On Being with Krista Tippett

From Krista: I'm on record bemoaning across the years that “love” is the most watered-down word in the English language. I know that invoking love feels very soft for our hard realms of politics and war. Yet it is an enduring truth that love is the only force as powerful in a human body as fear. And we inhabit a world that calls us to grow up our capacity to love — and to redeem our relationships to neighbors, strangers, and enemies — as never before, both in the present and for the sake of the world beyond this age of violence we've come to inhabit. Rabbi Shai Held has written an epic theological work called Judaism is About Love. And, as he interrogates Judaism's complicated history with love, he makes an offering that is of relevance to us all. — Find an excellent transcript of this show, edited by humans, on our show page. Sign yourself and others up for The Pause to be on our mailing list for all things On Being and to receive Krista's monthly Saturday newsletter, including a heads up on new episodes, special offerings, recommendations, and event invitations. Shai Held is a philosopher, biblical scholar, and rabbi. He is the President and Dean of the Hadar Institute, which describes itself as a center of life, learning, and practice supporting a Judaism that is both traditional and egalitarian. His recent book is Judaism is About Love, and he also hosts a podcast called Answers WithHeld. Learn more at hadar.org Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

From Krista: I was longing for a deep dive on the radiant and common-sense hope that Jason Reynolds embodies after I interviewed him at a Georgetown event last year. I got my chance at the 2025 Aspen Ideas Festival. Jason’s perspective is so urgent for the world we've now walked into: on giving ourselves grace to be hopeless, the virtue of stamina, and the hope that stays strong in him from his life in relationship with the very young in our midst — "the arbiters and purveyors of the future" — as well as an occasional stranger in a bar. Jason himself is preternaturally wise as well as talented and kind and humble. He's become a friend across the years and is one of my favorite people in the world. — Find an excellent transcript of this show, edited by humans, on our show page. Sign yourself and others up for The Pause to be on our mailing list for all things On Being and to receive Krista's monthly Saturday newsletter, including a heads up on new episodes, special offerings, recommendations, and event invitations. Jason Reynolds is a New York Times bestselling author of over 20 books for children and young adults. From 2020–2022, he served as National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. Among many honors, he has received the Newbery, Printz, and Coretta Scott King Awards, and was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2024. He is on the faculty at Lesley University for the Writing for Young People M.F.A. Program. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 transformation of perspective and path. You will hear me invoke a notion of "deep truth" from physics that is vividly with me in this time. Terrible ruptures and escalating violence are part of the truth of what we see ourselves capable. But they are not the whole truth, not the inevitable future. Courageous experiments in healing and transformation are also a reality of our time. In a packed room in New York City, I think we all felt like we were witnessing something unimaginable if you only judge the potentials of humanity from the extreme actions that shape what we call the news. The Bereaved Families Forum is extremism in a life-giving, heart-opening key. We left that room — and may you leave this listening — feeling a little bit healed ourselves, with a hopefulness become more magnetic and more reasonable. This event was hosted by the American Friends of the Parents Circle – Bereaved Israelis and Palestinians for Peace. My conversation partners were Robi Damelin, Arab Aramin, Mohamed Abu Jafar, and Liora Eilon. Liora, who lost her son in their kibbutz on October 7, 2023, is one of the newest members of this group. __ Listen to Krista’s original conversation with Robi Damelin and Ali Abu Awaad in the On Being podcast feed; the episode is called “No More Taking Sides”. And learn much more about this beautiful community at theparentscircle.org. The American Friends community website is parentscirclefriends.org. Find an excellent transcript of this show, edited by humans, on our show page. Sign yourself and others up for The Pause to be on our mailing list for all things On Being and to receive Krista's monthly Saturday newsletter, including a heads up on new episodes, special offerings, recommendations, and event invitations. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The word “trauma” is used so widely at present, arguably too widely. But it bespeaks a tenor of our shared reality. 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 world, there are countless clinical studies, yielding results it’s hard not at times to call miraculous — for complex PTSD, long-term addiction, treatment-resistant depression. What I’m talking about are therapeutically-administered treatments with plant medicines and chemical compounds we call psychedelic or empathogenic. Use those words, and many of us — including me until not that long ago — might become wary. Like all forces of great power, these can cut in every direction — the dark and the light of the human condition. But the conversation you are about to hear, with one of the leading neuroscientists in this field, revolves around serious, important research in settings designed for careful, beneficial human effect. Gül Dölen's groundbreaking contribution to all of us is in her fascinating insight into what psychedelically-assisted therapies are revealing about the workings of the human brain and the brain's capacity to change and the human capacity for major transformation altogether. The potential consequences of this science are intimate and civilizational at once. I see them as a stunning ray of hope in a struggling world. I interviewed Gül Dölen at the 2025 Aspen Ideas Festival. Find an excellent transcript of this show, edited by humans, on our show page. Sign yourself and others up for The Pause to be on our mailing list for all things On Being and to receive Krista's monthly Saturday newsletter, including a heads up on new episodes, special offerings, recommendations, and event invitations. Gül Dölen leads the Dölen Lab at U.C. Berkeley, where she is a Professor and the Bob & Renee Parsons Endowed Chair in the Department of Neuroscience and the Department of Psychology at the Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute. She also maintains an Adjunct Professorship in Neuroscience and Neurology at the Johns Hopkins University, School of Medicine. