment of American reactions to these times based on her harsher experiences. Last fall we began to conduct an online conversation parallel to but distinct from our culture’s more sustained focus on economic scenarios. For in each of our lives, whoever we are, very personal scenarios are unfolding that confront us with core questions of what matters to us and what sustains us. We made a list of our guests across the years who we thought might speak to this in fresh and compelling ways. See more at onbeing.org/program/repossessing-virtue-wise-voices-religion-science-industry-and-arts/162
]]>Activist Majora Carter says she doesn’t think of her work at Sustainable South Bronx as a moral endeavor, but a pragmatic one. Nevertheless she looks on this period of economic tumult as a chance for being happy and passing that on to others. Last fall we began to conduct an online conversation parallel to but distinct from our culture’s more sustained focus on economic scenarios. For in each of our lives, whoever we are, very personal scenarios are unfolding that confront us with core questions of what matters to us and what sustains us. We made a list of our guests across the years who we thought might speak to this in fresh and compelling ways. See more at onbeing.org/program/repossessing-virtue-wise-voices-religion-science-industry-and-arts/162
]]>This unedited conversation with Parker Palmer comes from our produced show “Parker Palmer on Repossessing Virtue: Economic Crisis, Morality, and Meaning.” We explore human and spiritual aspects of economic downturn with a wise public intellectual of our time, the Quaker author and educator Parker Palmer. He works with people from all walks of life at the intersection of spiritual, professional, and social change, and stresses the need to acknowledge the inner life of human beings as a source of reality and power. See more at onbeing.org/program/repossessing-virtue-parker-palmer-economic-crisis-morality-and-meaning/161
]]>Diane Winston holds the Knight Chair in Media and Religion at the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Her media and religion blog is called “the SCOOP.”
]]>Paul Zak is professor of Economics and director of the Center for Neuroeconomic Studies at Claremont Graduate University in California. He’s editor of Moral Markets: The Critical Role of Values in the Economy.
]]>In this unedited conversation, we meet Joshua DuBois, the 26-year-old political strategist, Pentecostal minister, and trusted associate of the president who will lead this charge. The very words “faith-based” became controversial during the Bush administration, yet Barack Obama has retained the faith-based centers in 11 federal agencies that his predecessor created. And within weeks of assuming the presidency, he announced priority areas for his own White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships — including economic recovery and poverty reduction, abortion reduction, responsible fatherhood, and global interfaith dialogue. See more at onbeing.org/program/obamas-faith-based-office-meeting-joshua-dubois/135
]]>In this unedited conversation, we seek fresh insight into the history and the human and religious dynamics of Islam’s Sunni-Shia divide. Our guest says that it is not so different from dynamics in periods of Western Christian history. See more at onbeing.org/program/obamas-faith-based-office-meeting-joshua-dubois/135
]]>In this unedited conversation with James Moore, we’ll take a fresh and thought-provoking look at Darwin’s life and ideas. He did not argue against God but against a simple understanding of the world — its beauty, its brutality, and its unfolding creation. See more at onbeing.org/program/evolution-and-wonder-understanding-charles-darwin/94
]]>This unedited conversation comes from the produced show “Pankaj Mishra on the Buddha in the World.” Journalist Pankaj Mishra pursued the social relevance of the Buddha’s thought across India and Europe, Afghanistan and America. He emerged with a startling critique of Western political economy that is even more resonant today as he pursued the social relevance of the Buddha’s core questions: Do desiring and acquiring make us happy? Does large-scale political change really address human suffering? See more at onbeing.org/program/buddha-world/186
]]>This unheard cut on “The Backdrop of the Buddha” comes from our produced show ‘Pankaj Mishra on the Buddha in the World.” See more at onbeing.org/program/buddha-world/186
]]>In this unedited conversation poet and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht says that as a scholar she always noticed the “shadow history” of doubt out of the corner of her eye. She shows how non-belief, skepticism, and doubt have paralleled and at times shaped the world’s great religious and secular belief systems. She suggests that only in modern time has doubt been narrowly equated with a complete rejection of faith, or a broader sense of mystery. See more at onbeing.org/program/history-doubt/51
