On Being with Krista Tippett

Ada Limón reads her poem, “ Dead Stars .” This poem is featured in Ada’s On Being conversation with Krista, “ To Be Made Whole .” Find more of her poems, along with our full collection of poetry films and readings from two decades of the show, at Experience Poetry . Ada Limón is the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States. She’s written six books of poetry, most recently, The Hurting Kind . Her vo...

Ada Limón reads her poem, “ The Quiet Machine .” This poem is featured in Ada’s On Being conversation with Krista, “ To Be Made Whole .” Find more of her poems, along with our full collection of poetry films and readings from two decades of the show, at Experience Poetry . Ada Limón is the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States. She’s written six books of poetry, most recently, The Hurting Kind ....

Ada Limón reads her poem, “ A New National Anthem .” This poem is featured in Ada’s On Being conversation with Krista, “ To Be Made Whole .” Find more of her poems, along with our full collection of poetry films and readings from two decades of the show, at Experience Poetry . Ada Limón is the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States. She’s written six books of poetry, most recently, The Hurting Ki...

Amanda Ripley began her life as a journalist covering crime, disaster, and terrorism. Then in 2018, she published a brilliant essay called “Complicating the Narratives,” which she opened by confessing a professional existential crisis. We journalists, she wrote, “can summon outrage in five words or less. We value the ancient power of storytelling, and we get that good stories require conflict, cha...

One of the most fascinating developments of our time is that human qualities we have understood in terms of virtue — experiences we've called spiritual — are now being taken seriously by science as intelligence — as elements of human wholeness. Dacher Keltner and his Greater Good Science Center at Berkeley have been pivotal in this emergence. From the earliest years of his career, he investigated...

We are immensely grateful for your patience in our season of podcasting pause. But enough already. Starting Thursday, February 2, we'll come to you with three months of soaring new On Being conversations with Krista, with an eye towards emergence. The science of awe. The wonder of biomimicry. "Lean Spirituality." What we're talking about — and not — when we talk about mental health. "Good conflict...

In the modern western world, vocation was equated with work. But each of us has callings, not merely to be professionals, but to be friends, neighbors, colleagues, family, citizens, lovers of the world. Each of us imprints the people in the world around us, breath to breath and hour to hour, as much in who we are and how we are present as in whatever we do. And just as there are callings for a lif...

We inhabit a liminal time between what we thought we knew and what we can’t quite yet see. But time is more spacious than we imagine it to be, and it is more of a friend than we always know. Cracking time open, seeing its true manifold nature, expands a sense of the possible in the here and the now. It sends us back to work with the raw materials of our lives, understanding that these are always t...

We live in a world in love with the form of words that is an opinion, and the way with words that is an argument. Yet it is a deep truth in life — as in science — that each of us is shaped as much by the quality of the questions we are asking as by the answers we have it in us to give.  Precisely at a moment like this, of vast aching open questions and very few answers we can agree on, our questio...

The first of four short offerings, more wisdom practice than podcast: life-giving, hope-generating words, ideas and practices that can literally shape your experience of reality — and shape what can become possible.  At this juncture in the life of the world, we are all stretching. We are finding the ground shifting beneath our feet, whoever we are. Think of these as tethering foundations towards...

Three years ago, Krista texted Pádraig Ó Tuama with a simple question: what if he were to start a poetry podcast that listened as much as it shared? Not long after, Poetry Unbound was born, and it keeps going from strength to strength. Pádraig likes to say that poems are interested in the people who listen to them. And so, as the next season of On Being takes shape for release in early 2023, why n...

Krista returns from her summer in Berlin, where her present-day self reunited with the 25-year-old of the 1980s, at large in the divided city. Hear the reflections that emerged from her season of creative rest, and her beloved practices of contemplative reading and journaling.  Pull on the thread of emergence with Krista and our Pause newsletter community as the next season of On Being takes shape...

