How to find wisdom and wholeness in a modern world w/ Krista Tippett (Transcript)

[00:00:00] Chris Duffy:
You are listening to How To Be A Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. Today's guest, Krista Tippett is someone whose work I have admired for years. She's able to talk about big, often unanswerable questions in a way that combines rigor, deep intelligence, and a respect for the unknown. And, at this particular moment in time, a moment when I, and maybe you too, often struggle to find optimism and hope for the world, Krista is a big believer in the fundamental goodness of human beings. She's an incredibly special person, and I am so glad that we got a chance to talk.

Krista is always looking for ways to acknowledge and to spend time with the issues that we're all dealing with, but can struggle to put into words. One huge example is that instead of moving on, minimizing, or dismissing it, Krista is grappling with what the legacy of the pandemic and the lockdowns mean for each of us personally. 


Here's a clip from her TED Talk. 


[00:00:53] Krista Tippett:
Here is one way to begin to talk about what the pandemic, the post 2020 world began to set in motion. All together, for a time, we felt for the ground beneath our feet. We remembered that the ground beneath our feet is never as solid as we believe it to be. We remembered that civilization revolves around something so tender as bodies breathing in proximity to other bodies.

We softened. Chasms became un unseeable between the ways we've been living and our deepest longings for all of our children, and the highest potentials for human flourishing. So, how to step into what we have been given to see, how we have been given to learn and to grow. 


[00:01:59] Chris Duffy:
We're gonna be right back with more Krista, more learning, and more growth in just a moment. But, first, a quick ad break. 


Today, we're talking with Krista Tippett about finding meaning and hope in a challenging time.

[00:02:18] Krista Tippett:
Hi, I'm Krista Tippett of On Being.

[00:02:23] Chris Duffy:
I, I think it's interesting given the subject matter of your TED Talk and you know also the whole course of your career that you started your career in, in post-war divided Berlin. 


[00:02:32] Krista Tippett:
Mm-Hmm.

[00:02:32] Chris Duffy:
And, I wanna talk about whether you feel like some of that very literal division resonates with, I think the division that many of us are feeling in the world right now and, and with the ways in which you have tried to approach that over the course of your career.

[00:02:49] Krista Tippett:
I mean, divided Berlin was this kind of cosmic drama where literally, one, people and history and language and culture and city had just been split down the middle into these two completely different geopolitical, economic, social realities. And, they weren't just different. They were, they literally had missiles pointed at each other. Like, they were our missiles. But, they were, they were at war. They were at, in a Cold War. Conflict in that place was not actually generated by people. 


It was generated by governments, which is quite different from the way we are so divided, internally. And, of course, none of these social platforms that, that human beings didn't have these, this place to be expressing themselves.

[00:03:43] Chris Duffy:
Yeah.

[00:03:43] Krista Tippett:
For better or worse, all the time. Difference in the conflict it is, is, doesn't feel as, as resonant for me, but what does feel resonant for me is how we are again, like, I have never in my lifetime since had a feeling of the world so ruptured, right? So existentially on edge and, in fact, facing existential challenges, what stays with me from that time in Berlin that I really hang on to is knowing that I, you know, I, I spent those last years before the wall came down in divided Berlin as a journalist and then with the State Department. 


And, what I know is that the world was just about to change seismically.

[00:04:33] Chris Duffy:
Hmm.

[00:04:33] Krista Tippett:
And, not a single person who was close, who was at that epicenter, none of our imaginations reached far enough for what was about to happen.

[00:04:44] Chris Duffy:
Hmm.

[00:04:45] Krista Tippett:
And, that feels really familiar now. And, also it is, is a source of hope. Honestly, I learned that, that there's always much that we simply are not looking for and therefore can't see, and that cosmic surprises are possible. 


And, so it's a lot of my wondering now and a lot of what I'm looking for is like, you know, what are those possibilities beyond the limits of what we understand now and how might those be part of the future that we, that we want to move into?

[00:05:18] Chris Duffy:
There's this quote that you used in your TED Talk that I've been thinking about a lot, which is don't reach for the answers, which could not be given to you now because you would not be able to live them. 


