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Transcriptions of On Being with Krista Tippett podcast

20 episodes 32K views

Transcript of Ocean Vuong – A Life Worthy of Our Breath

Krista interviewed the wise and wonderful writer Ocean Vuong on March 8, 2020 in a joyful, crowded room full of podcasters in Brooklyn. A state of emergency had just been declared in New York around a new virus. But no one guessed that within a handful of days such an event would become unimaginable. Most stunning is how presciently, exquisitely Ocean speaks to the world we have come to inhabit— its heartbreak, its poetry, and its possibilities of both destroying and saving. “I want to love more than death can harm. And I want to tell you this often: That despite being so human and so terrified, here, standing on this unfinished staircase to nowhere and everywhere, surrounded by the cold and starless night — we can live. And we will.”Ocean Vuong is an associate professor of English in the MFA Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the author of the poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds, which won the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Whiting Award; and a novel,  On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. He was a 2019 MacArthur Fellow.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.This show originally aired on April 30, 2020.

  • 50:48
  • 3.4K views
  • Published over 4 years ago

Transcript of [Unedited] Ocean Vuong with Krista Tippett

Krista interviewed the wise and wonderful writer Ocean Vuong on March 8, 2020 in a joyful, crowded room full of podcasters in Brooklyn. A state of emergency had just been declared in New York around a new virus. But no one guessed that within a handful of days such an event would become unimaginable. Most stunning is how presciently, exquisitely Ocean speaks to the world we have come to inhabit— its heartbreak, its poetry, and its possibilities of both destroying and saving. “I want to love more than death can harm. And I want to tell you this often: That despite being so human and so terrified, here, standing on this unfinished staircase to nowhere and everywhere, surrounded by the cold and starless night — we can live. And we will.”Ocean Vuong is an associate professor of English in the MFA Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the author of the poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds, which won the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Whiting Award; and a novel,  On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. He was a 2019 MacArthur Fellow.This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Ocean Vuong — A Life Worthy of Our Breath." Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org.

  • 01:33:01
  • 2.3K views
  • Published over 4 years ago

Transcript of Naomi Shihab Nye — “Before You Know Kindness As the Deepest Thing Inside...”

It’s pretty intriguing to follow poet Naomi Shihab Nye’s idea that most of us actually “think in poems” whether we know it or not. Rarely, as she points out, do you hear anyone say they feel worse after writing things down. That, she says, can be a tool to survive in hard times like these, to anchor our days - and to get into a conversation and community with all of the selves that live on in each of us at any given moment - “your child self, your older self, your confused self, your self-that-makes-a-lot-of-mistakes.” We also hear her read her beloved poem “Kindness” and tell us the story behind it.Naomi Shihab Nye is the Young People's Poet Laureate through the Poetry Foundation and a professor of creative writing at Texas State University. Her recent books include The Tiny Journalist, Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners, Cast Away, and Everything Comes Next: Collected and New Poems. She received the 2019 Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.This show originally aired on July 28, 2016. 

  • 50:50
  • 2.3K views
  • Published over 4 years ago

Transcript of Gaelynn Lea’s Voice and Violin

Gaelynn Lea’s voice and violin land like a balm — an offering of both clarity and gladness that can still be mustered in this midwinter, this upended Christmas season. She first came to the attention of many when she won NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Contest in 2016. This fiddler and singer-songwriter moves through the world in an electric wheelchair, and plays the violin like a cello because of the disability she was born with — a genetic condition that has made her bones more breakable. So much of what she’s learned through life in her body lands as wisdom, right now.Gaelynn Lea -- is a violinist and singer-songwriter from Duluth, Minnesota. Her albums include All the Roads that Lead Us Home, Learning How to Stay, and most recently, The Living Room Sessions: Gaelynn Lea LIVE.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

  • 51:09
  • 2.1K views
  • Published almost 5 years ago

Transcript of Jennifer Michael Hecht — 'We Believe Each Other Into Being'

“We are indebted to one another and the debt is a kind of faith — a beautiful, difficult, strange faith. We believe each other into being.” That’s the message the philosopher, poet, and historian, Jennifer Michael Hecht, puts at the center of her unusual writing about suicide. She’s traced how Western civilization has, at times, demonized those who died by suicide, and, at times, celebrated it as a moral freedom. She has struggled with suicidal places in her life and lost friends to it. She proposes a new cultural understanding based on our essential need for each other.Jennifer Michael Hecht is the author of Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It, Doubt: A History, and Who Said.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.This show originally aired on March 26, 2014.

