We are called to consider who we want to be as a people and what kind of world we will build with and for our children. Karen Murphy has been gathering wisdom for this juncture, as she’s worked around the world with teachers and educators in societies moving toward repair after histories of violence. We learn from her about how to prepare ourselves in the U.S. for the civic healing that we are called to ahead. Karen Murphy creates curricula, trains teachers, and leads global gatherings for Facin...
Nov 05, 2020•51 min•Ep. 895
We are called to consider who we want to be as a people and what kind of world we will build with and for our children. Karen Murphy has been gathering wisdom for this juncture, as she’s worked around the world with teachers and educational systems in societies moving toward repair after histories of violence. We learn from her about how to prepare ourselves in the U.S. for the civic healing that we are called to ahead. Karen Murphy creates curricula, trains teachers, and leads global gatherings...
Nov 05, 2020•1 hr 44 min•Ep. 894
Mary Oliver reads her poem, “ Wild Geese .” This poem is included in our “Taking the Long View” playlist on Spotify , which we created to get grounded in reflection that will be with us the day after the U.S. election and far beyond, whoever wins. Find more of Mary’s poems on our website, where we’ve recently launched an entirely new way to Experience Poetry ....
Oct 30, 2020•1 min
Elizabeth Alexander reads her poem, “ Ars Poetica #100: I Believe .” This poem is included in our “Taking the Long View” playlist on Spotify , which we created to get grounded in reflection that will be with us the day after the U.S. election and far beyond, whoever wins. Find more of Elizabeth’s poems on our website, where we’ve recently launched an entirely new way to Experience Poetry ....
Oct 30, 2020•1 min
Pádraig Ó Tuama reads his poem, “ The Facts of Life .” This poem is included in our “Taking the Long View” playlist on Spotify , which we created to get grounded in reflection that will be with us the day after the U.S. election and far beyond, whoever wins. Find more of Pádraig’s poems on our website, where we’ve recently launched an entirely new way to Experience Poetry ....
Oct 30, 2020•3 min
Gregory Orr reads his poem, “ This is what was bequeathed us .” This poem is included in our “Taking the Long View” playlist on Spotify , which we created to get grounded in reflection that will be with us the day after the U.S. election and far beyond, whoever wins. Find more of Gregory’s poems on our website, where we’ve recently launched an entirely new way to Experience Poetry ....
Oct 30, 2020•2 min
Richard Blanco reads his poem, “ America the Beautiful Again .” This poem is included in our “Taking the Long View” playlist on Spotify , which we created to get grounded in reflection that will be with us the day after the U.S. election and far beyond, whoever wins. Find more of Richard’s poems on our website, where we’ve recently launched an entirely new way to Experience Poetry ....
Oct 30, 2020•3 min
The U.S. election will be over soon but this year has surfaced deep human challenges that remain our callings — and possibilities for growth — for the foreseeable future. So this week and next, we’re taking the long view — first with journalist John Biewen, on the stories of our families and hometowns, what it means to be human, and what it means to be white. This conversation between Krista and John starts simply — tracing the racial story of our time through the story of a single life. It’s an...
Oct 29, 2020•51 min•Ep. 888
The U.S. election will be over soon but this year has surfaced deep human challenges that remain our callings — and possibilities for growth — for the foreseeable future. So this week and next, we’re taking the long view — first with journalist John Biewen, on the stories of our families and hometowns, what it means to be human, and what it means to be white. This conversation between Krista and John starts simply — tracing the racial story of our time through the story of a single life. It’s an...
Oct 29, 2020•1 hr 46 min•Ep. 887
An hour to sit with, and be filled. Two voices — one from the last century, one from ours — who inspire inward contemplation as an essential part of meeting the challenges in the world. Howard Thurman’s book Jesus and the Disinherited , it was said, was carried by Martin Luther King Jr. alongside the Bible and the U.S. Constitution. Thurman is remembered as a philosopher and theologian, a moral anchor, a contemplative, a prophet, and pastor to the civil rights leaders. Rev. Otis Moss III, himsel...
Oct 15, 2020•51 min•Ep. 884
An hour to sit with, and be filled. Two voices — one from the last century, one from ours — who inspire inward contemplation as an essential part of meeting the challenges in the world. Howard Thurman’s book Jesus and the Disinherited , it was said, was carried by Martin Luther King Jr. alongside the Bible and the U.S. Constitution. Thurman is remembered as a philosopher and theologian, a moral anchor, a contemplative, a prophet, and pastor to the civil rights leaders. Rev. Otis Moss III, himsel...
