Krista Tippett | Life Together

Tippett:

We differ on ideas and convictions and beliefs and choices that are really profound and meaningful and the point of being in conversation is not to deny that. But I think the point of coming into conversation, and more importantly coming into relationship, is that we can’t let those things that divide us define what is possible between us in human terms and in terms of, you know, can we, can we craft shared life or not?

I’m Krista Tippett and I lead something called the On Being project and also host the On Being public radio show and podcast.

Stump:

Welcome to Language of God. I’m your host, Jim Stump. Krista Tippett’s voice is one of the most recognizable on the radio. She has made an impressive career out of talking to a wide range of people about topics that are often related to science and faith and spirituality. My producer, Colin and I, were thrilled to spend a few days recently at the On Being offices and studio, watching how they do things. And we got to interview Krista for our own show.

Krista grew up in a conservative Christian community, and you still hear echoes of that background in the way she talks today. But I think it is fair to say that her understanding of faith and spirituality has broadened. And I think it is also fair to say that for many people who identify with conservative Christianity, that broader and more nebulous approach to faith makes them a little nervous. Many Christians understand their faith through very specific creeds and systematic theology; Krista’s approach to faith is more like poetry.

But we don’t actually spend much of the interview pressing into the specifics of her beliefs. I was more interested to talk to her about talking to people—particularly those people with whom we disagree. And whether you agree with her or not, I hope you find this conversation interesting. It has direct application to the work we do at BioLogos. You can find more about our commitment to gracious dialogue and lots of other resources at our website biologos.org.

But now, let’s get to my conversation with Krista Tippett.

Stump:

Well, let’s start a little bit with the form of your work and then we’ll get to the substance of it. I think it’s a little bit surprising in our culture of ever shrinking attention spans that long form audio has become such a popular format and we here on this podcast are a little bit a late to the party perhaps, but you’ve been around it for quite a while. So what was it that drew you to this medium in the first place and why do you think it has become so popular recently?

Tippett:

Yeah, well I’m very pleased to I guess now be able to say that I had foresight. That as much as our attention spans are hijacked and we’re trained to be entertained and to get things in bite sized form, that there are still places in us and subjects and questions that we want to dwell with. I always believed that. And I, and I always knew 10 or 15 years ago that certainly, you know, this language of 24/7, certainly you couldn’t offer that 24/7, but that there is a longing for spaces of depth and quiet and that if we created something beautiful people would make room for it in their lives.

And then podcasting came along. So the, I mean, even in public radio in the beginning we heard from a lot of experts, quote unquote, that the days of long form listening, were past that whatever we created, people needed to be able to pick up their dry cleaning, drop their kids off at soccer, and that this idea of having a big conversation that you had to follow and stay with just wouldn’t float.

And you know, we just, we just prove them wrong by putting it out there and there were people ready. And then podcasting came along and allowed people of all ages to choose when they would listen. Right? To choose that hour or 90 minutes when they were going to give that under that precious undivided attention and yeah. Now long-form listening is the hip new thing.

Stump:

It’s become like the Netflix of audio, right? We don’t have to wait for the time when your show comes on to NPR, but you can pick it up and listen anytime. But aren’t you also creating some smaller bite sized?

Tippett:

We are and that took us a long, long time. That took 15 years. So we’re, we’re going the opposite direction from everybody else–from long to short. Yeah. And I wasn’t… I was really insistent for a long time that we were going to do depth and that we were going to be serious about the fact that this is possible and it matters. And I still believe that and all along the way people have asked for something that is just that much more portable, more shareable. And what we’re finding is that, and really this is new colleagues coming on who were able to go into the archive and find those moments, in a way that I can’t, right? I see the arc of the conversation, I see the thing from beginning to end. And we have these new creative people who can come in and make so many beautiful pieces out of this long form. So yeah, that’s really exciting.

