Best On Being with Krista Tippett episodes upvoted by the community

Amichai Lau-Lavie — First Aid for Spiritual Seekers

July 13, 2017

Forms of religious devotion are shifting just like every institution right now. But there’s a new world of creativity towards crafting spiritual life while exploring the depths of tradition. Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie is a fun and forceful embodiment of this evolution. Born into an eminent and ancient rabbinical lineage, as a young adult he moved away from religion towards storytelling, theater, and drag. Today he leads a pop-up synagogue in New York City that takes as its tagline, “everybody-friendly, artist-driven, God-optional.” It’s not merely about spiritual community but about recovering the sacred and reinventing the very meaning of “we.”

[Unedited] Leonard Mlodinow with Krista Tippett

October 06, 2016

Leonard Mlodinow is a physicist, and the author of several books including “The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives” and “Feynman’s Rainbow: A Search for Beauty in Physics and in Life.” He’s also written for television, including “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Leonard Mlodinow — Randomness and Choice.” Find more at onbeing.org.

Maira Kalman — The Normal, Daily Things We Fall in Love With

September 07, 2017

To be in conversation with Maira Kalman is like wandering into one of her cartoons in The New Yorker. Millions have been prompted to smile and think by Maira Kalman’s illustrated revision of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style or a New York Times blog or her lovely books and her drawings about dogs. Her words and pictures bring life's whimsy and quirkiness into relief right alongside its intrinsic seriousness, its most curious truths.

Coleen Rowley and Tim McGuire — Work and Conscience (February 12, 2004)

February 12, 2004

Host Krista Tippett explores the practical implications of spirituality at work with Federal Bureau of Investigations special agent and whistleblower Coleen Rowley and syndicated columnist Tim McGuire. In May 2002, Rowley wrote a now-famous 13-page letter to Robert Mueller, Director of the FBI. In it, Rowley raised serious and detailed concerns about how the FBI had handled leads prior to the September 11th attacks.

Joe Henry — The Mystery and Adventure of Life and Songwriting

June 30, 2016

In life as in song, Joe Henry says “we’re really called not to dispel mystery but to abide it, to engage it.” He brings an inward wisdom to the art and craft of making music. Cherished by fans and fellow musicians alike, he’s produced a dozen albums of his own and for an array of artists, including Ani DiFranco, Elvis Costello, Bonnie Raitt, Allen Toussaint, and Billy Bragg. And he’s written songs together with Rosanne Cash and Madonna. With Joe Henry, we probe the mystery and adventure of discovering life through music.

David Fox-Benton and Bruce Weigl — Sacrifice and Reconciliation

May 27, 2004

In remembering the legacy of four World War II chaplains -- Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish -- who went down together with their torpedoed ship in 1943, we speak with David Fox, nephew of one of the chaplains. We also hear interviews with surviving veterans and veterans of the German ship that torpedoed them. Finally, a conversation with author, poet, and Vietnam War veteran Bruce Weigl. His most recent book, The Circle of Hahn, chronicles the long personal journey he has made back to Vietnam and to the adoption of a beloved Vietnamese child. The paradox of his life as a writer, he says, is that the war ruined his life and gave him his voice.

Richard Rohr — Living in Deep Time

April 13, 2017

Men of all ages say Richard Rohr has given them a new way in to spiritual depth and religious thought — through his writing and retreats. This conversation with the Franciscan spiritual teacher delves into the expansive scope of his ideas: male formation and what he calls “father hunger”; why contemplation is as magnetic to people now, including millennials, as it’s ever been; and how to set about taking the first half of life — the drive to “successful survival” — all the way to meaning.

Ruby Sales — Where Does It Hurt?

August 17, 2017

The civil rights icon Ruby Sales names “a spiritual crisis of white America” as a calling of this time. During the days of the movement, she learned to ask the question, “Where does it hurt?” 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. A probing conversation at a convening of 20 theologians seeking to reimagine the public good of theology for this century.

[Unedited] Carlo Rovelli with Krista Tippett

April 26, 2018

“We don’t understand the world as made by stones — by things. We understand the world made by kisses, or things like kisses: happenings. Carlo Rovelli offers vast, complex ideas beyond most of our imagining — “quanta,” “grains of space,” “time and the heat of black holes” — and condenses them into spare, beautiful words that render them newly explicable and moving. He is the scientist behind the global bestseller “Seven Brief Lessons on Physics,” and for him, all of reality is interaction — an everyday truth as scientific as it is philosophical and political. His physicist’s way of seeing the world helps make sense of what he calls “the huge wave of happenings” that is the human self. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Carlo Rovelli — All Reality is Interaction.” Find more at onbeing.org.

