From Speaking of Faith to On Being
Tippett was born in Shawnee, Oklahoma in 1960, took a degree in history from Brown, worked for The New York Times in Berlin during the late Cold War, and trained in diplomacy before returning to the United States in the mid-1990s and earning a Master of Divinity from Yale. Speaking of Faith — the radio programme that became On Being — began as a Minnesota Public Radio pilot in 2001 and went national on American Public Media in 2003. The format was unusually patient for public radio: a single hour-long interview with a thinker, religious leader, scientist or artist, recorded long, edited light, with the pauses the medium's conventions normally cut out kept in. The programme was renamed On Being in 2010 to signal that its territory was not religion narrowly construed but the wider question of what it means to be human and how we want to live, and in 2013 Tippett moved the show off public-radio production and into her own organisation, the On Being Project, where it has been produced as an independent podcast and adjacent slate of conversations and writing since. The Civil Conversations Project, launched in 2011, is the show's outward-facing application of its interview practice to broader public-life dialogue.
Editorial method
What distinguishes the show editorially is the position from which Tippett interviews. She is not a believer-from-inside in the way a sectarian interviewer would be, and she is not a journalist-of-record on doctrine in the way a religion correspondent at a daily newspaper would be. The recording-long, editing-light method allows her interlocutors to think out loud — to revise mid-sentence, to drop a question, to fall silent — and the silences are kept in the broadcast rather than smoothed away. The interviews are conducted from research that is unusually thorough by the standards of American long-form conversation broadcasting; she will frequently quote a guest a sentence the guest had forgotten writing twenty years before. The cumulative effect across more than a thousand episodes is an archive that functions in a way few single archives do: it is the record of how a generation of contemplatives, scientists, ethicists, poets and religious thinkers spoke about what they had spent their lives on, in long form, under reasonably honest conditions. The show received the National Humanities Medal in 2013, presented by President Obama; her 2016 book Becoming Wise condensed the curriculum the interviews had been describing.
In the index
The index carries twelve On Being episodes that bear directly on contemporary contemplative practice. Eckhart Tolle on the Power of Now and the Pain Body is the late-career conversation that put his teaching into a non-self-help register more clearly than any of his own books had managed. Sharon Salzberg on Loving-Kindness is one of the most accessible introductions to mettā in the English-language podcast archive. Richard Rohr on Contemplation names the Franciscan strand of the same contemplative current the Cistercian Thomas Keating was teaching. Maria Popova on the Examined Life draws the lineage out into the literary and curatorial register. Desmond Tutu on Suffering and Forgiveness is the conversation that became the South African anchor of the forgiveness-ethics current mapped under engaged Buddhism. Tami Simon on the Inner Life of Work is the Sounds True founder reflecting on forty years of contemplative publishing. Joanna Macy on Buddhist Ecology is the most-cited entry in the Work That Reconnects archive. Joan Halifax on Engaged Compassion names the Upaya Zen Center inflection of engaged Buddhist practice. John O'Donohue on Beauty and Celtic Mysticism — recorded near the end of his life — became one of the most-played episodes in the show's history. David Steindl-Rast on Gratefulness is the Benedictine theology of attention in its most accessible form. Jon Kabat-Zinn on Mindfulness is the early-archive conversation that sat alongside MBSR's clinical legitimisation.
What she isn't
Tippett is not a teacher in the way the figures she interviews are teachers — she does not have a method or a sangha — and the show has consistently declined to function as advocacy for any one of the traditions it covers. She is not a journalist-of-record on the politics of religion; the show treats religion as a register of human meaning-making rather than as a beat. And she is not a believer in the confessional sense: the few times the question has been put to her on the show by guests, she has answered indirectly and from a position the show's own format has trained her audience to read as deliberate. What the show is is an editorial position: that long, patient, attentive public conversation about the things humans take to be most serious is worth sustaining as a public good — and the position has shaped what counted as a hearable contemplative voice in the United States for nearly a quarter-century.
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