Stump:

So speaking of arcs, let’s look at the arc of what you have done here. And I’ve found it at least interesting to look at it through the lens of the books that you’ve published from Speaking of Faith to Einstein’s God to Becoming Wise. So in a sense we’ve got faith to science to wisdom. I don’t mean to suggest that you’ve somehow moved past or eliminated those earlier topics, but is it fair to say that this represents a kind of broadening of the topics you’re looking for or a more encompassing way into conversations? Or is that just me looking for patterns where there aren’t really any?

Tippett:

I think there’s a pattern, but what it represents is that this project has always been about listening to our cultural encounter with questions of religious and spiritual life of meaning, of moral imagination. And so this show started piloting in the year 2001, right? October, 2001. And we had an evangelical president in the White House. So many of us in America had just been introduced to this religion of over a billion people now over 2 billion of Islam by way of a catastrophic terrorist incident. And religion was in the headlines in a way, and it had been for a number of years, but in a way that it hadn’t been for most of the 20th century. You know, religious voices had reasserted themselves. And come into the public sphere and come into political life. And I always say, in the end we found that the word faith… It was very freighted and it was freighted differently for different people.

But I always say that I would… I believe if I did this again, I would still call it Speaking of Faith because in 2001, 2002, 2003, it felt really important to me to say, “Yes, this is public  radio and yes, we are speaking of faith.” What followed– one of the things that followed on that period of religious voices, often strident religious voices rising to the surface of our life together was what we think of as the new atheist backlash which was, which was a scientific hostility to religion to kind of meet what some people, but not everyone had experienced as a religious hostility to science. And you know, I started interviewing scientists from the very beginning and that was one of the most surprising and wonderful discoveries is that conversation between scientific questions and insights and religious questions and insights.

Stump:

So I have something here you’ve said about that. I wonder if that might react to in particularly since ours as a podcast on science and faith. We’ll push into that a little. You said “There’s a new conversation and interplay between religion and science and human life in it has wondering, not debating at its heart.” So how is it that wonder is the connection, the peacemaker say between these two enterprises that have so often found themselves at war?

Tippett:

Well, I mean I do want to say for starters, as I got into this interplay, one of the things seemed to me that this outright hostility between science and religion, this sense that they come up with competing answers to the same human questions, was not true to the history of science or the history, in particular, of Christianity. That it’s a very recent phenomenon of the last couple hundred years. And that up through Darwin, and certainly in people like Galileo and Copernicus and Kepler–you know, Galileo, we think of as this person who was at war with the church. Truth is the church was uncomfortable with him, but he insisted to his dying breath that he was… that his investigations of the natural world were helping humanity better understand the mind of its maker. So in my mind, investigating the interplay and the conversation between these aspects of the human enterprise is picking up something that is much older than the fights.

But in terms of the wondering, you know, I do feel, especially in as the 21st century has progressed, that this territory that previously really was there for theologians–and philosophers to a certain extent–of these questions of why are we here and what does it mean to be human? Increasingly, you know, astrophysicists and evolutionary biologists and neuroscientists are walking on that territory, seeing and naming mystery in some ways more robustly than the religious.

There was this Hubris of 20th century physics that we were just right on the cusp of understanding everything, right? There may be one or two other things that we had to get. And then we would sum it all up. And I think included in that Hubris for some, but certainly not all, this wasn’t even the point of it was that, you know, that we would explain away a need for thinking about the existence of God. But what physics discovered instead as the 20th century closed was absolute mystery, was every certainty turned on its head. There was this realization that that the vast majority of the cosmos composed of things we still to this day have not even begun to fathom what they are. You know, these evocatively named, dark energy and dark matter.

