Excerpt from Chapter One of Speaking of Faith
by Krista Tippett
Genesis: How We Got Here
What is faith? What is religion? What is spirituality? Each of these words is difficult for some of us and richly meaningful for others. Together they describe an aspect of human experience that has taken our age by surprise. I want to explore this surprise in all its complexity and variety, and to set our common encounter with it on a new footing. Some say, I know, that religious passions are the cause of our culture's worst divisions, and a threat to democracy and civilization here and abroad. But I think the truth is more broadly and deeply rooted in the human psyche and spirit. Every institution and essential human question is up for grabs in our time — definitions of the beginning and the end of life, of gender and marriage, of community and government. The unresolved issues before us touch realms of intimacy where it is impossible to be merely rational. We respond by clamping down fiercely, at both ends of the spectrum of our public life, on the answers we do have. Our sacred traditions could help us live more thoughtfully, generously, and hopefully with the tensions of our age. But to grasp that, we must look anew at the nature of faith, and at what it might really mean to take religion seriously in human life and in the world.
In the pages that follow, I describe an adventure of conversation across the world's traditions that has opened my imagination — spiritual, political, intellectual, and personal. I believe that what most Americans want, whether they are religious or not, is for the religious voice in our public life to be more constructive — to reflect the capacity religion has to nourish lives and communities. I illustrate a way to speak about faith that defuses the usual minefields. I explore light shed by my conversation partners on the great issues of our time, from the depths of their knowledge and experience in the world. They are theologians and scientists, educators and physicians, social activists and poets. We trace a powerful and creative and humbling line between theology and human experience — between religious ideas and real life. This is religion as it works in the lives of the many, not in the debates and headlines of a few.
As a journalist I'm committed to drawing out the contours and depths of what I call "the vast middle" — left, right, and center between the poles of competing answers that have hardened our cultural discourse. In the vast middle, faith is as much about questioning as it is about certainties. It is possible to be a believer and a listener at the same time, to be both fervent and searching, to nurture a vital identity and to wonder at the identities of others.
I am not out to excuse or downplay the damage religion does. But I believe that the spiritual energy of our time is tapping into the only sufficiently powerful counterweight we have against religious excesses. Real change will only emerge from critique and ferment inside religious traditions themselves. I have encountered a great deal of religious grief these past years. My conversation partners insist on an honest appraisal of the destructive energies alive in their faiths. But they also long for a nuanced appraisal-one intelligent enough to take the time and care to unravel extremism from devotion, to distinguish between what is ideological and what is human.
Of this I'm certain: the religious energy of our world now is not in essence a rejection of all the disciplines by which we've ordered our common life for many decades — law, politics, economics, science. It is, rather, a realization that these disciplines have a limited scope. They can't ask ultimate questions of morality and meaning. Our most heated debates — on marriage, or stem-cell research, or abortion — defy the boundaries of legal rulings and political rights into which we've attempted to fit them. They drive back to the mysteries of human life and human sexuality. They are prisms for deep questions about identity, relationship, and love in our time. They also arouse fierce human impulses both to question difference and to defend it. We can construct factual accounts and systems from DNA, gross national product, legal code — but they don't begin to tell us how to order our astonishments, what matters in a life, what matters in a death, how to love, how we can be of service to one another. These are the kinds of questions religion arose to address, and religious traditions are keepers of conversation across generations about them. I've seen a tapestry unfurled, both ancient and in progress like the whole of creation, a bearer of truths that arguments cannot contain. I must tell of these things, and how they meet my own deepest longings for truth, beauty, and hope.
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Speaking of Faith —
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"In a day where religion — or, rather arguments over religion — divide us into ever more entrenched and frustrated camps, Krista Tippett is exactly the measured, balanced commentator we need. Her intelligence is like a salve for all thinking people who have felt wounded or marginalized by The God Wars. This is a book not only about the universal need for prayer, but also about the ever-more-rare human virtue of thought."
—Elizabeth Gilbert
author of Eat, Pray, Love
"Speaking of Faith is of monumental importance and a source of light in a day and age when the darkness of intolerance, ignorance and hate blinds humanity from itself."
—Dr. Khaled Abou El Fadl
professor of law, UCLA and author of The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists
"I inhaled (this book) in one great life affirming breath."
—Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen
author of Table Wisdom and My Grandfather's Blessings
"Krista Tippett manages to claim the middle space-a very large, inclusive space-where most of us live most of the time, a place in which we must ponder and live the abiding questions of faith, doubt and meaning that have been at the heart of human experience from time immemorial."
—Patricia Hampl
"The brilliance of Krista Tippett's idea is to trust people to use the first person singular, to commit themselves with passion and clarity as they enlarge our urgent national conversation."
–Martin Marty
emeritus professor of American religious history, University of Chicago
"This a wonderful book. I deeply appreciate Krista Tippett's refusal to stigmatize — whether Islam or Christian evangelicals. She has created an original and authentic place in the great debate of our time."
–Yossi Klein Halevi
author of At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew's Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land
"More than a personal chronicle, however, this is a rigorously brainy piece of work, as informed by the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Reinhold Niebuhr, Charles Darwin and Annie Dillard as it is by Tippett's fascinating interviews with figures like Elie Wiesel and Karen Armstrong. As Tippett takes on issues from the science-and-religion debates to the future of progressive Islam, she shows herself to possess the same 'imaginative intellectual approach' that she admires in some of her interview subjects."
—Publishers Weekly
"This book is a marvel. Krista Tippett is in the front rank of fluent writers of English. Her love of the language suffuses every page. I suspect that Speaking of Faith will soon join the constellation of 'Dakota' and 'Traveling Mercies' as a provoker and reassurer. Krista Tippett's contribution to the understanding of Islam can be of unique importance. But it's not just head-understanding that she makes possible. It's ubuntu — a concept she describes from her interviews with Africans, a sense of our common and interdependent humanity."
—Patrick Henry
former Executive Director of the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research
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