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 witness to each other as we do so. I think all of us in the room left a little more lighthearted and alive as this conversation unfolded. I hope that will be your experience too. Tracy K. Smith and Joy Harjo are former U.S. poet laureates, beloved On Being guests, and friends. They are each wildly and deservedly awarded and not just as poets — Tracy also as a teacher and professor at Harvard, Joy as a saxophonist and painter. We were brought together at Symphony Space in Manhattan to celebrate their newest books: Fear Less by Tracy and Girl Warrior by Joy. Find an excellent transcript of this show, edited by humans, on our show page. Sign yourself and others up for The Pause to be on our mailing list for all things On Being and to receive Krista's monthly Saturday newsletter, including a heads up on new episodes, special offerings, recommendations, and event invitations. Joy Harjo was the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States. Among many honors, she has received the Poetry Society of America's Frost Medal and a National Humanities Medal. She is the inau­gur­al Artist-in-Res­i­dence for the Bob Dylan Cen­ter in Tul­sa, Okla­homa. She lives on the Musco­gee Nation Reser­va­tion in Oklahoma. Her new book of essays is Girl Warrior. Forthcoming in 2026 is her 12th book of poetry and a new album co-produced with esperanza spalding. Tracy K. Smith was the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States. She teaches at Harvard University, where she is Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, Professor of African and African American Studies, and Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Among her many honors, she has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and is a Chancellor of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her new memoir is Fear Less. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Five new On Being episodes will begin to roll out next week … We begin with the delightful beloved poets (and friends) Joy Harjo and Tracy K. Smith in conversation together with Krista. We move on to the neuroscientist Gül Dölen; a community of Israelis and Palestinians who will expand your heart and moral imagination; philosopher rabbi Shai Held; and, because we can't get enough of him, a wonderful new sit-down with Krista and Jason Reynolds on hope in this time and in friendship with the young in our world. All of them offer beauty and pragmatic nourishment for ourselves and for witnessing each other's hurt and each other's promise. There is searching and pondering on what love really means and how it works and what hope can mean in this world in which hopelessness feels so reasonable. And be prepared to be amazed in an introduction to majestic learning underway about new, transformative healing of our brains and our lives emerging from the frontier of psychedelically-assisted therapeutic treatments. Please help us spread the word, and join us! Sign yourself and others up for The Pause to be on our mailing list for all things On Being and to receive Krista's monthly Saturday newsletter, including a heads up on new episodes, special offerings, recommendations, and event invitations. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The great primatologist and humanitarian, Jane Goodall, died on October 1, 2025, at the age of 91. It is a joy and a comfort to revisit our last broadcast of her 2020 conversation with Krista. Jane Goodall began her epic work studying chimpanzees in the Gombe forest without even a college degree. The science she proceeded to do recalled modern western science to the fact that we are a part of nature, not separate from it. She spent the last decades of her life on the road, often with the young, tending to human fear and misunderstanding. In this beautiful conversation from pandemic lockdown, she shared the moral and spiritual wisdom that emerged in her extraordinary life — and the hope that, to the end, sustained her. Jane Goodall was the founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and its youth program, Roots & Shoots. She has been the subject of many films and documentaries, including “Jane Goodall: The Hope.” Her many books include In the Shadow of Man, Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey, and most recently, The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times. Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org. This show originally aired in August, 2020. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This rich, gorgeous conversation will fill your soul. The singular and beloved Joanna Macy died at home at the age of 96 on July 20, 2025. She has left an immense legacy of beauty and wisdom and courage to sustain us. A Buddhist teacher, ecological philosopher, and Rilke translator, she taught and embodied a wild love for the world. What follows is the second and final conversation Krista had with Joanna, together with Joanna’s friend, psychologist and fellow Rilke translator Anita Barrows, in 2021. Joanna and Anita had just published a new translation of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. At the turn of the last tumultuous century, Rilke was prescient in realizing that the world as he’d known it was passing away. Joanna’s adventurous life and vision took shape in the crucibles of the history that then unfolded. Relistening to her now is to experience a way of standing before the great, unfolding dramas of our time — ecological, political, intimate. We stand before the possibilities of what Joanna called “A Great Unraveling” or “A Great Turning” towards life-generating human society. All of this and so much more comes through in the riches of this life-giving conversation. Sign yourself and others up for The Pause to be on our mailing list for all things On Being and to receive Krista's monthly Saturday morning newsletter, including a heads-up on new episodes, special offerings, recommendations, and event invitations. Joanna Macy was the root teacher of The Work That Reconnects. Her books include Active Hope and four volumes of translated works of Rainer Maria Rilke, together with Anita Barrows: Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God; In Praise of Mortality; and A Year with Rilke. Krista's previous "On Being” episode with her is “A Wild Love for the World.” That’s also the title of a lovely book of homage to Joanna that was published in 2020. Anita Barrows’s most recent poetry collection is Testimony. She is the Institute Professor of Psychology at the Wright Institute in Berkeley, California, and also maintains a private practice.

