Groundbreaking Peabody Award-winning conversation about the big questions of meaning, hosted by Krista Tippett. Every Thursday a new discovery about the immensity of our lives — and frequent special features like poetry, music and Q + A with Krista.

On Being

The Becoming Wise podcast offers depth and discovery in the time it takes to make a cup of tea. Each episode is curated from hundreds of big conversations with wise and graceful lives. Reset your day. Replenish your sense of yourself and the world. On Being Studios is the producer of On Being, This Movie Changed Me, and more to come. Krista Tippett is the author of the New York Times bestselling Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living. President Obama honored her with the National Humanities Medal for “thoughtfully delving into the mysteries of human existence.” 

Discover more https://onbeing.org/series/becoming-wise/

Becoming Wise

The Civil Conversations Project (CCP) is an emergent resource for renewing public discourse and nourishing common life in this century. CCP is a series of radio shows, podcasts, live events, and digital resources that open, inspire, and ground new spaces for conversation and relationship across the differences of our age.

The Civil Conversations Project

Public theology is about the virtues that accompany the work of theology, not just the ideas. It means connecting grand religious ideas with messy human reality. It means articulating religious and spiritual points of view to challenge and deepen thinking on every side of every important question.

This project is about exploring a new generation of public theology for this century. We inhabit a world in which spiritual life is a fluid and dispersed, multi-faceted, and multiply articulated thing. Seekers and thinkers outside the bounds of religious tradition — scientists and artists, social entrepreneurs and poets — are illuminating the ancient questions of what it means to be human and who we are to each other. And the non-religious among us are some of the most passionate voices calling tradition to its own service-oriented heart.

Public Theology Reimagined

This Movie Changed Me

Jon Kabat-Zinn has learned, through science and experience, about mindfulness as a way of life. This is wisdom with immediate relevance to the ordinary and extreme stresses of our time — from economic peril, to parenting, to life in a digital age.

See more at http://www.onbeing.org/program/opening-our-lives/138

Jon Kabat-Zinn — Opening to Our Lives and a Science of Mindfulness (Dec 27, 2012)

Here you can listen to Derek Walcott's poem recited by Kabat-Zinn, saying a prose statement was "bound to be inadequate" in communicating his point.

Read the full poem at http://www.onbeing.org/program/opening-our-lives/138

"Love After Love" by Derek Walcott (Read by Jon Kabat-Zinn)

The word "Vodou" evokes images of sorcery and sticking pins into dolls. In fact, it's a living tradition wherever Haitians are found based on ancestral religions in Africa. We walk through this mysterious tradition — one with dramatic rituals of trances and dreaming and of belief in spirits, who speak through human beings, with both good and evil potential.

See more at www.onbeing.org/program/living-vodou/128

Patrick Bellegarde-Smith — Living Vodou (Jan 9, 2014)

Hear Anna Polonsky's live performance from WQXR's Greene Space, included in the show "Discovering the Cosmology of Bach." 

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

Anna Polonsky — "Sinfonia" from Partita No. 2 in C Minor for Solo Piano by Johann Sebastian Bach

Listening to the chaconne is as rich and layered an experience as the story behind the music. Whatever meaning you ascribe to the chaconne — personal, civic, divine, or none at all — it's certain to leave its mark.

Johann Sebastian Bach's chaconne has been arranged for nearly every instrument: from the ominous-sounding organ to the solo flute or the delightfully sparse marimba. Or, listen to these renditions by an enterprising clarinetist and an equally ambitious saxophonist. Or how about this menacing arrangement for trumpet and orchestra and this lyrical performance by two cellos. There is truly an arrangement for everyone.

But it's something spectacular when a great violinist performs the chaconne.

Tim Fain's live performance during Krista's conversation with Bernard Chazelle at WXQR's Bachstock is no exception. Before a full house at The Greene Space, he played Bach's chaconne, the fifth and final movement from Partita No. 2. As our executive editor Trent Gilliss observed, "It's a rarity and a privilege to be able to listen to a 15-minute violin solo without an orchestra." Especially a great performance like Tim Fain's, who is known for his electrifying recordings in Black Swan and 12 Years a Slave.