I think that idea of what you're just speaking about, right? The idea that you were in this moment where things are about to change in a enormous way and in a positive way, but couldn't really be seen in the moment, that feels such a direct parallel to that too.

[00:05:43] Krista Tippett:
We're so geared up to look for answers and it's completely understandable and reasonable, but it, it actually shuts down possibilities in ways that we, that it's hard for us to take in. 


[00:05:54] Chris Duffy:
So, this is where I, kind of, I'm really interested to talk to you about these almost like meta questions because I think that's what's really been striking me about the, the message you had in your TED Talk and also just my day-to-day life right now is the idea that living in questions and also trying to embrace a, a generative, a more positive, optimistic story of the world, that those are not naive head-in-the-sand approaches to the world.

[00:06:24] Krista Tippett:
Yeah, absolutely. And, living with questions in a, in an active, conscious, robust way is not, is not refusing to be proactive. Right? Like, it, like, it is a strong and intentional response and way to work with very complex reality.

[00:06:47] Chris Duffy:
Can you talk about like the practical way of doing that? 
Right? Because that's the thing that I, I'm struggling with and I imagine many people listening are is it's not that I disagree, not at all.

[00:06:56] Krista Tippett:
Mm-Hmm.

[00:06:57] Chris Duffy:
But, at a time when, and you know, as you put it, the story of rupture is such a dominant story in the news and in the world, and when you look around, if you try and be, and I'm putting this in quotes, 'cause I think that there's a skepticism to being quote unquote uninformed. 


[00:07:11] Krista Tippett:
Yeah.

[00:07:11] Chris Duffy:
That being informed is being informed about the bad and the terrible and the suffering.

[00:07:16] Krista Tippett:
There's a simple practice that comes with it, but it's, we're just inclined to be looking out for what's going wrong and what might hurt us and what might be dangerous, and we're riveted by what is, what feels threatening and, and what is, what is dramatic and what is failing. 


We're riveted by that. So, the practice is a practice of engaging your higher cognitive faculties, which are available to us, but they're not as automatic. They're not as automatic, and this other thing is happening below the level of consciousness all the time, nanosecond to nanosecond. And, the practice is to actively look for people and places and things that are demonstrating the best of what we're capable of, that are, that are life giving, that, that are gentle and kind and, and creative, right? Generatively creative. So, noticing those things, taking them in, and cognitively deciding that they are as real and as important as, as the other things that are also real and important that are going wrong, actively inviting that to factor in, to infuse, you know, your sense of the whole.

Because the other thing that we do when we're, because we privilege those, those catastrophic images, is that we then just ascent to a worldview that says this is the bottom line. And, then that means that anything that's good or good people, courageous people, you know, I don't like the language of heroes is what, which is what we do. 


'Cause then it's like, oh, that's special. That's, you know, there's this word in psychology. What is it? Positive deviance? Uh, this just says everything about us culturally, that when people are behaving in ways that are true to their highest humanity, we literally scientific calling them positively deviant, right? 


[00:09:07] Chris Duffy:
Uhhuh.

[00:09:08] Krista Tippett:
And, that's not true. You know, you in your real life, not in what you read in the newspaper or on Twitter, but like in your real life, most of the people you know, most of the strangers you come across in, in completely ordinary interactions in your daily life, they are trying their hardest, right? 


Like, they're doing their best. Um, and they may be people you disagree with. Um, but in, in, as, as a human, interacting, raising children, doing their work, there's so much goodness and there's so much beauty. There's just a lot of quiet beauty, right? That is actually the reality. That is actually the bottom line. 


So, but it's really hard for us to internalize that.

[00:09:49] Chris Duffy:
I think there's so much of a, it's almost a cliche, especially amongst people at, at my age, right, to be like, I am just trying to, like, take a break from social media. I'm just gonna like tune out of that for a little bit. And, I think that what people find is when they do focus on the immediate surroundings around them…

[00:10:09] Krista Tippett:
Yep.

[00:10:10] Chris Duffy:
…they find that it's a lot more positive.

But, the flip side, I think there's been this really welcome awareness of structural issues and of these bigger forces.

[00:10:21] Krista Tippett:
Mm-Hmm.