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 is 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 over to a practice of delight. As you move through your smallest interactions, look for moments/sightings/experiences that bring flashes of light into your day. Do you notice “unambiguously pleasant public physical interactions”? What is pleasant and sweet and tender? Can you feel how attending to delight as seriously as hardship nourishes a reality-bending imagination and passion for justice and hope that is as joyful as it is fierce? We've created a beautiful journal for the whole seven weeks, with full-size printable pages, that you can download for free HERE. A Possible Way to Organize This Experience Take each week’s brief listening offering, each around 15 minutes long, as a meditation to move through the week ahead. And as none of the great virtues — and certainly not hope — is meant to be carried alone, we encourage you to undertake this experience alongside others, perhaps your life partner or family or colleagues or friends, book group or study group. For example, you could: ● Listen to one Wisdom Practice (roughly 15 minutes) — together or separately — around the same time each week. Listen again and/or read the transcript as often as is useful. ● Carry the ideas, invitations, and journal prompts for the session into your ordinary interactions of the days that follow. ● Commit to some time journaling every day, even if just for a few minutes or a few words. ● Meet with or Zoom/call your companion(s) at the end of the week to share, converse, commune. The Hope Portal and this series are adventures in opening the deep enduring teaching that lives inside the 20 years of On Being. We would be so grateful if you would let us know how it goes for you and how it might be refined, by writing to us at mail@onbeing.org. Sign yourself and others up for The Pause to be first to know about all things On Being and to receive Krista's monthly Saturday morning newsletter, including a heads-up on new episodes, special offerings, recommendations, and event invitations.