Oct 15, 2020•1 hr 23 min•Ep. 883
After Arlie Hochschild published her book Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right , just before the 2016 election, it came to feel prescient. And the conversation Krista had with her in 2018 has now come to point straight to the heart of 2020 — a year in which many of us might say we feel like strangers in our own land and in our own world. Hochschild created a field within sociology looking at the social impact of emotion. She explains how our stories and truths — ...
Oct 08, 2020•51 min•Ep. 882
After Arlie Hochschild published her book Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right , just before the 2016 election, it came to feel prescient. And the conversation Krista had with her in 2018 has now come to point straight to the heart of 2020 — a year in which many of us might say we feel like strangers in our own land and in our own world. Hochschild created a field within sociology looking at the social impact of emotion. She explains how our stories and truths — ...
Oct 08, 2020•1 hr 27 min•Ep. 881
The poet Jericho Brown reminds us to bear witness to the complexity of the human experience, to interrogate the proximity of violence to love, and to look and listen closer so that we might uncover the small truths and surprises in life. His presence is irreverent and magnetic, as the high school students who joined us for this conversation experienced firsthand at the 2018 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. And now he’s won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Editor’s note: This interview disc...
Oct 01, 2020•51 min•Ep. 880
The poet Jericho Brown reminds us to bear witness to the complexity of the human experience, to interrogate the proximity of violence to love, and to look and listen closer so that we might uncover the small truths and surprises in life. His presence is irreverent and magnetic, as the high school students who joined us for this conversation experienced firsthand at the 2018 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. And now he’s won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Editor’s note: This interview disc...
Oct 01, 2020•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 879
We’re happy to share the first episode of the new season of Poetry Unbound with host Pádraig Ó Tuama. This poem by Ada Limón tells the story of a person living with invisible chronic pain who finds unexpected fortitude from a girl dressed as a superhero. Their encounter, “at the swell of the muddy Mississippi,” doesn’t have a fantasy ending, but instead finds strength and glory in bodies and myth. Subscribe to Poetry Unbound on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , Google Podcasts , Overcast , or wherever ...
Sep 28, 2020•16 min•Ep. 878
Poetry rises up in human societies in times of crisis when official words fail us and we lose sight of how to find our way back to one another; how to hear each other’s voices. This week we offer a preview of the next season of our Poetry Unbound podcast, which returns on Monday, Sept. 28. Each episode takes a single poem as its center, with host Pádraig Ó Tuama reading the poem and meditating on it. In this hour, we dwell with six poems that accompany the struggle, strangeness, and possibilitie...
Sep 24, 2020•51 min•Ep. 877
Music is a source of solace and nourishment in the best of times and the hardest of times. It has been for so many of us in this year of pandemic, and Cloud Cult is on every playlist Krista makes. Craig Minowa started the band in 1995. Its trajectory was cathartically changed the day he and his wife Connie woke up to find that their firstborn two-year-old son, Kaidin, had mysteriously died in his sleep. The music that has emerged ever since has spanned the human experience from the rawest grief ...
Sep 17, 2020•51 min•Ep. 876
Music is a source of solace and nourishment in the best of times and the hardest of times. It has been for so many of us in this year of pandemic, and Cloud Cult is on every playlist Krista makes. Craig Minowa started the band in 1995. Its trajectory was cathartically changed the day he and his wife Connie woke up to find that their firstborn two-year-old son, Kaidin, had mysteriously died in his sleep. The music that has emerged ever since has spanned the human experience from the rawest grief ...
Sep 17, 2020•1 hr 25 min•Ep. 875
This prophetic conversation, which Rev. angel Kyodo williams had with Krista in 2018, is an invitation to imagine and nourish the transformative potential of this moment — toward human wholeness. Rev. angel is an esteemed Zen priest and the second Black woman recognized as a teacher in the Japanese Zen lineage. She is one of our wisest voices on social evolution and the spiritual aspect of social healing. angel Kyodo williams is a Zen priest, activist, and teacher. She’s the author of Being Blac...
