On Being

Pursuing Happiness with the Dalai Lama
From Emory University in Atlanta, Krista leads a public discussion on the subject of human happiness with the Dalai Lama, the chief rabbi of the Commonwealth, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, and Islamic scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr.

The Prophetic Imagination of Walter Brueggemann
The people we later recognize as prophets, says Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann, are also poets. They reframe what is at stake in chaotic times. Hear a very special voice in conversation to address our changing lives and the deepest meaning of hope this season.

Legends To Live By
Could a Yiddish text from the Middle Ages serve as a guide to living now? Book composer and typographer Scott-Martin Kosofsky revives unlikely sources of 'customs' for leading a modern life and marking sacred time. For Hanukkah and all the seasons upon us.

Who Ordered This?
Astrophysicist Mario Livio works with science the Hubble Space Telescope makes possible. He is not a religious person. But he's fascinated with the enduring mystery of the very language of science, mathematics.

Monsters We Love: TV's Pop Culture Theodicy
Loving vampires. Amoral zombies. And righteous serial killers. Shows about monsters, human and otherwise, are captivating TV watchers of all ages. Diane Winston, a religion and media watcher on the in-your-face themes of God, meaning, and re-enchanting the world.

The Poetry of Creatures
We slow down with biblical scholar and conservationist Ellen Davis and with farmer and poet Wendell Berry. Learn about new readings of sacred text that have a power to reframe life in our most agrarian and most cosmopolitan places. Rediscover the lost art of being creatures.

Occupying the Gospel
Paul Raushenbush opens up a forgotten impulse of social activism in the DNA of American Christianity — the "social gospel" led by his great grandfather, Walter Rauschenbusch a century ago.

Holding Life Consciously
Arthur Zajonc sees contemplation as investigating life from the inside — and now it is teaching him about living with Parkinson's Disease. We hear how this physicist draws on the humanities and meditation to integrate the intellectual and sensory aspects of life.

Unfolding Language, Unfolding Life
Linguistics pioneer Jean Berko Gleason unlocks the way we learn an amazing and crucial human skill, learning to talk. She studies how language emerges from childhood on, and says it reveals unexpected truths about our human relationships with our world, and our consciousness of ourselves.

The "Happiest" Man in the World
"The happiest man in the world" — that's what Tibetan Buddhist spiritual teacher and author Matthieu Ricard was dubbed after his brain was studied by scientists. We explore his provocative thoughts on the meaning of happiness, as well as his insights into the nature of human consciousness, spirituality as "contemplative science," and the relationship between humor and wisdom.

Mormon Demystified
Journalist Joanna Brooks gives us an inside view of this "Mormon moment" of American life, a moment of deepened self-searching with the emergence of a viable Mormon presidential candidate. Brooks, who writes the blog, "Ask Mormon Girl," describes herself as unorthodox, but still passionately planted in this culture that is as much an identity as a faith.

A Voice for the Animals
Alan Rabinowitz, a wildlife biologist, shares his extraordinary 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" — both in life, and in the evolving science of wildlife conservation.

The Genesis of Desire
Avivah Zornberg is a celebrated participant in the ancient Jewish tradition of midrash — of reading between the lines of the Bible to uncover hidden layers of meaning for life. Hear what happens when she takes on Noah and the Flood and Adam and Eve in the garden.

Planting the Future
Wangari Maathai was the first African woman to win a Nobel Peace Prize. A biologist by training, she founded the Greenbelt Movement to make visible the links between trees and soil, war and peace, and the human body and spirit. In response to her recent death, we dedicate this encore presentation of Krista's beautiful 2006 conversation with Wangari Maathai to her memory.

Opening Up Windows
Philosopher and Rabbi David Hartman opens a window onto the inner life of the Israeli people — struggles and searching that shape news from this part of the world but are rarely heard directly. We experience an intimate reflection on the unfolding of Jewish tradition in the modern world.

The Evolution of Change
We experience a vision of caution and hope planted in a long view of Arab and Palestinian history, culture, and time in Palestinian philosopher Sari Nusseibeh. His personal story is steeped in layers of identity and, as he says, living legend, which shape history in the making today.

Who Do We Want to Become? Remembering Forward a Decade after 9/11
Who do we want to be for the next decade? What wisdom do we want to focus on, and grow more deeply into, as we move forward as a culture and pass on this narrative of 9/11 to generations to come?

Alive Enough? Reflecting on Our Technology
Sherry Turkle's book, Alone Together, created a catchword for anxiety about the alienating potential of technology. But that's not really her message. We explore the real challenge she poses — that we can and must lead examined lives with our digital objects — actively shaping technology to human purposes.