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 it — and she beckons us to enter and relearn. Journaling prompts for Session 6 Summon your 200-Year present. Take your mind back to the youngest age you can remember and to the oldest person you remember holding you. Roughly calculate the year of their birth and the history that shaped their lifetime. And who is the youngest person you have held in your arms most recently? Imagine a robust life for them — both the age and year to which they could live. Try to inhabit this expanse of history that you have literally touched and been touched by. Can you feel in your body, in your imagination, a more spacious grasp of time itself and of possibility and agency? What difference might it make? We've created a beautiful journal for the whole seven weeks, with full-size printable pages, that you can download for free HERE. A Possible Way to Organize This Experience Take each week’s brief listening offering, each around 15 minutes long, as a meditation to move through the week ahead. And as none of the great virtues — and certainly not hope — is meant to be carried alone, we encourage you to undertake this experience alongside others, perhaps your life partner or family or colleagues or friends, book group or study group. For example, you could: ● Listen to one Wisdom Practice (roughly 15 minutes) — together or separately — around the same time each week. Listen again and/or read the transcript as often as is useful. ● Carry the ideas, invitations, and journal prompts for the session into your ordinary interactions of the days that follow. ● Commit to some time journaling every day, even if just for a few minutes or a few words. ● Meet with or Zoom/call your companion(s) at the end of the week to share, converse, commune. The Hope Portal and this series are adventures in opening the deep enduring teaching that lives inside the 20 years of On Being. We would be so grateful if you would let us know how it goes for you and how it might be refined, by writing to us at mail@onbeing.org. Sign yourself and others up for The Pause to be first to know about all things On Being and to receive Krista's monthly Saturday morning newsletter, including a heads-up on new episodes, special offerings, recommendations, and event invitations.

Our teacher and inspiration for this session is Joanna Macy. What she embodies is a wild love for the world and a fierce hope that rises irrepressible from that. And she carries and lives an important reminder to us that when we love, we will also know pain, and we will know grief that can feel too awful to bear. When we talk about the muscle of hope being reality-based, that means that it does not call us to be brimming with optimism where that is not warranted. What we’re called to do is stay present. And when you’re present, there will be grieving to do, but that this — strangely, interestingly, kind of miraculously — increases our capacity to love this world. And it unleashes intelligence and ingenuity to sustain that love across a lifetime, as Joanna Macy has. Journaling prompts for Session 5 What is the love on the other side of your pain? What is a loss you have perhaps not quite acknowledged? The despair that you began to write about at the outset of this experience, the despair you may be feeling for the world today — what would it mean to stand reverently before your grief? Can you imagine what it would mean — to sit with what it would mean — to turn it into a mourning that brings you more deeply into the love that lies just on the other side of your pain? We've created a beautiful journal for the whole seven weeks, with full-size printable pages, that you can download for free HERE. A Possible Way to Organize This Experience Take each week’s brief listening offering, each around 15 minutes long, as a meditation to move through the week ahead. And as none of the great virtues — and certainly not hope — is meant to be carried alone, we encourage you to undertake this experience alongside others, perhaps your life partner or family or colleagues or friends, book group or study group. For example, you could: ● Listen to one Wisdom Practice (roughly 15 minutes) — together or separately — around the same time each week. Listen again and/or read the transcript as often as is useful. ● Carry the ideas, invitations, and journal prompts for the session into your ordinary interactions of the days that follow. ● Commit to some time journaling every day, even if just for a few minutes or a few words. ● Meet with or Zoom/call your companion(s) at the end of the week to share, converse, commune. The Hope Portal and this series are adventures in opening the deep enduring teaching that lives inside the 20 years of On Being. We would be so grateful if you would let us know how it goes for you and how it might be refined, by writing to us at mail@onbeing.org. Sign yourself and others up for The Pause to be first to know about all things On Being and to receive Krista's monthly Saturday morning newsletter, including a heads-up on new episodes, special offerings, recommendations, and event invitations.

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 for Session 4 As you move through these days, get really attentive in every moment to this world’s fluency in the language of violence — the vividness and omnipresence of words that engender fear and despair. Notice, and write down the easy metaphors of death and war that are used everywhere from the news to casual conversations to social media, about everything from relationships to politics to the weather. Notice the death and violence metaphors that come naturally in the way you speak. What happens when you alter your language? What does it mean to take off the shoes of your voice? We've created a beautiful journal for the whole seven weeks, with full-size printable pages, that you can download for free HERE. A Possible Way to Organize This Experience Take each week’s brief listening offering, each around 15 minutes long, as a meditation to move through the week ahead. And as none of the great virtues — and certainly not hope — is meant to be carried alone, we encourage you to undertake this experience alongside others, perhaps your life partner or family or colleagues or friends, book group or study group. For example, you could: ● Listen to one Wisdom Practice (roughly 15 minutes) — together or separately — around the same time each week. Listen again and/or read the transcript as often as is useful. ● Carry the ideas, invitations, and journal prompts for the session into your ordinary interactions of the days that follow. ● Commit to some time journaling every day, even if just for a few minutes or a few words. ● Meet with or Zoom/call your companion(s) at the end of the week to share, converse, commune. The Hope Portal and this series are adventures in opening the deep enduring teaching that lives inside the 20 years of On Being. We would be so grateful if you would let us know how it goes for you and how it might be refined, by writing to us at mail@onbeing.org. Sign yourself and others up for The Pause to be first to know about all things On Being and to receive Krista's monthly Saturday morning newsletter, including a heads-up on new episodes, special offerings, recommendations, and event invitations.