So this renaming of mystery and this wondering at that. And I also feel… I mean, I would put so many things in that category. I feel like the pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope have made the, not just the majesty of the cosmos, but its beauty, have brought that into people’s, you know, onto people’s laptops, into their homes, into our imaginations. I’m fascinated by how neuroscience is taking what we have previously–really the virtues of the church, right, the virtues of theology and philosophy–taking those things into the laboratory and explaining from a scientific perspective, not just why, you know, something like forgiveness or awe or compassion is life giving, right? That these things are key to a satisfying life. But helping the rest of us, including our theological traditions, understand how they work when they work. You know, how we can make forgiveness more likely than revenge. So in this way, in a way that I don’t think anybody could have anticipated science and religion have become companions, and companions in the mystery of the fact that we exist and how we navigate life.

Stump:

So for some people, I wonder if those mysteries of science they feel are kind of an ersatz religion, is it, is it taking away something religion to say, well, if I’m interested in wonder and mystery, I can just go do quantum physics and that, that is a replacement for religion? Or is this a drawing together of these two different expressions we have of science and of, and of religion that has this commonality at their core?

Tippett:

I don’t even know if I would put it in either of those categories. So, you know, I grew up with a southern Baptist preacher grandfather and his faith was very much about having answers and certainties and, and, and he had a big, beautiful mind. And I sensed a real fear in him at applying his mind, which I found puzzling because if God was as big and powerful as he believed and as he brought me to believe, I didn’t think that God would be afraid of any questions we asked.

Stump:

Let me try to ask it this way. So I listened to the interview you did with the physicist Brian Greene.

Tippett:

Yes. So let’s talk about that one.

Stump:

So he’s not a new atheist by any stretch, right. But yet at some level he seems uninterested in the kinds of questions that science can’t answer.

Tippett:

Oh, oh, I would even say he’s arrogant about the fact that those questions aren’t as serious as the questions he can explore in his laboratory.

Stump:

What do you make of people like that? For whom they’re just saying that just doesn’t, if science can’t answer it, it doesn’t interest me.

Tippett:

Well, but yeah. For example and I said this to Brian Green when he talks about the laws of physics as these omniscient, omnipotent core… this core built in intelligence behind the universe, it sounds a lot like the way other people across history, including my grandfather, have spoken about God. This is a provocative thing to say, and it’s a stretch. But sometimes I wonder if a hundred years from now we will see that what physics is exploring in terms of, you know, the mathematical laws behind the universe leads us–It is leading us back around to some of the same questions that the religious have pursued.

And sure you could take offense at that. You could say, what are they doing? You know, they’re co-opting this, they’re distorting it. I think it’s fascinating. I know this is where I was going to come with it. I think it’s in the realm of mystery. And one thing I see at the orthodox cores of our traditions is that at one in the same time, we are to hold faithfully to the truth as we know it and have discerned it and to hold to the reality of those things we will not comprehend in this lifetime. And I actually think like from a perspective of faith, some of this new complexity building up in the way science is grappling if not with the same language but with some of the same questions is in that realm of mystery. And so I actually think that orthodoxy would allow us to be fascinated by that, to be curious about it and not to be threatened by it. And I don’t think they’re necessarily coming together. Right. I think it’s something else over there. Yeah. But again, it’s, I don’t think it’s something to be afraid of.

[musical interlude]

BioLogos:

Hey Language of God listeners. If you’re interested in how to have civil and gracious conversations about science and faith you can check out the guide to better conversations at On Being, which we have linked in the show notes. If you’re interested in having some of those conversations you might want to head over to the BioLogos forum where you can ask questions or share your own thoughts on a variety of different topics, including each podcast episode. Find the link to the forum in the show notes or visit biologos.org and look for the forums tab at the top of the page. 

Stump:

So we work with one group of scientists that maybe themselves don’t have religious impulse or practice themselves, but are glad that a group like us is helping to show more conservative religious people that they don’t have to be afraid of science, but this group of scientists themselves just aren’t, they’re just not interested in those kind of questions.

Tippett:

Exactly, yeah.

Stump:

And can often even seem apathetic toward “what’s the point of that?”. So is there any way of using this mystery or this wonder that you’ve found that can help maybe stoke some interest in questions that are beyond what science can answer?

