Episodes
"I like it much better than ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’ — to be a seeker after the sacred or the holy, which ends up for me being the really real." – Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor From Krista, about this week's show: It's fascinating to trace the arc of spiritual searching and religious belonging in my lifetime. The Episcopal priest and public theologian Barbara Brown Taylor was one of the people I started learning about when I left diplomacy to study theology in the early 1990s. At that time,...
Published 04/06/23
"I like it much better than ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’ — to be a seeker after the sacred or the holy, which ends up for me being the really real." – Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor From Krista, about this week's show: It's fascinating to trace the arc of spiritual searching and religious belonging in my lifetime. The Episcopal priest and public theologian Barbara Brown Taylor was one of the people I started learning about when I left diplomacy to study theology in the early 1990s. At that time,...
Published 04/06/23
To say that Ruth Wilson Gilmore is a geographer, which she is, is not to convey the vast and varied ways in which she is influencing the makings of the future. She's a mentor and teacher to a new generation of social activism and creativity. She's a visionary of “abolition,” and that has become a fraught and polarizing word in our fraught and polarized public discourse. But when Ruth Wilson Gilmore speaks of “abolition,” she is working with a long, long view towards making a whole world,...
Published 03/30/23
There is a quiet, redemptive story of our time in this conversation — a radical way of approaching the gravest of our problems by attending to how original vitality functions. Biomimicry takes the natural world as mentor and teacher — for, as Janine Benyus puts it, "we are surrounded by geniuses." Nature solves problems and performs what appear to us as miracles in every second, all around: running on sunlight, fitting form to function, recycling everything, relentlessly "creating conditions...
Published 03/23/23
The flow and the ingredients by which an idea becomes an offering — and life practices which call that alchemy forth. The mystery of it all that can only be named and wondered at — and the ordinary mystery that creativity is a human birthright, a way of being rather than doing, that beckons to us all, in everything we do, from crafting something to conversing to the arranging of furniture in a room. This is where Krista goes with the rock star music producer Rick Rubin. It's not a...
Published 03/16/23
In this rich, expansive, and warm conversation between friends, Krista draws out the heart for humanity behind Isabel Wilkerson's eye on histories we are only now communally learning to tell — her devotion to understanding not merely who we have been, but who we can be. Her most recent offering of fresh insight to our life together brings "caste" into the light — a recurrent, instinctive pattern of human societies across the centuries, though far more malignant in some times and places. Caste...
Published 03/09/23
You might want to take a walk with this one. It is big and full of brain food and an enlivening opening of imagination to possibilities that are emergent now: the notion of the “broad commonwealth of life” that we are “inextricably entangled with and suffused by”; the paradox that the more accurately you try to measure some things, the more unmeasurable they become; the way words we use all the time have kept our cellular belonging to the natural world alive, even as civilization forgot.
Published 03/02/23
You might want to take a walk with this one. It is big and full of brain food and an enlivening opening of imagination to possibilities that are emergent now: the notion of the “broad commonwealth of life” that we are “inextricably entangled with and suffused by”; the paradox that the more accurately you try to measure some things, the more unmeasurable they become; the way words we use all the time have kept our cellular belonging to the natural world alive, even as civilization forgot.
Published 03/02/23
Nick Offerman has played many great characters, most famously Ron Swanson in Parks and Recreation, and he starred more recently in an astonishing episode of The Last of Us. But he is driven by passionate callings older and deeper than his public vocation as an actor and comedian. He works with wood, and he works with other people who work with their hands making beautiful, useful things. And this, it turns out, is also a primary source of his tethering in values. It's a source of a spiritual...
Published 02/23/23
An electric conversation with Ada Limón's wisdom and her poetry — a refreshing, full-body experience of how this way with words and sound and silence teaches us about being human at all times, but especially now. With an unexpected and exuberant mix of gravity and laughter — laughter of delight, and of blessed relief — this conversation holds not only what we have traversed these last years, but how we live forward.
Published 02/16/23
Ada Limón reads her poem, “The Quiet Machine.” This poem is featured in Ada’s On Being conversation with Krista, “To Be Made Whole.” Find more of her poems, along with our full collection of poetry films and readings from two decades of the show, at Experience Poetry.
Published 02/16/23
Ada Limón reads her poem, “A New National Anthem.” This poem is featured in Ada’s On Being conversation with Krista, “To Be Made Whole.” Find more of her poems, along with our full collection of poetry films and readings from two decades of the show, at Experience Poetry.