This performance is included in On Being's radio production, "Discovering the Cosmology of Bach" (http://www.onbeing.org/program/bernard-chazelle-discovering-the-cosmology-of-bach/7026)

Johann Sebastian Bach: "Chaconne" from Partita in D Minor for Solo Violin - Tim Fain

Courage is borne out of vulnerability, not strength. This finding of Brené Brown’s research on shame and "wholeheartedness" shook the perfectionist ground beneath her own feet. And now it’s inspiring millions to reconsider the way they live, parent, and navigate relations with members of the opposite gender.

See more at www.onbeing.org/program/brene-brown-on-vulnerability/4928

[Unedited] Brené Brown with Krista Tippett

Brené Brown — The Courage to Be Vulnerable

Alzheimer's disease has been described as "the great unlearning." But what does it reveal about the nature of human identity? What remains when memory unravels? Alan Dienstag is a psychologist who has led support groups with early Alzheimer's patients, as well as a writing group he co-designed with the novelist Don DeLillo. He's experienced the early stages of Alzheimer's as a time for giving memories away rather than losing them.

See more at www.onbeing.org/program/alan-dienstag-alzheimers-and-the-spiritual-terrain-of-memory/64

Alan Dienstag — Alzheimer's and the Spiritual Terrain of Memory

Few features of humanity are more fascinating than creativity; and few fields are more dynamic now than neuroscience. Rex Jung is a neuropsychologist who puts the two together. He's working on a cutting edge of science, exploring the differences and interplay between intelligence and creativity. He and his colleagues unsettle long-held beliefs about who is creative and who is not. And they're seeing practical, often common-sense connections between creativity and family life, aging, and purpose.

See more at www.onbeing.org/program/creativity-and-everyday-brain/1879

Rex Jung — Creativity And The Everyday Brain

Often quoted, but rarely interviewed, Mary Oliver is one of our greatest and most beloved poets. She’s just released a new volume, Felicity, at the age of 80. And so we’re revisiting the interview she granted us earlier this year on the wisdom of the world, the salvation of poetry, and the life behind her writing.

See more at www.onbeing.org/program/mary-oliver-listening-to-the-world/7267

Mary Oliver — Listening to the World

Jean Berko Gleason is a living legend in the field of psycholinguistics — how language emerges, and what it tells us about how we think and who we are. She has helped to illustrate the remarkable ordinary human capacity to begin to speak, and she’s continued to break new ground in exploring what this may teach us about adults as about the children we’re raising. We keep learning about the human gift, as she puts it, to be conscious of ourselves and to comment on that. For her, the exploration of language is a frontier every bit as important and thrilling as exploring outer space or the deep sea.

See more at http://www.onbeing.org/program/unfolding-language-unfolding-life/256

Jean Berko Gleason — Unfolding Language, Unfolding Life

"The most beautiful things I look back on in my life are coming out from underneath things I didn’t know I could get out from underneath. The moments I look back in my life and think, 'God, those are the moments that made me,' were moments of struggle." — Brené Brown

Find more at onbeing.org/becoming-wise

Courage Is Born from Struggle | Brené Brown [Becoming Wise]

"Beauty isn’t all about just niceness, loveliness. Beauty is about more rounded substantial becoming." Beloved Irish poet John O'Donohue on beauty's true grit, and finding it in the transformational edges of our daily lives.

Find more at www.onbeing.org/becoming-wise

Beauty Is an Edge of Becoming | John O'Donohue [Becoming Wise]

"Critical thinking without hope is cynicism. But hope without critical thinking is naïveté. I try to live in this space between the two." The creator and editor of Brain Pickings on the pratfalls and promise of knowledge-sharing in the digital age.

