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Joy Laden

The best way to nurture children's inner lives, Sylvia Boorstein says, is by taking care of our own inner selves for their sake. At a public event in suburban Detroit, Krista Tippett draws out the warmth and wisdom of the celebrated Jewish-Buddhist teacher and psychotherapist. And, in a light-hearted moment that is an audience pleaser, Boorstein shares what GPS might teach us about "recalculating" and our own inner equanimity.

Sylvia Boorstein is a founding teacher of Spirit Rock Meditation Center. Krista Tippett spoke with her on February 15, 2011 on stage at The Community House in Birmingham, Michigan. This interview is included in our show "What We Nurture." 

See more at http://www.onbeing.org/program/what-we-nurture-with-sylvia-boorstein/242

[Unedited] Sylvia Boorstein with Krista Tippett

Marcelo Gleiser is an astrophysicist.  Marilynne Robinson is a novelist. 
They’re both passionate about the majesty of science and they share a caution about what they call our modern “piety” towards science. They connect thrilling dots among the current discoveries about the cosmos and the new territory of understanding our own minds. A joyous, heady discussion of “the mystery we are.”

Marilynne Robinson + Marcelo Gleiser — The Mystery We Are (Jan 2, 2013)

We've isolated some of our favorite narrative sound treatments from Gordon Hempton's audio library, which we included in our radio show and podcast with him. An aural journey across three zones — from the Amazon and Central America to the temperate latitudes of the Great Northwest. The difference in silence will astound you.

See more at http://www.onbeing.org/program/last-quiet-places/4557

The Poetics of Space Across Latitudes

Dharma Talk by Eijun Linda Ruth Cutts on September 22, 2013, at Green Gulch Farm Zen Center.

The Mountains Belong to Those Who Love Them - SF Zen Center Dharma Talk for Jan 04, 2014

Free will is at the root of our notions of moral responsibility, choice and judgment. It is at the heart of our conception of the human individual as an autonomous end in himself. Nevertheless, free will is notoriously hard to pin down. Philosophers have denied its existence on the basis that we are determined by the laws of nature, society or history, insisting there is no evidence of free will in the iron chain of cause and effect. Theologians have argued everything happens according to the will of God, not man. And yet, when we decide we want something and act on that, it certainly seems as if we are choosing freely. Are we just kidding ourselves?

Some of the most profound contemporary challenges to the idea of free will come from neuroscientists, evolutionary psychologists and biologists. They argue we are effectively programmed to act in certain ways, and only feel as if we make choices. Some argue, for example, that we can easily be nudged into certain types of behavior if only the right stimuli are applied. It is widely believed that advertising can make us buy things we don’t need or even want. Stronger forms of this reasoning can be found in the idea that early intervention, usually before the age of three, can determine the sort of adult a child will grow up to be. Without such intervention, we are told, their future will be determined by genetics, by their environment, by the way their parents treat them.

Nevertheless, common sense still gives strong support to the idea that we have free will. We understand there are relatively large areas of our lives in which it makes sense to say we could have acted differently, with correspondingly different results. The law recognises this too: it is no defence to say you stole because your parents were cruel to you. We feel remorse at opportunities we could have taken but did not. And we do sometimes choose to do the right thing even against our own interests: in extreme cases some even lay down their lives for others and for ideals. Jean-Paul Sartre argued, ‘the coward makes himself cowardly, the hero makes himself heroic; and that there is always a possibility for the coward to give up cowardice and for the hero to stop being a hero’. Is the idea that we might be born cowards, or heroes, an excuse for not facing up to our moral responsibilities? Or is free will really an illusion, the by-product of a vain belief that we are all special? 

Free Will: Just An Illusion?

An enchanting hour of poetry drawing on the ways family and religion shape our lives. Marie Howe works and plays with her Catholic upbringing, the universal drama of family, and the ordinary time that sustains us. The moral life, she says, is lived out in what we say as much as what we do — and so words have a power to save us.

See more www.onbeing.org/program/the-poetry-of-ordinary-time-with-marie-howe/5301

Marie Howe — Mary Magdelene's Seven Devils

The Brazilian lyricist Paulo Coelho is best known for his book, The Alchemist — which has been on the New York Times bestseller list for over 300 weeks. His fable-like stories turn life, love, writing, and reading into pilgrimage. In a rare conversation, we meet the man behind the writings and explore what he’s touched in modern people.