  • 51:02
  • 1.6K views
  • Published almost 5 years ago

Transcript of Bishop Michael Curry & Dr. Russell Moore — Spiritual Bridge People

We’re in a tender spiritual moment, widely feeling our need for re-grounding both alone and together. By way of the Almighty force of Zoom, Krista engages a forward-looking conversation with two religious thinkers and spiritual leaders from very different places on the U.S. Christian and cultural spectrum: Episcopal Bishop Michael Curry and Russell Moore of the Southern Baptist Convention. Through their friendship as much as their words, they model what they preach. The Washington National Cathedral and the National Institute for Civil Discourse brought us all together.The Most Rev. Michael Curry is Presiding Bishop and Primate of The Episcopal Church. He is the author of Love is the Way: Holding on to Hope in Troubling Times. He gained a global following after his sermon at the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. Dr. Russell Moore is President of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, the moral and public policy agency 
of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. He is the author of The Courage to Stand: Facing Your Fear Without Losing Your Soul.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org

  • 50:58
  • 2.2K views
  • Published almost 5 years ago

Transcript of Richard Blanco — How to Love a Country

The Cuban American civil engineer turned writer, Richard Blanco, straddles the many ways a sense of place merges with human emotion to make home and belonging — personal and communal. The most recent — and very resonant — question he’s asked by way of poetry is: how to love a country? At Chautauqua, Krista invited him to speak and read from his books. Blanco’s wit, thoughtfulness, and elegance captivated the crowd. Richard Blanco  – practiced civil engineering for more than 20 years. He is now an associate professor of creative writing at his alma mater, Florida International University. His books of non-fiction and poetry include Looking for the Gulf Motel and, most recently, How to Love a Country.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.This show originally aired in November, 2019.

  • 50:54
  • 1.6K views
  • Published about 5 years ago

Transcript of Karen Murphy — The Long View, II: On Who We Can Become

We are called to consider who we want to be as a people and what kind of world we will build with and for our children. Karen Murphy has been gathering wisdom for this juncture, as she’s worked around the world with teachers and educators in societies moving toward repair after histories of violence. We learn from her about how to prepare ourselves in the U.S. for the civic healing that we are called to ahead.Karen Murphy creates curricula, trains teachers, and leads global gatherings for Facing History and Ourselves, an organization that partners with over 100,000 teachers and their classrooms around the world. A hallmark of this work is trusting the moral and civic intelligence of middle and high school students. Karen has worked from Rwanda to Colombia, from South Africa to Northern Ireland, and she grew up in Illinois.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org

  • 50:57
  • 1.7K views
  • Published about 5 years ago

Transcript of Rev. Otis Moss III — The Sound of the Genuine: Traversing 2020 with 'the Mystic of the Movement' Howard Thurman

An hour to sit with, and be filled. Two voices — one from the last century, one from ours — who inspire inward contemplation as an essential part of meeting the challenges in the world. Howard Thurman’s book Jesus and the Disinherited, it was said, was carried by Martin Luther King Jr. alongside the Bible and the U.S. Constitution. Thurman is remembered as a philosopher and theologian, a moral anchor, a contemplative, a prophet, and pastor to the civil rights leaders. Rev. Otis Moss III, himself the son of one of those leaders, is a bridge to Thurman’s resonance in the present day, and between the Black freedom movements then and now.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.Rev. Otis Moss III is senior pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. He was born in 1970 and grew up with legendary civil rights figures in and out of his family home, from Fannie Lou Hamer to Andrew Young, and his parents were married by Martin Luther King Jr. His father, Otis Moss Jr., was an influential pastor and civil rights leader based in Cleveland. Otis Moss III is the author of several books and one of the voices in the documentary Backs Against the Wall: The Howard Thurman Story.Howard Thurman was born in 1899 and died in 1981 in San Francisco, where he co-founded the first fully intentional cross-racial church in the U.S., the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples. Thurman insisted on a place for spiritual nurture at the heart of social activism, and he brought a searching theology of Jesus to that. He was, at the same time meditating in the early 20th century — traveling to India, bringing the teachings of Gandhi and Thich Nhat Hanh to the civil rights leaders, even influencing Jewish mysticism. Howard Thurman’s books include Jesus and the Disinherited. His meditations and sermons can be found at Morehouse College and Boston University. 