[00:10:24] Chris Duffy:
That underpin the, a lot of the suffering in the world. I sometimes worry that by turning away from the bigger things, these, these negative pieces or these big structural issues, or a war that's happening thousands of miles away, I wonder if I am losing part of my humanity, if I'm like numbing myself, which I don't know. I really don't know if that's the case.
[00:10:42] Krista Tippett:
This discipline of living the questions and seeing the generative narrative doesn't imply turning away.

Right? It, it does implies kind of seeing it all.

[00:10:51] Chris Duffy:
Yeah. Tell me more about that. That I want, I wanna hear about that.

[00:10:53] Krista Tippett:
It just implies that you look at the most terrible thing that's happening in the world right now, and actually you have such an array of choices, right? I mean, it's, there's so much that, to despair about. 


Um, there's something that we need to grapple with that has to do with the fact that technology and media as we have it can bring us immediate vivid pictures of far away suffering that we can actually do nothing to affect. And, yet, we are deeply affected, right, in human ways. We are filled with reasonable despair. 


And I, I think we're gonna have to learn how to, how to work with that, like how to live with that. And, it's not in me to say, as my daughter who's thirty says, “I just, I'm not going to read newspapers because all the, you know, they're giving me the worst picture. And, and they just, they demoralize and depress and they lead me to despair and I choose not to live in despair.”

Like, that's one way to handle that. I don't think the answer is to turn away, but I think we need to get really conscious about this particular dilemma. And, I think the question to live comes in where, where we kind of remind ourselves that there is this and I care and there are going to be far away conflicts for any of us that feel much closer to home than others. 


And, and that's true. And, we just hold that and we can choose not to turn away and to feel compassion and to feel pain. But, then the, the question to live, I think, and this is to your point about, you know, also large structural change. I mean, for example, I think that a question to live for a white person in this country at this time could be to really hang onto the question of knowing that there are structural advantages and systemic privileges, right, that I have inherited just by virtue of the body I was born into, the time, and place I was born into. And, I think that culturally what we get invited to do is posture about that, like have an opinion, position ourselves on the right side of it, whoever we are, whatever that right side feels like. 


Make some gestures, which honestly don't go very far beyond gesturing. Like, we, we can make really strong statements and we can make powerful gestures. I don't think that actually takes us very far at all in reckoning. I think, you know what, if every white person in this country, you know, lived the question every day, let this question be shaping what they were looking at, what they were noticing, what they look, noticing what they pay attention to, noticing what they turn away from. 


How is this legacy, this systemic, this, this system I've been born into, how is this influencing me? Like, how is this in me in ways that I haven't been attentive to? This holding the questions, living the questions is a way to get more conscious and intentional and to ask different questions of yourself, like to challenge yourself differently. 


[00:14:08] Chris Duffy:
I completely agree, and I mean, you know, you talk about moving into wholeness, both as individuals and as a society away from you, you said away from death dealing and into life giving. And, I think that we do live in a, in a time and in a culture and with technological tools that really privilege statements over questions.

[00:14:28] Krista Tippett:
Yeah. Yeah.

[00:14:28] Chris Duffy:
But, when you think about it, right, like being open to other people filling in pieces that you don't know, so many destructive moments happen from people coming up with a solution that they think is right for other people rather than listening to the other person. One of the biggest lessons I've had to learn in my own marriage is I'm upset and I'm about to say it. We're gonna have some conversation and the worst conversations are when I have scripted both sides of the conversation where I'm like…

[00:14:56] Krista Tippett:
Yeah.

[00:14:57] Chris Duffy:
…I say this and then you say that. And, then I say this and I smash that. Oh, I got your point totally. You, you said that. And, it's like she hasn't even said any of those things. 

How can you possibly…

[00:15:57] Krista Tippett:
Right!

[00:15:08] Chris Duffy:
…win an argument that hasn't even happened? Like, why not go in with a question or a curiosity or, like, open up to what you're feeling, but then leave space for, to be surprised. And, every time…

[00:15:18] Krista Tippett:
Yeah.

[00:15:20] Chris Duffy:
…I am surprised. I'm shocked by how often we go into this conversation. I go, “Oh, that's what you were doing?”
I, wow.