]]>Psychiatrist Robert Coles has spent his career exploring the inner lives of children. In this unedited interview, he says children are witnesses to the fullness of our humanity; they are keenly attuned to the darkness as well as the light of life; and they can teach us about living honestly, searchingly and courageously if we let them. See more at onbeing.org/program/inner-lives-children/204
]]>We remember Studs Terkel, who recently died at the age of 96. The legendary interviewer chronicled decades of ordinary life and tumultuous change in U.S. culture. We visited him in his Chicago home in 2004 and drew out his wisdom and warmth on large existential themes of life and death. A lifelong agnostic, Studs Terkel shared his thoughts on religion as he’d observed it in his conversation partners, in culture, and in his own encounters with loss and mortality. See more at onbeing.org/program/studs-terkel-life-faith-and-death/180
]]>In this unedited conversation, Krista interviewed Steve Waldman, journalist and founder of Beliefnet, for the produced show “Steven Waldman on Liberating the Founders.” Listen to their complete, unedited conversation. Here’s your chance to observe the editorial process and let us know what you think. Americans remain divided about how much religion they want in their political life. As we elect a new president, we return to an evocative, relevant conversation from earlier this year with journalist Steven Waldman. From his unusual study of the American founders, he understands why 21st-century struggles over religion in the public square spur passionate disagreement and entanglement with politics at its most impure. See more at onbeing.org/program/liberating-founders/122
]]>In this unedited conversation Krista Tippett interviews Vashti McKenzie, first female bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, for the produced show “Vashti McKenzie: African American. Woman. Leader.” The current U.S. presidential election has illustrated how gender, race, and religion can become lightning rods, and may be seen as potential stumbling blocks to leadership. Vashti McKenzie is a pioneering figure on all these fronts. When she became the first woman bishop of the oldest historic black church in America, she declared, “The stained glass ceiling has been pierced and broken.” We offer her story, her wisdom, and her good humor as an edifying lens on the American past, present, and future. http://onbeing.org/program/african-american-woman-leader/62
]]>This unedited conversation with Rod Dreher comes from the second part of our series “The Faith Life of the Party.” A conservative columnist, Rod Dreher is an outspoken critic of mainstream Republican economic and environmental ideas and the conduct of the Iraq war, but he voted for George W. Bush twice. We explore the little-known story of religiously influenced impulses within the conservative movement that diverge from the Religious Right. The second part of our examination of religious energies below the surface of the 2008 presidential campaign. Conservative columnist Rod Dreher is an outspoken critic of mainstream Republican economic and environmental ideas and the conduct of the Iraq war, but he voted for George W. Bush twice. We explore the little-known story of religiously-influenced impulses within the conservative movement that diverge from the Religious Right. See more at onbeing.org/program/faith-life-party-part-ii-right/196
]]>This unedited conversation with Amy Sullivan comes from the first part of our series “The Faith Life of the Party.” She’s a national corespondent for Time magazine, an Evangelical Christian, and an observer of the Democratic Party. The Religious Right has gotten a fair amount of coverage in recent years, while the political Left has rarely been represented with a religious sensibility. Our guest, a national correspondent for Time magazine is a political liberal and an Evangelical Christian who has been observing the Democratic Party’s complex relationship with faith and the little-told story of its response to the rise of the Religious Right. See more at onbeing.org/program/faith-life-party-part-i-left/195
]]>This unedited conversation with Cecil M. Robeck, Jr. took place on April 22, 2006 at The Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles and comes from our produced show Cecil M. Robeck, Jr. and Arlene Sanchez-Walsh on The Origins and Impact of Pentecostalism, Spiritual Tidal Wave.” See more at onbeing.org/program/spiritual-tidal-wave-origins-and-impact-pentecostalism/176
]]>This unedited conversation with Esther Sternberg comes from our produced show “Esther Sternberg on the Balance Within.” The American experience of stress has spawned a multi-billion dollar self-help industry. Wary of this, Esther Sternberg says that, until recently, modern science did not have the tools or the inclination to take emotional stress seriously. She shares fascinating new scientific insight into the molecular level of the mind-body connection. See more at onbeing.org/program/stress-and-balance-within/179
