Podcasts to listen to

Martin Luther King, Jr. once nominated Thich Nhat Hanh for a Nobel Peace Prize. And now the Vietnamese Zen master and poet is on a North American tour. Our encounter with him a decade ago has left a lasting imprint on us. In this radio pilgrimage, you’ll hear a rare, intimate conversation with him and with others who make use of his practical, lyrical teachings on finding buoyancy and "being peace" in a world of conflict.

See more at www.onbeing.org/program/thich-nhat-hanh-on-mindfulness-suffering-and-engaged-buddhism/74

Thich Nhat Hanh — Mindfulness, Suffering, and Engaged Buddhism

We live in a world that is recreating itself one life and one digital connection at a time. On this landscape for which there are no maps, Seth Godin is a singular thought leader and innovator in what he describes as our post-industrial "connection economy." Rather than merely tolerate change, he says, we are all called now to rise to it. We are invited and stretched in whatever we do to be artists — to create in ways that matter to other people.

See more www.onbeing.org/program/seth-godin-on-the-art-of-noticing-and-then-creating/5000

Seth Godin — The Art of Noticing, and Then Creating

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

Brené Brown — The Courage to Be Vulnerable

Often quoted, but rarely interviewed, Mary Oliver is one of our greatest and most beloved poets. At 79, she honors us with an intimate conversation 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

In her TED talks that have been viewed by millions of people, and the research she does for Match.com, Helen Fisher wields science as a sobering, if entertaining, lens on what feel like the most meaningful encounters of our lives. She is a leading anthropologist/explorer on the new frontier of seeing inside our brains when love and sex happen. In this wonderfully personal conversation, she reveals how we can take this knowledge as a form of power, to give conscious new meaning to the thrilling and sometimes treacherous human realms of love, sex, and marriage.

See more at www.onbeing.org/program/helen-fisher-love-and-sex-and-attachment/7288

Helen Fisher — Love and Sex and Attachment

What would it take to make our national encounter with gay marriage redemptive rather than divisive? David Blankenhorn and Jonathan Rauch came to the gay marriage debate from very different directions — but with a shared concern about the institution of marriage. Now, they’re pursuing a different way for all of us to grapple with the future of marriage, redefined. They model a fresh way forward as the subject of same-sex marriage is before the Supreme Court. 

See more at www.onbeing.org/program/future-marriage-david-blankenhorn-and-jonathan-rauch/4883

David Blankenhorn and Jonathan Rauch — The Future of Marriage

Journalist, novelist and travel writer Pico Iyer has become one of our most eloquent explorers of what he calls the "inner world" — in himself and in the 21st Century world at large. He travels the globe from Ethiopia to North Korea and lives in Japan. But he also experiences a remote Benedictine hermitage as his second home, retreating there many times each year. In this intimate conversation, we explore the discoveries he's making and his practice of "the art of stillness.”

See more at www.onbeing.org/program/pico-iyer-the-art-of-stillness/7615


Pico Iyer — The Art of Stillness

“Race is a little bit like gravity,” john powell says: experienced by all, understood by the few. He is an esteemed legal scholar and thinker who counsels all kinds of people and projects on the front lines of our present racial anguish and longings. Race is relational, he reminds us. It’s as much about whiteness as about color. And it largely plays out, as we’re learning through new science, in our unconscious minds. john powell is steeped in this new learning and offers it to us, as a form of everyday power, to animate our belonging to others that is already real. But we must claim it.

See more at www.onbeing.org/program/john-a-powell-opening-the-question-of-race-to-the-question-of-belonging/7695

john a. powell — Opening the Question of Race to the Question of Belonging

Ellen Langer is a social psychologist who some have dubbed “the mother of mindfulness.” But she defines mindfulness with counterintuitive simplicity: the simple act of actively noticing things — with a result of increased health, competence, and happiness. Her take on mindfulness has never involved contemplation or meditation or yoga. It comes straight out of her provocative, unconventional studies, which have been suggesting for decades what neuroscience is pointing at now: our experience of everything is formed by the words and ideas we attach to them. What makes a vacation a vacation is not only a change of scenery — but the fact that we let go of the mindless everyday illusion that we are in control. Ellen Langer has shown it’s possible to become physiologically younger through a changed frame of mind; to find joy in what was experienced as drudgery by renaming it as play; and to induce weight loss by substituting the label “exercise” for labor.