[00:15:24] Krista Tippett:
Right

[00:15:25] Chris Duffy:
I was completely telling myself a different story. So, I think that living in the questions applies at all levels of society.

[00:15:32] Krista Tippett:
Well, you know what I love about that story too? So, the thing is, if you, if you look at reality, the, the reality close to you that you know well, that you have, that, that is the only, the people who you truly interact with are, you know, the, there's so much we don't even get about ourselves, much less the people we're closest to, but the, the best chance we have are the people we interact with a lot of the time. 


And so, here's the other thing. I think that we have this bias that, you know, at least what is evil and dramatic is thrilling. Right? It's interesting. And, that, and then I, again, I think there's the thing about the hero stuff, putting people up on pedestals because they're good, it's very alienating. It's very dehumanizing. 


It, it's like, well, I, you know, I'm so glad that kind of person exists. I could never be like that. And, there's, there's, there's almost like a boredom factor in it, right? But, the truth is, the truth is close to life. First of all, we are very strange, like human beings are strange. And, the closer you are to yourself and other people, you know this, right? 


Like it's a very weird, reality is very weird. People are weird. And, also goodness is just as dramatic and complicated and really, actually, as tortured as, as you know, it's opposite. So, all these things that we think about, you know, we walk through our society judging and making moral judgements, which, you know, I'm not saying that there's a place for that. 


And, and, and there's, there's, there's right and wrong. But, you know, we have these ideas about how we should think about other people who have certain kinds of beliefs or do certain kinds of things. And, basically what we choose to do is not interact with them. And, that's part of our way of, of making our moral statement or like, you know, being our best self, but the notion of love being a public good is sounds like such a fairy tale, right? 


Unless, you actually interrogate how love functions in real life, which is what you said, it's, it's like, you know, even the most intimate love in our life is rarely about feeling understood or perfectly understanding. It's very often, it's sometimes about how we feel, but like, you know, even with our children, it's often about the things we do, even though we don't feel like it today because we're in this relationship.

Inter, even when we are, there's, there's a point of real disagreement or tension, 
what we learn to do is not blurt out the first thing that comes to mind. Right?

[00:18:12] Chris Duffy:
Yeah.

[00:18:12] Krista Tippett:
Right? Which is what we do in public all the time.

And, you know, because we are balancing what we have to say, even if it's a true grievance with this intelligence about how ca-, how can it be heard and how can we stay in relationship even if I say this. 


So, I guess I'm just saying like, to get more reality based in this way I'm talking about is actually more eff- it's more pragmatic, which, which is kind of the opposite of what I think the bias is if you just talk about this stuff in the abstract.

[00:18:42] Chris Duffy:
I, I love that. I, I, I believe that a hundred percent and it's a way of approaching the world and, and natural to me, and I don't think it's always affirmed by culture and society. 


In fact, it's often actively discouraged. And, so it, it's great to hear you make such a compelling case for it because it makes me feel like less of a sucker, honestly. You know, I think sometimes I go…

[00:19:01] Krista Tippett:
Right? Yeah.

[00:19:01] Chris Duffy:
…around being like, but I think people are good. And, people are like, oh boy, wait till you grow up. And. I'm like, when, I hope I don't grow up. 


You know? That's, that's kind of the feeling I have is that there's like, if this is being naive, maybe I don't want to be less naïve if that means seeing the world as a series of scams and traps and violent acts that are in a river.

[00:19:21] Krista Tippett:
But you know, I mean, what's ironic about that dialogue that you talked about, it's like this literally is the most primitive part of the brain that sees the world that way. 


[00:19:30] Chris Duffy:
Hmm.

[00:19:30] Krista Tippett:
But, it translates into our most sophisticated disciplines, you know?

[00:19:34] Chris Duffy:
Yeah.

[00:19:33] Krista Tippett:
Journalism is all about investigating what's going wrong and medicine, right, I mean, medicine until very recently, like there's absolutely no attention. It's all pathology. Like, we're only now, it's this major breakthrough that medicine could be about creating health. 


[00:19:52] Chris Duffy:
It's incredible.

[00:19:53] Krista Tippett:
Those are higher cognitive functions. Like, that, that is an advance in consciousness. 