Published 02/16/23
Ada Limón reads her poem, “Dead Stars.” This poem is featured in Ada’s On Being conversation with Krista, “To Be Made Whole.” Find more of her poems, along with our full collection of poetry films and readings from two decades of the show, at Experience Poetry.
Published 02/16/23
Amanda Ripley began her life as a journalist covering crime, disaster, and terrorism. Then in 2018, she published a brilliant essay called “Complicating the Narratives,” which she opened by confessing a professional existential crisis. We journalists, she wrote, “can summon outrage in five words or less. We value the ancient power of storytelling, and we get that good stories require conflict, characters and scene. But in the present era of tribalism, it feels like we’ve reached our...
Published 02/09/23
One of the most fascinating developments of our time is that human qualities we have understood in terms of virtue — experiences we've called spiritual — are now being taken seriously by science as intelligence — as elements of human wholeness. Dacher Keltner and his Greater Good Science Center at Berkeley have been pivotal in this emergence. From the earliest years of his career, he investigated how emotions are coded in the muscles of our faces, and how they serve as “moral sensory...
Published 02/02/23
We are immensely grateful for your patience in our season of podcasting pause. But enough already. Starting Thursday, February 2, we'll come to you with three months of soaring new On Being conversations with Krista, with an eye towards emergence. The science of awe. The wonder of biomimicry. "Lean Spirituality." What we're talking about — and not — when we talk about mental health. "Good conflict." Technology and vitality. Creativity. Woodworking and the meaning of life. Deeper truths and...
Published 01/26/23
"It is still an enduringly strange and hard time to be alive … Yet it's also on my mind, as we roll around to nearly three years since the pandemic shifted the ground beneath our feet, that we are a bit more open, many of us, to pick up more of what these years have given us to see and to learn and to live into." Join us online Dec 21, 5:15pm - 8:00pm ET, for a collaboration between Theater of War Productions, the Center for Jubilee, Reconciliation & Healing, and On Being, featuring...
Published 12/12/22
The language of vocation comes from the Latin “vocari”: “calling.” It is a word we use often at On Being as a pointer for the way forward. In Western culture, vocation has long been equated with work and with job title. But each of us is called not merely to be a professional, but to be a friend, neighbor, colleague, family, citizen, lover of the world.
Published 11/03/22
There is no subject more intriguing than time, and time is so much stranger and more dynamic than the clocks, deadlines, goals, and schedules we live by. In this third offering of ways of seeing and living that have emerged across two decades of On Being, we explore manifold understandings of how time works, and how change happens, that animate lives of wisdom and grace.
Published 10/27/22
It is a deep truth in life, as in science, that we are shaped as much by the quality of our questions as by our answers. Those moments in our lives when a new question rises up in us, stops us in our tracks, are pivot points. They are openings for discovery and new possibility to break in.
Published 10/20/22
We are fluent in the story of our time marked by catastrophe and dysfunction. That is real, and it is grave — but it’s not the whole story of us. Here’s what this phrase — the generative story, the generative narrative of our time — is insisting on: that there is also an ordinary and abundant reality of learning and growth that is happening, of dignity and care and social creativity and evolution.
Published 10/13/22
A new season of big On Being conversations is coming in the new year. But for the next few weeks, we are pulling back the veil on how we’re getting grounded for that. On Being Foundations are words and ideas — ways of seeing the world and walking through it — a few tethering understandings towards imagining and walking our way into our callings for now and the future.
Published 10/12/22
Three years ago, Krista texted Pádraig Ó Tuama with a simple question: what if he were to start a poetry podcast that listened as much as it shared? Not long after, Poetry Unbound was born, and it keeps going from strength to strength. Pádraig likes to say that poems are interested in the people who listen to them. And so, as the next season of On Being takes shape for release in early 2023, why not take Poetry Unbound as a listening companion and ritual this fall?
Published 10/06/22
Krista returns from her summer in Berlin, where her present-day self reunited with the 25-year-old of the 1980s, at large in the divided city. Hear the reflections that emerged from her season of creative rest, and her beloved practices of contemplative reading and journaling.
Published 09/29/22
In some languages, there are words for goodbye that are also a promise of a future "hello," and that's the kind of farewell this is. Krista offers this “see you later” with a parting poem as she and the full team at On Being get a bit restored and dream and make some new things. We are so grateful for your listening.
Published 07/07/22