Tippett:

On the part of scientists?

Stump:

Yeah, on the part of scientists themselves of trying to incite a little bit of that wonder and mystery in ways that might apply to questions that science itself can’t answer? Or maybe another way of asking this is, are there limits to what science can address in this realm of mystery in wonder?

Tippett:

Yeah, there absolutely are. And to me this is part of what’s gone wrong and how the whole, how we’ve we’ve reimagined and enacted this as a fight and a battle because what I, what I’ve come to understand in part, through my conversations with scientists, with theologians is that, you know…it’s not true. And I think the fight presumes that science and religion are looking at the very same questions of human life and coming up with different answers. And in fact, they’re asking different questions. So even when they are looking at that same phenomena, like how did the universe begin? They’re asking a different set of questions. To your point, I would like to bring in evolutionary biology here. And I also, and I know that… Again, I often feel like we’re focusing in the wrong place and we’re having the wrong fights altogether.

Stump:

So what are the right fights?

Tippett:

Well, I mean certainly there’s, you know, there’s the matter of whether evolution is valid, right? I mean that’s, that’s the fight and that’s the kind of the cultural fight. And I’ve written in Einstein’s God, you know, I have interviewed any number of scientists who are deeply devout Christians. John Polkinghorne being one of them, but others. And I know that it is possible to speak with someone who is steeped in physics and then the word that has been raised with me more than once from scientists like that who bring these two…or the astronomers who work on, in the Vatican observatory, right? The word they use to describe what science observes about the workings of evolution is that is ingenious. An ingenious solution of God to a problem. How to make a world that is alive rather than dead and clockwork.

So there’s, there’s that. But put that to one side. To me a much more fascinating development in our time, in evolutionary biology, is a scientist like David Sloan Wilson at Binghamton University who, who has actually disrupted and up-ended the field of evolutionary biology and been proven right by insisting for several decades that the selfish gene, that the survival of the fittest, that the way we’ve talked about evolution in cultural terms–cause we, we kind of confuse those things, right? The DNA of it, the geology of it and the culture of it. Cause a lot of it is about human behavior and human conduct.

So David Sloan Wilson got fascinated decades ago by, by religious communities and people as what he was call you know, these incredibly extraordinary examples of pro-social behavior and pro-social groups, adaptive groups. I don’t know all the language he uses. So he has this extraordinary respect as a scientist, kind of, again, not looking at religion from a religious perspective, but looking at religion from a scientific perspective about what this particular way of being community has brought into the world.

And at the same time that there’s that possibility within evolutionary biology really we are revisiting the notion of… This is what my daughter, my 19 year-old, our 19 year-olds are very wise, right? They often get things we don’t get. She said, “Mom, we’re redefining the meaning of fit.” So survival of the fittest, and this is true within the field of evolutionary biology and psychology, that is a crass, simplistic idea. Because what we’re appreciating as we get more sophisticated in that field is that human beings also have this super power of cooperation. And that, in fact, is every bit as much what has gotten us to this level of advance as fighting and winning. And so again that’s a scientific way to describe it. And what you also then start to describe with other words from a theological, religious point of view, is that things like compassion and love and community, in fact make us human and matter, and are worthy and make us who we are. And I’m totally fascinated by that, which again, is not about a coming together. It’s kind of about this convergence that is unplanned, unexpected and yet brings these disciplines that are fighting in one sphere very much in conversation in another.

Stump:

So you talk to a lot of people, many of whom are at least some of whom I would expect you yourself have disagreements with. But those even deep and fundamental disagreements don’t seem to hinder your ability to have a deep and meaningful conversation with such people. What’s the trick to that? What, how do you, how do you approach conversations like that going in when, you know, I probably disagree pretty deeply with this person, but what are you looking to draw out of them?

