Fairy tales don’t only belong to the domain of childhood. Their overt themes are threaded throughout hit TV series like Game of Thrones and True Blood, Grimm and Once Upon a Time. These stories survive, says Maria Tatar, by adapting across cultures and history. They are carriers of the plots we endlessly re-work in the narratives of our lives — helping us work through things like fear and hope.
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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.
May 14, 2009
Khalid Kamau, Ellen Williams, Oana Marian, et. al.
Repossessing Virtue: Living Differently, Beyond Economic Crisis
We’re bringing the voices of our listeners into the conversation we’ve been building online and on-air since the economic downturn began last year. Many are grappling with the shame that comes in American culture with the loss of a job, and many are seeking community in old places and new. For some, economic instability — a kind of life on the edge — is not new. They’ve been cultivating virtues of patience, self-examination, service and good humor that might help us all.
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.
Our guest straddles the worlds of cosmology and social activism. During a live audience interview in Philadelphia, he tells us how he unites his convictions about faith, ethics, and cosmology.
Experts once predicted that as the world grew more modern, religion would decline. Precisely the opposite has proven true; religious movements are surging and driving “alternative globalizations” across the world. Two leading thinkers offer a penetrating view of how and why religion of all kinds is shaping the global economy and political order.
August 3, 2006
Richard Mouw and Virginia Ramey Mollenkott
Gay Marriage: Broken or Blessed? Two Evangelical Views
Our culture’s acrimonious debate on the morality of gay marriage has been framed in religious — largely conservative Christian — terms. We go behind the rhetoric to explore the human confusion, hopes, and fears this subject arouses. We’ll name hard questions that these religious people on both sides of the issue are asking themselves, and that they would like to ask of others.
February 16, 2006
Vincent Cornell
The Face of the Prophet: Cartoons and Chasm
Our guest, an American Muslim and religious scholar, helps untangle the knot of violent and bewildered reactions to cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad.
In this personal exchange between a Jewish rabbi and Islamic scholar, host Krista Tippett explores the integrity of religious faith and openness to the faiths of others. In a world in which religious experience is implicated in violence, two thinkers discuss how it is possible to love their own traditions and honor those of others.
This program was recorded live at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles in June 2003.
November 9, 2001
Jean Bethke Elshtain, John Paul Lederach, and Michael Orange
Justice and a Just War
Just-war theory was set in motion in the 5th century as St. Augustine agonized over how to reconcile Christianity’s high ethical ideals with the devastating world realities which were bringing about the fall of Rome. For 1,600 years, theologians, ethicists, diplomats, and political leaders have drawn on this tradition, refined it, and employed its key questions: When is it permissible to wage war? And how might our ethical and religious foundations place limits on the ways we wage war?
In this program, we explore three varied perspectives on how such questions are alive and evolving today, and how they might inform our approach to the conflict in Afghanistan and the peace we would like to achieve beyond it.
October 27, 2022
Taking a Long View of Time, and Becoming "Critical Yeast"
We inhabit a liminal time between what we thought we knew and what we can’t quite yet see. But time is more spacious than we imagine it to be, and it is more of a friend than we always know. Cracking time open, seeing its true manifold nature, expands a sense of the possible in the here and the now. It sends us back to work with the raw materials of our lives, understanding that these are always the materials even of change at a cosmic or a societal level.
October 15, 2020
Rev. Otis Moss III
The Sound of the Genuine: Traversing 2020 with ‘the Mystic of the Movement’ Howard Thurman
An hour to sit with, and be filled. Two voices — one from the last century, one from ours — who inspire inward contemplation as an essential part of meeting the challenges in the world. Howard Thurman’s book Jesus and the Disinherited, it was said, was carried by Martin Luther King Jr. alongside the Bible and the U.S. Constitution. Thurman is remembered as a philosopher and theologian, a moral anchor, a contemplative, a prophet, and pastor to the civil rights leaders. Rev. Otis Moss III, himself the son of one of those leaders, is a bridge to Thurman’s resonance in the present day, and between the Black freedom movements then and now.
After Arlie Hochschild published her book Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, just before the 2016 election, it came to feel prescient. And the conversation Krista had with her in 2018 has now come to point straight to the heart of 2020 — a year in which many of us might say we feel like strangers in our own land and in our own world. Hochschild created a field within sociology looking at the social impact of emotion. She explains how our stories and truths — what we try to debate as issues in our social and political lives — are felt, not merely factual. And she shares why, as a matter of pragmatism, we have to take emotion seriously and do what feels unnatural: get curious and caring about the other side.
September 27, 2018
Frances Kissling
What Is Good in the Position of the Other
“If there isn’t the crack in the middle where there’s some people on both sides who absolutely refuse to see the other as evil, this is going to continue.”
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.
October 26, 2023
Latanya Sweeney
On Shaping Technology to Human Purpose
You may not know Latanya Sweeney’s name, but as much as any other single person — and with good humor and grace as well as brilliance — she has led on the frontier of our gradual understanding of how far from anonymous you and I are in almost any database we inhabit, and how far from neutral all the algorithms by which we increasingly navigate our lives.
In this conversation with Krista, she brings a helpful big-picture view to our lives with technology, seeing how far we’ve come — and not — since the advent of the internet, and setting that in the context of history both industrial and digital. She insists that we don’t have to accept the harms of digital technology in order to reap its benefits — and she sees very clearly the work that will take. From where she sits, the new generative AI is in equal measure an exciting and alarming evolution. And she shares with us the questions she is asking, and how she and her students and the emerging field of Public Interest Technology might help us all make sense.
This is the second in what will be an ongoing occasional On Being episode to delve into and accompany our lives with this new technological revolution — training clear eyes on downsides and dangers while cultivating an attention to how we might elevate the new frontier of AI — and how, in fact, it might invite us more deeply into our humanity.
We are called to consider who we want to be as a people and what kind of world we will build with and for our children. Karen Murphy has been gathering wisdom for this juncture, as she’s worked around the world with teachers and educators in societies moving toward repair after histories of violence. We learn from her about how to prepare ourselves in the U.S. for the civic healing that we are called to ahead.
“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.
Alain de Botton is a philosopher who likes the best of religion, but doesn’t believe in God. He says that the most boring question you can ask of any religion is whether it is true. But how to live, how to die, what is good, and what is bad — these are questions religion has sophisticated ways of addressing. So he’s created The School of Life — where people young and old explore ritual, community, beauty, and wisdom. He explains why these ideas shouldn’t be reserved just for believers.