Krista Tippett+

Full fathom five

and the music we turn to

The delights and demands of translation

Translation as a "poetry for peace"

What time is it?

The weight of time

Conversation about conversion

and greeting the world

Healing and hurt

And the objects that help

Loneliness and solidarity

Paradoxes and the past

Poetry of witness

Vellum and the archive of remembering

Today is history …

… making the future

Midway through life’s journey

and all the things it brings

Solstice stories

this June day

Exploring the present with the past

and how conversations with centuries are contemporary

Emily Dickinson, buttercups, and death

(plus a strange typo)

Some words about change

and the changes change contains

What time is it?

(it’s pantoum time)

Upon this rock

“the rock is here, is extremely visible and extremely, oh, eloquent”

The Time underneath Time

and what gives life

A recollection of a kind thing said

And the making of a map of memory

A question that’s guided me ...

... for 30 years

Music and memory

The where and the when of a memory of music

What rhyme does

(to set the heart abuzz)

"Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –"

On the turning of the year

Belief and wonder

Wondering about belief

Courage and rage [re-sending; now open to all]

And the call to creativity

Courage and rage

And the call to creativity

Turning Unbearable Loss Into Ground of Shared Life, with the Parents Circle -Bereaved Families Forum

From Krista: A few months ago, I was invited to sit with four people sharing a very different Israeli-Palestinian story than that which comes to us in headlines. They are members of the Parents Circle – Bereaved Families Forum, a very special community. It’s composed of hundreds of Palestinian and Israeli families, who despite having paid the highest price of the conflict between their peoples, choose to metabolize their loss as ground of shared suffering and possible reconciliation. I’m so grateful to share that conversation with you now. You will hear their various stories of a transformat

Rumi speaks of war and love

Translation from Haleh Liza Gafori’s Water

Thanks, and can you help?

And a question about the story of a poem

"Psychedelic Science and Radical Healing" — Gül Dölen with Krista Tippett

From Krista: This episode is a journey inside what I’ve come to see as a parallel universe unfolding, where our species is unlocking knowledge about ourselves and capacities for radical healing of the most extreme trauma and distress. These findings are even giving rise to dramatic healing alliances across political and social lines that are inflamed in the culture at large. At universities and research laboratories around the U.S. and the world, there are countless clinical studies, yielding results it’s hard not at times to call miraculous — for complex PTSD, long-term addiction, treatment

“Love / is paying attention”

Action in action

Joy Harjo and Tracy K. Smith "This world is full of everything good, everything beautiful."

From Krista: These days I sometimes have to remind myself to keep breathing. I think this is true of human beings across all of our differences and divides. But in a room in New York City just before the turn of this year, I was regrounded by this fierce and joyous conversation with Joy Harjo and Tracy K. Smith. I invite you to settle into your soft breathing body with these two wise women as companions and with a sense of poetry as a technology, as Tracy describes in her new book: a technology for rising to our truest, highest selves, even amidst grief and mystery and danger, and bearing

Taking stock

Lent and Ramadan

editing is a form of love

and other lessons from writing

Bearing witness

to our lives

“From Minneapolis in January”

A new poem by Michael Bazzett

Changing your mind about words

And words changing your mind

The nature of nature writing

What is revealed

"how often and how well"

poetry of life and death

A New Year; A New Pantoum

Lines of place and sound and thinking

Jason Reynolds and Kessley Janvier at Georgetown University, On Being Young In America

A heavy complexity is on the shoulders of the young of our species in these years — humans growing up in this time. At the same time, from the digital revolution and AI to the ecology and society, they have wisdom and instincts in their bones that will be essential if we are all to flourish and not merely survive this century. In November 2024, the Georgetown University Collaborative on Global Children’s Issues brought Krista together with esteemed children’s and young adult writer Jason Reynolds and Georgetown student Kessley Janvier. The encounter between the three of them spans generations

Justin Vernon, Being Bon Iver

A sweet and searching conversation between Krista and the man behind Bon Iver at this year’s On Air Fest, full of wisdom and revelation. He is a person who experiences deeply, who metabolizes creatively, and who just keeps growing. He opens up with Krista about the strangeness of being loved for how he put his broken heart to music. They venture into the mysteries of God and of numbers, the problem of fame, and the deep working of time in a life. He’s now released a gorgeous fifth album, SABLE, fABLE. This one tells of immense healing and learning. This was recorded live at the 2025 On A

Roberta Bondi, What is Prayer and How to Begin

Buried treasure from the On Being archive! Krista writes of this conversation from the earliest pre-history of On Being: In the years in which I was on a whole new spiritual and intellectual adventure that changed the direction of my life — years which led to the creation of this show — I befriended a delightful, brilliant, straight-talking theologian named Roberta Bondi. She’s now retired. At that point, she was on the faculty of the Candler School of Theology at Emory University. We were placed together as roommates at a five-day consultation. We fell deep into conversation about all kind