  • 51:01
  • 2.7K views
  • Published about 5 years ago

Transcript of [Unedited] Rev. Otis Moss III with Krista Tippett

An hour to sit with, and be filled. Two voices — one from the last century, one from ours — who inspire inward contemplation as an essential part of meeting the challenges in the world. Howard Thurman’s book Jesus and the Disinherited, it was said, was carried by Martin Luther King Jr. alongside the Bible and the U.S. Constitution. Thurman is remembered as a philosopher and theologian, a moral anchor, a contemplative, a prophet, and pastor to the civil rights leaders. Rev. Otis Moss III, himself the son of one of those leaders, is a bridge to Thurman’s resonance in the present day, and between the Black freedom movements then and now.Rev. Otis Moss III is senior pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. He was born in 1970 and grew up with legendary civil rights figures in and out of his family home, from Fannie Lou Hamer to Andrew Young, and his parents were married by Martin Luther King Jr. His father, Otis Moss Jr., was an influential pastor and civil rights leader based in Cleveland. Otis Moss III is the author of several books and one of the voices in the documentary Backs Against the Wall: The Howard Thurman Story.Howard Thurman was born in 1899 and died in 1981 in San Francisco, where he co-founded the first fully intentional cross-racial church in the U.S., the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples. Thurman insisted on a place for spiritual nurture at the heart of social activism, and he brought a searching theology of Jesus to that. He was, at the same time meditating in the early 20th century — traveling to India, bringing the teachings of Gandhi and Thich Nhat Hanh to the civil rights leaders, even influencing Jewish mysticism. Howard Thurman’s books include Jesus and the Disinherited. His meditations and sermons can be found at Morehouse College and Boston University.This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Rev. Otis Moss III — The Sound of the Genuine: Traversing 2020 with ‘the Mystic of the Movement’ Howard Thurman." Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org.

  • 01:22:51
  • 1.6K views
  • Published about 5 years ago

Transcript of Arlie Hochschild – The Deep Stories of Our Time

After Arlie Hochschild published her book Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, just before the 2016 election, it came to feel prescient. And the conversation Krista had with her in 2018 has now come to point straight to the heart of 2020 — a year in which many of us might say we feel like strangers in our own land and in our own world. Hochschild created a field within sociology looking at the social impact of emotion. She explains how our stories and truths — what we try to debate as issues in our social and political lives — are felt, not merely factual. And she shares why, as a matter of pragmatism, we have to take emotion seriously and do what feels unnatural: get curious and caring about the other side.Arlie Hochschild is professor emerita in the sociology department at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of ten books including The Managed Heart, The Second Shift, and Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, a finalist for the National Book Award.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.This show originally aired in October, 2018.

  • 50:57
  • 1.7K views
  • Published about 5 years ago

Transcript of [Unedited] Arlie Hochschild with Krista Tippett

After Arlie Hochschild published her book Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, just before the 2016 election, it came to feel prescient. And the conversation Krista had with her in 2018 has now come to point straight to the heart of 2020 — a year in which many of us might say we feel like strangers in our own land and in our own world. Hochschild created a field within sociology looking at the social impact of emotion. She explains how our stories and truths — what we try to debate as issues in our social and political lives — are felt, not merely factual. And she shares why, as a matter of pragmatism, we have to take emotion seriously and do what feels unnatural: get curious and caring about the other side.Arlie Hochschild is professor emerita in the sociology department at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of ten books including The Managed Heart, The Second Shift, and Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, a finalist for the National Book Award.This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Arlie Hochschild — The Deep Stories of Our Time." Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org.

  • 01:27:11
  • 2.1K views
  • Published about 5 years ago
Description of On Being with Krista Tippett

Groundbreaking Peabody Award-winning conversation about the big questions of meaning — spiritual inquiry, science, social healing, and the arts. Each week a new discovery about the immensity of our lives. Hosted by Krista Tippett. New conversations every Thursday, with occasional extras.