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Rabbi Hartman was a charismatic and challenging figure in Israeli society and a champion of adaptive Judaism. He convened rare encounters of Jews from different backgrounds--men and women--at his institute. We remember his window into the unfolding of his tradition in the modern world - Judaism as a lens on the human condition. 

See more at http://www.onbeing.org/program/david-hartman-hope-in-a-hopeless-god/16


David Hartman — Hope In a Hopeless God (Feb 6, 2014)

Dr. Sherwin Nuland died this week at the age of 83. He became well-known for his first book, How We Die, which won the National Book Award. For him, pondering death was a way of wondering at life — and the infinite variety of processes that maintain human life moment to moment. He reflects on the meaning of life by way of scrupulous and elegant detail about human physiology.

See more at www.onbeing.org/program/biology-spirit/184

About the image: Zoe Middleton poses behind an artwork entitled 'My Soul' by Katharine Dawson, which consists of a laser etched lead chrystal glass formation in the shape of a brain, and was created using the artists own MRI Scan, from an exhibit at the Wellcome Collection in London. Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images.

Sherwin Nuland — The Biology of the Spirit (Mar 6, 2014)

An astrophysicist who’s also explored her science by way of a novel about two pivotal 20th-century mathematicians, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing. Both pushed at boundaries where mathematics presses on grand questions of meaning and purpose. Such questions helped create the technologies that are now changing our sense of what it means to be human.

See more at www.onbeing.org/program/mathematics-purpose-and-truth/130

Janna Levin — Mathematics, Purpose, and Truth (April 3, 2014)

Who knew that we learn empathy, trust, irony, and problem solving through play — something the dictionary defines as "pleasurable and apparently purposeless activity." Dr. Stuart Brown suggests that the rough-and-tumble play of children actually prevents violent behavior; that play can grow human talents and character across a lifetime. Play, as he studies it, is an indispensable part of being human.

See more at www.onbeing.org/program/play-spirit-and-character/143


Stuart Brown — Play, Spirit, and Character

The first in a four-part series on "The American Consciousness."

Imani Perry is a scholar of law, culture, race — and hip hop. She acknowledges wise voices who say that we will never get to the promised land of racial equality. She writes, “That may very well be true, but it also true that extraordinary things have happened and keep happening in our history. The question is, how do we prepare for and precipitate them?” We took her up on this emboldening question at the Chautauqua Institution, on the cusp of yet a new collective reckoning with the racial fabric of American life.

See more at www.onbeing.org/program/imani-perry-the-fabric-of-our-identity/6747


Imani Perry — The Fabric of Our Identity

The third in a four-part series, "The American Consciousness."

If journalism is a primary way we tell the story of ourselves and our time, Michel Martin is a person helping us tell that story — and take part in it — more completely. Her daily NPR program Tell Me More was often labeled as “diversity” or “minority” programming. But in fact, she and her journalism are about a more generous and realistic sweep of who we are now — and how we’re creating our life together anew. At the Chautauqua Institution, we mine her wisdom on the emerging fabric of human identity.

See more at www.onbeing.org/program/michel-martin-the-fabric-of-our-identity/6791

Michel Martin — The Fabric of Our Identity

Computer scientist Bernard Chazelle has an original take on what music works in us — especially the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Just as mathematicians talk about discovering rather than inventing great equations, so, he says, Bach set out to “discover” the musical rules behind the universe. After hearing this conversation, you may never listen to any piece of music — whether Bach or Jay-Z — in quite the same way again.

See more at www.onbeing.org/program/bernard-chazelle-discovering-the-cosmology-of-bach/7026

Bernard Chazelle — Discovering the Cosmology of Bach

In a probing and personal conversation, Reza Aslan opens a refreshing window on religion in the world and Islam in particular. It’s a longer view of history and humanity than news cycles invite — certainly when it comes to the Arab Spring, or to ISIS. His life is a kind of prism on the fluid story of religion in this century. But in a globalized world, we all have a personal stake in how this story unfolds.

See more at www.onbeing.org/program/reza-aslan-on-islams-reformation/7039

Reza Aslan — Islam's Reformation

Two legendary Buddhist teachers shine a light on the lofty ideal of loving your enemies and bring it down to Earth. How can that be realistic, and what do we have to do inside ourselves to make it more possible? In a conversation filled with laughter and friendship, Sharon Salzberg and Robert Thurman share much practical wisdom on how we relate to that which makes us feel embattled from without, and from within.

