On Being with Krista Tippett (On Being Studios)

To say that Ruth Wilson Gilmore is a geographer, which she is, is not to convey the vast and varied ways in which she is influencing the makings of the future. She's a mentor and teacher to a new generation of social activism and creativity. She's a visionary of “abolition,” and that has become a fraught and polarizing word in our fraught and polarized public discourse. But when Ruth Wilson Gilmore speaks of “abolition,” she is working with a long, long view towards making a whole world, starting now, in which prisons and policing as we do them now become unnecessary, unthinkable. In this sense, abolition is not primarily a matter of what to get rid of, but what to build and to orient around — being present, for example, to human vulnerability and to the ingredients that make for deep human flourishing. 

Meeting Ruth Wilson Gilmore and drawing her out in this way is an exercise in muscular hope — and in understanding the passion of a new generation that is shaping what we will collectively become.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is a professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences, and American Studies, at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where she is also director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics. She grew up in New Haven, Connecticut. Her paternal grandfather was a janitor at Yale who helped organize the first blue-collar union at that university. And as a tool and die maker for the firearm manufacturer Winchester, her father played a central role in organizing the machinists at that company in the mid-1950s. She has co-founded several organizations, including the California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network. She has authored and co-edited several books, including Golden Gulag, Abolition Geography, and the forthcoming Change Everything. 

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

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Journalist Oliver Burkeman has made a delightful and important philosophical, spiritual, and practical investigation of all that is truly at stake in what we blithely refer to as “time management.” At this time of year, many of us are making plans and resolutions — treating time as part bully, part resource — something we could fit everything we want into if only we had the discipline. This conversation is offered up to release you from that illusion. He invites us into a new relationship with time, our technologies, and the power of limits — and thus with our mortality and with life itself.

Oliver Burkeman is a journalist and author. His most recent book is Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. He’s also the author of The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking. He writes and publishes a twice monthly email newsletter called “The Imperfectionist.” You can find The Guardian column he wrote from 2006 to 2020 online. It’s titled, “This Column Will Change Your Life.”  

This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Oliver Burkeman – Time Management for Mortals." Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org. 

The late poet Mary Oliver is among the most beloved writers of modern times. Amidst the harshness of life, she found redemption in the natural world and in beautiful, precise language. She won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award among her many honors — and published numerous collections of poetry and also some wonderful prose. Krista met with her in 2015 for this rare, intimate conversation. We offer it up anew, as nourishment.

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 collection of poetry from her more than 50-year career, curated by the poet herself. She died in 2019.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

This show originally aired in February, 2015.

The remarkable Archbishop Emeritus of Cape Town and Nobel Laureate died in the closing days of 2021. He helped galvanize South Africa's improbably peaceful transition from apartheid to democracy. He was a leader in the religious drama that transfigured South African Christianity. And he continued to engage conflict well into his retirement, in his own country and in the global Anglican communion. Krista explored all of these things with him in this warm, soaring 2010 conversation — and how Desmond Tutu's understanding of God and humanity unfolded through the history he helped to shape.

Desmond Tutu was an Anglican Archbishop Emeritus of Cape Town, South Africa and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. He wrote numerous books for adults and children — including The Rainbow People of God, No Future Without Forgiveness, Made for Goodness and, together with his good friend the Dalai Lama, The Book of Joy.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

This show originally aired in April, 2010.

We’d heard Derek Black, the former white-power heir apparent, interviewed before about his past, but never about the college friendships that changed him. After Derek’s ideology was outed at the New College of Florida, Matthew Stevenson (one of the only Orthodox Jews on campus) invited him to Shabbat dinner. What happened next is a roadmap for navigating some of the hardest and most important territory of our time.

Matthew Stevenson was born and raised in South Florida. He graduated from the New College of Florida, the state's honors college, with degrees in mathematics and economics. He holds an MBA from Columbia Business School and currently works as an investment analyst at T. Rowe Price.

Derek Black is a PhD student in history at the University of Chicago, where he’s examining how the legacy of the medieval European worldview influenced the development of ideas about race in the early-modern Atlantic. He is the subject of the recent book “Rising Out of Hatred” by Eli Saslow.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org. This interview originally aired in May 2018.

Journalist Ezra Klein has been widely interviewed about his new book, Why We're Polarized. In this conversation, he's frank and reflective about what's at stake in human terms in this political moment. And he describes how we all — Democrat and Republican, journalist and citizen alike — walked into this as a way to trace our steps out of it.

Ezra Klein is the co-founder and editor-at-large of Vox Media and host of two podcasts: The Weeds and The Ezra Klein Show. His book is Why We’re Polarized.

This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Ezra Klein — How We Walked Into This and How We Can Walk Out." Find more at onbeing.org.

Suzanne Simard is the forest ecologist who has proven, beyond doubt, that trees communicate with each other — that a forest is a single organism wired for wisdom and care. Simard found that the processes that make for a high-functioning forest mirror the maps of the human brain that we’re also just now drawing. All of this turns out to be catching up with intelligence long held in aboriginal science. She calls the mature hub trees in a forest “Mother Trees” — parenting, eldering, in a mode of mutuality and reciprocity, modeling what we also know to be true of genuinely flourishing human ecosystems.

Suzanne Simard is Professor of Forest Ecology at the University of British Columbia. You can connect with her ongoing work at mothertreeproject.org. Her book is called, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest.

This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Suzanne Simard — Forests Are Wired For Wisdom." Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org.

In her writing, it is Kate DiCamillo's gift to make bearable the fact that joy and sorrow live so close, side by side, in life as it is (if not as we wish it to be). In this conversation, along with good measures of raucous laughter and a few tears, Kate summons us to hearts "capacious enough to contain the complexities and mysteries of ourselves and each other" — qualities these years in the life of the world call forth from all of us, young and old, with ever greater poignancy and vigor.

Kate DiCamillo has written many bestselling books, beloved by children and adults in touch with their inner eight-year-old, for two decades, including Because of Winn-Dixie, The Tale of Despereaux, The Magician’s Elephant, Flora & Ulysses, and The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane. Some of these have been turned into operas and movies. Her new books in 2024 include the middle grade novel Ferris and Orris and Timble: The Beginning. She is a rare two-time winner of the Newbery Medal.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

This show originally aired in March 2022.

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Hanif Abdurraqib’s writing is filled with lyricism, rhythm, people and precision. In his essays and poetry, he introduces readers to a soundscape of Black performance and Black joy: we hear hip-hop and jazz, we hear Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin and Little Richard. Music and performance of every kind are the source of his fascination, focus and wisdom: what makes people cry, or feel safe, or brave; held in struggle, joy, or love. Hanif is interviewed by our colleague, Pádraig Ó Tuama, a poet himself and the host of On Being Studios’ Poetry Unbound podcast, now in its third season.

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His poetry has been published in Muzzle, Vinyl, PEN American, and various other journals. His essays and music criticism have been published in The FADER, Pitchfork, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. His books include, A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest, and A Fortune for your Disaster. He’s also the host of the podcast, Object of Sound.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org 

A few years ago, Krista hosted an event in Detroit — a city in flux — on the theme of raising children. The conversation that resulted with the Jewish-Buddhist teacher and psychotherapist Sylvia Boorstein has been a companion to her and to many from that day forward. Here it is again as an offering for Mother’s Day — in a world still and again in flux, and where the matter of raising new human beings feels as complicated as ever before. Sylvia gifts us this teaching: that nurturing children’s inner lives can be woven into the fabric of our days — and that nurturing ourselves is also good for the children and everyone else in our lives.

Sylvia Boorstein is a mother, grandmother, Jewish-Buddhist teacher, psychotherapist, and a founding teacher of Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, California. Her books include That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Buddhist, It’s Easier Than You Think, Happiness Is an Inside Job, and Making Friends with the Present Moment.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

This show originally aired in May 2011.

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The Cuban American civil engineer turned writer, Richard Blanco, straddles the many ways a sense of place merges with human emotion to make home and belonging — personal and communal. The most recent — and very resonant — question he’s asked by way of poetry is: how to love a country? At Chautauqua, Krista invited him to speak and read from his books. Blanco’s wit, thoughtfulness, and elegance captivated the crowd. 

Richard Blanco  – practiced civil engineering for more than 20 years. He is now an associate professor of creative writing at his alma mater, Florida International University. His books of non-fiction and poetry include Looking for the Gulf Motel and, most recently, How to Love a Country.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

This show originally aired in November, 2019.
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Elemental human capacities like friendship and love, teaching and learning, have tremendous, constant, practical force. We don’t think of these in terms of what has given our species the grit to endure through hard times and even evolve in the long run. They’re lived social intelligence, part of the everyday, and so can be hard to see as serious amidst the high tumult of our age. But these kinds of human qualities are what sociologist Nicholas Christakis studies from his Human Nature Lab at Yale and his life generously lived. He offers a wide lens, a broad perspective, that deepens and refreshes.

Nicholas Christakis is the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University, where he’s also the director of the Human Nature Lab and co-director of the Institute for Network Science. He’s the author of Connected: How Your Friends’ Friends’ Friends Affect Everything You Feel, Think, and Do and Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society. In October 2020, he published Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

This show originally aired on March 5, 2020.

“We are indebted to one another and the debt is a kind of faith — a beautiful, difficult, strange faith. We believe each other into being.” That’s the message the philosopher, poet, and historian, Jennifer Michael Hecht, puts at the center of her unusual writing about suicide. She’s traced how Western civilization has, at times, demonized those who died by suicide, and, at times, celebrated it as a moral freedom. She has struggled with suicidal places in her life and lost friends to it. She proposes a new cultural understanding based on our essential need for each other.