Civility, History, and Hope
Civil rights veteran Vincent Harding says America is still a developing nation when it comes to democratic encounter across real difference. But he finds hope in the young people he's been bringing into contact with civil rights elders. They are his answer to the question that drives him: "Is America possible?"

Restoring Political Civility
Richard Mouw challenges his fellow conservative Christians to civility in public discourse. He offers historical as well as spiritual perspective on American Evangelicals' navigation of disagreement, fear, and truth. Part of our Civil Conversations Project — ideas and tools for our fractured civic spaces.

Listening Beyond Life and Choice
Frances Kissling is known for her longtime activism on the abortion issue but has devoted her energy more in recent years to real relationship and new conversations across that bitter divide. She's learned, she's written, about the courage to be vulnerable in front of those with whom we passionately disagree. Part of our Civil Conversations Project — ideas and tools for our fractured civic spaces.

Sidling Up to Difference
The marriage of Kwame Anthony Appiah's parents helped inspire the movie Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. He's studied ethics in a world of strangers. We explore his down to earth take on moral hostilities in America now. Part of our Civil Conversations Project — ideas and tools for our fractured civic spaces.

Words That Shimmer
Poetry is something many of us seem to be hungry for these days. We're hungry for fresh ways to tell hard truths and redemptive stories, for language that would elevate and embolden rather than demean and alienate. Elizabeth Alexander shares her sense of what poetry works in us — and in our children — and why it may become more relevant, not less so, in hard and complicated times. Part of our Civil Conversations Project — ideas and tools for our fractured civic spaces.

The Far Shore of Aging
We are living longer, for better and for worse. And the story of aging is one that too often goes untended. Jane Gross created The New Old Age blog at The New York Times after she accompanied her mother through unfamiliar territory in life: the way we live longer now, and die more slowly too. She tells us that we not only have to care for our parents — but for ourselves.

Autism and Humanity
Long before autism had a name, it had a history — a mystery shrouded in misunderstanding. But what might autism teach us all about what it means to be human now? About our abilities. About our creativity and differences. Jennifer Elder and Paul Collins, a painter and a literary historian who are parents of a son with autism, offer a way to see beyond the controversies and cures.

Pleasure More Than Hope
Did you know that the sacred city of Bethlehem lies within the West Bank? And, inside its borders, you'll find something unexpected — a close-knit neighborhood where generations of people have created a new life for themselves. Amahl Bishara and Nidal Al-Azraq show us something rare that we don't see in the news about refugee camps — the quiet cycles of everyday life.

The Inward Work of Democracy with Jacob Needleman
As young democracies emerge around the world, we take a long view of the ingredients that formed this democracy well beyond July 4, 1776. The philosopher Jacob Needleman reminds us of the inward work of conscience behind institutions and political values that Americans now take for granted.

Investigating Healthy Minds with Richard Davidson
Once upon a time we assumed the brain stops developing when we're young. Neuroscientist Richard Davidson helped overturn this idea by studying the brains of meditating Buddhist monks. Now he's working on conditions like ADHD and autism. He focuses not on fixing what is wrong, but on rewiring our minds with life-enriching behaviors.

Catching Song with Bobby McFerrin
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?

Reviving Sister Aimee
A look back at the closest thing the early 20th century may have had to Oprah Winfrey: Aimee Semple McPherson. A media sensation and a powerful religious leader, the flamboyant Pentecostal preacher's life is a window into the world of global Pentecostalism that thrives today.

Cosmic Origami and What We Don't Know
Parallel realities and the deep structure of space-time sound like science fiction, but these are matters of real scientific inquiry. Lord Martin Rees is an astrophysicist and atheist who spends his life contemplating extreme cosmic events and says that human beings are the most complex phenomena in the universe, by far.

Presence in the Wild
Kate Braestrup is a chaplain to game wardens, often on search and rescue missions, in the wilds of Maine. She works, as she puts it, at hinges of human experience when lives alter unexpectedly — where loss, disaster, decency, and beauty intertwine.

Driven by Flavor
Dan Barber is a celebrated young chef — but his passionate ethics and intellect have made him much more. He's out to restore food to its rightful place vis-à-vis our bodies, our ecologies and our economies. And he would do this by resurrecting our natural insistence on flavor.

Thin Places, Thick Realities
From Jerusalem, Yossi Klein Halevi teases out the complex nature of Jewish Israeli identity. The journalist and author believes that the Holy Land is a place where not merely religion, but the essential human story, plays itself out with particular intensity.

