When to rush to an answer would be to deny the gravity of the question before us, then what we’re called to do is hold and love and inhabit that question itself and have it be our teacher and our guide…
Krista Tippett
Living Your Questions
Topic: Spiritual Growth & Practice
When to rush to an answer would be to deny the gravity of the question before us, then what we’re called to do is hold and love and inhabit that question itself and have it be our teacher and our guide… We waste so much time when we rush to fixes and answers that do not meet the complexity of what is before us… We’re pretty much living vast, aching, open questions right now. We have very, very few answers.
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.
Hagens, Nate, host. "Living Your Questions: A Pathway Through the Unanswerable." The Great Simplification, featuring Krista Tippett, episode 130, 3 July 2024.
Krista Tippett
Theme: Spiritual Growth
About This Krista Tippett Quotation [Commentary]
Krista Tippett invites us to embrace the uncertainty that shapes our lives, urging us not to rush toward answers when doing so would “deny the gravity of the question before us.” Instead, she encourages us to “hold and love and inhabit that question itself,” allowing it to teach and guide us. In a culture that often seeks immediate solutions, this perspective challenges the impulse to resolve complexity too quickly. Tippett acknowledges that unanswered questions are not empty spaces to be filled but opportunities to deepen our understanding.
Drawing from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, Tippett echoes his call to “learn to love the questions.” Rilke warned against seeking conclusions before one is ready to live them, emphasizing that true answers emerge gradually. Tippett sees this wisdom as especially relevant in our time, where “we waste so much time when we rush to fixes and answers that do not meet the complexity of what is before us.” She recognizes that many of the struggles we face—political, social, economic, and spiritual—are not problems to be solved overnight but questions that demand patience and presence.
By resisting the urge for premature certainty, we make space for deeper transformation. Tippett’s words suggest that some questions are not obstacles but paths, guiding us toward greater wisdom. “We’re pretty much living vast, aching, open questions right now,” she observes, and “we have very, very few answers.” Rather than seeking closure too quickly, she invites us to sit with these questions, trusting that in time, we may “live our way into the answers.
Nate Hagen’s Interview with Krista Tippett [Excerpt from transcript]
Nate Hagen [00:05:38]: When I saw you speak last month in person, it struck me that we are saying a lot of the same things, just using different language. And that was quite an aha moment for me. So, when I saw you speak, you mentioned the poet Rilke as someone who inspired you to focus on the questions―as opposed to the solutions. Can you unpack that a little bit?
Krista Tippett [00:06:02]: I spent a lot of time in Germany in my 20s in a different world, you know, in the Cold War years. And so I’ve been in conversation with Rilke for a long time inside myself and what also has become more meaningful to me as we lived into this age we inhabit now, is that he also was writing from the last young century, which had so much tumult ahead, which was already fermenting.
What he identified in these letters that he wrote―called Letters to a Young Poet… In these letters, he exhorted this young man to learn to love the questions, and so he said: “Don’t try to rush to answers that you couldn’t yet live in. Learn to hold and love the questions themselves. And then perhaps you will live your way into the answers…”
I feel like the wisdom there is so important―in a culture like ours―which is so desperate to rush to fixes and closure and answers. And we waste so much time when we rush to fixes and answers that do not meet the complexity of what is before us. And I think what Rilke was saying―what I understand now―is when, to rush to an answer would be to deny the gravity of the question before us, then what we’re called to do is hold and love and inhabit that question itself and have it be our teacher and our guide. And I just feel like any of the areas that you mentioned, all of the realms of our life of being human and our life together, whether they are political or social or economic or spiritual we’re pretty much living vast, aching, open questions right now. We have very few answers.
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