The Nones of this age are ecumenical, humanist, transreligious. But in their midst are analogs to the original monastics: spiritual rebels and seekers on the margins of established religion, pointing tradition back to its own untamable, countercultural, service-oriented heart.
Krista Tippett
The Nones of This Age
Topic: Society & Civil Religion
“And there is a kindred shift in the Nones’ generation of young Christians, including Evangelicals and others–people who have not rejected the faith of their childhood, but grew up allergic to stridency and determined to reform it. One pivotal, loosely federated movement is called the New Monasticism….
The Nones of this age are ecumenical, humanist, transreligious. But in their midst are analogs to the original monastics: spiritual rebels and seekers on the margins of established religion, pointing tradition back to its own untamable, countercultural, service-oriented heart.“
Krista Tippett, born Krista Weedman on November 9, 1960, in the United States, is a journalist, author, and public thinker known for exploring faith, ethics, and human meaning. She earned a Bachelor of Arts from Brown University in 1983 and studied at the University of Bonn in West Germany on a Fulbright scholarship. Her early career as a journalist took her to divided Berlin, where she worked for The New York Times, Newsweek, and other international outlets. She later served as a political aide to U.S. diplomats in West Berlin and West Germany, an experience that deepened her interest in the moral dimensions of power and shaped her future work in spirituality and public discourse.
Seeking a deeper understanding of these questions, Tippett earned a Master of Divinity from Yale University in 1994. While conducting an oral history project for the Collegeville Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research, she developed the idea for On Being, a radio program exploring religious and philosophical questions with depth and openness. Launched as a monthly series in 2001 and expanded nationally in 2003, the show has featured conversations with scholars, artists, and religious thinkers. It earned a Peabody Award in 2008 for its episode "The Ecstatic Faith of Rumi." In 2013, Tippett founded Krista Tippett Public Productions, an independent nonprofit dedicated to fostering meaningful dialogue, and co-created the Civil Conversations Project to help address political and social divides.
Tippett is the author of Speaking of Faith (2008), Einstein’s God (2010), and Becoming Wise (2016), a New York Times bestseller. Her contributions to public thought have been widely recognized, including the National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama in 2014. In 2019, she was named the Mimi and Peter E. Haas Distinguished Visitor at Stanford University, and in 2025, she was appointed a Chubb Fellow at Yale University. Through her writing and conversations, Tippett continues to engage the complexities of human experience, bridging faith, science, and philosophy in ways that invite reflection and understanding.
Becoming Wise
Tippett, Krista. Becoming Wise: an Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living. Penguin Books, 2017, p. 179, [Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise, Penguin Press, New York, 2016].
Krista Tippett
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The New Monasticism
Shane Claiborne is now one of its [the New Monasticism’s] guiding lights and, at forty, one of its elders:
“But initially, when we started the [The Simple Way] community, we were just responding to crisis, you know. And then there comes a point, as Dr. Martin Luther King said so well, where we’re called to be the Good Samaritan and lift our neighbor out of the ditch. But after you lift so many people out of the ditch, you start to say, Maybe the whole road to Jericho needs to be transformed.
Everywhere I go, I am so encouraged by the questions that people are asking, especially even within the Evangelical church that’s been so scared of a lot of those questions. Most people my age that I see, even within the Evangelical church, transcend categories of left and right, and really are wanting to know how to create a better world. And they know that the world we’ve been handed is very fragile. They say, we need to figure out how to live differently ourselves and how to live with some imagination and some creativity, and give ourselves to something bigger than just our own little circle of friends.”
–Krista Tippett [Interview with Shane Claiborne, The Simple Way (Becoming Wise, Penguin Press, New York, 2016)] p. 175.