David Bornstein, On Our Lives with the News

A calming and helpful conversation for making sense of the very story of our time, and how that is coming to us and being powerfully shaped through media and journalism. The theory of change of journalism as it came out of the 20th century, David Bornstein says, is that shining a light on what is going wrong — what is dangerous and dysfunctional, catastrophic or corrupt — will mobilize and lead us to correct it. But this emphasis on the terrible and the extreme, from whichever side of our cultural trenches you inhabit, has helped fuel a paralyzing, dehumanizing fear and the collapse of trust i

Yochi Fischer and Loaay Wattad, On Seeing the Trauma of the Other

This episode emerged from a private gathering in The Hague in the fall of 2024 with a small group of people who live in Israel — both Jewish and Palestinian, Jews and Palestinians who continue to share life. We’re pleased to invite you now to overhear this particular conversation, with the permission of all involved. It centered around the matter of intergenerational trauma and healing — in a land in which the traumas of two peoples are terribly, inextricably intertwined. Yochi Fischer is a historian, author and lecturer at the intersection of religion and secularism, memory and history, schol

Katsi Cook, "Women are the First Environment"

Katsi Cook is a beacon in an array of quiet powerful worlds — a magnetic, joyous, loving presence. The public conversation we offer up here was part of a gathering where a fantastic group of young people had come to be nourished, to explore the depths of what community can mean, to become more grounded and whole. They’ve taken to sitting at the feet of this Mohawk wise woman, mother, and grandmother, and you will experience why. Globally renowned in the field of midwifery, Katsi’s practice and teaching is based in ancient ancestral knowledge, and has taken an esteemed place in research and adv

Ross Gay, Hope Portal, Episode 7

Ross Gay is a poet, community gardener, and teacher who brings another way of wisdom to the conviction that we have to know what we love and what delights us. And that we have to tend to that as fiercely as to what is broken and what we’re called to make better, what we’re called to make more just. Knowing what we love and knowing how to take delight are fuel even — and especially — in times of great challenge. This is something we can practice moment to moment, he teaches, through every ordinary day. Journaling prompts for Session 7 Give your curiosity and your journaling during this week

Ocean Vuong, Hope Portal, Episode 4

If hope is to be defining and forceful in the world we have to remake ahead of us, we must also speak hope into being. Ocean Vuong is a fascinating and singular person. The sweep of his work is about bearing witness to the other side of violence and the possibility of joy, while taking nothing away and continuing to bear witness to the fullness of what has been carried and what has been survived. And he is wise about the violence of language that is habitually, culturally instinctive — and how changing that is key to shaping our very presence to others and to this world. Journaling prompts fo

Krista Tippett, Hope Portal Introduction, Episode 1

We’re opening a reflection/course experience curated by Krista and drawing upon her conversations with several visionary humans: adrienne maree brown, Naomi Shihab Nye, Ocean Vuong, Joy Harjo, Joanna Macy, and Ross Gay. Together, they extend rich and actionable invitations for a muscular, reality-based hope. They offer ways of seeing and living to lay our hands and our hearts, our imaginations and life force on the generative possibilities of life in this time. Journaling Prompts for Session We’ve created a beautiful journal for the whole seven weeks, with full-size printable pages, that y

adrienne maree brown, Hope Portal, Episode 2

adrienne maree brown shines a light on an emerging ecosystem in our world over and against the drumbeat of what is fractured and breaking. She works with the complex fullness of reality to move towards a wholeness of living. In exploring the idea of hope — the meaning of it, the practice of it — it feels important to begin with someone who works to shift realities on the ground. Many words and phrases have been used to describe what she does and who she is, who she is to so many people, especially in younger generations: She is a student of complexity; a student of change and how groups change

Naomi Shihab Nye, Hope Portal, Episode 3

In these next few sessions, we investigate some orientations and ways of being that are companions to hope. If hope is a muscle that can be exercised to become stronger and more supple, these qualities might be thought of as fascia, or the tendons — complementary ligaments that make the whole viable and sustainable. The wonderful poet Naomi Shihab Nye is winsome and wise about how writing is a companion to life, and certainly a companion to hope, for her. And it’s a companion to the way we are investigating hope here: the calming simple act of writing things down. Journaling prompts for Sessi

Joy Harjo, Hope Portal, Episode 6

Our teacher this time is the extraordinary Joy Harjo. She is a musician, a visual artist, a member of the Muscogee Creek Nation, and she’s also former Poet Laureate of the United States. From the beginning of her life, from childhood and even before, she has carried and retained a sense of space and time and life that is so much vaster than present circumstances. She uses this evocative phrase for the sense of time she knows and lives. She calls it “the whole of time.” It is stunning to be present to Joy Harjo and see someone who holds this sense of time. She’s always known it — never lost i