“There’s no question about the reality of evil, of injustice, of suffering, but at the center of this existence is a heart beating with love.” South African Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu on how his understanding of God and humanity has unfolded through the history he’s lived and shaped.
“Let’s go back and look at our faith before it was reduced to a system, before it was reduced to a system of abstractions and beliefs. How can we rediscover our faith as a series of stories and as a series of encounters?” Brian McLaren on the evolution of Christianity and the meaning of progressive Evangelicalism....
Brian McLaren is a leading Evangelical pastor and author of several books including “A Generous Orthodoxy,” “Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road?,” and the forthcoming “We Make the Road by Walking.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Brian McLaren — The Equation of Change.” Find more at onbeing.org....
Sherwin Nuland was a clinical professor of surgery at Yale University, where he also taught bioethics and medical history. His books include “How We Die,” “Lost in America,” “Maimonides,” and “How We Live: The Wisdom of the Body.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Sherwin Nuland — The Biology of the Spirit.” Find more at onbeing.org....
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....
Bobby McFerrin is a ten-time Grammy Award winner. He is one of the world’s best-known vocal innovators and improvisers, a world-renowned classical conductor, and a passionate spokesman for music education. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Bobby McFerrin — Catching Song.” Find more at onbeing.org....
He is a genius of improvisation; a genre-bending vocal magician and conductor. And he sings the territory between music, mystery, and spirit. Who better to contemplate the human voice — its delights, its revelations, and its mystery — than Bobby McFerrin?
The writers Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy, social activist Dorothy Day, and the Trappist monk Thomas Merton — all four shared a complex Catholic faith. Paul Elie takes us on a kind of literary pilgrimage through a Catholic imagination that still resonates in our time.
Paul Elie is a senior fellow with the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and the director of the American Pilgrimage Project. His books include “The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage” and “Reinventing Bach.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Paul Elie — Faith Fired by Literature.” Find more at onbeing.org....
David Hartman was an Orthodox rabbi and founder of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. He authored many books, including “A Heart of Many Rooms” and “The God Who Hates Lies.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “David Hartman — Hope in a Hopeless God.” Find more at onbeing.org....
David Hartman died a year ago this week. The Orthodox rabbi was a charismatic and challenging figure in Israeli society, called a “public philosopher for the Jewish people” and a “champion of adaptive Judaism.” We remember his window into the unfolding of his tradition in the modern world — Judaism as a lens on the human condition....
Ursula King is Professor Emerita of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Bristol. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Ursula King, Andrew Revkin, and David Sloan Wilson — Teilhard de Chardin’s “Planetary Mind” and Our Spiritual Evolution.” Find more at onbeing.org....
The coming stage of evolution, Teilhard de Chardin said, won’t be driven by physical adaptation but by human consciousness, creativity, and spirit. We visit with his biographer Ursula King, and we experience his ideas energizing New York Times Dot Earth blogger Andrew Revkin and evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson.
Patrick Bellegarde-Smith is a professor at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee and author of many books about Vodou. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Patrick Bellegarde-Smith — Living Vodou.” Find more at onbeing.org.
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....
Talk show pioneer Phil Donahue opens up on his remarkable perspective on the last half century of America and who we are now. He shares his personal transformations on race, gender roles, and parenting in the dramatic era he captured on television.
In this unedited interview, talk show pioneer Phil Donahue opens up on his remarkable perspective on the last half century of America and who we are now. He shares with Krista Tippett his personal transformations on race, gender roles, and parenting in the dramatic era he captured on television....
What might words like repentance or forgiveness mean, culturally, in this moment? These are questions of the emerging church, a loosely-defined movement that crosses generations, theologies and social ideologies in the hope of reimagining Christianity. With Phyllis Tickle and Vincent Harding, an honest and sometimes politically incorrect conversation on coming to terms with racial identity in the church and in the world....
This is the unedited version of On Being’s produced show, “Racial Identity in the Emerging Church and the World.” Emerging church elder Phyllis Tickle and civil rights veteran Vincent Harding in an honest and sometimes politically incorrect conversation on coming to terms with racial identity in the church and in the world....
Parallel realities and the deep structure of space-time sound like science fiction. These are matters of real scientific inquiry. Lord Martin Rees is an astrophysicist and self-professed atheist who paints a fascinating picture of how we might be changed by what we do not yet know.
Some of the biggest philosophical and ethical questions of this century may be raised on scientific frontiers — as we gain a better understanding of the deep structure of space and time and the wilder “microworld.” Astrophysicist Martin Rees paints a fascinating picture of how we might be changed by what we do not yet know: “If science teaches me anything, it teaches me that even simple things like an atom are fairly hard to understand. And that makes me skeptical of anyone who claims to have th...
What if we understand death as a developmental stage — like adolescence or mid-life? Dr. Ira Byock is a leading figure in palliative care and hospice in the United States. He says we lose sight of “the remarkable value” of the time of life we call dying if we forget that it’s always a personal and human event, and not just a medical one. From his place on this medical frontier, he shares how we can understand dying as a time of learning, repair, and completion of our lives....
What if we understand death as a developmental stage — like adolescence or mid-life? Dr. Ira Byock shares how we can understand dying as a time of learning, repair, and completion of our lives. Krista Tippett interviewed Dr. Ira Byock on March 2, 2012. This interview is included in the show “Contemplating Mortality.” Download the produced show at onbeing.org....
The light and smells in places like hospitals can often depress us. And, our favorite room at home keeps us sane. But why? Immunologist Esther Sternberg explains the scientific research revealing how physical spaces create stress and make us sick — and how good design can trigger our “brain’s internal pharmacies” and help heal us....
Krista Tippett spoke with immunologist Esther Sternberg on March 30, 2012. This unedited interview is included in our show, “The Science of Healing Places.” Download the mp3 of the produced show at onbeing.org.
David Sloan Wilson believes that evolution is not just a description of how we got here. He says it can also be a tool kit for improving how we live together. He’s taken what he’s learned in studying evolution in animals and is now applying it to the behavior of groups in his hometown of Binghamton, New York. His goal is to help people behave pro-socially — at their best, and for the good of the whole. This is Krista Tippett’s complete, unabridged conversation with David Sloan Wilson that’s incl...
David Sloan Wilson believes that evolution is not just a description of how we got here. He says it can also be a tool kit for improving how we live together. He’s taken what he’s learned in studying evolution in animals and is now applying it to the behavior of groups in his hometown of Binghamton, New York. His goal is to help people behave pro-socially — at their best, and for the good of the whole....
Mathematical equations are like sonnets says Keith Devlin. What most of us learn in school, he says, doesn’t begin to convey what mathematics is. And technology may free more of us to discover the wonder of mathematical thinking — as a reflection of the inner world of our minds....
Keith Devlin is a mathematician and executive director of H-STAR at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. Krista Tippett spoke with him on July 11, 2013. This interview is included in our show “The Joy of Math.” Download the mp3 of the produced show at onbeing.org.
What happens when you bring together science and poetry on something like color or light? Arthur Zajonc is a physicist and contemplative. And he says we can all investigate life as vigorously from the inside as from the outside.