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 Session 3 Exchange words with yourself — the many selves alive inside you — about what you’re doing here. What has hope meant in your life and in your world(s)? Do the different selves inside you have different orientations to despair and to imagination with real-world consequences? How about your best self? During this week and in the following weeks, as it feels interesting, try this exercise proposed by Naomi. Land on a single word or phrase that you find animating in this Wisdom Practice, and “use it as as an oar that could get you through the days” — just by holding it in your mind (and heart) and seeing how it rubs against other words and how it meets experiences and other words. And remember Mary Oliver’s advice: Keep your journal close by at all times. We've created a beautiful journal for the whole seven weeks, with full-size printable pages, that you can download for free HERE. A Possible Way to Organize This Experience Take each week’s brief listening offering, each around 15 minutes long, as a meditation to move through the week ahead. And as none of the great virtues — and certainly not hope — is meant to be carried alone, we encourage you to undertake this experience alongside others, perhaps your life partner or family or colleagues or friends, book group or study group. For example, you could: ● Listen to one Wisdom Practice (roughly 15 minutes) — together or separately — around the same time each week. Listen again and/or read the transcript as often as is useful. ● Carry the ideas, invitations, and journal prompts for the session into your ordinary interactions of the days that follow. ● Commit to some time journaling every day, even if just for a few minutes or a few words. ● Meet with or Zoom/call your companion(s) at the end of the week to share, converse, commune. The Hope Portal and this series are adventures in opening the deep enduring teaching that lives inside the 20 years of On Being. We would be so grateful if you would let us know how it goes for you and how it might be refined, by writing to us at mail@onbeing.org. Sign yourself and others up for The Pause to be first to know about all things On Being and to receive Krista's monthly Saturday morning newsletter, including a heads-up on new episodes, special offerings, recommendations, and event invitations.

The great Christian scholar of the biblical prophets died on June 5, 2025. Yet, in the lineage of the prophets who called humanity to face its hardest realities, this profound, warm, and timeless conversation is a stunning offering straight into our present. “The amazing contemporaneity of this material," Walter Brueggemann says to Krista in this conversation from 2011, “and we relive by relistening, is that the issues are the same: the world we have trusted in is vanishing before our eyes and the world that is coming at us feels like a threat to us and we can't quite see the shape of it." He embodied as much as taught a prophetic way of fearless truth telling, fierce hope, and disarming language that can break through "human hearts and human hurt." What is the calling of the Christian in a time like this, and what is the role of the preacher? We are lifting this episode out of the archive to mark this moment. Krista felt particularly called to point to this unedited version of their conversation, which was previously edited to meet time constraints, as the full discussion has such timely resonance. You can also watch the video of this conversation between Krista and Walter Brueggemann on our YouTube page. Sign yourself and others up for The Pause to be on our mailing list for all things On Being and to receive Krista's monthly Saturday morning newsletter, including a heads-up on new episodes, special offerings, recommendations, and event invitations. Find the shorter, edited and produced version of this show — and all of Krista's conversations across the years — on our website at onbeing.org/series/podcast. Bio Walter Brueggemann was the William Marcellus McPheeters Professor Emeritus at Columbia Theological Seminary in Georgia. He died on June 5, 2025. He was the author of many books including The Prophetic Imagination, The Spirituality of the Psalms, The Collected Sermons of Walter Brueggemann, and, written in his 90s, Real World Faith.

