On Being with Krista Tippett

On Being with Krista Tippett

On Being Studios

On Being with Krista Tippett

Society & Culture Religion & Spirituality Social Sciences English

Wisdom to replenish and orient in a tender, tumultuous time to be alive.

Spiritual inquiry, science, social healing, and poetry.

Conversations to live by.

With a 20-year archive featuring luminaries like Mary Oliver, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Desmond Tutu, each episode brings a new discovery about the immensity of our lives. Hosted by Krista Tippett,

Learn more about the On Being Project’s work in the world at onbeing.org.

Remembering Nikki Giovanni - ‘We Go Forward With a Sanity and a Love’

12 December 2024

Remembering Nikki Giovanni - ‘We Go Forward With a Sanity and a Love’

The delightful Nikki Giovanni died on Dec. 9. It is a joy and a solace to relisten to this beloved conversation she had with Krista in 2016 – to experience her signature mix of high seriousness, sweeping perspective, and insistent pleasure. Her words and her spirit feel, if anything, more necessary now. In the 1960s, she was a poet of the Black Arts Movement that nourished civil rights. She...

Joan Baez — "This Gift of a Voice"

26 November 2024

Joan Baez — "This Gift of a Voice"

She is known as the voice of a generation. The Queen of Folk. A legend. An icon, the one who sang “We Shall Overcome” alongside Martin Luther King Jr. at the 1963 March on Washington. As much as anyone, Joan Baez embodied the spirit of that decade of soaring dreams and songs and dramas set in motion that echo through this world of ours. Meanwhile, her love affair with a young Minnesota...

adrienne maree brown — On Radical Imagination and Moving Towards Life

adrienne maree brown — On Radical Imagination and Moving Towards Life

The wonderful 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....

“The End of Poetry” by Ada Limón

“The End of Poetry” by Ada Limón

An impassioned plea, a yearning for connection — the poem U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón wrote when she says all language failed her. Take in Ada's reading of her piece, “The End of Poetry” — and hear her read more of her work in the On Being episode, “To Be Made Whole.”Ada Limón is the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States. She’s written six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the...

Atul Gawande — On Mortality and Meaning

Atul Gawande — On Mortality and Meaning

We are strange creatures. It is hard for us to speak about, or let in, the reality of frailty and death — the elemental fact of mortality itself. In this century, western medicine has gradually moved away from its understanding of death as a failure — where care stops with a terminal diagnosis. Hospice has moved, from something rare to something expected. And yet advances in technology have made...

“Ars Poetica #100: I Believe” by Elizabeth Alexander

“Ars Poetica #100: I Believe” by Elizabeth Alexander

Today, a poem with a poignant question to live: “...and are we not of interest to each other?” Carry Elizabeth Alexander’s reading of her poem “Ars Poetica #100: I Believe” with you — and hear Elizabeth read more of her poetry in the On Being episode, “Words That Shimmer.”Elizabeth Alexander is a poet, author, and educator. Since 2018, she has served as president of The Andrew W. Mellon...

Luis Alberto Urrea — On Our Belonging to Each Other

Luis Alberto Urrea — On Our Belonging to Each Other

We humans have this drive to erect barriers between ourselves and others, Luis Alberto Urrea says, and yet this makes us a little crazy. He is an exuberant, wise, and refreshing companion into the deep meaning and the problem of borders — what they are really about, what we do with them, and what they do to us. The Mexican-American border was as close and personal to him as it could be when he...

Ross Gay — On the Insistence of Joy

Ross Gay — On the Insistence of Joy

In our world of so much suffering, it can feel hard or wrong to invoke the word "joy." Yet joy has been one of the most insistent, recurrent rallying cries in almost every life-giving conversation that Krista has had across recent months and years, even and especially with people on the front lines of humanity's struggles. Ross Gay helps illuminate this paradox and turn it into a muscle.We are...

Janine Benyus and Azita Ardakani Walton — On Nature's Wisdom for Humanity

Janine Benyus and Azita Ardakani Walton — On Nature's Wisdom for Humanity

In this all-new episode, Krista engages biomimicry pioneer Janine Benyus in a second, urgent conversation, alongside creative biomimicry practitioner Azita Ardakani Walton. Together they trace precise guidance and applied wisdom from the natural world for the civilizational callings before us now. What does nature have to teach us about healing from trauma? And how might those of us aspiring to...

Befriend Your Body: A Compassionate Body Scan

Befriend Your Body: A Compassionate Body Scan

In a time of stress, uncertainty, and isolation, Christine Runyan turns our attention to what often evades our awareness — the response of our nervous systems. As part of On Being’s 2021 Midwinter Gathering, she offered this brief, practical, gently guided practice as an invitation to befriend your beleaguered body, to “blanket it with a little bit of tenderness, a little bit of kindness.”Delve...