]]>The news has been marked in recent years, at regular intervals, by the moral and practical downfall of prominent businesses. Jonathan Greenblatt is among a new generation of entrepreneurs who want to lead a fundamental shift in corporate culture as well as philanthropy — a merger between making a profit and doing good. We explore his way of seeing the world and his economics of “ethical brand architecture” and “fiercely pragmatic idealism.” See more at onbeing.org/program/business-doing-good/187
]]>An environmentalist who pursued the ecological impulse of Paganism, from its ancient roots to its modern revival in Europe and North America, discusses his observations about the spirit of Paganism and its influence on everyday Western culture — and even on old-time religion. See more at onbeing.org/program/pagans-ancient-and-modern/139
]]>Alcoholics Anonymous co-founder Bill Wilson once said that the program he helped create is, “utter simplicity which encases a complete mystery.” Our guests reflect on the Twelve Steps and how they resonate in their personal stories and in Buddhist and Christian teachings. See more at onbeing.org/program/spirituality-addiction-and-recovery/229
]]>This unedited conversation with Fr. Donald Senior comes from our produced show “The Beauty and Challenge of Being Catholic: Hearing the Faithful” We received hundreds of essays in response to our query about what anchors and unsettles our Catholic audience. So we asked some of you to speak about your tradition. The moving reflections we heard prompted us to depart from our usual format and bring you a fabric of voices from the Church itself. See more at onbeing.org/program/beauty-and-challenge-being-catholic-hearing-faithful/183
]]>Ingrid Mattson, the first woman and first convert to lead the Islamic Society of North America, describes her experience of Islamic spirituality, which she discovered in her twenties after a Catholic upbringing. We probe her unusual perspective on a tumultuous age for Islam in the West and around the world. See more at onbeing.org/program/new-voice-islam/54
]]>Before a live audience at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, Minnesota, Krista reads from her book, “Speaking of Faith.” She traces the intersection of human experience and religious ideas in her own life, just as she asks her guests to do each week. Krista reflects on her adventure of conversation across the world’s traditions — and on the whole story of religion in human life, beyond the headlines of violence. See more at onbeing.org/program/remembering-forward/160
]]>Americans have been hearing a lot about Mormonism in the context of Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign. But much of the public discussion of this faith of 13 million people has focused on controversies in the church’s history. We’ll avoid well-trodden ground to seek an understanding of the lived beliefs and spirituality of Latter Day Saints, with a leading scholar of the church and a lifelong practitioner. Robert Millet describes a developing young religion with distinct mystical and practical interpretations of the nature of God, family, and eternity. See more at onbeing.org/program/inside-mormon-faith/112
]]>Environmentalism and climate change are hot topics; yet they’re still often imagined as the territory of scientists, expert activists, and those who can afford to be environmentally conscious. We discover two people who are transforming the ecology of their immediate worlds: biologist Calvin DeWitt in Dunn, Wisconsin and Majora Carter in New York’s South Bronx. See more at onbeing.org/program/discovering-where-we-live-reimagining-environmentalism/87
]]>Environmentalism and climate change are hot topics; yet they’re still often imagined as the territory of scientists, expert activists, and those who can afford to be environmentally conscious. We discover two people who are transforming the ecology of their immediate worlds: biologist Calvin DeWitt in Dunn, Wisconsin and Majora Carter in New York’s South Bronx. See more at onbeing.org/program/discovering-where-we-live-reimagining-environmentalism/87
]]>In this unedited conversation, Krista interviews Douglas Johnston, president and founder of the International Center for Religion and Diplomacy. We’re making the entire, unedited conversation available for the first time. Here’s your chance to observe the editorial process and let us know what you think. See more at onbeing.org/program/diplomacy-and-religion-21st-century/86
]]>Evangelical Christianity has no single, central authority, but it does have guiding figures in every generation. Progressive social activist Jim Wallis has become something of a national celebrity, proposing a new agenda for religion in politics in what he calls the “post-Religious Right era.” See more at onbeing.org/program/new-evangelical-leaders-part-ii-rick-and-kay-warren/213