Devendra Banhart — ‘When Things Fall Apart’

May 07, 2020 • 51m

In this “spiritual book club” edition of the show, Krista and musician/artist Devendra Banhart read favorite passages and discuss When Things Fall Apart, a small book of great beauty by the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön. It’s a work — like all works of spiritual genius — that speaks from the nooks and crannies and depths of a particular tradition, while conveying truths about humanity writ large. Their conversation speaks with special force to what it means to be alive and looking for meaning right now.Devendra Banhart is a visual artist, musician, songwriter, and poet. His albums include Ma, Mala, What Will We Be, Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon, and Cripple Crow, among others. His book of poetry is Weeping Gang Bliss Void Yab-Yum.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org

Ocean Vuong — A Life Worthy of Our Breath

April 30, 2020 • 51m

Krista interviewed the writer Ocean Vuong on March 8 in a joyful room full of podcast makers at On Air Fest in Brooklyn. None of us would have guessed that within a handful of days such an event would become unimaginable. So this conversation holds a last memory before the world shifted on its axis. More stunning is how exquisitely Ocean Vuong spoke on that day to the world we have now entered — its heartbreak, its poetry, and its possibilities of both destroying and saving.Ocean Vuong is an assistant professor of English in the MFA Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the author of the poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds, which won the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Whiting Award; and a novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. He was a 2019 MacArthur Fellow.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org 

[Unedited] Junot Díaz with Krista Tippett

September 14, 2017

“From the bottom will the genius come that makes our ability to live with each other possible. I believe that with all my heart.” These are the words of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Dominican-American writer Junot Díaz. His hope is fiercely reality-based, a product of centuries lodged in his body of African-Caribbean suffering, survival, and genius.

Marilyn Nelson — Communal Pondering in a Noisy World

February 23, 2017

Marilyn Nelson has taught poetry and contemplative practice to college students and to West Point cadets. She gives winsome voice to forgotten people from history, shining a light on the complicated ancestry that can help us in what she calls “communal pondering.” To sit with Marilyn Nelson is to gain a newly spacious perspective on what that might mean — and on why, in this troubled moment, Americans young and old are turning to poetry with urgency.

Ira Byock — Contemplating Mortality

November 07, 2013

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.

Elie Wiesel — The Tragedy of the Believer

July 13, 2006

A survivor of the Holocaust, in which he lost most of his family, Wiesel was a seminal chronicler of that event and its meaning. Wiesel shares some of his thoughts on modern-day Israel and Germany, his understanding of God, and his practice of prayer after the Holocaust.

[Unedited] Vashti McKenzie with Krista Tippett

October 23, 2008

In this unedited conversation Krista Tippett interviews Vashti McKenzie, first female bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, for the produced show “Vashti McKenzie: African American. Woman. Leader.” The current U.S. presidential election has illustrated how gender, race, and religion can become lightning rods, and may be seen as potential stumbling blocks to leadership. Vashti McKenzie is a pioneering figure on all these fronts. When she became the first woman bishop of the oldest historic black church in America, she declared, “The stained glass ceiling has been pierced and broken.” We offer her story, her wisdom, and her good humor as an edifying lens on the American past, present, and future. http://onbeing.org/program/african-american-woman-leader/62

[Unedited] Mary Oliver with Krista Tippett

January 17, 2019

Mary Oliver was one of our greatest and most beloved poets. She is often quoted by people across ages and backgrounds — and it’s fitting, since she described poetry as a sacred community ritual. “When you write a poem, you write it for anybody and everybody,” she said. Mary died on January 17, 2019, at the age of 83. She was a prolific and decorated poet, whose honors included the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. In this 2015 conversation — one of the rare interviews she granted during her lifetime — she discussed the wisdom of the world, the salvation of poetry, and the life behind her writing. Mary Oliver published over 25 books of poetry and prose, including Dream Work, A Thousand Mornings, and A Poetry Handbook. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984 for her book American Primitive. Her final work, Devotions, is a curated collection of poetry from her more than 50-year career. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Mary Oliver — Listening to the World.” Find more at onbeing.org.

Claire Danes, Ellen Burstyn, Tracy K. Smith, et al. — Stories About Mystery

December 28, 2017

We often find ourselves talking to poets and writers about the vivid connections between art and faith. This special hour came out of a live collaboration between On Being and Selected Shorts at Symphony Space in New York. Claire Danes, Ellen Burstyn, Julie White, and U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith joined us with stories and poems about meaning and mystery.

[Unedited] danah boyd with Krista Tippett

July 27, 2017

Steeped in cutting edge research around the social lives of networked teens, danah boyd demystifies technology while being wise about the changes it’s making to life and relationship. She has intriguing advice on the technologically-fueled generation gaps of our age — that our children’s immersion in social media may offer a kind of respite from their over-structured, overscheduled analog lives. And that cyber-bullying is an online reflection of the offline world, and blaming technology is missing the point. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “danah boyd — The Internet of the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” Find more at onbeing.org.

[Unedited] Arnold Eisen with Krista Tippett

September 21, 2017

“In a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.” A mystic, a 20th-century religious intellectual, a social change agent, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marched alongside Martin Luther King, Jr., famously saying afterwards that he felt his legs were praying. Heschel’s poetic theological writings are still read and widely studied today. His faith was as much about “radical amazement” as it was about certainty. And he embodied the passionate social engagement of the prophets, drawing on wisdom at once provocative and nourishing.