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 together; a scholar of belonging. And she is an organizer as much as a writer. Journaling prompts for Session 2 Preparing inwardly after listening, ask these questions: Examine your orientation to the idea that imagination has real-world consequences. Do you believe that? Trace its reality in the lives of people you admire and in your own life. Ponder emergence. Consider how this way of change has found expression across the years in your life, your work, your world — moments when what you did not plan or control became a catalyst for your growth. “Emergence notices the way small actions and connections create complex systems, patterns that become ecosystems and societies.” “Emergence emphasizes critical connections over critical mass.” “The crisis we are in at scale is in part a response to control or overcome the emergent processes that are our own nature, the processes of the planet we live on and the universe we call home.” We've created a beautiful journal for the whole seven weeks, with full-size printable pages, that you can download for free HERE. A Possible Way to Organize This Experience Take each week’s brief listening offering, each around 15 minutes long, as a meditation to move through the week ahead. And as none of the great virtues — and certainly not hope — is meant to be carried alone, we encourage you to undertake this experience alongside others, perhaps your life partner or family or colleagues or friends, book group or study group. For example, you could: ● Listen to one Wisdom Practice (roughly 15 minutes) — together or separately — around the same time each week. Listen again and/or read the transcript as often as is useful. ● Carry the ideas, invitations, and journal prompts for the session into your ordinary interactions of the days that follow. ● Commit to some time journaling every day, even if just for a few minutes or a few words. ● Meet with or Zoom/call your companion(s) at the end of the week to share, converse, commune. The Hope Portal and this series are adventures in opening the deep enduring teaching that lives inside the 20 years of On Being. We would be so grateful if you would let us know how it goes for you and how it might be refined, by writing to us at mail@onbeing.org. Sign yourself and others up for The Pause to be first to know about all things On Being and to receive Krista's monthly Saturday morning newsletter, including a heads-up on new episodes, special offerings, recommendations, and event invitations.

Beginning today, and for the next six weeks in the On Being podcast feed and Substack, 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 1 Preparing inwardly after listening, ask these questions: Right now, today, what is filling you with despair? And what is giving you hope? What is hope? Answer this question through the story of your life. Who have been the “live human signposts” of muscular hope in your life across time? Hold their faces and the qualities of their presence in your heart and in your mind’s eye in the days to come. We've created a beautiful journal for the whole seven weeks, with full-size printable pages, that you can download for free HERE. A Possible Way to Organize This Experience Take each week’s brief listening offering, each around 15 minutes long, as a meditation to move through the week ahead. And as none of the great virtues — and certainly not hope — is meant to be carried alone, we encourage you to undertake this experience alongside others, perhaps your life partner or family or colleagues or friends, book group or study group. For example, you could: ● Listen to one Wisdom Practice (roughly 15 minutes) — together or separately — around the same time each week. Listen again and/or read the transcript as often as is useful. ● Carry the ideas, invitations, and journal prompts for the session into your ordinary interactions of the days that follow. ● Commit to some time journaling every day, even it’s just for a few minutes or a few words. ● Meet with or Zoom/call your companion(s) at the end of the week to share, converse, commune. The Hope Portal and this series are adventures in opening the deep enduring teaching that lives inside the 20 years of On Being. We would be so grateful if you would let us know how it goes for you and how it might be refined, by writing to us at mail@onbeing.org. Sign yourself and others up for The Pause to be first to know about all things On Being and to receive Krista's monthly Saturday morning newsletter, including a heads-up on new episodes, special offerings, recommendations, and event invitations.

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 kinds of things — life and love and God, a subject that fascinated us both. She’d written a book called Memories of God, and she’d written a series of books about the eccentric, dazzling wisdom of spiritual rebels and innovators known as the desert fathers and mothers of the 3rd century. These were people who believed that the established church — at that time the Church of Rome — had grown cold and remote from very heart of the impulses that brought it into the world in the first place: the rootedness in wisdom and not mere knowledge, the humility over against power, the core moral and spiritual values. Then, not that long ago in our world of institutions ceasing to make sense, someone I very much admire told me he was interested in picking up a practice of prayer. He had no idea how to begin or really even what this would be about – he just knew it was a longing he wanted to follow. The first thing that came to my mind to share with him is this somewhat eccentric, rich little half hour I had with Roberta in the earliest piloting of what eventually became On Being. Her wisdom about what it means to be a person who prays, in conversation and relationship with God, whoever God is and whatever God means, has formed me ever after. I am so delighted to share it now with you. Find an excellent transcript of this show, edited by humans, on our show page. Sign yourself and others up for The Pause to be on our mailing list for all things On Being and to receive Krista's monthly Saturday morning newsletter, including a heads-up on new episodes, special offerings, recommendations, and event invitations. Bio Roberta Bondi is Professor Emeritus of Church History at Emory University. Her books include To Pray and to Love: Conversations on Prayer with the Early Church; Memories of God: Theological Reflections on a Life; and In Ordinary Time: Healing the Wounds of the Heart.