Find more at onbeing.org/becoming-wise

Mapping Meaning in a Digital Age | Maria Popova [Becoming Wise]

"Your body, for as long as it possibly can, will be faithful to living. That's what it does." Matthew Sanford, an innovator of adaptive yoga, on taking a new orientation to our physical change and pain, and the outward healing that can result.

Find more at onbeing.org/becoming-wise

Compassion for Our Bodies | Matthew Sanford [Becoming Wise]

"Are we human beings who are in community, do we call to each other? Do we heed each other? Do we want to know each other?" Poet Elizabeth Alexander speaks of our need for language to understand our neighbors.

Find more at onbeing.org/becoming-wise

The Desire to Know Each Other | Elizabeth Alexander [Becoming Wise]

He is a complicated person in American life, and he’s acknowledging his role in the damaged state we’re in. To create the world we want our children to inhabit, we all need to be ready to let others surprise us, to offer forgiveness, and to ask hard questions of our own part in this moment. This doesn’t happen often in politics, but it is essential in life, and it must be part of common life, too. As part of our ongoing Civil Conversations Project, Krista draws out Glenn Beck in this spirit.

On Being with Krista Tippett

Glenn Beck — What You Do Will Be a Pivot Point

A French-born Tibetan Buddhist monk and a central figure in the Dalai Lama's dialogue with scientists, Matthieu Ricard was dubbed "The Happiest Man in the World" after his brain was imaged. But he resists this label. In his writing and in his life, he explores happiness not as a pleasurable feeling but as a way of being that gives you the resources to deal with the ups and downs of life and that encompasses many emotional states, including sadness. We take in Matthieu Ricard's practical teachings for cultivating inner strength, joy, and direction.

Matthieu Ricard  — Happiness as Human Flourishing

It’s easy to despair at all the bad news and horrific pictures that come at us daily. But Roshi Joan Halifax says this is a form of empathy that works against us. There’s such a thing as pathological altruism. This zen abbot and medical anthropologist has nourishing wisdom as we face suffering in the world.

Joan Halifax — Buoyancy Rather Than Burnout in Our Lives

The new field of epigenetics sees that genes can be turned on and off and expressed differently through changes in environment and behavior. Rachel Yehuda is a pioneer in understanding how the effects of stress and trauma can transmit biologically, beyond cataclysmic events, to the next generation. She has studied the children of Holocaust survivors and of pregnant women who survived the 9/11 attacks. But her science is a form of power for flourishing beyond the traumas large and small that mark each of our lives and those of our families and communities.

On Being with Krista Tippett 

Rachel Yehuda — How Trauma and Resilience Cross Generations

A Jesuit priest famous for his gang intervention programs in Los Angeles, Fr. Greg Boyle makes winsome connections between service and delight, and compassion and awe. He heads Homeboy Industries, which employs former gang members in a constellation of businesses. This is not work of helping, he says, but of finding kinship. The point of Christian service, as he lives it, is about “our common calling to delight in one another.”

Greg Boyle — The Calling of Delight: Gangs, Service, and Kinship

The wise and lyrical writer Adam Gopnik muses on the ironies of spiritual life in a secular age through the lens of his many fascinations — from parenting, to the arts, to Darwin. He touches on all these things in a conversation inspired by his foreword to "The Good Book," in which novelists, essayists, and activists who are not known as religious thinkers write about their favorite biblical passages. Our ancestors acknowledged doubt while practicing faith, he says; we moderns are drawn to faith while practicing doubt.

Adam Gopnik — Practicing Doubt, Redrawing Faith

A sneak peek into This Movie Changed Me, a new podcast from On Being Studios hosted by Lily Percy.

This Movie Changed Me — Trailer

David Greene, co-host of NPR’s Morning Edition and Up First, shares how Star Wars Episode IV instilled a sense of wanderlust and adventure in his life and ultimately made him want to become a foreign correspondent. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the This Movie Changed Me episode "Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope." Find more at onbeing.org/thismoviechangedme.