Jennifer Michael Hecht is the author of 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 — ‘We Believe Each Other Into Being’" Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org.

Alex Elle complicates the idea of self-care, opening it up as community-care, as a way towards generational healing. And she’s revivifying the meaning of meeting one’s “inner child” for a new generation. Our colleague Lily Percy says she could not have survived the physical isolation of the pandemic without Alex’s writing, teaching, and Instagram presence. So Krista hands over the mic to Lily for this conversation.

Alex Elle has a beloved presence on Instagram @alex_elle. She teaches workshops on “writing to heal,” and hosts the podcast “hey, girl.” Her books include After the Rain: Gentle Reminders for Healing, Courage, and Self-Love, Neon Soul, and In Courage Journal.

This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Alex Elle — Self-Care as Generational Healing" Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org.

You can’t think about something if you can’t talk about it, says Eula Biss. The writer helpfully opens up lived words and ideas like complacence, guilt, and opportunity hoarding for an urgent reckoning with whiteness. This conversation was inspired by her 2015 essay in the New York Times, “White Debt.”

Eula Biss teaches writing at Northwestern University. Her books include On Immunity: An Inoculation and Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org 

This show originally aired in January, 2017.

The British psychologist Kimberley Wilson works in the emergent field of whole body mental health, one of the most astonishing frontiers we are on as a species. Discoveries about the gut microbiome, for example, and the gut-brain axis; the fascinating vagus nerve and the power of the neurotransmitters we hear about in piecemeal ways in discussions around mental health. The phrase “mental health” itself makes less and less sense in light of the wild interactivity we can now see between what we’ve falsely compartmentalized as physical, emotional, mental, even spiritual. And so much of what we’re seeing brings us back to intelligence that has always been in the very words we use — “gut instinct,” for instance. It brings us back to something your grandmother was right about, for reasons she would never have imagined: you are what you eat. There is so much actionable knowledge in the tour of the ecosystem of our bodies that Kimberley Wilson takes us on this hour. This is science that invites us to nourish the brains we need, young and old, to live in this world. 

Kimberley Wilson has a private psychotherapy and nutrition practice in central London. She co-hosts the BBC Radio 4 podcast Made of Stronger Stuff and is the author of How to Build a Healthy Brain. She came to the attention of many as a finalist in an early season of The Great British Bake Off. She grew up, as she tells it, eating both the West Indian food of her family and over-processed modern British fare.

This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Kimberley  Wilson — Whole Body Mental Health." Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org.

And, this week, an invitation: As you may have heard, after twenty years (!), we are transitioning On Being from a weekly show to a seasonal podcast. We hope you’ll help us celebrate these first two decades, by sharing how you’ve made this adventure of conversation your own.

Is there a guest, an idea, or a moment from an episode that has made a difference, that has stayed with you? 

We’ve made it easy (and fun) to record your reflection — and at the same time sign up to stay on top of what’s happening next: onbeing.org/staywithus. Krista will be offering some of her defining memories, too: in a special online event in June, on social media, and more. So — please and thank you — go to onbeing.org/staywithus.

If we didn’t have vast civilizational challenges upon us, we might be living in a constant state of wonder at what science in this century is learning and showing us about the cosmos and about ourselves — the new questions it’s giving us to live. We are the generation of our species to map the genome, to detect black holes colliding, to hear gravitational waves. The physicist Brian Greene is one of our greatest interpreters from the human enterprise that is science. And in his most recent thinking and writing, there’s a stunning evolution in his own approach to science and life and the matters of purpose and meaning. We delve into his exuberant, cosmic lens on living in the here and the now.

Brian Greene is a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University, where he is also the director of Columbia’s Center for Theoretical Physics. He is the co-founder and chairman of the World Science Festival. His books include The Elegant Universe, The Hidden Reality, The Fabric of the Cosmos, and most recently, Until The End Of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

The classic economic theory embedded in western democracies holds an assumption that human beings will almost always behave rationally in the end and make logical choices that will keep our society balanced on the whole. Daniel Kahneman is the psychologist who won the Nobel Prize in Economics for showing that this is simply not true. There’s something sobering — but also helpfully grounding — in speaking with this brilliant and humane scholar who explains why none of us is an equation that computes. As surely as we breathe, we will contradict ourselves and confound each other.

Daniel Kahneman received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002. He’s best known for his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow and is now releasing a new book, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, written with Olivier Sibony and Cass R. Sunstein. He’s the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Princeton University, Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs Emeritus at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, 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 the transcript for that show at onbeing.org.

Baratunde Thurston is a comedian, writer, and media entrepreneur. He has eyes open to the contradictions, strangeness, and beauty of being human. He looks for learning happening even amidst our hardest cultural tangles. And he intertwines all of this, innovatively and searchingly, with his lifelong joy in the natural world. 

The kaleidoscopic view of life and love and the world that is Baratunde's builds and builds in this conversation Krista had with him around the edges of the 2023 Aspen Ideas Festival — towards an exuberant glimpse of how we can all be more fully human and socially creative.

Baratunde Thurston's latest adventure is hosting the fascinating PBS series America Outdoors. He's been Director of Digital at The Onion, produced The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, and advised on digital strategy at The White House. He's a founding partner of the media start-up Puck, and creator and host of the podcast How To Citizen. He's the author of several books, including How To Be Black.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

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“Becoming other people” for a living, as Kerry Washington likes to describe her craft, turns out to be a revelatory lens on the high drama that is the human condition. As a “learning actor,” a kind of actor/anthropologist, she has brought elegance and moral rigor to all kinds of roles: as the uber-glamorous, tough-as-nails Olivia Pope on Scandal; as the wife of Idi Amin and the wife of Ray Charles; from Little Fires Everywhere to Django Unchained. Just after Scandal ended seven triumphant seasons, she starred on Broadway as Kendra, a jeans-clad mother in a Miami police station waiting to hear what has happened to her beloved son. Krista was in that audience, and saw how Kerry attended not just to her role on stage but to bringing a beautifully racially mixed audience to participating and reflecting together. 

So this conversation has been a while in coming. It is rich with grace and surprising angles of insight — on the roles we all learn to play in the stories of the lives that we are given, and the evolution that is possible in how we assume those characters and leave them behind and grow them up. 

This episode of On Being was produced with consideration of the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike and with external legal guidance. In distributing this episode, we attest to our belief that no statements made involve promotion of struck work in violation of the SAG-AFTRA Strike Order.

Kerry Washington is the author of a new memoir, Thicker Than Water, and founder of the production company Simpson Street. Her many credits include the television series Little Fires Everywhere, the Broadway play — and Netflix film — American Son, and the film Django Unchained. She starred as Olivia Pope on seven seasons of the hit TV series Scandal. 

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

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We live in a world in love with the form of words that is an opinion, and the way with words that is an argument. Yet it is a deep truth in life — as in science — that each of us is shaped as much by the quality of the questions we are asking as by the answers we have it in us to give.  Precisely at a moment like this, of vast aching open questions and very few answers we can agree on, our questions themselves become powerful tools for living and growing. 

"If you are faithful to living a question, that question will be faithful back to you."

Experience the whole collection of four Foundations for Being Alive Now on the On Being Project website.

Pádraig Ó Tuama reads his poem, “The Facts of Life.” This poem is included in our “Taking the Long View” playlist on Spotify, which we created to get grounded in reflection that will be with us the day after the U.S. election and far beyond, whoever wins. Find more of Pádraig’s poems on our website, where we’ve recently launched an entirely new way to Experience Poetry.

Alison Gopnik understands babies and children as the R&D division of humanity. From her cognitive science lab at the University of California, -Berkeley, she investigates the “evolutionary paradox” of the long human childhood. When she first trained in philosophy and developmental psychology, the minds of children were treated as blank slates. But her research is helping us see how even the most mundane facts of a toddler or a teenager — from fantasy play to rebelliousness — tell us what it means to be human.

Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California, -Berkeley, where she also heads the Cognitive Development and Learning Lab. She’s written more than 100 journal articles and several books, including The Scientist in the Crib, The Philosophical Baby, and, most recently, The Gardener and the Carpenter.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org

The Cuban American civil engineer turned writer, Richard Blanco, straddles the many ways a sense of place merges with human emotion to make home and belonging — personal and communal. The most recent — and very resonant — question he’s asked by way of poetry is: how to love a country? At Chautauqua, Krista invited him to speak and read from his books. Blanco’s wit, thoughtfulness, and elegance captivated the crowd.

Richard Blanco  – practiced civil engineering for more than 20 years. He is now an associate professor of creative writing at his alma mater, Florida International University. His books of non-fiction and poetry include Looking for the Gulf Motel and, most recently, How to Love a Country.

This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Richard Blanco — How to Love a Country." Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org.

This show originally aired in November, 2019.
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And: if you can, please take a minute to rate On Being in this podcast app — you'll be bending the arc of algorithms towards this adventure of conversation and living.

“I’m entering into this next phase… with a great deal of curiosity and perhaps tenderness, wanting to hold each other tight, because I think that there are ramifications of last year that have yet to be felt.” Rev. Jen Bailey is a wise young pastor and social innovator, and a “friend of a different generation” of Krista. This conversation is a loving adventure in cross-generational mapmaking and care. Jen is a leader in a widening movement that is “healing the healers” — sustaining individuals, organizers, and communities for the long, life-giving transformations ahead.

Jen Bailey is Founder and Executive Director of the Faith Matters Network and serves on the staff of Greater Bethel AME Church in Nashville, Tennessee. Her first book, to be published in October 2021, is called, To My Beloveds: Letters on Faith, Race, Loss and Radical Hope.

This conversation came about in partnership with Encore.org.

Find the transcript at onbeing.org.

