Krista Tippett
This country prides itself on a separation of church and state, yet it often seems religion holds as much sway as politics. What is it that drives us to look to the ineffable for fulfillment? Is faith hot-wired into the brain? An opiate for the masses? A portal to transcendence? Krista Tippett asks these questions weekly as host of the syndicated radio series, On Being. A Fulbright-winning historian and the granddaughter of a Southern Baptist minister, Tippett sees her show as a forum in which to open dialogue. Each Sunday on NPR, she speaks with scientists and mystics, anthropologists and men of the cloth, exploring not so much the place of religion in our lives as the essential questions of being. As the show’s website says, “We pursue wisdom and moral imagination as much as knowledge; we esteem nuance and poetry as much as fact.” Since we at Conduit do much the same, we spoke with Tippett at length, finding her both insightful and inspiring. In short, we believe.
steven lee beeber: Nietzsche famously said, “God is dead.” Do you think the reports of his death were exaggerated?
krista tippett: Well, he’s not the only one who said that [laughs]. You know, I don’t think that’s actually the interesting question for modern people. I think people still long for the spiritual, but there’s a much larger vocabulary used to address this. What certainly has not gone away is a kind of reflecting and experiencing and conversation across generations and interactions with these traditions that grew up around questions of God. And I think questions about who we are as human beings and who we are to each other are, in a concrete way, connected to how we’ve always raised that question. I don’t think that was dead when Nietzsche said it, and I don’t think it was dead when Time magazine said it in the ’60s. There was a big group of sociologists in the ’60s who predicted religion would be more and more consigned to the sidelines. But you know, most of them have recanted, and some of them have become the greatest scholars of the vitality of religion in our time.
conduit: So, where do you see religion in our culture? Some see it as a guide for morality, others as just a place for people to express wonder at the mysteries of life.
tippett: Spiritual and religious
identity are as fluid now in
human history as they ever
have been. We are among the
first generation that has not
inherited some kind of
religious tradition, identity, or spiritual practice. As a
result, we are crafting our
own spiritual and religious
lives in a way that’s really new.
And I think that process of
crafting has become much
more sophisticated and
substantive in the last few
decades. You can look at the
New Age movement of the
1980s, which admittedly had
a lot of fluffiness to it, and
there’s a lot of searching
going on now and redefining
that doesn’t fit into
established categories and is
anything but fluffy. So,
there’s a lot of talk about
what it means to be spiritual
but not religious. Regarding
your question and the topic
of wonder, I’m also aware of,
and in some sense curating, a
conversation among scientists
who are saying that regardless
of a belief in the existence of
God, there are these realities
of an experience of mystery,
of an animating sensation of
wonder—the language of
spirit, the spirit of inquiry—which even a lot of secular
and non-actively religious
people are wanting to reclaim.
And that’s just all really
interesting to me. It’s a big
brew. It’s a big range of
experience and identity.
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