Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippett

Listening Generously
Rachel Naomi Remen, physician and best-selling author, discusses her own lifelong struggle with chronic illness and how it has shaped her practice of medicine. She speaks about the art of listening to patients and other physicians, the difference between curing and healing, and how our losses help us to live.

A Voice for the Animals
A profound stutter as a child left Alan Rabinowitz virtually unable to communicate and to prefer animals to people. The wildlife biologist shares his insights into the animal-human bond, and also about the dramatic personal odyssey that has brought him across the years to rediscover "the human side of things."

The Ethics of Eating
Barbara Kingsolver describes an adventure her family undertook to spend one year eating primarily what they could grow or raise themselves. As a citizen and mother more than an expert, she turned her life towards questions many of us are asking. Food, she says, is a "rare moral arena" in which the ethical choice is often the pleasurable choice.

The Art of Peace
John Paul Lederach describes what really happens when people transcend violence while living in it, and so find the moral imagination to live beyond it. Also, stories you've never heard in the news — from Colombia, Nepal, Tajikistan, Sierra Leone, Northern Ireland, and Burma.

A Monastic Revolution
Shane Claiborne is a leading spirit in a gathering movement of young people known as the New Monastics. Emerging from the edges of Evangelical Christianity, they are patterning their lives in response to the needs of the poor — and the detachment they see in our culture's vision of adulthood.

Holding Life Consciously
How do parents and grandparents nurture the spiritual and moral awareness of the children in our lives? The spiritual life, Rabbi Sandy Sasso says, begins not in abstractions, but in concrete everyday experiences. And children need our questions as much as our answers.

The Spirituality of Parenting
How do parents and grandparents nurture the spiritual and moral awareness of the children in our lives? The spiritual life, Rabbi Sandy Sasso says, begins not in abstractions, but in concrete everyday experiences. And children need our questions as much as our answers.

Land, Life, and the Poetry of Creatures
Biblical scholar Ellen Davis is helping to shape a new approach to thinking about human domination of the Earth and its creatures. With her friend, the farmer and poet Wendell Berry, they speak to our collective grief at destruction of the natural world and nourish a "chastened" yet "tenacious" hope.

An Architecture of Decency
The Rural Studio in western Alabama draws architectural students into the design and construction of homes and public spaces in some of the poorest counties in the United States. They're creating beautiful and economical structures that are unique in the world — and that nurture sustainability of the natural world as of human dignity.

The Body's Grace, Matthew Sanford's Story
An unusual take on the mind-body connection with author and yoga teacher Matthew Sanford. He's been a paraplegic since the age of 13. He shares his wisdom for us all on knowing the strength and grace of our bodies even in the face of illness, aging, and death.

Who Ordered This? New Mysteries of an Expanding Universe
Astrophysicist Mario Livio works with the Hubble Telescope's findings on phenomena like dark energy and white dwarfs. We explore edges of discovery where scientific advance meets recurrent mystery — questions richer than any of their current answers.

Being Autistic,
Being Human
Jennifer Elder, an artist, and Paul Collins, a literary historian, have unearthed a vivid history of people grappling with autism, before it had a name. Through the experiences of their autistic child, they share what all of this is teaching them about what it means to be human.

Preserving Words and Worlds
Saint John's University and Abbey in rural Minnesota houses a monastic library that rescues writings from across the centuries and across the world. There are worlds in this place on palm leaf and papyrus, in microfilm and pixels. And the relevance of the past to the present is itself revealed in a new light.

Desmond Tutu's God of Surprises
An intimate and joyous conversation with the Nobel laureate on how his understanding of God and humanity has unfolded — from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission through the violence that marks South Africa today, and even in his friendship with the Dalai Lama.

Alzheimer's, Memory, and Being
Alzheimer's disease has been described as "the great unlearning," a "disease of memory," a demise of consciousness." But what does it reveal about the nature of human identity? And how might such insights help sufferers themselves? We explore this emotional, mental, and spiritual territory with Alan Dienstag.

Laying the Dead to Rest
With Mercedes Doretti, we explore the human landscape of forensic sciences and its emergence as a tool for global human rights from Ethiopia to Juarez, Mexico. We also hear from one of the disappeared, Argentinean human rights activist and poet, Alicia Partnoy.