[Unedited] Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope with David Greene

David Greene is co-host of NPR’s Morning Edition and Up First and is known for loving karaoke, pulling all-nighters in bars, and crying during nearly every movie, especially on planes. In a former life he was a foreign correspondent, and he details his adventures in the book Midnight in Siberia: A Train Journey into the Heart of Russia.

Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope

“A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.” Mary Karr has a captivating ability to give voice to what is funny in life’s most heartbreaking moments. She is beloved for her salty memoirs in which she traces her harrowing childhood in southeast Texas — with a mother who once tried to kill her with a butcher’s knife and her own adult struggles with alcoholism and breakdown. Mary Karr embodies this wryness and wildness in her lesser-known spiritual practice as a devout Catholic — an unexpected move she made in mid-life.

Mary Karr — Astonished by the Human Comedy

The Nightmare Before Christmas helped writer Ashley C. Ford accept life’s imperfections. As a kid, the movie taught her that it was okay to be different and to embrace the weird and the creepy. You can find the edited version of this conversation with music and clips in the This Movie Changed Me episode "The Nightmare Before Christmas." Find more at onbeing.org/thismoviechangedme.

[Unedited] The Nightmare Before Christmas with Ashley C. Ford

The Nightmare Before Christmas helped writer Ashley C. Ford accept life’s imperfections. As a kid, the movie taught her that it was okay to be different and to embrace the weird and the creepy.

The Nightmare Before Christmas

“When you're in a very quiet place, when you're remembering, when you're savoring an image, when you're allowing your mind calmly to leap from one thought to another, that's a poem.” Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Kindness” has traveled around the world. She grew up between Ferguson, Missouri, Ramallah, and Jerusalem. She insists that language must be a way out of cycles of animosity. And she’d have us notice “petite discoveries” that embolden us to choose human nourishment over division. “Before you know what kindness really is / you must lose things.”

Naomi Shihab Nye — Your Life Is A Poem

How can we stay present to what’s happening in the world without giving in to despair and hopelessness? 

Good conversation is an adventure. A few weeks ago, Krista asked on social media for the questions you’ve been asking in your own lives. Your responses were beautiful and delved into so many facets of life — from boredom and vulnerability to compassionate conversation. Here, she responds to what’s on your mind. The first installment of “Living the Questions,” a new feature of the On Being podcast.

Living the Questions with Krista Tippett — #1

One of today's most influential spiritual teachers shares his youthful experience of depression and despair -- suffering that led him to his own spiritual breakthrough, and ultimately, freedom and peace of mind. He also explicates his view of what he calls "the pain body" -- the accumulated emotional pain that may influence us and our relationships in negative ways. And Tolle talks about spirit and God, and what those concepts mean to him.

See more at www.onbeing.org/program/power-eckhart-tolles-now/217

Eckhart Tolle — The Power of Now (Oct 8, 2009)

Matthew Sanford says he's never seen anyone live more deeply in their body -- in all of its grace and all of its flaws -- without becoming more compassionate toward all of life. He is a renowned yoga teacher, and he has been paralyzed from the chest down since he was 13. He teaches yoga to the able-bodied and adapts yoga for people with ailments and disabilities, including military veterans. With Krista Tippett, he shares his story on finding his own way in to what we call the mind-body connection, and what might be discovered there. His wisdom holds lessons for how all of us can fully inhabit our bodies across the span of our lives.

An unusual take on the mind-body connection with author and yoga teacher Matthew Sanford. He's been a paraplegic since the age of 13. He shares his wisdom for us all on knowing the strength and grace of our bodies even in the face of illness, aging, and death. 

See more at http://www.onbeing.org/program/bodys-grace-matthew-sanfords-story/185

Matthew Sanford — The Body's Grace (May 3, 2012)

The science of implicit bias is one of the most promising fields for animating the human change that makes social change possible. The social psychologist Mahzarin Banaji is one of its primary architects. She understands the mind as a “difference-seeking machine” that helps us order and navigate the overwhelming complexity of reality. But this gift also creates blind spots and biases as we fill in what we don’t know with the limits of what we do know. This is science that takes our grappling with difference out of the realm of guilt and into the realm of transformative good.