In this all-new episode, Krista engages biomimicry pioneer Janine Benyus in a second, urgent conversation, alongside creative biomimicry practitioner Azita Ardakani Walton. Together they trace precise guidance and applied wisdom from the natural world for the civilizational callings before us now. 

What does nature have to teach us about healing from trauma? And how might those of us aspiring to good and generative lives start to function like an ecosystem rather than a collection of separate, siloed projects? We are in kinship. How to make that real — and in making it real, make it more of an offering to the whole wide world?

Krista, Azita, and Janine spoke at the January 2024 gathering of visionaries, activists, and creatives where Krista also drew out Lyndsey Stonebridge and Lucas Johnson for the recent episode on Hannah Arendt. We're excited to bring you back into that room.

Janine Benyus's classic work is Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. She is the co-founder of the non-profit Biomimicry Institute. She also co-founded Biomimicry 3.8, a consulting and training company. 

Azita Ardakani Walton is a philanthropist and social entrepreneur. She has pursued her work through nature’s principles as a means to inform economics, social organizations, and design. She was the founder of the creative impact agency Lovesocial, and is currently in the pursuit of the relationship between inner life and outer ecology to meet the challenges of these times.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

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A big conversation to live by starting NEXT WEEK — every Thursday — from September 21. 

Loss — and love. AI — and the intelligence that lives in our bodies. 

Kerry Washington, Kate Bowler, Reid Hoffman, Latanya Sweeney, Nick Cave, Baratunde Thurston … and more.

Subscribe, tell your friends, and buckle your (metaphorical) seatbelts.

“Though we have instructions and a map buried in our hearts when we enter this world,” the extraordinary Joy Harjo has written, “nothing quite prepares us for the abrupt shift to the breathing realm.” She is a saxophone player and performer, a visual artist, a member of the Muscogee Creek Nation, and the 23rd Poet Lau­re­ate of the Unit­ed States. She opens up with Krista about her life, dreaming as a way of relating to time and place, and the story matrix that connects us all. 

Joy Harjo — is a member of the Muscogee Creek Nation and the 23rd Poet Lau­re­ate of the Unit­ed States. She is the author of nine books of poet­ry, including An American Sunrise and She Had Some Horses, and a memoir, Crazy Brave. She has also produced several award-winning music albums, including her most recent, I Pray for My Ene­mies. Her new memoir, coming out in September 2021, is called, Poet Warrior.

This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Joy Harjo — The Whole of Time." Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org.

The psychotherapist Esther Perel has changed our discourse about sexuality and coupledom with her TED talks, her books, and her podcast, Where Should We Begin? Episode after episode lays bare the theater of relationship, which is also the drama of being human. Her insights speak to the flip side of social isolation — the intense experience many have now had of togetherness. And her deep understanding of “erotic intelligence” feels so interesting as we grapple with emergent dynamics of the human condition writ large — coupled or not, and both intimate and societal.

Esther Perel has a private couples and family therapy practice in New York. She hosts two podcasts, Where Should We Begin? and How’s Work? and is the creator of a new game called, Where Should We Begin? - A Game of Stories. She is also the author of two TED talks and two 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 the transcript for that show at onbeing.org. 

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To a question from listener Elena Rivera of Colorado Springs, Krista reflects on seeing this as a collective moment of transition (which is always stressful in human life) and ponders what we might integrate into the people we become on the other side of it. “To really, actively, accompany each other in holding that question — that might be a spiritual calling but also a civilizational calling for this very extraordinary transition,” she says. 

Living the Questions is an occasional On Being segment where Krista muses on questions from our listening community. Submit your own at ltq@onbeing.org.

Krista Tippett created and leads The On Being Project, hosts the On Being radio show and podcast, and curates The Civil Conversations Project. She received the National Humanities Medal at the White House in 2014. She speaks widely and writes books including Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living. Read her full bio here.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org

The years of pandemic and lockdown are still working powerfully on us from the inside. But we have trouble acknowledging this, much less metabolizing it. This conversation with Christine Runyan, which took place in the dark middle of those years, helps make sense of our present of still-unfolding epidemic distress — as individuals, as communities, as a species. She has cultivated a reverence for the human nervous system. She tells truths about our bodies that western medicine itself is only fitfully learning to see. This quiet conversation is not just revelatory, but healing and calming. It holds startling prescience about some of what we're navigating now. And it offers self-compassion and simple strategies for finding ease within ourselves — and with each other — as we live forward from here.

Christine Runyan is a clinical psychologist and professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health at UMass Chan Medical School. She is also a certified mindfulness teacher, and she co-founded and co-leads Tend Health, a clinical consulting practice focused on the mental well-being of medical and health care workers.

This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Christine Runyan — On Healing Our Distressed Nervous Systems." Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org.

Katharine Hayhoe is one of the most esteemed atmospheric scientists in the world. She’s made her mark by connecting dots between climate systems and weather patterns and the lived experience of human beings in their neighborhoods and communities. She’s also an ambassador, if you will, between the science of climate change and the world of evangelical Christian faith and practice, which she also inhabits. To delve into that with her is to learn a great deal that refreshingly complicates the picture of what is possible and what is already happening, even across what feel like cultural fault lines. If you want to speak and walk differently on this frontier, this is a conversation for you.

Katharine Hayhoe is a professor of political science at Texas Tech University, and since 2021 Chief Scientist of the Nature Conservancy. She founded the Atmos Research and Consulting Firm, has been named one of Time 's 100 Most Influential People (2014), and serves as the climate ambassador for the World Evangelical Alliance. Her new book is Saving Us: A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World.

This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Katharine Hayhoe — “Our future is still in our hands" Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org.

Ornithologist J. Drew Lanham reads his poem, “Love for a Song.” Krista’s conversation with him is our episode, ‘I Worship Every Bird that I See.’

As people, and as a culture, Alain de Botton says, we would be much saner and happier if we reexamined our very view of love. His New York Times essay, “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person,” is one of their most-read articles in recent years, and this is one of the most popular episodes we’ve ever created. We offer up the anchoring truths he shares amidst a pandemic that has stretched all of our sanity — and tested the mettle of love in every relationship.

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. He’s also published many books as part of The School of Life’s offerings, including a chapbook created from his essay Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person.

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 the transcript for that show at onbeing.org.

We often explore on this show the places in the human experience where ordinary language falls short. The poet Gregory Orr has wrested gentle, healing, life-giving words from extreme grief and trauma. And right now we are all carrying some magnitude of grief in our bodies.

Gregory Orr is the author of two books about poetry, Poetry as Survival and A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry, a memoir, The Blessing, and twelve collections of poetry, including How Beautiful the Beloved and The Last Love Poem I Will Ever Write. He taught at the University of Virginia from 1975 to 2019, where he founded the university’s Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org

This show originally aired in May, 2019.

The classic economic theory embedded in western democracies holds an assumption that human beings will almost always behave rationally in the end and make logical choices that will keep our society balanced on the whole. Daniel Kahneman is the psychologist who won the Nobel Prize in Economics for showing that this is simply not true. There’s something sobering — but also helpfully grounding — in speaking with this brilliant and humane scholar who explains why none of us is an equation that computes. As surely as we breathe, we will contradict ourselves and confound each other.

Daniel Kahneman received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002. He’s best known for his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow and is now releasing a new book, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, written with Olivier Sibony and Cass R. Sunstein. He’s the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Princeton University, Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs Emeritus at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, and a fellow of the Center for Rationality at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

This show originally aired on October 5, 2017.

Nick Offerman has played many great characters, most famously Ron Swanson in Parks and Recreation, and he starred more recently in an astonishing episode of The Last of Us. But he is driven by passionate callings older and deeper than his public vocation as an actor and comedian. He works with wood, and he works with other people who work with their hands making beautiful, useful things. And this, it turns out, is also a primary source of his tethering in values. It's a source of a spiritual thoughtfulness that runs through this conversation with Krista. So is his love and study of the farmer-poet Wendell Berry, whose audiobook The Need to Be Whole Nick just recorded.

This is a moving and edifying conversation that is also, not surprisingly, a lot of fun.

Nick Offerman grew up on a three-acre homestead "out in a cornfield" in Minooka, Illinois. His five books include Where the Deer and the Antelope Play and Good Clean Fun: Misadventures in Sawdust at Offerman Woodshop. He founded Offerman Woodshop in Los Angeles in 2001, a collective that creates hand-crafted items from spoons to canoes to ukuleles. He's also written a book with his wife, Megan Mullally, called The Greatest Love Story Ever Told, and they have a podcast called In Bed with Nick and Megan. 

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.
 

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We are digging into the archives to celebrate some of the conversations listeners have loved the most and that have shaped this project. Béla Fleck is one of the greatest living banjo players. 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 refreshment 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. He has released two full album collaborations with Abigail Washburn, Béla Fleck and Abigail Washburn and Echo in the Valley. In 2020, he released Throw Down Your Heart: The Complete Africa Sessions. His latest album is, My Bluegrass Heart. 

Abigail Washburn is a clawhammer banjo player and singer. Her solo albums include Song of the Traveling Daughter and City of Refuge. Her newest album is Wu Fei And Abigail Washburn, a collaboration with her longtime friend, the renowned guzheng player Wu Fei. 

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 the transcript for that show at onbeing.org.

We often explore on this show the places in the human experience where ordinary language falls short. The poet Gregory Orr has wrested gentle, healing, life-giving words from extreme grief and trauma. And right now we are all carrying some magnitude of grief in our bodies.

Gregory Orr is the author of two books about poetry, Poetry as Survival and A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry, a memoir, The Blessing, and twelve collections of poetry, including How Beautiful the Beloved and The Last Love Poem I Will Ever Write. He taught at the University of Virginia from 1975 to 2019, where he founded the university’s Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing.

