Krista Tippett: “Living Your Questions: A Pathway Through the Unanswerable”
Episode 130
July 3rd, 2024
(Conversation recorded on May 16th, 2024)
Show Summary
At the intersection between science and spirituality lies some of the most profound questions we can ask ourselves about the future - the answers to which could mean the difference between humanity’s mere survival or a flourishing.
Today’s episode with Peabody-award winning broadcaster Krista Tippett is an exploration into what it means to be human in our modern world and engage as individuals in the inner work required to create outward transformation.
What does it mean to ask questions that include the layer of a “Deep How”, and how can we learn to hold, love, and live into the questions themselves when their answers may not exist yet? How could ‘moral imagination’, intentional conversation, and slowing down the pace of change lead to a longer lasting, sustainable evolution in human society? What would it take for us to finally grow up as a species and step up to face some of the most existential challenges in the history of our existence?
About Krista Tippett
Krista Tippett is a Peabody-award winning broadcaster, National Humanities Medalist, and New York Times bestselling author. She created and hosts On Being, which has won the highest honors in broadcast, Internet and podcasting. Her newsletter, The Pause, and On Being Project are evolving to meet the callings of the post-2020 world — and to accompany the generative people and possibilities within this tender, tumultuous time to be alive. Her most recent book is Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living.
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Show Notes & Links to Learn More
00:00 - Krista Tippett Works + Info, On Being, The Pause
06:25 - Rainer Maria Rilke
06:54 - Letters to a Young Poet
10:09 - Vulcan mind meld
15:25 - Generative inquiries
19:01 - ‘The better angels of our nature’ - Lincoln
22:05 - Discernment
25:02 - Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s
25:20 - Isabel Wilkerson
27:30 - Jonas Salk, Are we being good ancestors?
31:02 - Fall of religiousness in the US and Europe
32:20 - Crisis of community gathering and grounding
33:02 - Importance of ritual
33:31 - Poetry for meaning
34:20 - Importance of silence
34:32 - ‘Time is money’ - Benjamin Franklin
35:25 - How clocks changed our relationship with time
36:13 - Time is not linear - Einstein on time as an illusion
37:19 - John Paul Letterock - On Being Episode
40:06 - Vincent Harding - On Being Episode
42:05 - Neils Bohr, the physics of deep truth
44:01 - The cooperative nature of a forest
44:56 - There are more microbial cells than human cells in the body
47:02 - The Carbon Pulse
47:58 - Scientists are finding new organs
50:01 - Gabrielle Giffords shooting
51:56 - Amygdala, Nervous system
53:55 - The importance of doing nothing
54:54 - Mental Health Crisis
1:00:42 - NPR funding cuts and bias accusations
1:01:27 - The illusion of objectivity
1:04:03 - Economics basis of the rational human
1:05:45 - AI risks to journalism
1:07:07 - Gut as the second brain, most serotonin is produced in the gut
1:08:44 - All the types of love in ancient greek
1:10:37 - The Science of Awe, Dacher Keltner - On Being Episode
1:12:12 - Collective Effervescence
1:13:15 - Moral Beauty
1:14:03 - Awe Walks
1:15:34 - Critical Mass, Critical Yeast - On Being Episode
1:25:46 - Solutions journalism network
1:30:02 - St. John’s Abbey, Minnesota