See more at www.onbeing.org/program/ellen-langer-science-of-mindlessness-and-mindfulness/6332


Ellen Langer — Science of Mindlessness and Mindfulness

More than 30 objects on the moon are named after the Jesuits who mapped it. A Jesuit was one of the founders of modern astrophysics. And four Jesuits in history, including Ignatius of Loyola, have had asteroids named after them – Brother Guy Consolmagno and Father George Coyne being the two living men with this distinction. In a conversation filled with friendship and laughter, and in honor of the visit of Pope Francis to the U.S., we experience the spacious way they think about science, the universe, and the love of God.

See more at www.onbeing.org/program/asteroids-stars-and-love-god/68

Guy Consolmagno and George Coyne — Asteroids, Stars, and the Love of God

“Let death be what takes us,” Dr. B.J. Miller has written, “not a lack of imagination.” As a palliative care physician, he brings a design sensibility to the matter of living until we die. And he’s largely redesigned his sense of own physical presence after an accident at college left him without both of his legs and part of one arm. He offers a transformative reframing on our imperfect bodies, the ways we move through the world, and all that we don’t control.

See more at www.onbeing.org/program/bj-miller-reframing-our-relationship-to-that-we-don-t-control/8380

B.J. Miller — Reframing Our Relationship to That We Don't Control

“Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet / confinement of your aloneness / to learn / anything or anyone / that does not bring you alive / is too small for you.”

David Whyte is a poet and philosopher who believes in the power of a “beautiful question” amidst the drama of work as well as the drama of life — amidst the ways the two overlap, whether we want them to or not. He shared a deep friendship with the late Irish philosopher John O’Donohue. They were, David Whyte says, like “two bookends.” More recently, he’s written about the consolation, nourishment, and underlying meaning of everyday words.

Find more www.onbeing.org/program/david-whyte-the-conversational-nature-of-reality/8560

David Whyte — The Conversational Nature of Reality

Nobel physicist Frank Wilczek sees beauty as a compass for truth, discovery, and meaning. His book, A Beautiful Question, is a long meditation on the question: “Does the world embody beautiful ideas?” He’s the unusual scientist willing to analogize his discoveries about the deep structure of reality with deep meaning in the human everyday.

Find more at www.onbeing.org/program/frank-wilczek-why-is-the-world-so-beautiful/8565

Frank Wilczek — Why Is the World So Beautiful?

Where does it hurt? That’s a question the civil rights icon Ruby Sales learned to ask during the days of that movement. It’s a question we scarcely know how to ask in public life now, but it gets at human dynamics that we are living and reckoning with. At a convening of 20 theologians seeking to reimagine the public good of theology for this century, Ruby Sales unsettles some of what we think we know about the force of religion in civil rights history, and names a “spiritual crisis of white America” as a calling of this time.

On Being with Krista Tippett

Ruby Sales — Where Does It Hurt?

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 non-fiction, "The Warmth of Other Suns." She's immersed herself in the stories of the Great Migration, the diaspora of six million African Americans to the north of the U.S. in the 20th century. It's a carrier of untold histories and truths that help make sense of human and social challenges newly visible at the heart of our life together.

Isabel Wilkerson — The Heart Is the Last Frontier

Before Pope Francis, James Martin was perhaps the best-loved Jesuit in American life. He’s followed the calling of St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order, to “find God in all things” — and for him that means being a writer of books, an editor of America magazine, and as a wise and witty presence on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. To delve into Fr. Martin's way of being in the world is to discover the "spiritual exercises" St. Ignatius designed to be accessible to everyone more than six centuries ago.

James Martin  — Finding God in All Things

Could we learn to talk about whiteness? The writer Eula Biss has been thinking and writing about being white and raising white children in a multi-racial world for a long time. She helpfully opens up words and ideas like “complacence,” “guilt,” and something related to privilege called “opportunity hoarding.” To be in this uncomfortable conversation is to realize how these words alone, taken seriously, can shake us up in necessary ways — but also how the limits of words make these conversations at once more messy and more urgent.

On Being with Krista Tippett 

Eula Biss — Let’s Talk About Whiteness

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

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

The African-American spiritual is the source from which gospel, jazz, blues, and hip-hop evolved. We celebrate the life of Joe Carter, who explored the meaning of the Negro spiritual in word and song -- through its hidden meanings, as well as its beauty, lament, and hope.

See more at http://www.onbeing.org/program/joe-carter-and-legacy-african-american-spiritual/113

Podcasts to listen to

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