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.

This show originally aired in May, 2019.

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This prophetic conversation, which Rev. angel Kyodo williams had with Krista in 2018, is an invitation to imagine and nourish the transformative potential of this moment — toward human wholeness. Rev. angel is an esteemed Zen priest and the second Black woman recognized as a teacher in the Japanese Zen lineage. She is one of our wisest voices on social evolution and the spiritual aspect of social healing.

angel Kyodo williams is a Zen priest, activist, and teacher. She’s the author of Being Black: Zen and the Art of Living with Fearlessness and Grace and Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation. In 2020, she created the first annual Great Radical Race Read.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

This show originally aired in April 2018.

David Whyte reads his poem, “Working Together.” This poem is featured in David’s On Being conversation with Krista, “Seeking Language Large Enough.” Find more of his poems, along with our full collection of poetry films and readings from two decades of the show, at Experience Poetry.

David Whyte is the author of The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America, Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words, and The Bell and the Blackbird. His latest collections are David Whyte: Essentials and Still Possible.

Moral reckonings are being driven to the surface of our life together: What are politics for? What is an economy for? Jacqueline Novogratz says the simplistic ways we take up such questions — if we take them up at all — is inadequate. Novogratz is an innovator in creative, human-centered capitalism. She has described her recent book, Manifesto for a Moral Revolution, as a love letter to the next generation.

Jacqueline Novogratz is the founder and CEO of Acumen, a venture capital fund that serves some of the poorest people in the world. She’s also the author of a memoir, The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org

Ai-jen Poo is a next-generation labor organizer who co-founded a beautiful and muscular movement with caregivers and those who employ them: The National Domestic Workers Alliance. For over two decades, she has been reinventing policy and engaging a deep conversation that has now met its civilizational moment. This conversation was recorded before “coronavirus” was a word we all knew. But the many dimensions of the crisis now upon us have revealed Ai-jen Poo and her world of wisdom and action as teachers for our life together, in and beyond it.

Ai-jen Poo is executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and the co-director of Caring Across Generations. Her book is The Age of Dignity. Her podcast, co-hosted with Alicia Garza, is Sunstorm.

Find the transcript for this show 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 nonfiction, The Warmth of Other Suns. She’s immersed herself in the stories of the Great Migration, the movement of six million African Americans to northern U.S. cities in the 20th century. The book is a carrier of histories and truths that help make sense of human and social challenges at the heart of our life together now.

Isabel Wilkerson won the Pulitzer Prize for her work as Chicago bureau chief of The New York Times and was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama in 2016 “for championing the stories of an unsung history.” Her book The Warmth of Other Suns won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. Her new book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, comes out in August 2020.

This show originally aired in November, 2016.

This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Isabel Wilkerson — This History is Long; This History Is Deep." Find more at onbeing.org.

Ta-Nehisi Coates says we must love our country the way we love our friends — and not spare the hard truths. “Can you get to a place where citizens are encouraged to see themselves critically, where they’re encouraged to see their history critically?” he asks. Coates is a poetic journalist and a defining voice of our times. He’s with us in a conversation that is joyful, hard, kind, soaring, and down-to-earth all at once. He spoke with Krista as part of the 2017 Chicago Humanities Festival.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a distinguished writer in residence at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. His books include “Between the World and Me,” “We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy,” and the novel “The Water Dancer.” He’s also the current writer of the Marvel comics “The Black Panther” and “Captain America.”

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org. This episode originally aired in November 2017.

Novelist Marilynne Robinson and physicist Marcelo Gleiser are both passionate about the majesty of science, and they share a caution about what they call our modern “piety” toward science. They connect thrilling dots among the current discoveries about the cosmos and the new territory of understanding our own minds. We brought them together for a joyous, heady discussion of the mystery we are.

Marcelo Gleiser is Appleton Professor of Natural Philosophy and a professor of physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College. He’s the author of The Dancing Universe, A Tear at the Edge of Creation, and, most recently, The Simple Beauty of the Unexpected: A Natural Philosopher’s Quest for Trout and the Meaning of Everything. He was awarded the 2019 Templeton Prize.

Marilynne Robinson is a professor emeritus of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She’s the author of several novels, including Housekeeping, Home, and Gilead, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Her works of nonfiction include Absence of Mind and, most recently, What Are We Doing Here?

This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the 

On Being

 episode "Marilynne Robinson and Marcelo Gleiser — The Mystery We Are." Find more at

 onbeing.org

. This show originally aired in January 2012.

The flow and the ingredients by which an idea becomes an offering — and life practices which call that alchemy forth. The mystery of it all that can only be named and wondered at — and the ordinary mystery that creativity is a human birthright, a way of being rather than doing, that beckons to us all, in everything we do, from crafting something to conversing to the arranging of furniture in a room.

This is where Krista goes with the rock star music producer Rick Rubin. It's not a conversation about the creative process of the many great musicians he's worked with — but a conversation that is for and about us all. 

There are some surprises, too, in his lovely, soothing voice — like the way he finds a metaphor for all of life in pro wrestling. And he leaves the doors of his studio wide open as they speak, so there is a soundtrack of ocean waves.

Rick Rubin has been a singular, transformative creative muse for artists across genres and generations — from the Beastie Boys to Johnny Cash, from Public Enemy to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, from Adele to Jay-Z. To name just a few. His new (and first) book is The Creative Act: A Way of Being. He is co-founder of the record label Def Jam Recordings, and former co-president of Columbia Records. He is also one of the hosts of the podcast, Broken Record. 

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

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When Krista interviewed the psychiatrist and trauma specialist Bessel van der Kolk for the first time, his book The Body Keeps the Score was about to be published. She described him then as “an innovator in treating the effects of overwhelming experiences on people and society.” She catches up with him in 2021 — as we are living through one vast overwhelming experience after the other. And The Body Keeps the Score is now one of the most widely read books in the pandemic world. His perspective is utterly unique and very practically helpful — on what’s been happening in our bodies and our brains, and how that relationship can become severed and restored.

Bessel van der Kolk is the founder and medical director of the Trauma Research Foundation in Brookline, Massachusetts. He’s also a professor of psychiatry at Boston University Medical School. His books include Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on the Mind, Body, and Society and The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

The astrophysicist Mario Livio spent 24 years at the Space Telescope Science Institute working with the Hubble Telescope, which has revealed the reality and beauty of the Universe to scientists and citizens in whole new ways. The Hubble’s successor, the James Webb Telescope, will become fully operational in 2022, and will further some of the questions about the early formation of the Universe and the origins of life to which Mario Livio has been devoted. Krista spoke with him in 2010, and this conversation has become an On Being Classic, imparting a thrilling sense of all we are learning about the cosmos in this generation in time, our terrible earthly woes notwithstanding. Also: how scientific advance always meets recurrent mystery, from the emergence of life in the Universe to the very heart of mathematics and the puzzle of dark matter and dark energy.

Mario Livio is the author of seven books, including Galileo: And the Science Deniers, The Golden Ratio, and Is God a Mathematician? His current research centers on the emergence of life in the Universe.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

This show originally aired in May 2010.

“Having tasted beauty at the heart of the world, we hunger for more.” These are words from Nobel physicist Frank Wilczek in his book, A Beautiful Question. It’s a winsome, joyful meditation on the question: Do cosmic realities embody beautiful ideas? — probing the world, by way of science, as a work of art. He reminds us that time and space, mystery and order, are so much stranger and more generous than we can comprehend. He’s now written a wonderful new book, Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality.

Frank Wilczek is the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2004, he received the Nobel Prize in physics. His books include A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design and The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces. His new book is Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality.

This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Frank Wilczek — Beauty as a Compass for Truth." Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org.

This is the unedited conversation Krista had with Anita Barrows in 2002, which is excerpted within our produced episode “The Soul in Depression.” That episode also includes the voices of Andrew Solomon and Parker Palmer.  Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org. 

Anita Barrows is a psychologist, poet and translator. Her most recent poetry collection is We are the Hunger. She has translated several volumes of the writings of Rainer Maria Rilke together with Joanna Macy, including Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God.

This is an excerpt from a chapter called “New Religion” in 'The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature.'

There's also a video designed around this reading on our YouTube channel. Krista's conversation with J. Drew is our episode ‘I Worship Every Bird that I See.’

In this intimate conversation between Krista and one of her beloved teachers, we ponder the world and our place in it, through sacred text, with fresh eyes. In the edited version of this conversation, we’re accompanied by the meditative and prophetic poetry of Wendell Berry, read for us from his home in Kentucky: “Stay away from anything / that obscures the place it is in. / There are no unsacred places; / there are only sacred places / and desecrated places. / Accept what comes of silence."

Ellen Davis is the Amos Ragan Kearns Distinguished Professor of Bible and Practical Theology at the Duke University Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina. She’s the author of Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible. 

Wendell Berry is a farmer, poet, and environmentalist who has published more than 50 books. He lives in Port Royal, Kentucky.

This show originally aired in June, 2010.

This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Wendell Berry & Ellen Davis — The Art of Being Creatures." Find more at onbeing.org.

For as far back as Joy Ladin can remember, her body didn’t match her soul. In her mid-40s, Ladin transitioned from male to female identity and later became the first openly transgender professor at an Orthodox Jewish institution. She admits the pain this caused for people and institutions she loved. And she knows what it is to move through the world with the assumed authority of a man and the assumed vulnerability of a woman. We take in what she’s learned about gender and the very syntax of being.

Joy Ladin is the David and Ruth Gottesman Chair in English at the Stern College for Women of Yeshiva University in New York. Her memoir is called “Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey Between Genders.” She’s also the author of nine collections of poetry and most recently published the book “The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective.”