Tippett:

You know, I think we’ve worked our way into a few dehumanizing ruts, culturally. And one of them is this idea–and I find this idea on the right as on the left, although I hate these binary ways, we divide everything up, but whatever the right is, or the left on any issue or in any situation–um, this idea that because I disagree, that to be in conversation with that person with whom I disagree would be a form of capitulation or compromise in and of itself. And that is so damaging to our life together. And the truth is we do share life. We share life at our communities. We share life in the places we live and work and worship. And so, you know, part of it to me is about… One of–a guest I really enjoyed a few years ago, John Powell, you know, says the question is not whether we’re going to be in relationship like we are in relationship. It can be a good relationship or a bad relationship. And so part of this is acknowledging, you know, that not only are we sharing this human experience, but we have to remake shared life. We have to do that, you know, for so many reasons, but one of them is to show our children something that we want them to inherit.

I mean, there are many other reasons to do it, but that’s one that I know that I feel brings a lot of people together when they find it in themselves to come together. I think for me, talking about civility is about saying–is absolutely not about saying that the things that divide us are not important because they are. And that’s part of what makes this moment hard. We differ on ideas and convictions and beliefs and choices that are really profound and meaningful. And the point of being in conversation is not to deny that. But I think the point of coming into conversation and more importantly coming into relationship is that we can’t let those things that divide us define what is possible between us–in human terms, and in terms of, you know, can we craft shared life or not? And whether we craft shared life or not is at the root of all kinds of other existential questions. Can we make politics functional again? Right? Can we have an economy that is humane? Can we grapple with caring for the natural world together, with so much crisis that we can all see, even if we define it differently. So that’s to me is the point. It’s speaking together differently in order to live together differently. And the other thing that’s really important to me that I ended up talking to people about a lot is that in our intimate lives and in our circles of trust and community, our families, our circles of extended friends, you know, our workplaces, our congregations, our neighborhoods, we live and stay in relationship across all kinds of disagreement all the time.

Stump:

Such as?

Tippett:

If we all think about our circles of our most beloveds, if we’re lucky, there are one or two people in there whose sentences we complete and are complete soul-mates on everything. But that’s not–that’s just not the nature of being human. In our spectrum of intimacy, there are people with whom we stay in relationship by deciding what we will not talk about or not talk about now. We don’t reduce the people we love to the thing that we most disagree with. Love, in fact as it functions in real life is often not at all about how you feel about somebody or feel at the moment. It’s about practices. It’s about what you do nevertheless, despite the way you feel. It’s that Agape love. It’s a practical care. And if we just applied, you know, again, acknowledging the reality that we share our communities, that we share our political life, that we share the future and that we really, I think, again, if nothing else that we are called to create the world we want our children to walk into. I think we could just pragmatically apply some of the intelligence we have in our lives of an intimacy to our public life to that other and just move forward in a life-giving way.

Stump:

One of those deep disagreements is on the nature of truth claims related to religions. Which different expressions of different religions might be able to parade forth certain truth claims that are mutually incompatible. And these, for many people, reach right down to the core of their identities. And I wonder if you’d respond to it in this way. This is like the most provocative way you can put it. I was reading Jean Jacques Rousseau in The Social Contract where he thought discussion of religion needed to be banned from civil society because he said “It’s impossible to live at peace with those we regard as damned. To love them would be to hate God who punishes them. We positively must either reclaim or torment them.”

Tippett:

He sounds like a modern man, doesn’t he?

Stump:

Yeah, but is there room? Can we live at peace with people for whom we have this, what we take to be like a universal and objective belief that religion is true or false and mine is true and yours is false?

Tippett:

Yeah. Again, I would say that anyone who is truly steeped in the depths of, let’s just say Christian tradition or Jewish tradition for that matter, is also called to love the enemy, to love the stranger. And again, to live humbly with the reality that there is mystery. That there are things we won’t understand in this lifetime. And I think living with those, with these ways of being to which we’re called. I don’t think this is easy, but again, I’m talking about this from the perspective of the religious person. You know, I won’t speak for… this is where I come from, right? That we are called to be certain ways and we all do it imperfectly every single day. And yet this is our calling to get up the next day and live as faithfully according to that way of being that we can. And it, I don’t think it gives us the choice to opt out.