Mahzarin Banaji — The Mind Is a Difference-Seeking Machine

The poet, essayist, and playwright Claudia Rankine says every conversation about race doesn’t need to be about racism. But she says all of us — and especially white people — need to find a way to talk about it, even when it gets uncomfortable. Her bestselling book, "Citizen: An American Lyric," catalogued the painful daily experiences of lived racism for people of color. Claudia models how it’s possible to bring that reality into the open — not to fight, but to draw closer. And she shows how we can do this with everyone, from our intimate friends to strangers on airplanes. 

Claudia Rankine is the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University and founder of The Racial Imaginary Institute. She is the author of five collections of poetry including "Don’t Let Me Be Lonely." Her plays include "The Provenance of Beauty" and "The White Card."

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

Claudia Rankine — How Can I Say This So We Can Stay in This Car Together?

She has called Brain Pickings, her invention and labor of love, a “human-powered discovery engine for interestingness.” What Maria Popova really delivers, to hundreds of thousands of people each day, is wisdom of the old-fashioned sort, presented in new-fashioned digital ways. She cross-pollinates — between philosophy and design, physics and poetry, the intellectual and the experiential. We explore her gleanings on what it means to lead a good life — intellectually, creatively, and spiritually.

Maria Popova is the creator and presence behind BrainPickings.org, which is included in the Library of Congress’s permanent digital archive of culturally valuable materials. She is the author of “Figuring” and hosts “The Universe in Verse” — an annual celebration of science through poetry — at the interdisciplinary cultural institute Pioneer Works in Brooklyn.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

Maria Popova — Cartographer of Meaning in a Digital Age

Writer and photographer Teju Cole says he is “intrigued by the continuity of places, by the singing line that connects them all.” He attends to the border, overlap and interplay of things — from Brahms and Baldwin to daily technologies like Google. To delve into his mind and his multiple arts is to meet this world with creative raw materials for enduring truth and quiet hope. 

Teju Cole is a photography critic for The New York Times and the Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing at Harvard. His books are Blind Spot, a book of photography and writing; a collection of essays, Known and Strange Things; and two novels: Open City and Every Day Is for the Thief.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

Teju Cole — Sitting Together in the Dark

Rabbi Lawrence Kushner is a long-time student and articulator of the mysteries and messages of Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition. Kushner says mysticism tends to appear when religion — whatever the tradition — becomes too formal and logical. “The minute mysticism becomes permissible, acceptable, possible, it’s an immediate threat to organized religious structures,” he says. “Because what mysticism does is it gives everybody direct unmediated personal access to God.” He is influenced by the Jewish historian Gershom Scholem, who resurrected Kabbalah from obscurity in the 20th century and made it accessible to modern people.

Lawrence Kushner is the Emanu-El Scholar at Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco. He served for 28 years as the rabbi of Congregation Beth El in Sudbury, Massachusetts. He has been an adjunct faculty member at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles and also a commentator for NPR’s All Things Considered. His many books include God Was in This Place & I, i Did Not Know, Kabbalah: A Love Story, and I’m God; You’re Not: Observations on Organized Religion & Other Disguises of the Ego.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

Lawrence Kushner — Kabbalah and Everyday Mysticism

A prolific writer on sociology, history, economics, and politics, W.E.B. Du Bois was one of the most extraordinary minds of American and global history. His life traced an incredible arc; he was born three years after the end of the Civil War and died on the eve of the March on Washington. In 1903, he penned the famous line that “the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line.” Du Bois was a formative voice for many of the people who gave us the Civil Rights Movement and for all of us navigating the still-unfolding, unfinished business of civil rights now. We bring his life and ideas into relief through three conversations with people who were inspired by him. 

Maya Angelou was a poet, educator, and activist. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Arts in 2000 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011. She is most well-known for her series of seven autobiographies, including I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

Elizabeth Alexander is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and president of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Her books include Crave Radiance and her memoir, The Light of the World.