]]>Evangelical Christianity has no single, central authority, but it does have guiding figures in every generation. Progressive social activist Jim Wallis has become something of a national celebrity, proposing a new agenda for religion in politics in what he calls the “post-Religious Right era.” See more at onbeing.org/program/new-evangelical-leaders-part-i-jim-wallis/212
]]>U.S. culture’s clash between religion and science is almost exclusively driven by Christian instincts and arguments. Hindu physicist V.V. Raman offers another view of religion, the universe, and the complementarity of the questions of science and faith. See more at www.onbeing.org/program/hearts-reason-hinduism-and-science/202
]]>Former Burmese Buddhist nun and anthropologist Ingrid Jordt takes us inside the spiritual culture of Burma, exploring the meaning of monks taking to the streets there in September, the way in which religion and military rule are intertwined, and how Buddhism remains a force in and beyond the current crisis. See more at onbeing.org/program/burma-buddhism-and-power/75
]]>In over 50 years as a Benedictine nun, Sister Joan Chittister has emerged as a powerful and uncomfortable voice in Roman Catholicism and in global politics. If women were ordained in the Catholic Church in our lifetime, some say, Joan Chittister would be the first female bishop. See more at onbeing.org/program/obedience-and-action/137
]]>Anchee Min has recently published the second book in her fictional account of the last Chinese imperial court and its empress. In her personal story and in her writing, Anchee Min offers a window into spiritual instincts and experiences that mark a rapidly evolving China into the present. See more at onbeing.org/program/surviving-religion-mao/181
]]>We revisit Krista’s 2005 conversation with Eboo Patel, who calls al-Qaeda the most effective youth organization in the world. But contrary to the wisdom of secular society, he’s working to deepen rather than tame the religious energies of the young across many traditions. And he believes this may be our only chance for survival. See more at onbeing.org/program/religious-passion-pluralism-and-young/159
]]>This unedited conversation with Marie Friedmann Marquardt comes from our produced show “Marie Friedmann Marquardt and Manuel A. Vasquez on Latino Migrations and the Changing Face of Religion in the Americas.” See more at onbeing.org/program/latino-migrations-and-changing-face-religion-americas/106
]]>American ideals of courtship and marriage echo with Biblical imagery — “bone of my bones” “flesh of my flesh.” But what does the Bible really say, and how has it been taught across the centuries in which the institution of marriage has changed dramatically? With a rabbi and a New Testament scholar, we explore nuances of biblical teachings about marriage, family, and divorce — the surprising ambiguities of the New Testament and the striking practicality of Jewish tradition across the ages. See more at onbeing.org/program/marriage-family-and-divorce/129
]]>American ideals of courtship and marriage echo with Biblical imagery — “bone of my bones” “flesh of my flesh.” But what does the Bible really say, and how has it been taught across the centuries in which the institution of marriage has changed dramatically? With a rabbi and a New Testament scholar, we explore nuances of biblical teachings about marriage, family, and divorce — the surprising ambiguities of the New Testament and the striking practicality of Jewish tradition across the ages. See more at onbeing.org/program/marriage-family-and-divorce/129
]]>In this close-up look at the human dynamics of the war on terror, our guest speaks about her husband, journalist Daniel Pearl, who was murdered in Pakistan shortly after 9/11. She talks about Buddhism, her ethic of spiritual defiance, and her hopes for the future. See more at onbeing.org/program/spirit-defiance/58
]]>Part one of this series takes Einstein’s science as a starting point for exploring the great physicist’s perspective on ideas such as mystery, eternity, and the mind of God. See more at www.onbeing.org/program/einsteins-ethics/89
]]>Part one of this series takes Einstein’s science as a starting point for exploring the great physicist’s perspective on ideas such as mystery, eternity, and the mind of God. See more at www.onbeing.org/program/einsteins-ethics/89
]]>A great public theologian and historian, Martin Marty offers personal and historical perspective on religion in modern life — including the nature of fundamentalism, and the decline of America’s mainline Protestant majority as Evangelical Christianity gains in influence. See more at onbeing.org/program/americas-changing-religious-landscape-conversation-martin-marty/65
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