A special offering from Krista Tippett and all of us at On Being: an incredible, celebratory event — listening back and remembering forwards across 20 years of this show in the good company of our beloved friend and former guest, Rev. Jen Bailey, and so many of you. We offer it here as an audio experience, and we think you will enjoy being in the room retroactively. You will hear the voices of wis...

The beloved civil rights elder Vincent Harding liked to look around the world for what he called "live human signposts" — human beings who embody ways of seeing and becoming and who point the way forward to the world we want to inhabit. And adrienne maree brown, who has inspired worlds of social creativity with her notions of "pleasure activism" and "emergent strategy," is surely one of these.  We...

Krista interviewed the wise and wonderful writer Ocean Vuong on March 8, 2020 in a joyful, crowded room full of podcasters in Brooklyn. A state of emergency had just been declared in New York around a new virus. But no one guessed that within a handful of days such an event would become unimaginable. Most stunning is how presciently, exquisitely Ocean speaks to the world we have come to inhabit— i...

We are in the final weeks as On Being evolves to its next chapter — in a world that is evolving, each of us changed in myriad ways we’ve only begun to process and fathom. So it felt right to listen again to one of our most beloved shows of this post-2020 world. In fact, Krista interviewed the wise and wonderful Ocean Vuong right on the cusp of that turning, in March 2020, in a joyful and crowded r...

Amidst all of the perspectives and arguments around our ecological future, this much is true: we are not in the natural world — we are part of it. The next-generation marine biologist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson would let that reality of belonging show us the way forward. She loves the ocean. She loves human beings. And she’s animated by questions emerging from those loves — and from the science she d...

Amidst all of the perspectives and arguments around our ecological future, this much is true: we are not in the natural world — we are part of it. The next-generation marine biologist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson would let that reality of belonging show us the way forward. She loves the ocean. She loves human beings. And she’s animated by questions emerging from those loves — and from the science she d...

The conversation of this hour always rises as an early experience that imprinted everything that came after at On Being . Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen is one of the wise people in our world. She trained as a doctor in a generation that understood death as a failure of medicine. Yet her lifelong struggle with Crohn’s Disease and her pioneering work with cancer patients shaped her view of life. Becoming w...

The conversation of this hour always rises as an early experience that imprinted everything that came after at On Being . Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen is one of the wise people in our world. She trained as a doctor in a generation that understood death as a failure of medicine. Yet her lifelong struggle with Crohn’s Disease and her pioneering work with cancer patients shaped her view of life. Becoming w...

It has ever and always been true, David Whyte reminds us, that so much of human experience is a conversation between loss and celebration. This conversational nature of reality — indeed, this drama of vitality — is something we have all been shown, willing or unwilling, in these years. Many have turned to David Whyte for his gorgeous, life-giving poetry and his wisdom at the interplay of theology,...

David Whyte reads his poem, “ Everything is Waiting for You .” This poem is featured in David’s On Being conversation with Krista, “ Seeking Language Large Enough .” Find more of his poems, along with our full collection of poetry films and readings from two decades of the show, at Experience Poetry . David Whyte is the author of The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corpor...

David Whyte reads his poem, “ Working Together .” This poem is featured in David’s On Being conversation with Krista, “ Seeking Language Large Enough .” Find more of his poems, along with our full collection of poetry films and readings from two decades of the show, at Experience Poetry . David Whyte is the author of The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America ,...

David Whyte reads his poem, “ Sweet Darkness .” This poem is featured in David’s On Being conversation with Krista, “ Seeking Language Large Enough .” Find more of his poems, along with our full collection of poetry films and readings from two decades of the show, at Experience Poetry . David Whyte is the author of The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America , C...

It has ever and always been true, David Whyte reminds us, that so much of human experience is a conversation between loss and celebration. This conversational nature of reality — indeed, this drama of vitality — is something we have all been shown, willing or unwilling, in these years. Many have turned to David Whyte for his gorgeous, life-giving poetry and his wisdom at the interplay of theology,...