Stump:

So the fear, I think for some people, and I don’t hear you saying this, but I think the fear for some that want to hold to that universal and objective way of understanding the truth claims of their own religion is that to do the opposite seems to turn that into some wishy washy, this is your preference. The way we might argue over which flavor of ice cream is better.

Tippett:

Yeah no, and I think that actually is about the failure of tolerance. I think tolerance with a baby step in the 1960s, when this country having been pretty much homogeneously, I mean in terms of our self understanding of course this wasn’t like the, the actual truth, but in terms of our self understanding, White Protestant, Christian…and the 1960s there was a racial awakening. There was a whole new immigration policy, which actually for the first time brought non white Christian Europeans to be Americans for the first time. I mean we forget this, right?

And so we took this, this thing called tolerance as our civic virtue, which in fact always had been about really, you know, religious tolerance came from the religious realm. I think it translated very imperfectly into all of our differences. And from a religious perspective, and this is, you know, this is one way I want to come back to that question is tolerance was always too small. I mean, tolerance doesn’t ask us to love the stranger or the neighbor or the enemy doesn’t even ask us to be interested in each other. It doesn’t ask us to care. It says, I’m going to do my thing over here. You do your thing over there. We’re going to check all of this at the door when we come to work. So that we don’t offend each other. Right? So they won’t offend each other. We’re going to check it at the door of politics, which we pretended we were doing for a long time. We have morally hollowed out institutions because we morally hollowed out ourselves before we came into our shared public spaces. I do believe that. So part of the challenge now, and it’s really important is, how do we honor the fullness of ourselves and others and the seriousness of those convictions and beliefs and identity, very much including religious and moral identity. How do we let that fullness in, honor that, and share life?

[musical interlude]

Stump:

So I have a couple of quotes from you here in front of me and I’m not afraid to use them. From an episode that you did with Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie about interfaith dialogue. You said something really interesting about talking to people with whom you disagree. You said “You don’t give up the ground, you stand on, right? The world becomes larger because you’ve seen this other and you may have an appreciation for them or a curiosity about what they bring into the world, but it’s also the ground beneath your feet that’s somehow richer and more interesting.” Can you unpack that a little bit more? That seems to be important in this.

Tippett:

Well that is the paradox, the mystery if you will of relationship, of generative relationship across difference of, you know, anybody who’s been involved in ecumenical or interfaith. Meaningful. You know, there’s a lot of superficial stuff going on, but anything that is meaningful, where relationship happens, where you experience that mystery of the religious, other. You know, somebody said to me very early on in the life of the show and when it was called Speaking of Faith. An evangelical scholar, he said, “You’re kind of doing stealth.” He said, “This is like stealth interfaith work cause you’re talking to people I wouldn’t talk to. But I’m learning about them.”

But what I think is behind that is that we think, and I think this is true for me growing up too, if we get too close, we might get infected, right? Or they will change us or they will say, you know? There was a lot of fear in the religion of my childhood. What I see when I think about it is that it kind of assumes that what we believe in that the ground we stand on is so fragile. But what, what you see again and again, and let’s just stick to interfaith or ecumenical, but it’s also true across racial lines or generational lines, that when that happens in a meaningful way, generally what happens is that at one in the same time, you have some delight in this other and you know more firmly about… You are more richly planted in the ground you stand on, you understand better what it is that makes you. What it is that forms your beliefs and why you believe them. You know that better. It’s a both, and. And it really is in the realm of mystery. And what I’m describing is just, it is, it is an experience that many people have had. And it certainly does not communicate in language like an ecumenical encounter, an interfaith encounter.

Or a science religion encounter. I think that’s true across that divide too. It’s like, you know this is why I’m a theologian. These are questions I care about, and yet you can know that and be fascinated and inspired by, by what this other person is passionate about the knowledge they’re bringing into the world. It doesn’t have to be a challenge.

