What is Krista Tippett?
Krista Tippett (b. 1960) is an American journalist, author, and broadcaster. She created and hosts On Being, a long-form public radio conversation about spirituality, ethics, and what it means to be human. The show began in 2003 on American Public Media and now runs as an independent podcast through the On Being Project. Over more than a thousand episodes, it has become one of the main English-language archives of contemplative thought in the early twenty-first century.
What she isn't
Tippett is not a teacher in the way the figures she interviews are teachers. She has no method and no sangha. The show has consistently declined to function as advocacy for any one of the traditions it covers. She is also 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. When guests have put the question to her, she has answered indirectly. What the show is is an editorial position: that long, patient, public conversation about what humans take to be most serious is worth sustaining as a public good. That position has shaped what counted as a hearable contemplative voice in the United States for nearly a quarter-century.
From Speaking of Faith to On Being
Tippett grew up in Shawnee, Oklahoma. She took a degree in history from Brown University, then worked as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times in Berlin during the late Cold War. She later trained in diplomacy, serving as a political assistant to senior US officials in West Berlin. In the mid-1990s she returned to the United States and earned a Master of Divinity from Yale. Speaking of Faith 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 and edited light, with pauses kept in. The programme was renamed On Being in 2010 to reflect a broader territory: not religion narrowly defined, but the wider question of what it means to be human. In 2013 Tippett moved the show to her own organisation, the On Being Project, where it has run as an independent podcast since. The Civil Conversations Project, launched in 2011, applies the show's interview practice to broader civic dialogue.
Editorial method
What sets the show apart is the position from which Tippett interviews. Her research is thorough: she will quote guests sentences they had forgotten writing decades earlier. The format records long and edits light, keeping pauses that other broadcasters cut. Guests think out loud, revise mid-sentence, fall silent. These silences stay in the broadcast. The result, across more than a thousand episodes, is an archive: a record of how a generation of contemplatives, scientists, poets, and religious thinkers spoke about their life's work, at length, under honest conditions. Tippett received the 2013 National Humanities Medal, presented by President Obama in July 2014. Her 2016 book Becoming Wise distilled what the interviews had been teaching.
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.
