The calming voice of Krista Tippett floats across public radio airwaves nationwide each week as she interviews guests about the depths and foundations of their beliefs, and religion’s role in the world today. The 49-year-old host of “Speaking of Faith,” heard Sundays at 7 a.m. on the District’s WAMU 88.5, was in town recently to speak about her new book, “Einstein’s God: Conversations about Science and the Human Spirit.” In a shift from interviewer to interviewee, Tippett shared with the Washington Examiner by e-mail her own thoughts on faith, and the questions that a faithful life inspires.
Do you consider yourself to be of a specific faith?
I am Christian, and that has become more important to me than a denominational identity. I love the fact that Christianity is an embodied faith — pursuing meaning in the thick of the messiness and strangeness, the light and the darkness, of human life.
Did anyone especially influence your faith or your path in life?
My grandfather was a preacher, an old-fashioned evangelist. He taught me to pursue truth and he taught me to revere sacred text. I’ve come to treasure his example as I’ve grown older, even though I read my Bible differently than he read his. I watched him struggle to keep his lively mind at a kind of distance from the faith he loved. This drove me away from the religion of my childhood, but it later compelled me to bring my intelligence and my faith together. I think my grandfather had been taught that science was opposed to his faith. But he couldn’t test this, because he only had a second-grade education. And he had a mysterious gift for performing amazing mathematical feats in his head. So my memory of him has also emboldened my conversations with scientists these past years. I’ve loved imagining the delight he might have taken in Galileo’s observation that mathematics is the language in which the universe is written. Last but not least, my grandfather had a fantastic sense of humor. That is a quality of the holiest people I’ve come across ever since, and I’ve come to see it as a quality of God.
You have a unique ability to draw out people’s most deeply held beliefs — even before a public audience. What qualities must you cultivate to allow people to share so much, so comfortably?
This is one of the hardest, most intimate parts of life to put words around. I honor that and take the time to let a real conversation unfold. I ask people to trace how their beliefs have unfolded in and through the lives they’ve lived. This is a wonderful exercise that anyone can do — reflecting on a large and difficult question in terms of how we come to it through the story of our lives. This allows people to speak and be heard in terms of their humanity rather than their positions. I’ve been influenced, too, by an observation of the Quaker author Parker Palmer that we have to create “quiet, inviting and trustworthy spaces” for the soul to speak. I have tried to create a quiet, inviting and trustworthy media space to draw out the insights of the soul — and that yields a very different result from a contentious media space aimed at drawing out opinion and emotion.
In your book you mention that one theme you draw out with your guests is “the intersection of large ideas with concrete experience.” Where has that intersection been for you?
I experienced a major depression about 15 years ago, which forced me to face sadness and struggle in my life that I had not wanted to see and had not incorporated into my understanding of myself. Living in and beyond depression has helped me really grasp that the dark places I’ve experienced, the weaknesses that are as much a part of my identity as my strengths, are part of the gift I bring to a world in pain. As my Buddhist conversation partners ask so eloquently, we cannot become compassionate if we have not known suffering and taken it seriously in ourselves and the world. And isn’t compassion one of the most important virtues any of us can cultivate in the span of our lives?
At your core, what is one of your defining beliefs?
I believe that religion is as much about living with questions as it is about dealing in answers.
— Leah Fabel
