Krista Tippett. Photo by Chris Daniels.
Krista Tippett. Photo by Chris Daniels.
Longtime listeners of St. Louis Public Radio have likely noticed an absence from the station’s slate of weekly programming. Last summer, the Peabody Award-winning show On Being with Krista Tippett concluded production of its radio broadcast program, which had aired on more than 400 stations around the country. The show returns beginning February 2 for a three-month seasonal run, available as a podcast for download each Thursday.
Tippett, who President Barack Obama honored with the National Humanities Medal, is not one to shy away from big questions. She’s hosted conversations with scientists and poets, civil rights leaders and novelists, theologians and bloggers, on stages in the St. Louis region and around the world. Her podcast has been downloaded more than 400 million times.
Ahead of the new season, we spoke to Tippett about her vision for the show, the power of language in public life, and traditions as vehicles for social healing.
Poetry, in so many ways, has been the animating force and compass for the On Being Project. Your team won the 2007 Peabody Award for your interview with Iranian-American poet and scholar of Rumi, Fatemeh Keshavarz, who was a professor of Persian & Comparative Literature at Washington University at the time. And Pádraig Ó Tuama, host of the Project’s popular podcast Poetry Unbound, recently published an anthology of 50 poems with his accompanying reflections. How would you describe the show’s poetic sensibility and the possibilities that poetry opens up in your conversations?
Just last night, I interviewed our new poet laureate, Ada Limón, for one of the shows in the coming season…One of the things I said to her last night is that poetry, as you say, is at the heart of what we do, and it's not something I knew would happen when I started this 20 years ago. It’s something that evolved.
I interview a lot of poets, and then somehow poetry also finds its way in with non-poets. It's not so much about talking about poetry, but what I think I'm just so attentive to is where poetry comes from in us, in human experience — in a life, in a culture — and what poetry works in us. What I experienced [back in my twenties in divided Berlin] has been experienced in cultures around the world: when official language fails us, when we understand ourselves to have an intense need to reach across the mystery of ourselves and the mystery of each other, we get to these points at times and in places where we know that we need fresh words for that. And poetry provides those words.
I've asked this question of a lot of people across the years about what it is that poetry does. And I really like an answer that David Whyte gave me, which is that poetry is language against which we have no defense. And if you put it like that, it's clear how valuable that is, in a time in our country, in the life of the world, where we're all tangled up in so many forms of fighting. To have language that creates silence and pondering against which we have no defense, so that we have to kind of turn back to ourselves as much as we open up: it's very precious.
Because of the nature of poetry, and because of this time in which we live, it's just absolutely essential. I feel like a lot of people are waking up to that. That's also been an interesting thing in the last few years, to see poetry just explode online. People are reading poetry and quoting poetry in ways that weren't happening even five years ago.
Since its premiere in July 2003, the show has really tried to lay claim to the deepest and best of its listeners’ attention and thinking, by elevating public theology and spiritual inquiry in common life.
Part of the reason we took the show into independent production in 2013—and we've been motivated by this ever since—is that I've always felt like the people who gather on On Being are a far-flung community, an ecosystem. I never think in terms of audience. I think in terms of listeners. And as we continue to evolve as a project, we're always thinking about how to serve that, how to activate it.
Back in December, the On Being Project co-presented Antigone in Savannah (after Sophocles’ ancient Greek play) with the Center for Jubilee, Reconciliation, and Healing and Theater of War Productions at First African Baptist Church, the oldest continually running Black church in North America. St. Louis musician Philip A. Woodmore led the choir that performed during the production, which commemorated Jubilee Freedom Day and honored enslaved Africans who had been buried near the Unnamed Square (formerly Calhoun Square). Could you talk a little about this event and about the importance of grief in social healing, what it has to do with what you’ve called the “generative story of our time”?