What We Nurture
For Mother's Day, a delightful conversation with Sylvia Boorstein. The Jewish-Buddhist teacher, mother, and grandmother speaks about loving and teaching children in a complex world.

Children of Both Identities
Mohammad Darawshe is Arab with an Israeli passport — a Muslim Palestinian citizen of the Jewish state. Like 20 percent of Israel's population, he is, as he puts it, a child of both identities. He brings an unexpected way of seeing inside the Middle Eastern present and future.

Restoring the Senses: Gardening and Orthodox Easter
An understanding of Easter that is at once mystical and literally down to earth. Vigen Guroian is an Armenian Orthodox theologian who experiences Easter as a call to our senses. He is passionate about the meaning of grand ideas like incarnation, death, and eternity as revealed in life and in his garden.

Exodus, Cargo of Hidden Stories
In the Exodus story, Moses is no simple hero and Pharoah no simple villain. With a literary and psychological understanding, Avivah Zornberg invigorates our grasp of this story with the rabbinic discipline of Midrash — an ancient Jewish art of inquiry for deeper meaning in and between the lines.

Alive Enough? Reflecting on Our Technology
Sherry Turkle's book, Alone Together, created a catchword for anxiety about the alienating potential of technology. But that's not really her message. We explore the real challenge she poses — that we can and must lead examined lives with our digital objects — actively shaping technology to human purposes.

Whale Songs and Elephant Loves
An acoustic biologist with a Quaker sensibility, Katy Payne reflects on a life spent listening to humpback whales that compose ever-changing songs and elephants that communicate across long distances by way of sounds beyond the realm of human hearing.

Sidling Up to Difference
Ghanaian-British-American philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah has studied ethics in a world of strangers and how unimaginable social change happens. We explore his erudite yet down-to-earth take on disarming moral hostilities in America now.

A Wild Love For the World
Joanna Macy is a philosopher of ecology, a Buddhist scholar, and an exquisite translator of the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. We take that poetry as a lens on her wisdom, at 81, on spiritual life and its relevance for the great dramas of our time.

Asteroids, Stars, and the Love of God
Brother Guy Consolmagno and Father George Coyne study the composition of meteorites and the life and death of stars. They share their observations of life, faith, friendship, and the universe from their seats in the Vatican Observatory.

Yoga. Meditation in Action.
The 5,000-year-old spiritual technology of yoga is converging with 21st-century medical science and with many religious and philosophical perspectives. Seane Corn is a renowned yoga teacher takes us inside the practicalities and power of yoga — even as a source of social healing.

Civility, History, and Hope
Civil rights elder Vincent Harding describes how Martin Luther King Jr.'s vision might speak to our current domestic confusions and divisions. Also, what he's learned in recent decades of how lessons of that time can be powerfully useful for the young of today.

Planting the Future
A Kenyan environmentalist and Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Wangari Maathai founded a grassroots organization that empowers African women to improve their lives and conserve the environment through planting trees. She speaks about the global balance of human and natural resources, and shares her thoughts on where God resides.

Demonstrations, Hopes, and Dreams
With anthropologist Scott Atran, we make deeper sense of the human dynamics in the Middle East and North Africa. Atran offers bracing context on the promise of this moment and the response it asks from the watching world.

The Vitality of the Struggle
Terry Tempest Williams is a naturalist and writer who takes the interior American West as her center of political, spiritual, and creative gravity. She sheds light on the West as a particular crucible of American divides and offers up notions of neighborliness, sacred rage, and beauty as an act of survival.

Opening to Our Lives
Jon Kabat-Zinn has learned, through science and experience, about mindfulness as a way of life. This is wisdom with immediate relevance to the ordinary and extreme stresses of our time — from economic peril, to parenting, to life in a digital age.

Listening Beyond Life and Choice
Frances Kissling is known for her longtime activism on the abortion issue but has devoted her energy more in recent years to real relationship and new conversations across that bitter divide. She's learned, she's written, about the courage to be vulnerable in front of those with whom we passionately disagree.

Quarks and Creation
Science and religion are often pitted against one another; but how do they complement, rather than contradict, one another? Physicist and theologian, John Polkinghorne, applies the deepest insights of modern physics to think about how the world fundamentally works, and how the universe might make space for prayer.

Words That Shimmer
Poetry is something many of us seem to be hungry for these days. We're hungry for fresh ways to tell hard truths and redemptive stories, for language that would elevate and embolden rather than demean and alienate. Elizabeth Alexander shares her sense of what poetry works in us — and in our children — and why it may become more relevant, not less so, in hard and complicated times.