Arnold Rampersad is emeritus professor of English at Stanford University and author of The Art and Imagination of W.E.B. Du Bois. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2010.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

Maya Angelou, Elizabeth Alexander, And Arnold Rampersad — W.E.B. Du Bois And The American Soul

Pádraig Ó Tuama is a poet, theologian, and extraordinary healer in our world of fracture. He leads the Corrymeela community of Northern Ireland, a place that has offered refuge since the violent division that defined that country until the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. Ó Tuama and Corrymeela extend a quiet, generative, and joyful force far beyond their northern coast to people around the world. Over cups of tea and the experience of bringing people together, he says it becomes possible to talk with each other and be in the same room with the people we talk about.

Pádraig Ó Tuama is the community leader of Corrymeela, Northern Ireland’s oldest peace and reconciliation organization. He finishes his five-year term in 2019. His books include a prayer book, “Daily Prayer with the Corrymeela Community,” a book of poetry, “Sorry for Your Troubles,” and a memoir, “In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World.”

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

Pádraig Ó Tuama — Belonging Creates and Undoes Us

Community organizers Rami Nashashibi and Lucas Johnson have much to teach us about using love — the most reliable muscle of human transformation — as a practical public good. Nashashibi is the founder of the Inner-City Muslim Action Network, a force for social healing on Chicago’s South Side. Johnson is the newly-named executive director of The On Being Project’s Civil Conversations Project. In a world of division, they say despair is not an option — and that the work of social healing requires us to get “proximate to pain.”

Rami Nashashibi is founder and executive director of the Inner-City Muslim Action Network (IMAN) in Chicago. He was named a MacArthur fellow in 2017 and an Opus Prize laureate in 2018.

Lucas Johnson is the executive director of The On Being Project’s Civil Conversations Project. He was previously international coordinator for the International Fellowship of Reconciliation, a century-old peace-building organization. Lucas is also a community organizer, writer, and a minister in the American Baptist Churches.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

Rami Nashashibi and Lucas Johnson — Community Organizing as a Spiritual Practice

Men of all ages say Richard Rohr has given them a new way into spiritual depth and religious thought through his writing and retreats. This conversation with the Franciscan spiritual teacher delves into the expansive scope of his ideas: from male formation and what he calls “father hunger” to why contemplation is as magnetic to people now, including millennials, as it’s ever been.

Richard Rohr is a Franciscan writer, teacher, and the founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His many books include “Falling Upward,” “Divine Dance,” and most recently, “The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe.”

This interview originally aired in April 2017. Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

Richard Rohr — Growing Up Men

We still work with the old idea that we should check the messy parts of ourselves at the door of our professional lives. But Jerry Colonna says doing so cuts us off from the source of our creativity. “The result is that our organizations are actually less productive, less imaginative; not just poor workplaces for individuals to be, but poor places for collaboration … and spontaneity and laughter and humor.” Colonna is a former venture capitalist who now coaches CEOs. He says undoing the old model starts with radical self-inquiry and asking ourselves questions like “Who is the person I’ve been all my life?” — and that it’s only after we sort through the material of our personal lives that we can become better leaders.

Jerry Colonna — Can You Really Bring Your Whole Self to Work?

The folk rock duo Amy Ray and Emily Saliers have been making music for over 25 years. They’re known for their social activism on-stage and off, but long before they became the Indigo Girls, they were singing in church choirs. They see music as a continuum of human existence, intertwined with spiritual life in a way that can’t be pinned down.

Amy Ray is a singer-songwriter who is one half of the folk-rock duo Indigo Girls. Her latest solo album, “Holler,” was released in September 2018. 

Emily Saliers is a singer-songwriter who is one half of the folk-rock duo Indigo Girls. She is also the co-author of “A Song to Sing, A Life to Live: Reflections on Music as a Spiritual Practice.” Her debut album, “Murmuration Nation,” was released in 2017.