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org. This interview originally aired in June 2013.

In Leanne O’Sullivan’s poem “Leaving Early,” the poet writes to her ill husband, entrusting him into the care of a nurse named Fionnuala. As the novel coronavirus sweeps the globe, many of us can’t physically be there for loved ones who are sick. Instead, it is the health care workers — and all involved in the health care system — who are tirelessly present, caring for others in spite of exhaustion and the risk it brings to their own well being.

We offer this episode of Poetry Unbound in profound gratitude toward all who are working in health care right now.

“Leaving Early” comes from Leanne O’Sullivan’s book A Quarter of an Hour. Thank you to the publisher, Bloodaxe Books, who gave us permission to use Leanne’s poem. Read it on our website at onbeing.org.

Find the transcript for this episode at onbeing.org.

The original music in this episode was composed by Gautam Srikishan.

Michael Pollan is one of our most revelatory explorers of the interaction between the human and natural worlds — especially the plants with which we have, as he says, co-evolved — from food to caffeine to psychedelics. In this episode of our series, The Future of Hope, Wintering’s Katherine May draws him out on the burgeoning human inquiry and science to which he’s now given himself over — the transformative applications of altered states for healing trauma and depression, for end-of-life care — and the thrilling matter of grasping what consciousness is for. This is an informative, intriguing, utterly uncategorizable conversation.

You may know Katherine May from her On Being conversation with Krista about “wintering” as a season in the natural world — and a recurrent season in every human life. She too operates out of a deep curiosity about the human mind — the remarkable complexity of mental states and well-being — informed in part by her own welcome mid-life diagnosis of autism and her love of cold-water swimming. Her books of fiction and memoir include: Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, The Electricity of Every Living Thing, and Burning Out. She is also the editor of an anthology of essays about motherhood, called The Best, Most Awful Job. Her podcast is The Wintering Sessions.

Michael Pollan is a professor at the University of California Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. His many bestselling books include The Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, and most recently, This Is Your Mind on Plants. In 2020, he co-founded the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

Our colleague Lucas Johnson catches up with one of his mentors, Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons. Now a member of the National Council of Elders, she was a teenager when she joined the Mississippi Freedom Summer. She shares what she has learned about exhaustion and self-care, spiritual practice and community, while engaging in civil rights organizing and deep social healing. Dr. Simmons was raised Christian and later converted to the Sufi tradition of Islam.

Lucas Johnson leads The On Being Project's work in social healing as Executive Director of Civil Conversations and Social Healing. He is a community organizer, writer, and a minister in the American Baptist Churches. Read his full bio here.

Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons is assistant professor of religion at the University of Florida and 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.

We need a modicum of vitality to simply be alive in this time. And we're in an enduringly tender place. The mental health crisis that is invoked all around, especially as we look to the young, is one manifestation of the gravity of the post-2020 world. How to name and honor this more openly? How to hold that together with the ways we've been given to learn and to grow? Who are we called to be moving forward? Dr. Vivek Murthy is a brilliant, wise, and kind companion in these questions. He's a renowned physician and research scientist in his second tenure as U.S. Surgeon General. And for years, he's been naming and investigating loneliness as a public health matter, including his own experience of that very human condition. 

It is beyond rare to be in the presence of a person holding high governmental office who speaks about love with ease and dignity — and about the agency to be healers that is available to us all. There is so much here to walk away with, and into. This conversation quieted and touched a room full of raucous podcasters at the 2023 On Air Fest in Brooklyn.

There are many resources for mental health support. If you're in the U.S., find some of them here.

Vivek Murthy is the 21st Surgeon General of the United States. He also served in this role from 2014 to 2017. He hosts the podcast House Calls with Dr. Vivek Murthy. And he’s the author of Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

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In the modern western world, vocation was equated with work. But each of us has callings, not merely to be professionals, but to be friends, neighbors, colleagues, family, citizens, lovers of the world. Each of us imprints the people in the world around us, breath to breath and hour to hour, as much in who we are and how we are present as in whatever we do. And just as there are callings for a life, there are callings for our time. 

"Some of us are called to be bridge people.. Some of us are called to be patient calmers of fear. This calling is so tender and so urgent if what we truly want is to coax our own best selves and the best selves of others into the light." 

“Across my life of conversation I have seen that wisdom and wholeness emerge in moments like ours, when human beings have to hold seemingly opposing realities in a creative tension and interplay: power and frailty, death and birth, pain and hope, beauty and brokenness, mystery and conviction, calm and fierceness, mine and yours.”

– Krista Tippett

Experience the whole collection of four Foundations for Being Alive Now on the On Being Project website.

Journalist Oliver Burkeman has made a delightful and important philosophical, spiritual, and practical investigation of all that is truly at stake in what we blithely refer to as “time management.” At this time of year, many of us are making plans and resolutions — treating time as part bully, part resource — something we could fit everything we want into if only we had the discipline. This conversation is offered up to release you from that illusion. He invites us into a new relationship with time, our technologies, and the power of limits — and thus with our mortality and with life itself.

Oliver Burkeman is a journalist and author. His most recent book is Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. He’s also the author of The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking. He writes and publishes a twice monthly email newsletter called “The Imperfectionist.” You can find The Guardian column he wrote from 2006 to 2020 online. It’s titled, “This Column Will Change Your Life.”  

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

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Where to turn to find my place of standing when it feels like the world is on fire? This question surfaced in a public conversation Krista had just a couple of years ago with Pádraig Ó Tuama and Marilyn Nelson, two poet-contemplatives. Pádraig weaves together social healing, poetry, and theology. Marilyn is a lyrical excavator of stories that would rather stay hidden — yet as she coaxes them into the light, they lead to new life. This conversation is a pleasure and balm, and a reminder that the ruptures and unease and reckonings of what we call “this moment” were all before us before the pandemic. Pádraig and Marilyn’s offerings are beyond wise, and distinctly tender and powerful for this now.

Pádraig Ó Tuama is the host of On Being’s Poetry Unbound podcast. Previously, he was community leader of Corrymeela, Northern Ireland’s oldest peace and reconciliation organization. His books include a prayer book, Daily Prayer with the Corrymeela Community, a book of poetry, Sorry For Your Troubles, and a poetic memoir, In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World.

Marilyn Nelson is professor emerita of English at the University of Connecticut, and Chancellor Emeritus of the Academy of American Poets. She is a recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s Frost Medal “for distinguished lifetime achievement,” and the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Prize. She is a writer for all ages: her books of poetry for adults include The Meeting House and Faster Than Light; for children, Papa’s Free Day Party, and for young adults, A Wreath For Emmett Till and the forthcoming Augusta Savage: The Shape of a Sculptor's Life.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

This show originally aired in September 2018.

No conversation we’ve ever done has been more beloved than this one. The 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.

John O'Donohue was a poet, theologian, and philosopher. He authored beloved books, including Anam Ċara and Beauty: The Invisible Embrace. To Bless the Space Between Us, a collection of blessings, was published posthumously. A wonderful book drawn from his voice in conversation, Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World, was published in November 2018.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

This show originally aired in February 2008.

Krista interviewed Larry Ward around the edges of a retreat with revered Zen master, teacher, and poet Thich Nhat Hanh in 2003. Parts of this interview, as well as Krista’s conversation with Thich Nhat Hanh, appear in our show, Remembering Thich Nhat Hanh, Brother Thay. 

Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org

Larry Ward is co-founder of the Lotus Institute, and was ordained as a Dharma teacher in Thich Nhat Hanh's Plum Village tradition. He accompanied Thich Nhat Hanh on peace-building missions internationally, as well as throughout the United States. He brings 35 years of experience in organizational change, local community renewal, and religion studies. In 2020 he published America's Racial Karma: An Invitation to Heal.

“Our discomfort and our grappling is not a sign of failure,” America Ferrera says, “it’s a sign that we’re living at the edge of our imaginations.” She is a culture-shifting actor and artist. John Paul Lederach is one of our greatest living architects of social transformation. From the inaugural On Being Gathering, a revelatory, joyous exploration of the ingredients of social courage and how change really happens in generational time.

John Paul Lederach is a senior fellow at Humanity United and professor emeritus of international peacebuilding at the University of Notre Dame. He is also the co-founder and first director of the Eastern Mennonite University’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. In 2019 he won the Niwano Peace Foundation Peace Prize.

America Ferrera is an Emmy Award-winning actor and producer. She’s known for the movies Real Women Have Curves and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and for the TV series Ugly Betty. She also stars in and co-produces the current NBC series Superstore. She’s the co-founder of Harness, a grassroots organization for social healing.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org. This interview originally aired in June 2018.

This is the unedited conversation Krista had with Andrew Solomon in 2002, which is excerpted within our produced episode “The Soul in Depression.” That episode also includes the voices of Anita Barrows and Parker Palmer.  Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org. 

Andrew Solomon is a journalist and writer of epic books, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist  The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, and Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity. 

There’s dark matter in the cosmos, and inside us, and hidden beneath our feet. Robert Macfarlane is an explorer and linguist of landscape and his book, Underland: A Deep Time Journey, is an odyssey that’s full of surprises — from caves and catacombs under land, under cities, and under forests to the meltwater of Greenland. “Since before we were Homo sapiens,” he writes, “humans have been seeking out spaces of darkness in which to find and make meaning.” Darkness in the natural world and in human life, he suggests, is a medium of vision — and descent, a movement toward revelation.

Robert Macfarlane is a Fellow at the University of Cambridge. His books include Mountains of the Mind, The Old Ways, Landmarks, and Underland: A Deep Time Journey. With the artist Jackie Morris, he co-created the book of illustrated poetry, The Lost Words and a follow-up,  The Lost Spells.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

This show originally aired on November 14, 2019.

