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“The best expression of humor is something that comes out of suffering and comes out of a sense of alienation.”
Margaret Cho opens difficult conversations about rape, abuse, addiction, failure, and anger through her work as a comedian and writer. Anger and humor, she says, are deeply connected. And she sees talking and joking about her pain as a way to help people heal.
“Humor is a tool for inclusion and for making everyone realize: we’re all together on this.”
Jonny Sun has formed a devoted community of almost half a million followers on Twitter — tweeting through his alter ego, a lonely alien who views the world as an outsider, with curiosity and wonder. His tweets alternate between silly jokes and insightful, almost Zen-like, poetry. Through his words, he makes the world feel a little less lonely.
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.
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. A cross-generational reflection on evolving social change.
Humor as a tool for survival. That’s the theme of our second season of Creating Our Own Lives. Host Lily Percy speaks with 15 different voices on the surprising ways humor shapes them and brings meaning to their lives. Including insights from writers, comedians, political and financial reporters, a sex educator and a rabbi — and starring voices like Margaret Cho, Hari Kondabolu, Terry McMillan, Sam Sanders, and Lindy West.
Glenn Beck is a complicated person in American life, and he is acknowledging his role in the damaged state we’re in. To create the world we want our children to inhabit, we all need to be ready to let others surprise us, to offer forgiveness, and to 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 spirit.
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.
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.
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.
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. Her Institute for Figuring in Los Angeles reveals evocative, visceral connections between high mathematics, crochet and other folk arts, and our love of for the planet.
February 2, 2017
To be Evangelical is not one thing, even on abortion. 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 recorded it. We offer this searching dialogue, which is alive anew, to a changed political landscape.
A wildly popular blogger, tech entrepreneur, and Silicon Valley influencer, Anil Dash has been an early activist for moral imagination in the digital sphere — an aspiration which has now become an urgent task. We explore the unprecedented power, the learning curves ahead, and how we can all contribute to the humane potential of technology in this moment.
December 6, 2016
Singing is able to touch and join human beings in ways few other arts can. Alice Parker is a wise and joyful thinker and writer on this truth, and has been a hero in the universe of choral music as a composer, conductor, and teacher for most of her 90 years. She began as a young woman, studying conducting with Robert Shaw at Juilliard, and collaborated with him on arrangements of folk songs, spirituals, and hymns that are still performed around the world today.
Before Pope Francis, James Martin was perhaps the best-loved Jesuit in American life. He’s followed the calling of St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order, to “find God in all things” — and for him that means being a writer of books, an editor of America magazine, and a wise and witty presence on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. To delve into Fr. Martin’s way of being in the world is to discover the “spiritual exercises” St. Ignatius designed to be accessible to everyone more than six centuries ago.
October 27, 2016
This political season has surfaced our need to reimagine and re-weave the very meaning of common life and common good. We take a long, nourishing view of the challenge and promise of this moment with former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey and interfaith visionary Eboo Patel. This is the second of two public conversations convened by the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis on the eve of the 2016 presidential debate on that campus.
October 20, 2016
This is a strange, tumultuous political moment. With columnists David Brooks and E.J. Dionne, we step back from the immediate political gamesmanship. We take public theology as a lens on the challenge and promise we will all be living as citizens, whoever our next president might be. This public conversation was convened by the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Graham Chapel at Washington University in St. Louis, the day before the second presidential debate on that campus.
Fundamental forces of physics somehow determine everything that happens, “from the birth of a child to the birth of a galaxy.” Yet physicist Leonard Mlodinow has an intriguing perspective on the gap between theory and reality — and the fascinating interplay between a life in science and life in the world. As the child of two Holocaust survivors, he asks questions about our capacity to create our lives, while reflecting on extreme human cruelty — and courage.
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.
Join our constellation of listening and living.
The Pause is a monthly Saturday morning companion to all things On Being, with heads-up on new episodes, special offerings, event invitations, recommendations, and reflections from Krista all year round.
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