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. Loaay Wattad is a lecturer, translator, and editor focused on children’s and adolescent literature in Arabic and also in Hebrew. It is a gift to experience the friendship between them, as well as the struggle. This, and the passionate interaction with others in the room that follows, holds complexity and nuance and persistent humanity that news from this part of the world rarely conveys. We were brought together by the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. Looay Wattad is a Palestinian lecturer, researcher, translator, and editor and a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology and the School of Cultural Studies at Tel Aviv University. He is a member of the Maktoob translators’ circle, a group that translates works of literature from Arabic to Hebrew. He is the editor-in-chief of the Hkaya, a web platform centered around children’s literature. Yochi Fischer is a historian and the deputy director of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, a senior research fellow at the institute, and head of its Sacredness, Religion, and Secularization Cluster. She also leads its Intellectual Journeys program.Her current research focuses largely on religion and secularization — she also does work on memory and history, and the connection between research and creativity. Special thanks to Michael Feigelson, Shai Held, Rebecca Plumbley, and Philip Pieters of the Toussainthuis. Find aFind an excellent transcript of this show, edited by humans, on our show page. Sign yourself and others up for The Pause to be on our mailing list for all things On Being and to receive Krista's monthly Saturday morning newsletter, including a heads-up on new episodes, special offerings, recommendations, and event invitations.

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 from the 20s to the 40s to the 60s and extended out to a room of people of all ages and walks of life. The wisdom that unfolded is as much about who we will be and how we will be as what we have before us to do, each in our own lives. Jason Reynolds is a New York Times bestselling author of over 20 books for children and young adults. From 2020–2022 he served as National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. Among many honors, he has received the Newbury, Printz, and Coretta Scott King awards and in 2024 was named a MacArthur Fellow. He is on faculty at Lesley University for the Writing for Young People MFA Program. Kessley Janvier is a senior at Georgetown University, majoring in history. She’s former president of the Georgetown University NAACP. She has organized around reparations, as part of Hoyas Advocating for Slavery Accountability, and she has also led efforts to promote climate justice, police accountability, and racial justice. Special thanks this week to Gillian Huebner, Ian Manzi, Rabbi Rachel Gartner and Derek Goldman. On Being Young in America was sponsored by the Culture of Encounter Project and was convened by the Collaborative on Global Children's Issues, the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, and the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics at Georgetown University in collaboration with The On Being Project. Find an excellent transcript of this show, edited by humans, on our show page. Sign yourself and others up for The Pause to be on our mailing list for all things On Being and to receive Krista's monthly Saturday morning newsletter, including a heads-up on new episodes, special offerings, recommendations, and event invitations.

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 in institutions and in each other. Many of us are turning away from the news altogether. Is that the answer? How to live in this world with this media and retain meaningful, reasonable hope and agency? And what are we not seeing and hearing that we can orient towards? There is no one wiser on these questions than David Bornstein. Krista spoke with David Bornstein before a small group of citizens of Minneapolis in November, 2024. Find an excellent transcript of this show, edited by humans, on our show page. Sign yourself and others up for The Pause to be on our mailing list for all things On Being and to receive Krista's monthly Saturday morning newsletter, including a heads-up on new episodes, special offerings, recommendations, and event invitations. BIO David Bornstein is co-founder and CEO of the globally esteemed Solutions Journalism Network. Learn more about their work with news organizations around the world, and their solutions story tracker at solutionsjournalism.org. He has been a journalist focusing primarily on social innovation for three decades. From 2010 to 2021, he co-authored the “Fixes” column in The New York Times. He is the author of The Price of a Dream: The Story of the Grameen Bank and How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, which has been published in 25 languages. Special thanks to Dana Mortenson, who created the event that brought Krista and David together. She is founder of World Savvy, an organization that seeks to reimagine education to build the global competence necessary to navigate a complex and ever-changing world.