China's Hidden Spiritual Landscape
Mayfair Yang discusses the ancient and reemerging traditions of reverence and ritual — revealing background to its approach to Tibet. And, she tells us how China gleaned some of its recent dismissive attitudes towards religion from the West.

Asteroids, Stars, and the Love of God
Four Jesuits in history have had asteroids named after them. Brother Guy Consolmagno and Father George Coyne are the two living astronomers with that distinction. They share their observations of life, faith, friendship, and the universe from their seats in the Vatican Observatory.

Getting Revenge and Forgiveness
Michael McCullough describes science that helps us comprehend how revenge came to have a purpose in human life. At the same time, he stresses, science is also revealing that human beings are more instinctively equipped for forgiveness than we've perhaps given ourselves credit for. Knowing this suggests ways to calm the revenge instinct in ourselves and others and embolden the forgiveness intuition.

Heart and Soul with Mehmet Oz
Mehmet Oz is well-known these days as a popular television and radio personality. But before that, when we interviewed him in 2004, he was busy revolutionizing the field of cardiac surgery. He speaks about the intersection of Western medicine, human spirituality, and the physiology of the human heart.

Mathematics, Purpose, + Truth
Astrophysicist Janna Levin has a special interest in the origins and shape of the universe. She's also the author of a novel that explores boundaries where science presses on great questions of meaning more often taken up by philosophy and theology: the nature of truth, free will, and purpose in life.

The Evolution of God
Robert Wright takes a relentlessly logical look at the history of religion, exposing its contradictions. Yet he also traces something "revelatory" moving through human history. In this public conversation we explore the story he tells, the import he sees in it for our culture, and where it has personally taken him.

Einstein's God
Albert Einstein's quip that "God does not play dice with the universe," was about quantum physics, not a statement of faith. But he did ponder the relationship between science and religion and his sense of "the order deeply hidden behind everything." Explore Einstein's wisdom on mystery, eternity, and the mind of God.

No More Taking Sides
Robi Damelin is an Israeli who lost her son to a Palestinian sniper; Ali Abu Awwad is a Palestinian who lost his older brother to an Israeli soldier. But in their unlikely friendship and determination, these two defy headlines of despair. They are part of a citizen-led movement to turn pain into hope.

Black & Universal
E. Ethelbert Miller is a poet, "literary activist," and long-time director of the Afro-American Studies Resource Center at Howard University. In writing and in life, his voice resembles a jazz riff more than a linear narrative. He pushes at the parameters within which mainstream America routinely sees "blackness" — political, artistic, and spiritual.

Living Vodou
Patrick Bellegarde-Smith descends from long line of Haitian philosophers and statesmen. He is a scholar of Africology and a Vodou priest. Here, he sheds clarifying light on the inner life of the Haitian people. Listening anew, we find historical and cultural context for watching Haiti's current struggle and contemplating its long process of rebuilding ahead.

A Different Kind of Capitalism — The Reinvention of Aid
The devastation of the Haiti earthquakes has deepened an ongoing debate over foreign aid, international development, and helping the poorest of the world's poor. Jacqueline Novogratz is reinventing that landscape with what she calls "patient capitalism," — charting a third way between investment for profit and aid for free.

Whale Songs and Elephant Loves
Trained as a musician, acoustic biologist Katy Payne was first to discover that humpback whales compose ever-changing song to communicate, and first to understand that elephants communicate with one another across long distances by infrasound. We hear what she has learned about life in this world from two of its largest and most mysterious creatures.

Reflections of a Former Islamist Extremist
British activist Ed Husain was seduced, at the age of 16, by revolutionary Islamist ideals that flourished at the heart of educated British culture. Yet he later shrank back from radicalism after coming close to a murder and watching people he loved become suicide bombers. He dug deeper into Islamic spirituality, and now offers a fresh and daring perspective on the way forward.

The Meaning of Intelligence
An expansive reflection on work, education, and civic imagination with an esteemed researcher and teacher at UCLA and a poetic writer. We explore his perspective, through life and scholarship, on hard subjects that drive to the heart of who we are — literacy, schooling, social class, and the deepest meaning of vocation.