Sep 10, 2020•51 min•Ep. 874
A companion conversation to this week’s On Being episode — Krista catches up with Rev. angel Kyodo williams on how she’s keeping her fearlessness alive through pandemic and rupture. Krista Tippett created and leads The On Being Project and hosts the On Being radio show and podcast. She’s a National Humanities Medalist, and The New York Times bestselling author of Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living . Read her full bio here . angel Kyodo williams is a Zen priest, activist...
Sep 10, 2020•31 min•Ep. 873
This prophetic conversation, which Rev. angel Kyodo williams had with Krista in 2018, is an invitation to imagine and nourish the transformative potential of this moment — toward human wholeness. Rev. angel is an esteemed Zen priest and the second Black woman recognized as a teacher in the Japanese Zen lineage. She is one of our wisest voices on social evolution and the spiritual aspect of social healing. angel Kyodo williams is a Zen priest, activist, and teacher. She’s the author of Being Blac...
Sep 10, 2020•1 hr 27 min•Ep. 872
“The sudden passionate happiness which the natural world can occasionally trigger in us may well be the most serious business of all,” Michael McCarthy writes. He is a naturalist and journalist with a galvanizing call — that we stop relying on the immobilizing language of statistics and take up our joy in nature as our defense of it. And he reminds us that the natural world is where we first found our metaphors and similes and it is the resting place for our psyches. Michael McCarthy is a natura...
Aug 27, 2020•51 min•Ep. 869
“The sudden passionate happiness which the natural world can occasionally trigger in us may well be the most serious business of all,” Michael McCarthy writes. He is a naturalist and journalist with a galvanizing call — that we stop relying on the immobilizing language of statistics and take up our joy in nature as our defense of it. And he reminds us that the natural world is where we first found our metaphors and similes and it is the resting place for our psyches. Michael McCarthy is a natura...
Aug 27, 2020•1 hr 37 min•Ep. 868
Dario Robleto has been called a sculptural artist, a philosopher, and a “materialist poet.” He works with unconventional materials — from dinosaur fossils and meteorites to pulverized vintage records — and has been a creative partner to an eclectic range of projects. At the heart of his work is a fascination with human survival and the creative response to loss. Dario Robleto is an artist-at-large at the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University. His work has been displayed at g...
Aug 13, 2020•51 min•Ep. 865
Dario Robleto has been called a sculptural artist, a philosopher, and a “materialist poet.” He works with unconventional materials — from dinosaur fossils and meteorites to pulverized vintage records — and has been a creative partner to an eclectic range of projects. At the heart of his work is a fascination with human survival and the creative response to loss. Dario Robleto is an artist-at-large at the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University. His work has been displayed at g...
Aug 13, 2020•1 hr 28 min•Ep. 864
Marilyn Nelson is a storytelling poet who has taught poetry and contemplative practice to college students and West Point cadets. She brings a contemplative eye to ordinary goodness in the present and to complicated ancestries we’re all reckoning with now. And she imparts a spacious perspective on what “communal pondering” might mean. Marilyn Nelson is a professor emerita of English at the University of Connecticut and a former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She is the recipient of...
Jul 30, 2020•51 min•Ep. 861
Marilyn Nelson is a storytelling poet who has taught poetry and contemplative practice to college students and West Point cadets. She brings a contemplative eye to ordinary goodness in the present and to complicated ancestries we’re all reckoning with now. And she imparts a spacious perspective on what “communal pondering” might mean. Marilyn Nelson is a professor emerita of English at the University of Connecticut and a former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She is the recipient of...
Jul 30, 2020•1 hr 55 min•Ep. 861
An extraordinary conversation with the late congressman John Lewis, taped in Montgomery, Alabama, during a pilgrimage 50 years after the March on Washington. It offers a rare look inside his wisdom, the civil rights leaders’ spiritual confrontation within themselves, and the intricate art of nonviolence as “love in action.” John Lewis was a member of the United States House of Representatives from Georgia’s 5th Congressional District. He is the author of Walking With the Wind: A Memoir of the Mo...
Jul 23, 2020•51 min•Ep. 860
An extraordinary conversation with the late congressman John Lewis, taped in Montgomery, Alabama, during a pilgrimage 50 years after the March on Washington. It offers a rare look inside his wisdom, the civil rights leaders’ spiritual confrontation within themselves, and the intricate art of nonviolence as “love in action.” John Lewis was a member of the United States House of Representatives from Georgia’s 5th Congressional District. He is the author of Walking With the Wind: A Memoir of the Mo...
Jul 23, 2020•1 hr•Ep. 859