This interview originally aired in June 2017. Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

Indigo Girls — No Separation: On Music And Transcendence

We must shine a light on the past to live more abundantly now. Historian Annette Gordon-Reed and painter Titus Kaphar lead us in an exploration of that as a public adventure in this conversation at the Citizen University annual conference. Gordon-Reed is the historian who introduced the world to Sally Hemings and the children she had with President Thomas Jefferson, and so realigned a primary chapter of the American story with the deeper, more complicated truth. Kaphar collapses historical timelines on canvas and created iconic images after the protests in Ferguson. Both are reckoning with history in order to repair the present.

Titus Kaphar is an artist whose work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions from the Savannah College of Art and Design and the Seattle Art Museum to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His 2014 painting of Ferguson protesters was commissioned by “TIME” magazine. He has received numerous awards including the Artist as Activist Fellowship from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and the 2018 Rappaport Prize.

Annette Gordon-Reed is the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School and a professor of history in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. Her books include “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family,” for which she won the Pulitzer Prize, and “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination.”

This interview originally aired in June 2017. Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

Annette Gordon-Reed & Titus Kaphar — Are We Actually Citizens Here?

Applied philosopher Jonathan Rowson insists on holding a deeper appreciation for how our inner worlds influence our outer worlds. His research organization, Perspectiva, examines how social change happens across “systems, souls, and society.” “If we can get better and more nimble and more generous about how we move between those worlds, then the chance of creating a hope that makes sense for all of us is all the greater,” he says. We engage his broad spiritual lens on the great dynamics of our time, from social life to the economy to the climate.

Jonathan Rowson is co-founder and director of the research institute Perspectiva based in London. He is also the former director of the Social Brain Centre at the Royal Society of Arts and is a chess grandmaster and three-time British Chess Champion. His books include “The Seven Deadly Chess Sins,” “Chess for Zebras,” and, most recently, “Spiritualize: Cultivating Spiritual Sensibility to Address 21st Century Challenges.” His forthcoming book, “The Moves that Matter: A Chess Grandmaster on the Game of Life,” will be published in November 2019.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

Jonathan Rowson — Integrating Our Souls, Systems, and Society

Forms of religious devotion are shifting — and there’s a new world of creativity toward crafting spiritual life while exploring the depths of tradition. Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie is a fun and forceful embodiment of this evolution. Born into an eminent and ancient rabbinical lineage, as a young adult he moved away from religion towards storytelling, theater, and drag. Today he leads a pop-up synagogue in New York City that takes as its tagline, “everybody-friendly, artist-driven, God-optional.” It’s not merely about spiritual community but about recovering the sacred and reinventing the very meaning of “we.”

Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie is a rabbi and founding spiritual leader of Lab/Shul in New York City. He’s also the founding director of Storahtelling.

This interview originally aired in July 2017. Find the transcript at onbeing.org.

Amichai Lau-Lavie — First Aid for Spiritual Seekers

Darnell Moore says honest, uncomfortable conversations are a sign of love — and that self-reflection goes hand-in-hand with culture shift and social evolution. A writer and activist, he’s grown wise through his work on successful and less successful civic initiatives, including Mark Zuckerberg’s plan to remake the schools of Newark, New Jersey, and he is a key figure in the ongoing, under-publicized, creative story of The Movement for Black Lives. This conversation was recorded at the 2019 Skoll World Forum in Oxford, England.

Darnell Moore is the U.S. head of strategy and programs at Breakthrough, a global human rights organization. He is a civic media fellow at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab and a writer-in-residence at Columbia University’s Center on African-American Religion, Sexual Politics, and Social Justice. His book is “No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America.”

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

Darnell Moore — Self - Reflection And Social Evolution

Spiritual border-crossing and social creativity were themes in a conversation between Shane Claiborne and Omar Saif Ghobash, two people who have lived with some discomfort within the religious groups they continue to love. Ghobash is a diplomat of the United Arab Emirates and author of Letters to a Young Muslim. One of his responses to the politicization of Islam has been to bring a new art gallery culture to Dubai, creating spaces for thought and beauty. Claiborne is a singular figure in Evangelical Christianity as co-founder of The Simple Way, an intentional neighborhood-based community in North Philadelphia. One of the things he’s doing now is a restorative justice project inspired by a Bible passage — to transform guns into garden tools. This conversation took place at the invitation of Interfaith Philadelphia, which hosted a year of civil conversations modeled after the work of On Being’s Civil Conversations Project.

