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.

See more at www.onbeing.org/program/last-quiet-places/4557

Gordon Hempton — The Last Quiet Places: Silence and the Presence Of Everything

She works at an emerging 21st century intersection of industry, social healing, and diverse contemplative practices. Raised Catholic with Joan of Arc as her hero, Mirabai Bush is one of the people who brought Buddhism to the West from India in the 1970s. She is called in to work with educators and judges, social activists and soldiers. She helped create Google’s wildly popular employee program, Search Inside Yourself. Mirabai Bush’s life tells a fascinating narrative of our time: the rediscovery of contemplative practices, in many forms and from many traditions, in the secular thick of modern culture.

See more at www.onbeing.org/program/mirabai-bush-search-inside-yourself-contemplation-in-life-and-work/7731

Mirabai Bush — Search Inside Yourself: Contemplation in Life and Work

Kevin Kling is part funny guy, part poet and playwright, part wise man. A treasured figure on the national storytelling circuit, his voice inhabits an unusual space — where a homegrown Minnesota wit meets Dante and Shakespeare. Born with a disabled left arm, he lost the use of his right one after a motorcycle accident nearly killed him. He shares his special angle on life's humor and its ruptures — and why we turn loss into story.

Find more at www.onbeing.org/program/kevin-kling-the-losses-and-laughter-we-grow-into/1863

Kevin Kling — The Losses and Laughter We Grow Into

Alice Parker is Artistic Director of the non-profit Melodious Accord and is the author of "Melodious Accord: Good Singing in Church." This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Alice Parker — Singing Is the Most Companionable of Arts." Find more at onbeing.org.

On Being with Krista Tippett

[Unedited] Alice Parker with Krista Tippett

Singing is able to touch and join human beings in ways few other arts can. Alice Parker is a wise and joyful thinker and writer on this truth, and has been a hero in the universe of choral music as a composer, conductor, and teacher for most of her 90 years. She began as a young woman, studying conducting with Robert Shaw at Juilliard, and collaborated with him on arrangements of folk songs, spirituals, and hymns that are still performed around the world today.

Alice Parker — Singing Is the Most Companionable of Arts

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.

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

We take in the extraordinary wisdom of Congressman John Lewis, on what happened in Selma on Bloody Sunday and beyond — and how it might inform common life today. A rare look inside the civil rights leaders’ spiritual confrontation with themselves — and their intricate art of "love in action."

On Being Studios | Krista Tippett Public Productions

John Lewis — Love In Action

Sheryl Sandberg is synonymous with Facebook, and Silicon Valley success, and she’s the voice of Lean In. She joins us, frank and vulnerable, together with the psychologist Adam Grant. His friendship – and his research on resilience - helped her survive the shocking death of her husband while on vacation. They share what they’ve learned about planting deep resilience in ourselves and our children, and even reclaiming joy. There is so much learning here, on facing the unimaginable when it arrives in our lives and being more practically caring towards the losses woven into lives all around us.

Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant — Resilience After Unimaginable Loss

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.

On Being with Krista Tippett 

Marie Howe — The Power of Words to Save Us

Humor lifts us up but it also underscores what’s already great; it connects us with others and also brings us home to ourselves. And like everything meaningful, it’s complex and nuanced — it can be fortifying or damaging, depending on how we wield it. But as a tool for survival, humor is elemental. We explore this idea with a rabbi who started out in drag, comedians, an NPR host, writers of sci-fi fantasy, social commentary, and the TV show VEEP.

Hari Kondabolu, Lindy West, et al. — Humor as a Tool for Survival

No conversation we’ve ever done has been more beloved than this one. This 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 — The Inner Landscape of Beauty

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.

Alice Parker — Singing Is the Most Companionable of Arts

On Being Studios

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