On Being with Krista Tippett

For the Fourth of July, a refreshing reality check about the long road of American democracy. We remember forgotten but fascinating, useful history as we contemplate how we might help young democracies on their own tumultuous paths now.

Stuart Brown is founder and president of the National Institute for Play near Monterey, California. He is co-author of “Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Stuart Brown — Play, Spirit, and Character.” Find more at onbeing.org.

Who knew that we learn empathy, trust, irony, and problem solving through play — something the dictionary defines as “pleasurable and apparently purposeless activity.” Dr. Stuart Brown suggests that the rough-and-tumble play of children actually prevents violent behavior, and that play can grow human talents and character across a lifetime. Play, as he studies it, is an indispensable part of being...

Rosanne Cash is a Grammy award-winning singer-songwriter and author of several books. Her latest album is “The River & the Thread.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Rosanne Cash — Time Traveler.” Find more at onbeing.org.

As the daughter of Johnny Cash, singer-songwriter Rosanne Cash describes her life as “circumscribed by music.” But, it’s through her love of language and quantum mechanics that she’s finding new sources of creativity and mathematical ways to think about the divine. The mother of five shares her perspectives on being present, Twitter as a “boot camp for songwriters,” and how she wrestles with love...

Maria Tatar is the John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, where she also chairs the Program in Folklore and Mythology. Her books include “Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood” and “The Annotated Brothers Grimm.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Maria Tatar — The Great Cauldron o...

Fairy tales don’t only belong to the domain of childhood. Their overt themes are threaded throughout hit TV series like “Game of Thrones” and “True Blood,” “Grimm” and “Once Upon a Time.” These stories survive, says Maria Tatar, by adapting across cultures and history. They are carriers of the plots we endlessly re-work in the narratives of our lives — helping us work through things like fear and...

Jaroslav Pelikan was professor of history at Yale University for four decades. He authored many books “Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine” and “Credo.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Jaroslav Pelikan — The Need for Creeds.” Find more at onbeing.org.

The idea of reciting an unchanging creed sounds suspicious to modern ears. But the late, great historian Jaroslav Pelikan illuminated ancient tradition in order to enliven faith in the present and the future. He insisted that strong statements of belief will be necessary if pluralism in the 21st century is to thrive. We take in his moving, provocative perspective on our enduring need for creeds.

Janna Levin is an astrophysicist and writer. She has contributed to an understanding of black holes, the cosmology of extra dimensions, and gravitational waves in the shape of spacetime. She is the author of “A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines,” which won the PEN/Bingham prize. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Janna Levin — Mathematics, P...

An astrophysicist who studies the shape of the universe, Janna Levin has also explored her science by writing a novel about two pivotal 20th-century mathematicians, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing. Both men pushed at boundaries where mathematics presses on grand questions of meaning and purpose. Such questions, she says, help create the technologies that are now changing our sense of what it means to b...

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.

“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.

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?

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...

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.

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.