Stump:

Another thing, I think this came from your Becoming Wise book. “There’s value in learning to speak together honestly and relate to each other with dignity without rushing to common ground. That would leave all the hard questions hanging.” So you said a little bit ago about some of these encounters are superficial and I think our fear is either it’s going to become combative or it’s just we’re going to sing Koombaya together and pretend that we all get along.

Tippett:

No. And this is another thing like, you know, the tolerance and the other thing we did is celebrating diversity. If all you’re doing is celebrating diversity, you’re staying at a really superficial level. Because our diversity has all this particularity in it and this complexity in it and this is this new muscle we have to flex. How do we invite that into the room? And you know, put one of the moves that we’re, that we’re all kind of used to: we want to really quickly get, find the common ground, right?

Stump:

That’s our intuition right?

Tippett:

Or get on the same page. Or in religious institutions this is a political form that is tearing our traditions apart, which is, “Or we’ll take a vote,” right? We’ll take a vote and it doesn’t settle anything when we’re dealing with these deep civilizational, intimate human religious questions, that just creates new pain. So I would be all for banishing and really very, very seriously assessing like what are the forms and the instincts that we have and in fact are alien. And you know, that in fact come from this political thing that happened that is, that that does not serve us and is alien to the more important teachings and beliefs that we have. Yeah and I think…I get nervous. And the other question that makes me… when people say to me what are the common denominators? Right? Like what are, what are the underlying things that every person you’ve spoken with. There’s this some assumption that there’s some way in which we’re all alike and you know, I say like, I’m just not even interested in that common denominator. I’m interested in depth. I’m interested in particularity. If, as I move from conversation to conversation, I start to hear echoes–and that’s really how I think of it, echoes– in that place of depth, that for me is in the territory of mystery and I stand in awe of that. I don’t have to tie that up. I honor that.

Stump:

Is there some tension between this conversation we’ve just been having there about preserving particularity and even traditions with the new emergent phenomenon of the nones? Where do you think this movement came from? Is it really something new? Or have people always fallen outside of the strict institutional categories and just now we’re able to talk about it?

Tippett:

No I think they’re the desert fathers and mothers of our time. My observation is that the way in which people are reaching for to craft spiritual life when they have been given no formation, that there’s a depth to that now. And that there are a lot of ways growing up to accompany that with depth and that is new, that was not there in the eighties and nineties. That I don’t think this is like the new age. And what I also see is that, and I just think this is true that as people go, you know, certainly in the beginning, if you have somebody who has no formation, nothing given they’re, you know, you’re going to read books, you’re going to, I don’t know, listen to On Being. I mean I hear that a lot, you know, you’re going to listen to On Being, you’re going to–there are a lot of beautiful programs forming and projects and ways you can even get kind of, you know, somewhat, you know, theological, a taste of theological education. But that at some point, as people get serious about it, they do start to gravitate towards community, towards a ritual, towards text, towards some of the fundamentals of the traditions. And I think the question is you know, how, how do the institutions rise to this to meet them? What I mean by that is so much the opposite of changing your message to appeal to the millennials. I think that they are ready for depth and you know, the language of virtues. I see that.

Stump:

So when you interview somebody, you almost always start by asking them about the spiritual environment of their youth, of their childhood even. You then go on in Becoming Wise to say that you’d never ask the more obvious and unnerving question. Tell me about your spiritual life now. I won’t ask you that question, but I wonder if I can ask you about that question a little bit because I’m curious what that attitude says that you take the spiritual life to be, if it’s the kind of thing that you shouldn’t ask another person.

Tippett:

Well what I mean by that is just that it’s so intimate. I just think it’s one of the most intimate questions. And it generally would need a lot more time and care than, you know, where did you grow up or, I know the other question. So when it’s, it’s not, I guess what I mean is it’s not, it’s not a conversation opener. You know, we have this idea in this country that you can’t kind of ask somebody who they voted for, right? Like that, that’s private space that is so personal. And it’s not a great analogy, but I do feel like in the world I grew up in, you know, I like I would be taught to…

Stump:

Yeah, you blurt out stuff out, right?