A lot of what we're working on now is quiet and under that radar of rancor. That part of the country is a pivotal place. And I think the work now starts small and particular and local. Savannah is this beautiful city and also a major place where the slave trade happened. It's an American place. It has the possibility of beauty and it has the possibility of terror. There are all kinds of dynamics going on there that are going on in all kinds of places, including the naming of the square.
My colleague Lucas Johnson has been walking alongside people there, where there were human beings who were enslaved, who were never really buried, whose burial grounds are neglected. The way we honor, or refuse to honor, our dead, even the way we tend to bodies: these are actually things that make us human. It's very profound, how we care about this, and how we can't really be complete or whole or healthy when that's not done well. It's kind of a microcosm of our larger national picture, that we have losses, and we have neglect, and desecration that is part of our story.
Going to Savannah, and then bringing in the technology that Theater of War is applying of these Greek tragedies—this technology that gives voice to communal trauma and that is a pathway to communal healing—I saw that happen in that room. It was an extraordinary thing. This kind of healing and catharsis and breakthrough I do know is happening all over the place in our communities and in our country. This story isn't told. This is part of what I mean when I talk about the generative story of our time: the places where we are doing our best and rising to our best, where there is breakthrough, and there is learning, and there is a creation of new forms and new ways. This is ordinary and abundant, but it's not investigated, it's not told in the same way.
That really has become absolutely animating for me and for our work. And that's another way the people who gather around On Being, our community, are an ecosystem: I see them as participants in ways that are very quiet and sometimes very visible, the whole spectrum. This landscape is as real as the landscape of catastrophe and dysfunction and danger. Those things are real, but they're so abundantly documented. We have to tell and live into this other story of us, to meet the things that we have been given to meet in this century. The pandemic just made more of it un-unseeable; it accelerated callings and reckonings that are existential.
The language of lamentation and repentance isn't terribly fashionable.
But it’s necessary! What I find with language like repentance and lamentation, when you insert those words, when you put those words out into a room or a conversation, they work something. I think people hear a word like repentance or a word like lamentation, and you realize we need those things. And yet they're a little bit mysterious because we've lost some of our belonging to traditions that used to be the place people were offered those things. We’re a very ritual-poor society. So I do think some of the work in the next period is figuring out how to honor those ritual aspects of life that we really need to be whole.
Emergence and the science of awe are themes of the show’s new season, inspired by your last conversation with the author adrienne maree brown. As longtime listeners to St. Louis Public Radio’s broadcast of the show begin to transition to your podcast-only platform, how do you hope folks will engage with this next chapter of On Being?
Being on public radio was fantastic and an honor, but 52 weeks a year for 20 years is enough. For us as a project, the show does continue; it’s just more concentrated in these seasons. Between the seasons and within the seasons, we want to do more convening. In small and large ways, we want to bring people together, and we feel that that is something that is one of our gifts and one of the ways we can be of service. We also want to connect up the show, the content, and the conversations with the questions that I know are so pressing for so many of us: How do we live forward from here? What is my calling? What can I do in my life to meet these great civilizational challenges? And I think the answer to that question is close to life for each of us.
Bryan Stevenson has been a great teacher for me, and he talks about how that's not a question that has an obvious answer. What you have to do is get proximate to places and people and questions that you haven't been paying attention to, and let that teach you what your next step might be. There’s a process of discernment that I think each of us individually (and we collectively) are in, and that a lot of us want to be in, but we have to create that space.
One of the challenges is that the world opened up, and there's this lure of the way things were and what feels normal. And then I think there's this discipline which is spiritual, in the most robust sense of that word, for those of us who want to live differently, who want to meet this time, to shape what our presence is going to be in the world, and to ask these questions and then to live these questions. Like Rilke said, you live the questions when you can't live the answers now. To rush to an answer, to rush to an action, which is also such an American impulse, can be to disrespect the gravity of the question.
So this space we want to create is where we accompany each other, also on the bad days, this space of holding the magnitude of what we have to do and the time and the patience and the stillness and the reflection that that needs. This is the work for the rest of our lives, so how do we stay in this together?