Shane Claiborne is the founder of The Simple Way, an intentional community in North Philadelphia. He’s recently written a book, Beating Guns, about the movement he co-leads to transform America’s guns into garden tools. His other books include The Irresistible Revolution.

His Excellency Omar Saif Ghobash is now the assistant minister for cultural affairs in the Cabinet of the United Arab Emirates. He was formerly UAE ambassador to France and Russia. His book is Letters to a Young Muslim.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

Shane Claiborne and Omar Saif Ghobash — Called and Conflicted

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.

Ta-Nehisi Coates — Imagining a New America

James Baldwin said, “American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.” Imani Perry embodies that prism. For the past few years, Perry has been pondering the notions of slow work and resistant joy as she writes about what it means to raise her two black sons — as a thinker and writer at the intersection of law, race, culture, and literature. This live conversation was recorded at the Chautauqua Institution.

Imani Perry - More Beautiful

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.

Jennifer Bailey and Lennon Flowers — An Invitation to Brave Space

Ross Gay — Tending Joy and Practicing Delight

“If I believe that we are all inherently worthy just by being human, how can I feel that way when I feel I’m doing ‘nothing?’” — Anna Bondoc from Los Angeles

So many of us are raised to believe that hard work is what makes us valuable; many of our professions and even our identities as helpers are on hold. How does self-worth interact with just being when we feel we're doing nothing? Krista reflects on the problem with the phrase "just being" — and how settling inside ourselves right now, and kindness towards ourselves, are gifts to the world we want to make beyond this crisis.

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.

Living the Questions: At home, frustrated and stressed — is 'just being' worthy right now?

[Unedited] Ai-jen Poo with Krista Tippett

Ai-jen Poo — This Is Our (Caring) Revolution

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."

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.

This show originally aired in June, 2010

[Unedited] Ellen Davis With Krista Tippett

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.

Wendell Berry & Ellen Davis — The Art Of Being Creatures

One of the great challenges of life is to learn to be alone peaceably, at home in oneself. And now, by way of a virus, we have been sent inside physically and emotionally, even if we’re not home on our own. We’re forced to work out the difference between isolation and loneliness or solitude. With teachers across the ages and drawing on his life from monasticism to marriage, Buddhist writer and scholar Stephen Batchelor teaches how to approach solitude as a graceful and life-giving practice.

Stephen Batchelor teaches seminars and leads meditation retreats worldwide. He’s a co-founder and faculty member of Bodhi College, which is focused on the study and practice of early Buddhism. His many books include Buddhism Without Beliefs, The Faith to Doubt, and most recently, The Art of Solitude.

This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Stephen Batchelor — Finding Ease in Aloneness." Find more at onbeing.org.

[Unedited] Stephen Batchelor With Krista Tippett

One of the great challenges of life is to learn to be alone peaceably, at home in oneself. And now, by way of a virus, we have been sent inside physically and emotionally, even if we’re not home on our own. We’re forced to work out the difference between isolation and loneliness or solitude. With teachers across the ages and drawing on his life from monasticism to marriage, Buddhist writer and scholar Stephen Batchelor teaches how to approach solitude as a graceful and life-giving practice.

Stephen Batchelor teaches seminars and leads meditation retreats worldwide. He’s a co-founder and faculty member of Bodhi College, which is focused on the study and practice of early Buddhism. His many books include Buddhism Without Beliefs, The Faith to Doubt, and most recently, The Art of Solitude. 

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org

Stephen Batchelor — Finding Ease In Aloneness

The exquisite writer, with wisdom for the world we’ve entered — its heartbreak, its poetry, and its possibilities of both destroying and saving.

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