"Close" by David Whyte read by Krista Tippett

David Whyte is an associate fellow at Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford. His books include The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America, Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment, and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words and The Bell and The Blackbird. His latest collection is David Whyte: Essentials.

Find more at onbeing.org

Marilyn Nelson is a storytelling poet who has taught poetry and contemplative practice to college students and West Point cadets. She brings a contemplative eye to ordinary goodness in the present and to complicated ancestries we’re all reckoning with now. And she imparts a spacious perspective on what “communal pondering” might mean.

Marilyn Nelson is a professor emerita of English at the University of Connecticut and a former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She is the recipient of the 2012 Poetry Society of America’s Frost Medal for “distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry,” and the 2019 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Her books include The Fields of Praise and The Meeting House. Her upcoming children’s picture book about social justice and the power of introverts is called Lubaya’s Quiet Roar.

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 esteemed writer Jane Hirshfield has been a Zen monk and a visiting artist among neuroscientists. She has said this: “It’s my nature to question, to look at the opposite side. I believe that the best writing also does this … It tells us that where there is sorrow, there will be joy; where there is joy, there will be sorrow … The acknowledgement of the fully complex scope of being is why good art thrills … Acknowledging the fullness of things,” she insists, “is our human task.” And that’s the ground Krista meanders with Jane Hirshfield in this conversation: the fullness of things — through the interplay of Zen and science, poetry and ecology — in her life and writing.

Jane Hirshfield is the author of books of poetry, including The Beauty, Come, Thief, and most recently, Ledger, with selections read this hour. She’s also written two books of essays: Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

The wonderful civil rights elder Vincent Harding liked to look around the world for what he called "live human signposts" — human beings who embody ways of seeing and becoming and who point the way forward to the world we want to inhabit. And adrienne maree brown, who has inspired worlds of social creativity with her notions of "pleasure activism" and "emergent strategy," is surely one of these. 

We're listening with new ears as she brings together so many of the threads that have recurred in this season of On Being: on looking the harsh complexity of this world full in the face while dancing with joy as life force and fuel, and on keeping clear eyes on the reasons for ecological despair while giving oneself over to a loving apprenticeship with the natural world as teacher and guide. A love of visionary science fiction also finds a robust place in her work and this conversation. She altogether shines a light on an emerging ecosystem in our world over and against the drumbeat of what is fractured and breaking — the cultivation of old and new ways of seeing, towards a transformative wholeness of living.

adrienne maree brown’s influential books include Emergent Strategy, We Will Not Cancel Us, and Pleasure Activism. More recently, she has published Maroons, a work of speculative fiction, and she co-edited the anthology Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements. She also co-hosts the podcast How to Survive the End of the World. And, a special heads up: in late summer 2024, adrienne maree brown will publish a phenomenal new book — Loving Corrections.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

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Moral reckonings are being driven to the surface of our life together: What are politics for? What is an economy for? Jacqueline Novogratz says the simplistic ways we take up such questions — if we take them up at all — is inadequate. Novogratz is an innovator in creative, human-centered capitalism. She has described her recent book, Manifesto for a Moral Revolution, as a love letter to the next generation.

Jacqueline Novogratz is the founder and CEO of Acumen, a venture capital fund that serves some of the poorest people in the world. She’s also the author of a memoir, The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World.

It’s a piece of deep psychological acuity, carried in many religious traditions: that each of us is defined as much by who our enemies are and how we treat them as by whom and what we love. In this episode, two legendary Buddhist teachers shine a light on the lofty ideal of loving your enemies and bring it down to earth. Across a half-century conversation and friendship, Sharon Salzberg and Robert Thurman have investigated the mind science behind this virtue and practice. They illuminate how to transmute the very real, very consequential and consuming energy of anger and hatred — and why love in fact can be a rational and pragmatic stance towards those who vex us. This is a conversation filled with laughter and friendship and with practical wisdom on how we relate to that which makes us feel embattled from without, and from within.

Robert Thurman is the first American to be ordained a Tibetan Buddhist monk by the Dalai Lama. He is president of Tibet House U.S., and was a professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University for 30 years. His many books include Inner Revolution and the book he co-wrote with Sharon Salzberg, Love Your Enemies. In 2021, he published Wisdom Is Bliss: Four Friendly Fun Facts That Can Change Your Life. 

Sharon Salzberg is one of the original three young Americans who traveled to India in the 1960s and ‘70s and introduced Buddhist meditation into mainstream Western culture. She is a globally renowned meditation teacher and co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts. Her books include Real Happiness, Lovingkindness, and most recently, Real Change: Mindfulness To Heal Ourselves and the World.

This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Sharon Salzberg and Robert Thurman – Love Your Enemies? (Really?)." Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org. 

Trabian Shorters is a visionary who has seen and named a task that is necessary for all healing and building, for every vision and plan, whether in a family or a world, to flourish. It’s called Asset Framing — and it works with both new understandings of the brain and an age-old understanding of the real-world power of the words we use, the stories we tell, and the way we name things and people. From everyday social media, to hallowed modes of journalistic, academic, and policy analyses, we have a habit of seeing deficits — and of defining people in need in terms of their problems. This has not only doomed some of our best efforts to failure — it leaves all of us prone to cynicism and hopelessness. What’s exciting is that what Trabian Shorters proposes is not only more effective, it is simple and straightforward to grasp. It is in and of itself dignifying and renewing. The main question you might be asking at the end of this is why, at this advanced stage of our species, it took us so long to learn to asset frame. 

Trabian Shorters consults widely in philanthropy, business, nonprofits, and journalism. He’s the founder and CEO of the BMe Community. He’s been a Vice President of Communities at the Knight Foundation, co-led the Ashoka-US venture team, and founded a successful early social impact tech company in 1999. He’s co-editor of the book, Reach: 40 Black Men Speak on Living, Leading and Succeeding.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

Here is a stunning sentence for you, written by Lyndsey Stonebridge, our guest this hour, channeling the 20th-century political thinker and journalist Hannah Arendt: "Loneliness is the bully that coerces us into giving up on democracy." This conversation is a kind of guide to generative shared deliberations we might be having with each other and ourselves in this intensely fraught global political moment: on the human underlay that gives democracy its vigor or threatens to undo it; on the difference between facts and truth — and on the difference between violence and power. Krista interviewed Lyndsey once before, in 2017, after Hannah Arendt's classic work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, had become a belated runaway bestseller. Now Lyndsey has published her own wonderful book offering her and Arendt's full prescient wisdom for this time. What emerges is elevating and exhilaratingly thoughtful — while also brimming with helpful, practicable words and ideas. We have, in Lyndsey's phrase, "un-homed" ourselves. And yet we are always defined by our capacity to give birth to something new — and so to partake again and again in the deepest meaning of freedom.

Hannah Arendt's other epic books include The Human Condition, and Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which she famously coined the phrase "the banality of evil." She was born a German Jew in 1906, fled Nazi Germany and spent many years as a stateless person, and died an American citizen in 1975. This conversation with Lyndsey Stonebridge happened in January 2024, as part of a gathering of visionaries, activists, and creatives across many fields. Krista interviewed her alongside Lucas Johnson, a former leader of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation who now leads our social healing initiatives at The On Being Project.

Lyndsey Stonebridge is a Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham in the U.K. Her 2024 book is We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience. Her other books include Placeless People: Writings, Rights, and Refugees. In 2023, she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.

Lucas Johnson is Executive Vice President of Public Life & Social Healing at The On Being Project. He was previously a leader of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation, the world’s oldest interfaith peace organization.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

Note: A previous version of this audio mistakenly attributed a quote to James Baldwin. The author of the quote is Maria Popova, creator of The Marginalian, and appears in an essay she wrote discussing Baldwin’s work.

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“I grew up a witness,” Mike Rose wrote, “to the intelligence of the waitress in motion, the reflective welder, the strategy of the guy on the assembly line. This then is something I know: the thought it takes to do physical work.” Mike Rose died in August, yet the particular way he saw the world resonates more than ever before as our debates about the future of school and work only intensify. He argued with care and eloquence that we risk too narrow a view of the way the physical, the human, and the cognitive blend in all kinds of learning and in all kinds of labor. Mike Rose’s intelligence would enlarge our civic imagination on big subjects at the heart of who we are — schooling, social class, and the deepest meaning of vocation.

Mike Rose was a research professor in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. He authored 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.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

This show originally aired in January 2010.

Civil rights legend Ruby Sales learned to ask “Where does it hurt?” because it’s a question that drives to the heart of the matter — and a question we scarcely know how to ask in public life now. Sales says we must be as clear about what we love as about what we hate if we want to make change. And even as she unsettles some of what we think we know about the force of religion in civil rights history, she names a “spiritual crisis of white America” as a calling of today.

Ruby Sales is the founder and director of The Spirit House Project in Atlanta. She is included in an oral history of the Civil Rights Movement at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Ruby Sales — Where Does It Hurt?" Find more at onbeing.org.

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.

Karen Murphy creates curricula, trains teachers, and leads global gatherings for Facing History and Ourselves, an organization that partners with over 100,000 teachers and their classrooms around the world. A hallmark of this work is trusting the moral and civic intelligence of middle and high school students. Karen has worked from Rwanda to Colombia, from South Africa to Northern Ireland, and she grew up in Illinois.

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 as one of Northern Ireland’s foremost living poets. He is known, in part, as a poet of “the Troubles” — the violent 30-year conflict between Protestants and Catholics, English and Irish. And he is a gentle voice for all of us now, wise and winsome about the everyday, never-finished work of social healing.