[00:20:01] Chris Duffy:
We're gonna have a quick break right now from advancing our consciousness so that we can play a few podcast ads. We'll be right back. 


And we are back with Krista Tippett. Here's another clip from her TED Talk.

[00:20:19] Krista Tippett:
Across my life of conversation, I have learned that wisdom and wholeness emerge in moments precisely like ours, though ours is writ large, where human beings have to hold seemingly opposing realities in a creative tension and interplay.

Power and frailty, birth and death, pain and hope, mystery and conviction, brokenness and beauty, calm and fierceness, mine and yours.

[00:21:00] Chris Duffy:
I think that for many people, their association with you and with your work and why they have such a strong attachment to you is because you've managed to bring these questions of spirituality and religion and these questions about meaning and connection and suffering and purpose into secular places. 


[00:21:20] Krista Tippett:
Hmm.

[00:21:20] Chris Duffy:
Where do you see that being most needed and, also, where do you see that being the hardest to get people to actually engage with?

[00:21:27] Krista Tippett:
You mean just acknowledging this spiritual aspect?

[00:21:30] Chris Duffy:
Absolutely. The, the question of meaning of life.

[00:21:33] Krista Tippett:
Yeah.

[00:21:33] Chris Duffy:
Not just like quantity of life or even quality of life.

[00:21:36] Krista Tippett:
Mm-Hmm. 20 years ago when I entered public radio, I took 10 years of hazing.

Like, because, you know, I was, I was close to a newsroom and, and that was just so suspect and I always understood it to be a really great creative challenge. And, I said in the beginning a lot to people who were skeptical that you could talk about these things in a way that had intellectual content that wasn't exclusionary or inflammatory or proselytizing. 


Right? And, I understood that, that's, those are the associations we have. You know, I was pretty sure that that it, that it could be done, but I just said like, maybe it won't work. But, it's too important not to try because this is a really important part of a human being and it's an important part of the human enterprise. 


So, I've always been really intentional and it has to do with taking care with words and creating an ethos that, that disarms those expectations. And, I think interestingly in these 20 years, the American culture has become more and more secular and, and that does not correlate with, with the spiritual aspect of life waning. Right? It, and in fact, something I observe about younger generations, you know, we now have this, in this country and I guess in, in Northern Europe, you have this phenomenon that is completely new in, in the whole history of our species of human beings, for the first time growing up without any kind of religious, ritualistic, religious identity and formation.

Right? I mean, in most cultures, from the beginning of human history, religious identity was something that was inherited, just like your skin color, right? 
And, your hometown. And, in this very short period of time, that's fallen away.

I mean, you know, I grew up in the middle of America, Bible belt. This was so, it was just so defining and unquestioned, and, of course, the experiences people had and what the quality of that formation could be, could be pleasant. It could be positive. It could be catastrophic. 
It could be, you know, boring and lazy and, you know, everything, the whole spectrum. So, one of the things I'm observing now about when you suddenly have this generation of people who are getting no formation at all is I, actually, think that they're, that they have a more kind of fresh, pure curiosity about this. 


Like, what they don't have, what their parents had is baggage, and a lot of their parents said, “I'm not gonna pass that on to my kids.” But, the kids as adults are also not rejecting anything. And, so when this part of you rises up, this place in us that asks questions of meaning and what is it all for, and what is a worthy life? 


And, it happens for a lot of people when they have children too, because you start asking like, what is my obligation to form this, this young human being morally? And, and then you have to ask what you think. And, I think also what this part of life carries forward is ritual, which we have an animal need for. You know? And, we live in such a ritual poor society, but there are placed points in our life where each of us know our need of these things. 


A certain kind of community and text and tradition and, and I don't know what I would call like spiritual mentoring across time, which is, which is what's happening in part in sacred text and in sacred tradition. So, I find that in some places this stuff is being reached for anew and rediscovered, and in some places remade. 


You know, there was a, a, a guy named Jaroslav Pelikan, who was this great, like monumental Christian historian of the 20th century at Yale. And, he said to me like, if you get rid of tradition, the only alternative to tradition is bad tradition. Like, usually when you make this up, you don't make up something better. 


And, so there's, you know, there's a lot of that, but there's a lot of energy that I see.