On Being with Krista Tippett

Sharon Salzberg and Robert Thurman — Meeting Our Enemies and Our Suffering

Silence is an endangered species, says Gordon Hempton. He defines real quiet as presence — not an absence of sound, but an absence of noise. The Earth, as he knows it, is a "solar-powered jukebox." Quiet is a "think tank of the soul." We take in the world through his ears.

Gordon Hempton — Silence and the Presence of Everything

A passionate translator of the beauty and relevance of scientific questions, Margaret Wertheim is also wise about the limits of science to tell the whole story of the human self. Her Institute For Figuring in Los Angeles reveals evocative, visceral connections between high mathematics, crochet and other folk arts, and our love of the planet.

Margaret Wertheim — The Grandeur and Limits of Science

Men of all ages say Richard Rohr has given them a new way in to spiritual depth and religious thought — through his writing and retreats. This conversation with the Franciscan spiritual teacher delves into the expansive scope of his ideas: male formation and what he calls "father hunger"; why contemplation is as magnetic to people now, including millennials, as it’s ever been; and how to set about taking the first half of life — the drive to "successful survival" — all the way to meaning.

On Being with Krista Tippett 

Richard Rohr — Living In Deep Time

The moral life, Marie Howe says, is lived out in what we say as much as what we do. She became known for her poetry collection What the Living Do, about her brother’s death at 28 from AIDS. Now she has a new book, Magdalene. Poetry is her exuberant and open-hearted way into the words and the silences we live by. She works and plays with a Catholic upbringing, the universal drama of family, the ordinary rituals that sustain us — and how language, again and again, has a power to save us.

Marie Howe — The Power of Words to Save Us

Along with George Orwell, the 20th-century political theorist Hannah Arendt is a new bestseller. She famously coined the phrase “the banality of evil” and wrote towering works like The Origins of Totalitarianism. She was concerned with the human essence of events that we analyze as historical and political. Totalitarianism she described as “organized loneliness,” and loneliness as the “common ground for terror.” The historian, she said, always knows how vulnerable facts are. And thinking is not something for elites; it is the human power to keep possibility alive.

Lyndsey Stonebridge — Thinking and Friendship in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt for Now

Black Lives Matter co-founder and artist Patrisse Cullors presents a luminous vision of the spiritual core of Black Lives Matter and a resilient world in the making. She joins Dr. Robert Ross, a physician and philanthropist on the cutting edge of learning how trauma can be healed in bodies and communities. A cross-generational reflection on evolving social change.

Patrisse Cullors and Robert Ross — The Spiritual Work of Black Lives Matter

A thrilling, mind-bending view of the cosmos and of the human adventure of modern science. In a conversation ranging from free will to the multiverse to the meaning of the Higgs boson particle, physicist Brian Greene suggests the deepest scientific realities are hidden from human senses and often defy our best intuition.

Brian Greene — Reimagining the Cosmos

A philosopher’s questioning and a scientist’s eye shape Enrique Martínez Celaya’s original approach to art and to life. A world-renowned painter who trained as a physicist, he’s fascinated by the deeper order that “whispers” beneath the surface of things. Works of art that endure, he says, possess their own form of consciousness. And a quiet life of purpose is a particular form of prophecy.

Enrique Martínez Celaya — The Whisper of the Order of Things

Life as an improvisational art, at every age. This idea animates the wise linguist and anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson, whose book Composing a Life has touched many. Since her childhood as the daughter of the iconic anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, she’s had an ability to move through the world as both an original observer and a joyful participant.  Now in her 70s, she’s pondering — and living — what she calls the age of “active wisdom.” She sees longer life spans creating a new developmental stage for our species.

Mary Catherine Bateson — Composing A Life

The band Cloud Cult is hard to categorize — both musically and lyrically — though it’s been called an “orchestral indie rock collective.” Less in question is the profound and life-giving force of its music. Cloud Cult’s trajectory was altered the day its co-founder and singer-songwriter, Craig Minowa, and his wife woke up to find that their two-year-old son had mysteriously died in his sleep. Live from our studios on Loring Park, we explore the art that has emerged ever since — spanning the human experience from the rawest grief to the fiercest hope.

Cloud Cult — Music Is Medicine

In the 1960s, Nikki Giovanni was a revolutionary poet of the Black Arts Movement that nourished civil rights. She had a famous dialogue with James Baldwin in Paris in 1971. Now a professor at Virginia Tech, she brought beauty and courage by way of poetry after the shooting there. Today, she is a self-proclaimed space freak and a delighted elder — an adored voice to hip-hop artists and the new forms of social change this generation is creating.

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KateUnsworth