Michael Longley has written more than 20 books of poetry including Collected Poems, Gorse Fires, The Stairwell and his most recent collection, The Candlelight Master. He was the professor of poetry for Ireland from 2007 to 2010 and is a winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Hawthornden Prize. He was also the international winner of the 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize — and that same year was honored with the Freedom of the City of Belfast.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

This show originally aired November 3, 2016.

In this rich, expansive, and warm conversation between friends, Krista draws out the heart for humanity behind Isabel Wilkerson's eye on histories we are only now communally learning to tell — her devotion to understanding not merely who we have been, but who we can be. Her most recent offering of fresh insight to our life together brings "caste" into the light — a recurrent, instinctive pattern of human societies across the centuries, though far more malignant in some times and places. Caste is a ranking of human value that works more like a pathogen than a belief system — more like the reflexive grammar of our sentences than our choices of words. In the American context, Isabel Wilkerson says race is the skin, but "caste is the bones." And this shift away from centering race as a focus of analysis actually helps us understand why race and racism continue to shape-shift and regenerate, every best intention and effort and law notwithstanding. But beginning to see caste also gives us fresh eyes and hearts for imagining where to begin, and how to persist, in order finally to shift that. 

Isabel and Krista spoke in Seattle before a packed house at Benaroya Hall, at the invitation of Seattle Arts & Lectures.

[Content Advisory: Beginning at 21:16, there is a discussion of Nazi terminology and a quotation from Hitler with an epithet that is offensive and painful. We chose to include this language to illustrate the heinous nature of the history being discussed and Hitler’s admiration for it.]

Isabel Wilkerson won a Pulitzer Prize while reporting for the New York Times. Her first book, The Warmth of Other Suns, brought the underreported story of the Great Migration of the 20th century into the light, and she published her best-selling book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents in August 2020. Among many honors, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama. 

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

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Across the past year, and now as the murder trial of Derek Chauvin unfolds with Minneapolis in fresh pain and turmoil, we return again to the grounding insights of Resmaa Menakem. He is a Minneapolis-based therapist and trauma specialist who activates the wisdom of elders, and very new science, about how all of us carry in our bodies the history and traumas behind everything we collapse into the word “race.” We offer up his intelligence on changing ourselves at a cellular level — practices towards the transformed reality most of us long to inhabit.

Resmaa Menakem, MSW, LICSW, SEP, teaches workshops on Cultural Somatics for audiences of African Americans, European Americans, and police officers. He is also a therapist in private practice, and a senior fellow at The Meadows. His New York Times best-selling book is My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

This show originally aired June 4, 2020.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — or SETI — goes beyond hunting for E.T. and habitable planets. Scientists in the field are using telescopes and satellites looking for signs of outright civilizational intelligence. One of the founding pioneers in this search is astronomer Jill Tarter. She is a co-founder of the SETI Institute and was an inspiration for Jodie Foster’s character in the movie Contact, based on the novel by Carl Sagan. To speak with Tarter is to begin to grasp the creative majesty of SETI and what’s relevant now in the ancient question: “Are we alone in the universe?”

Jill Tarter — is the co-founder and chair emeritus for SETI Research at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. She currently serves on the management board for the Allen Telescope Array. She has been awarded two Exceptional Public Service medals from NASA and the Women in Aerospace Lifetime Achievement Award. In April of 2021, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

This show originally aired on February 27, 2020.

An extraordinary conversation with the late congressman John Lewis, taped in Montgomery, Alabama, during a pilgrimage 50 years after the March on Washington. It offers a rare look inside his wisdom, the civil rights leaders’ spiritual confrontation within themselves, and the intricate art of nonviolence as “love in action.”

John Lewis was a member of the United States House of Representatives from Georgia’s 5th Congressional District. He is the author of Walking With the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement, Across That Bridge: Life Lessons and a Vision for Change, and March, a three-part graphic novel series. He died on July 17, 2020.

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.

Vincent Harding was wise about how the vision of the civil rights movement might speak to 21st-century realities. He reminded us that the movement of the ‘50s and ‘60s was spiritually as well as politically vigorous; it aspired to a “beloved community,” not merely a tolerant integrated society. He pursued this through patient-yet-passionate cross-cultural, cross-generational relationships. And he posed and lived a question that is freshly in our midst: Is America possible?

Vincent Harding was chairperson of the Veterans of Hope Project at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver. He authored the magnificent book Hope and History: Why We Must Share the Story of the Movement and the essay “Is America Possible?” He died in 2014.

This show originally aired in February 2011.

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.

There’s dark matter in the cosmos, and inside us, and hidden beneath our feet. Robert Macfarlane is an explorer and linguist of landscape and his book, Underland: A Deep Time Journey, is an odyssey that’s full of surprises — from caves and catacombs under land, under cities, and under forests to the meltwater of Greenland. “Since before we were Homo sapiens,” he writes, “humans have been seeking out spaces of darkness in which to find and make meaning.” Darkness in the natural world and in human life, he suggests, is a medium of vision — and descent, a movement toward revelation.

Robert Macfarlane — is a Fellow at the University of Cambridge. His books include Mountains of the Mind, The Old Ways, Landmarks, and Underland: A Deep Time Journey. With the artist Jackie Morris, he co-created the book of illustrated poetry, The Lost Words and a follow-up,  The Lost Spells.

This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Robert Macfarlane — The Worlds Beneath Our Feet." Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org.

“Though we have instructions and a map buried in our hearts when we enter this world,” the extraordinary Joy Harjo has written, “nothing quite prepares us for the abrupt shift to the breathing realm.” She is a saxophone player and performer, a visual artist, a member of the Muscogee Creek Nation, and the 23rd Poet Lau­re­ate of the Unit­ed States. She opens up with Krista about her life, dreaming as a way of relating to time and place, and the story matrix that connects us all. 

Joy Harjo — is a member of the Muscogee Creek Nation and the 23rd Poet Lau­re­ate of the Unit­ed States. She is the author of nine books of poet­ry, including An American Sunrise and She Had Some Horses, and a memoir, Crazy Brave. She has also produced several award-winning music albums, including her most recent, I Pray for My Ene­mies. Her new memoir, coming out in September 2021, is called, Poet Warrior.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

Katharine Hayhoe is one of the most esteemed atmospheric scientists in the world. She’s made her mark by connecting dots between climate systems and weather patterns and the lived experience of human beings in their neighborhoods and communities. She’s also an ambassador, if you will, between the science of climate change and the world of evangelical Christian faith and practice, which she also inhabits. To delve into that with her is to learn a great deal that refreshingly complicates the picture of what is possible and what is already happening, even across what feel like cultural fault lines. If you want to speak and walk differently on this frontier, this is a conversation for you.

Katharine Hayhoe is a professor of political science at Texas Tech University, and since 2021 Chief Scientist of the Nature Conservancy. She founded the Atmos Research and Consulting Firm, has been named one of Time 's 100 Most Influential People (2014), and serves as the climate ambassador for the World Evangelical Alliance. Her new book is Saving Us: A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

"I like it much better than ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’ — to be a seeker after the sacred or the holy, which ends up for me being the really real."

– Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor

From Krista, about this week's show:

It's fascinating to trace the arc of spiritual searching and religious belonging in my lifetime. The Episcopal priest and public theologian Barbara Brown Taylor was one of the people I started learning about when I left diplomacy to study theology in the early 1990s. At that time, she was leading a small church in Georgia. And she preached the most extraordinary sermons, and turned them into books read far and wide. Then in 2006, she wrote Leaving Church — about her decision to leave her life of congregational ministry, finding other ways to stay, as she's written, "alive and alert to the holy communion of the human condition, which takes place on more altars than anyone can count.” 

She's written other books since, with titles like An Altar in the World, Learning to Walk in the Dark, and Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others. Being in the presence of Barbara Brown Taylor's wonderfully wise and meandering mind and spirit, after all these years of knowing her voice in the world, is a true joy. I might even use a religious word — it feels like a "blessing." And this is not a conversation about the decline of church or about more and more people being "spiritual but not religious." We both agree that this often-repeated phrase is not an adequate way of seeing the human hunger for holiness. This is as alive as it has ever been in our time — even if it is shape-shifting in ways my Southern Baptist and Barbara's Catholic and Methodist forebears could never have imagined.

Barbara Brown Taylor is the author of many books, including An Altar in the World,  Leaving Church, Holy Envy, and Learning to Walk in the Dark. Her 2020 book is Always a Guest, a compilation of recent sermons. She is the former rector of Grace-Calvary Episcopal Church of Clarkesville, Georgia, and she taught for two decades in the religion department at Piedmont College.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

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And: if you can, please take a minute to rate On Being in this podcast app — you'll be bending the arc of algorithms towards this adventure of conversation and living.

Wendell Berry reads his poem “The Peace of Wild Things”

Wendell Berry is a farmer, poet, and environmentalist who has published more than 40 books. He lives in Port Royal, Kentucky.

In this intimate conversation between Krista and one of her beloved teachers, we ponder the world and our place in it, through sacred text, with fresh eyes. We’re accompanied by the meditative and prophetic poetry of Wendell Berry, read for us from his home in Kentucky: “Stay away from anything / that obscures the place it is in. / There are no unsacred places; / there are only sacred places / and desecrated places. / Accept what comes of silence."

Ellen Davis is the Amos Ragan Kearns Distinguished Professor of Bible and Practical Theology at the Duke University Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina. She’s the author of Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible. 

