The On Being Project is one of the few programs available online to which I regularly attend. (Five others are Maria Popova's Brain Pickings, Poetry Magazine, Orion Magazine, Yes! Magazine, Betsey Crawford's The Soul of the Earth; as well, of course, as the major sources of news and commentary: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian's US edition, and The New Yorker.
On Being's founder and skilled interviewer is Krista Tippett, author of an excellent book, Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living, Unlike standard descriptions of books on sites like Amazon, the paragraphs about Tippett's book are not only useful in themselves, but offer a useful introduction to the On Being program itself:
“The discourse of our common life inclines towards despair. In my field of journalism, where we presume to write the first draft of history, we summon our deepest critical capacities for investigating what is inadequate, corrupt, catastrophic, and failing. The ‘news’ is defined as the extraordinary events of the day, but it is most often translated as the extraordinarily terrible events of the day. And in an immersive 24/7 news cycle, we internalize the deluge of bad news as the norm—the real truth of who we are and what we’re up against as a species. But my work has shown me that spiritual geniuses of the everyday are everywhere. They are in the margins and do not have publicists. They are below the radar, which is broken.
"Peabody Award-winning broadcaster and National Humanities Medalist Krista Tippett has interviewed the most extraordinary voices examining the great questions of meaning for our time. The heart of her work on her national public radio program and podcast, On Being, has been to shine a light on people whose insights kindle in us a sense of wonder and courage. Scientists in a variety of fields; theologians from an array of faiths; poets, activists, and many others have all opened themselves up to Tippett's compassionate yet searching conversation.
"In Becoming Wise, Tippett distills the insights she has gleaned from this luminous conversation in its many dimensions into a coherent narrative journey, over time and from mind to mind. The book is a master class in living, curated by Tippett and accompanied by a delightfully ecumenical dream team of teaching faculty.
"The open questions and challenges of our time are intimate and civilizational all at once, Tippett says – definitions of when life begins and when death happens, of the meaning of community and family and identity, of our relationships to technology and through technology. The wisdom we seek emerges through the raw materials of the everyday. And the enduring question of what it means to be human has now become inextricable from the question of who we are to each other.
"This book offers a grounded and fiercely hopeful vision of humanity for this century – of personal growth but also renewed public life and human spiritual evolution. It insists on the possibility of a common life for this century marked by resilience and redemption, with beauty as a core moral value and civility and love as muscular practice. Krista Tippett's great gift, in her work and in Becoming Wise, is to avoid reductive simplifications but still find the golden threads that weave people and ideas together into a shimmering braid.
"One powerful common denominator of the lessons imparted to Tippett is the gift of presence, of the exhilaration of engagement with life for its own sake, not as a means to an end. But presence does not mean passivity or acceptance of the status quo. Indeed Tippett and her teachers are people whose work meets, and often drives, powerful forces of change alive in the world today. In the end, perhaps the greatest blessing conveyed by the lessons of spiritual genius Tippett harvests in Becoming Wise is the strength to meet the world where it really is, and then to make it better."
________________________
Here is a letter written and posted online in early 2019 by Krista Tippett, conveying the most recent developments in the On Being Project:
It’s been a year of expansion and deepening at The On Being Project. Our beautiful team has more than doubled in size to be of greater service in a tender and tumultuous moment in the life of the world. I’m delighted to announce that Lucas Johnson has joined us as the first executive director of the Civil Conversations Project. You may remember him from this conversation taped at the On Being Gathering — another milestone among many this past year.
And I’m beyond excited to announce the launch of a whole new gathering space and experience here at onbeing.org. Our website had become unwieldy under the weight of 15 years of content and wasn’t serving the ways we’ve heard you engage with and use our work — for personal reflection, for discussion in family and community, and for teaching and social repair. In over a year of intensive labor, full of the care and creativity of many, we fashioned a digital home that is newly beautiful and hospitable.
Transcripts are easier to find and read. Search is vastly improved. And we’ve created new features to meet the needs, thoughts, and suggestions we’ve heard across the years.
There are Starting Points — curated for the kind of day you may be having, for particular challenges or curiosities, or to introduce someone new to On Being. There are Libraries — our entire archive made accessible and welcoming by topic — for browsing and diving deep.
The Civil Conversations Project also now has a robust presence at the heart of our online home. The Grounding Virtues and the Better Conversations Guide are integrated throughout onbeing.org as they have become woven into the fabric of The On Being Project as a whole. Poetry, so foundational to our work and sensibility, also has its rightful place — present along just about every pathway.
As we’ve contemplated the purpose and shape of The On Being Project, we’ve defined our mission in this way:
Pursuing deep thinking and social courage, moral imagination and joy, to renew inner life, outer life, and life together
This is an aspiration we take on with a generational sense of time. Onbeing.org will be a primary place where we are actively watching, learning, adding, and evolving. And you may already have noticed a new interactive volume and vitality as well in various social media spaces, like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
In the discernment of the last year, we have decided to discontinue the On Being Blog and columnists in their original form, but the wonderful writing that graced our project in recent years is present throughout this new site, and we are actively exploring what to incubate next. The Pause newsletter, which has grown in leaps and bounds as a beloved Saturday morning ritual, will be a primary way to stay on top of new developments and experiments to come – including our ongoing ventures on the road, in the old-fashioned flesh and blood.
On Being has always grown and evolved through listening to our listeners and to the world as much as listening to our guests. This is more than ever before, and we are so honored by every voice and life that joins this adventure, even for an hour. I believe that the people and projects and energies alive in our community and its kindred places are nothing less than the generative narrative of our time. This is emerging right alongside the destructive narrative that gets all the attention, and we are committed to nourishing, emboldening, and accompanying it — that is to say, you.
With deep gratitude and, yes, love,
Krista