Tippett:

Well, but what I would do is I would quote John 3:16, right? I mean, I would give you some Bible verses. But to say, what is your spiritual life? What is the state of your soul? How… What’s your relationship with God these days? Who is God to you? It’s…they’re just such huge questions where they’re just, they’re hard to answer straight on and they’re partly hard to answer straight on because these questions are hard to put words around, right? The words aren’t worthy. and, and somehow asking the question about the spiritual background of somebody’s childhood kind of plants some of the things about those questions in physical memories. And it allows people to talk about them more openly than if I said, tell me about this straight on.

Stump:

Your last topic in the Becoming Wise book is hope. And you say, “My mind inclines now more than ever towards hope,” and hope is one of the breeding grounds you’ve identified for the virtue of wisdom. Where does hope come from? Does it itself need a breeding ground or is it something you can just choose to be hopeful?

Tippett:

Oh, well I, I do think hope is a choice. I think it’s a muscle. When I say that I’m contrasting it with what for me is uh more flimsy option, which is to be, well either cynical, which is completely lacking in courage and any, you know, just absolves you of any responsibility. And it’s lazy. Idealism to me…or I mean optimism, which to me that’s a very different notion from hope. It feels something kind of wished based. You know, and to me, hope is reality based, it takes in the complexity of what we’re working with and it’s sees the darkness and it sees what is hard and it also sees the light. It sees what is possible beyond that. And I don’t think hope is something…I think it’s a really muscular choice. And I think one of the reasons especially in a moment like this where we need to surround ourselves with others is that I, you know, it’s, I don’t even think it’s something that all of us can carry and every minute or on every day. I think that’s true of actually all the virtues. I don’t think we’re called to carry those things privately. I think we surround ourselves with people who can be our companions and accompany us. And I don’t, yeah, I mean hope is hard now. And it flies in the face of, and I think about this as a journalist, a lot flies in the face of what comes to us as the news every morning which is about how we’ve interpreted news and how we’re some so much more sophisticated at analyzing and talking about what is destructive and catastrophic than we are at pointing at and analyzing and emulating what is life giving and generative. But I think that’s the only way to live right now. I think that’s a commitment.

Stump:

So you, perhaps more than anybody else, have your finger on the spiritual pulse of a wide swath, not just of America, but of, of the world. And when you survey that, what are you hopeful about?

Tippett:

You know, I think a lot about that, the biblical notion of developing eyes to see and ears to hear. And again, I think in a 24/7 media environment where we have so much given to us to see and hear, there’s this spiritual discipline of looking beyond that. And when I look beyond that, I see so much beauty. And so there’s an abundance of good people crafting good and beautiful lives and working in the world that they can touch to create the new realities that they want their children to inhabit. And, you know, working inside institutions that have outlived their–the forms have outlived their usefulness and kind of working, you know, within those forms to create something new. I see so much of that. And again, this doesn’t it’s not going to be on the cover of the New York Times tomorrow. But it is as true and real as what will be. So if I train my eyes and ears, you know, my hope is reasonable and reality based and it’s a life giving choice.

Stump:

Thank you for bringing those people to our attention through On Being week after week, since they’re not on the cover of the New York Times. We need to see them somewhere. It’s a tremendous service you provide.

Tippett:

Thank you.

Stump:

Thanks for talking to me.

Tippett:

Yeah, it was great.

BioLogos:

Language of God is produced by BioLogos. It has been funded in part by the John Templeton Foundation and more than 300 individuals who donated to our crowdfunding campaign. Language of God is produced and mixed by Colin Hoogerwerf. Our theme song is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We are produced out of the BioLogos offices in Grand Rapids, Michigan

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