See more at www.onbeing.org/program/paulo-coelho-the-alchemy-of-pilgrimage/6639

Paulo Coelho — The Alchemy of Pilgrimage (August 14, 2014)

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

After September 11, 2001, Richard Rodriguez traveled to the Middle East to explore his kinship, as a Roman Catholic, with the men who stepped onto airplanes and turned them into weapons of terror. What he learned illuminates some of the deepest paradox and promise of the world we inhabit. He is an especially intriguing conversation partner for right now — a life and mind straddling left and right, religious and secular, immigrant and intellectual. At the Chautauqua Institution, we mine his wisdom on the emerging fabric of human identity.

See more at www.onbeing.org/program/richard-rodriguez-the-fabric-of-our-identity/6761

Richard Rodriguez — The Fabric of Our Identity

Joanna Macy is a Buddhist philosopher of ecology and an exquisite translator of the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. We take that poetry as a lens on her wisdom about the dramas of our time — ecological, political, and personal.

See more at www.onbeing.org/program/joanna-macy-a-wild-love-for-the-world/61

Joanna Macy — A Wild Love for the World

Gender defines us from the moment we’re born. But how is that related to the lifelong work of being at home in ourselves? For as far back as Joy Ladin can remember, her body didn’t match her soul. We explore this question through her story of transition from male to female — in an orthodox Jewish world.

See more at www.onbeing.org/program/gender-and-the-syntax-of-being-joy-ladin-on-identity-and-transition/5646

Joy Ladin — Gender and the Syntax of Being: Identity and Transition

The charge of ‘moralism’ or ‘moralising’ is always complicated. Nobody endorses immorality, we all know the difference between moralism and morality. Or do we? The former implies an unattractive self-righteousness; the latter is ‘the real thing’. But without righteousness, does morality have any meaning? The obvious danger with rejecting moralism is that we abandon any attempt to talk about right and wrong. Indeed, contemporary culture seems uncomfortable with the language of morality. Terms like good, bad, right, wrong, should, should not, duty and obligation are often seen as moralistic ‘tut tutting’ that unfairly stigmatises people.

To some extent, the kinds of moral judgements that are acceptable or not change with the times, such as attitudes to slavery or eugenics. But do changing moral norms always reflect more enlightened attitudes, or just changing prejudices? For example, is the routine denigration of those who embrace traditional ideas of morality any more than a new form of ‘moralising’? Earlier this year, UK Supreme Court judge Lord Wilson of Culworth declared that the nuclear family had been replaced by a ‘blended’ variety, and that Christian teaching on the family has been ‘malign’. Paradoxically, though, something like homosexuality was not only once considered immoral and now seen as fine; one’s attitude to it has become a marker of one’s own moral standing: ‘enlightened’ or ‘bigoted’. The intriguing result is that those who still frown on homosexuality might well protest against the ‘moralism’ of those who condemn them, while the latter retort that some moral judgements are beyond debate.

In other cases, moral etiquette changes for seemingly more fickle reasons. While judgementalism about sexual mores is ostensibly frowned on, the intense moral reaction that followed recent allegations of historic sexual offences seemed to go beyond particular crimes to condemn old-fashioned attitude to sex, and even the past itself. Or take the sphere of public health, in which medics and politicians cite ‘the science’ while engaging in what otherwise looks like a moral crusade to change attitudes to what we eat, drink or smoke, showing a remarkable willingness to tell others what they can and cannot do, or else. The zealousness of those policing behaviour in relation to lifestyle choices points to another apparent contradiction in today’s moral landscape. If religious moral values are seen as too narrow, we seem less troubled by formalised norms dictated by rigid codes of conduct, ethics committees, or ‘you can’t say that’ speech rules, the last of which cast certain words as morally reprehensible, and dubs those who may utter them as beyond the pale.

Such discrepancies are hard to explain rationally, perhaps because they have less to do with individual or collective moral judgements than with moral ‘fashion’. So is it possible to engage in serious moral debate that avoids both self-righteous groupthink and relativistic indifference? Are morals best left to individuals, or is there a place for ‘intelligent moralising’?
Speakers
Dr Hannah Dawson
historian of ideas, New College of the Humanities; author, Life Lessons from Hobbes

Kenan Malik
writer and broadcaster; author, From Fatwa to Jihad and The Quest for a Moral Compass

	Alister McGrath
Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion, University of Oxford

Chair
Dolan Cummings
associate fellow, Institute of Ideas; editor, Debating Humanism; co-founder, Manifesto Club 

Our morals, their moralism?

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.

Joy Ladin — Gender and the Syntax of Being: Identity and Transition

On Being Studios