Our kids want us to finally get this right. They have injected the language of transparency and authenticity and integrity into our civic vocabulary…. I hear a wise refusal to disconnect what we know from who we are, what we believe from how we live and who we are to each other.
Krista Tippett
Who We Are to Each Other
Topic: Society & Civil Religion
This was a pattern of unintentional self-destruction glorified in the twentieth century–to enrich on the outside and impoverish within. Our kids want us to finally get this right. They have injected the language of transparency and authenticity and integrity into our civic vocabulary. These are fragile words, like all words meant to convey deep truth, at risk of overuse and simplification. Behind them I hear a wise refusal to disconnect what we know from who we are, what we believe from how we live and who we are to each other. Such words carry heart-breaking, holy longings for us to see ourselves in our wholeness–to make the move from intelligence to wisdom, from the inside.
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. 169.
Krista Tippett
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I don’t find it surprising that young people, born in the 1980s and 1990s have distanced themselves from the notion of religious declaration, growing up as they did in an era in which strident religious voices became toxic forces in American cultural life. . . . More to the point: the growing universe of the “Nones” [the approximately 30% of people under thirty who answer “none” when asked about their religious affiliation]–the new nonreligious–is one of the most spiritually vibrant and provocative spaces in modern life. It is not a world in which spiritual life is absent. It is a world that resists religious excesses and shallows. Large swaths of this universe are wild with ethical passion and delving, openly theological curiosity, and they are expressing this in unexpected places and unexpected ways.
–Krista Tippett [Becoming Wise – An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living, Penguin Press, New York, 2016] pp. 170-171.