Wendell Berry is a farmer, poet, and environmentalist who has published more than 50 books. He lives in Port Royal, Kentucky.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

This show originally aired in June, 2010

Glennon Doyle’s book Untamed has been a sensation of 2020 and beyond, and now she’s launched a new podcast titled with words of hers that have become a cultural force: We Can Do Hard Things. Meanwhile her wife, the soccer icon Abby Wambach, has her own bestselling books and is hosting a new tv show - Abby’s Places on ESPN+. Krista spoke with them before they were quite so much in the public eye together, and it’s a window into the passions that brought them here. They sat together in Seattle at the 2018 summit of Women Moving Millions, a consortium of women testing the meaning and boundaries of philanthropy. And courage was the theme of the day.

Abby Wambach is a two-time Olympic gold medalist, FIFA Women’s World Cup champion, and six-time winner of the U.S. Soccer Athlete of Year Award. She’s written two books: Wolfpack and Forward: A Memoir, and is host of “Abby’s Places” on ESPN+.

Glennon Doyle is creator of the online community Momastery and founder and president of Together Rising, a nonprofit for women and children in crisis. Her books include Untamed and Love Warrior. She also hosts the podcast, “We Can Do Hard Things.”

 Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org.

This show originally aired in January 2019.

The delightful Nikki Giovanni died on Dec. 9. It is a joy and a solace to relisten to this beloved conversation she had with Krista in 2016 – to experience her signature mix of high seriousness, sweeping perspective, and insistent pleasure. Her words and her spirit feel, if anything, more necessary now. In the 1960s, she was a poet of the Black Arts Movement that nourished civil rights. She became a professor at Virginia Tech, where she called forth beauty and courage after the 2007 shooting there — a precursor to violence that has become all too familiar in American life in the intervening years. And she was an adored voice to a new generation — an enthusiastic elder to all — at home in her body and in the world, even while she saw and exulted in the beyond of this tumultuous age of her lifetime.

Nikki Giovanni was a University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech. Some of her best known collections from which the readings in this show were taken include Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea, Black Feeling, Black Talk/Black Judgement, and The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni. Her final publications include Make Me Rain: Poems & Prose and A Library.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

Lennon Flowers and Rev. Jennifer Bailey embody a particular wisdom of millennials around grief, loss, and faith. Together they created The People’s Supper, which uses shared meals to build trust and connection among people of different identities and perspectives. Since 2017, they have hosted more than 1,500 meals. In the words they use, the practices they cultivate (some of which we’ve collected on onbeing.org), and the way they think, Flowers and Bailey issue an invitation not to safe space, but to brave space.

Rev. Jennifer Bailey is co-founder of The People’s Supper and the founder and executive director of Faith Matters Network. She is also an ordained itinerant elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and her writing appears regularly in publications including Sojourners and The Huffington Post.

Lennon Flowers is co-founder of The People’s Supper and the co-founder and executive director of The Dinner Party. She is also an Ashoka Fellow and an Aspen Ideas Scholar. She has written for CNN,YES!, Forbes, Open Democracy, EdWeek, and Fast Company.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

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.

Arlie Hochschild is professor emerita in the sociology department at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of ten 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 — The Deep Stories of Our Time." Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org.

We are immensely grateful for your patience in our season of podcasting pause. But enough already. Starting Thursday, February 2, we'll come to you with three months of soaring new On Being conversations with Krista, with an eye towards emergence. The science of awe. The wonder of biomimicry. "Lean Spirituality." What we're talking about — and not — when we talk about mental health. "Good conflict." Technology and vitality. Creativity. Woodworking and the meaning of life. Deeper truths and larger stories of ourselves as societies, as a planet, as humans, that at once complicate and enliven our capacity to live with dignity and joy and wholeness. And poetry, and poetry.

As we live into, yes, this new way of being — with podcasting and not radio, our first audio home — we're eager to extend an invitation to listen as widely as possible. Please spread the word in your world and your digital places. And show us some love, if you have a minute, by rating On Being in this app. It's a small way to bend the arc of algorithms towards this community of conversation and living. 

We are so thrilled to have you as part of this, and to be back. Sign up for our Saturday newsletter, The Pause, for extras every week and news on all that is happening at the wider On Being Project, at onbeing.org/newsletter.

Alison Gopnik understands babies and children as the R&D division of humanity. From her cognitive science lab at the University of California, -Berkeley, she investigates the “evolutionary paradox” of the long human childhood. When she first trained in philosophy and developmental psychology, the minds of children were treated as blank slates. But her research is helping us see how even the most mundane facts of a toddler or a teenager — from fantasy play to rebelliousness — tell us what it means to be human.

Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California, -Berkeley, where she also heads the Cognitive Development and Learning Lab. She’s written more than 100 journal articles and several books, including The Scientist in the Crib, The Philosophical Baby, and, most recently, The Gardener and the Carpenter.

This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Alison Gopnik — The Evolutionary Power of Children and Teenagers." Find more at onbeing.org.

Pádraig Ó Tuama is a friend, teacher, and colleague to the work of On Being. But before that was true, Krista took a revelatory trip to meet him at his home in Northern Ireland, a place that has known sectarianism and violent fracture and has evolved, not to perfection, yet to new life and once unimaginable repair and relationship. Our whole world screams of fracture, more now than when Krista sat with Pádraig in 2016. This conversation is a gentle, welcoming landing for pondering and befriending hard realities we are given. As the global educator Karen Murphy, another friend of On Being and of Pádraig, once said to Krista: “Let’s have the humility and the generosity to step back and learn from these places that have had the courage to look at themselves and look at where they’ve been and try to forge a new path with something that resembles ‘together’ … Right now we should be taking these stories and these examples and these places and filling our pockets and our lungs and our hearts and our minds with them and learning deeply.” And that’s what this hour with Pádraig invites.

Pádraig Ó Tuama is a theologian, writer, and conflict transformation practitioner. He is a member and former leader of the Corrymeela Community of Northern Ireland. His books include an incandescent memoir, In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World; a prayer book, Daily Prayer with the Corrymeela Community; a book of poetry, Sorry For Your Troubles; and a book of theology and politics co-authored with Glenn Jordan, Borders & Belonging. He hosts the On Being Studios podcast Poetry Unbound. His forthcoming book, Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World, will be published in October 2022 and is available for pre-order wherever you get your books. Pádraig grew up in the Republic of Ireland, near Cork.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

This show originally aired in March 2017.

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“Remember,” Bryan Doerries likes to say in both physical and virtual gatherings, “you are not alone in this room — and you are not alone across time.” With his public health project, Theater of War, he is activating an old alchemy for our young century. Ancient stories, and texts that have stood the test of time, can be portals to honest and dignified grappling with present wounds and longings and callings that we aren’t able to muster in our official places now. It’s an embodiment of the good Greek word catharsis — releasing both insight and emotions that have had no place to go, and creating an energizing relief. And it is now unfolding in the “amphitheater” of Zoom that Sophocles could not have imagined.

Bryan Doerries — is co-founder, principal translator, and artistic director of Theater of War Productions. In 2021, Theater of War is launching a new form of global amphitheater in conjunction with the first ever Nobel Prize Summit on the civilizational issues facing humanity. Learn more - and register - at theaterofwar.com. His books include The Theater of War: What Ancient Greek Tragedies Can Teach Us Today and All That You’ve Seen Here is God, his translations of four ancient plays. 

This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Bryan Doerries — “You are not alone across time." Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org.

“I’m entering into this next phase… with a great deal of curiosity and perhaps tenderness, wanting to hold each other tight, because I think that there are ramifications of last year that have yet to be felt.” Rev. Jen Bailey is a wise young pastor and social innovator, and a “friend of a different generation” of Krista. This conversation is a loving adventure in cross-generational mapmaking and care. Jen is a leader in a widening movement that is “healing the healers” — sustaining individuals, organizers, and communities for the long, life-giving transformations ahead.

Jen Bailey is Founder and Executive Director of the Faith Matters Network and serves on the staff of Greater Bethel AME Church in Nashville, Tennessee. Her first book, to be published in October 2021, is called, To My Beloveds: Letters on Faith, Race, Loss and Radical Hope.

This conversation came about in partnership with Encore.org. It is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Jen Bailey — What We Inherit & What We Send Forth." Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org.

Jane Goodall’s early research studying chimpanzees helped shape the self-understanding of our species and recalled modern Western science to the fact that we are a part of nature, not separate from it. In honor of the publication of her 32nd book — The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times — we’re re-releasing her beautiful conversation with Krista over Zoom from pandemic lockdown. From her decades studying chimpanzees in the Gombe forest to her more recent years attending to human poverty and misunderstanding, the legendary primatologist reflects on the moral and spiritual convictions that have driven her, and what she is teaching and still learning about what it means to be human.

Jane Goodall is the founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and its youth program, Roots & Shoots. She has been the subject of many films and documentaries, including “Jane Goodall: The Hope.” Her many books include In the Shadow of Man, Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey, and most recently, The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times.

This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Jane Goodall – What It Means to Be Human." Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org.

Joe Henry faced his mortality in 2018 when he was diagnosed with stage 4 prostate cancer and told he might only have months to live. Now in remission, the singer-songwriter and producer has created a gorgeous new album, The Gospel According to Water. Henry’s wisdom on living — and the loss that strangely defines it — ran all the way through this conversation, recorded before his cancer, in 2015. Beloved by fellow musicians as much as by his fans, he’s produced over a dozen albums of his own and written and produced for other artists, from Elvis Costello to Madonna.

Joe Henry is a Grammy Award-winning producer and singer-songwriter. He's recorded 13 albums and produced dozens of other artists. He's the co-author of Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him. His albums include Invisible Hour, Shine A Light: Field Recordings From The Great American Railroad, and, most recently, The Gospel According to Water.

This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Joe Henry — Welcoming Flies at the Picnic." Find more at onbeing.org.