[00:25:49] Chris Duffy:
Yeah.

[00:25:49] Krista Tippett:
And, then the final thing I'll say is since the pandemic. I am having the experience all over the place, including at dinner parties in New York City where five years ago and certainly 10 years ago, the word spiritual would've been anathema or, or even talking around what we're talking about when we're, when we're talking about spiritual. We were cracked wide open in ways that we've scarcely begun to metabolize and, and the pandemic brought us up against all of these things that, you can call them spiritual or not, but they are, they're included. Right? Our sense of our own fragility and mortality. It is, you know, it disrupted the natural embodied connection we have to other human beings. 


It made us all think, you know, we had to culturally, and this is an amazing, as a collective, as a nation, as a world, ask the question, what is essential and what is non-essential? That's a practical question, but it's also a spiritual question.

And, actually, most of the answers that came back had to do with the giving of care. 

So, I feel like this whole space has opened wide, and I'm just really curious to see how this is gonna unfold over the next five years.

[00:27:05] Chris Duffy:
Yeah, I really did want to talk to you about the, the ways in which the pandemic changed your thinking and changed the way that we experience the world. Because I, I feel like for me, one of the most profound effects of it was that it put these questions that I think had before been like philosophical or heady or kind of, you know, late night dorm room conversations about like what is the meaning of life and the value of life and whose life is most valuable and what, what value does connection have in our life?

All of those questions became practical questions that needed to be answered…

[00:27:42] Krista Tippett:
Yeah.

[00:27:43] Chris Duffy:
…in, in very sometimes extremely scary and serious ways. And, I think that it also really raised more than anything is what's the, what do we owe to each other?

[00:27:54] Krista Tippett:
Yeah.

[00:27:54] Chris Duffy:
What do we owe to our neighbors? What's our duty to take care of the people around us? It's interesting to me to see the ways in which we have continued to engage with those questions, and in a lot of ways, the ways in which we've decided that we do not want to talk about or think about…

[00:28:11] Krista Tippett:
Yeah.

[00:28:11] Chris Duffy:
those questions at all. 
The cultural inertia towards forgetting, towards denying that it happened towards not engaging with those years is so strong.

[00:28:22] Krista Tippett:
You know, it's, again, it's our brains. It's like how we normalize, we normalize everything. I'm also watching it with climate, you know?

[00:28:29] Chris Duffy:
Mm-Hmm.

[00:28:30] Krista Tippett:
You know, I think a lot about weather. 


Okay? Like, just a couple of, just a generation ago, you know, when I was growing up, whether it was small talk, right? Small talk. And, at a, at a more significant level. And, and that that was also a reflection of this more significant fact that it was like, there was this predictable rhythm to our lives in these seasons. 


I talked a year or two ago with this wonderful ecological activist Colette Pichon Battle in the, in the Gulf who lost everything in Hurricane Katrina. And, you know, she talked to me about how another feature of, you know, what we are losing, what we've lost was that, you know, wherever you grow up, there are the storms that go with the place, the part of the world you grew up in. 


Right? And so, like, you know, people who don't live in California, you know, can't imagine how you could live with this, you know, live with, on the San Andreas fault. But, of course you don't think about that. Or, like, I grew up in Oklahoma where he had tornadoes.

But, the thing is we do live with the storms of the places we come from. 
We actually know how to stay safe. We've lost that too, right? Or fires in California, right? The, these, these aren't the fires we knew. The tornadoes aren't the tornadoes I knew. You know, what happened. Hurricane Katrina was not the hurricanes that came before it. And, this is, this is monumental, right? 


Like, this is the ground beneath our feet and the air we breathe and, but we're normalizing it. We're just like, I notice like people talk about fire season just now factoring in that, that is wildly destructive. And, it's a way we keep ourselves sane. But, I also think that this collective trauma of the pandemic has called us. 


You know, in a human life you have these rupture points, and I don't know why we're like this. It's one of the strange things about us that we, that we get these great chances to learn and grow when things go terribly wrong. Right? Why, I don't know, does it have to be that way? But, it is the illness, the breakdown, the, the loss of a relationship. 


You know, those are strangely moments when sometimes when we, we can really have catharsis. And, I think that this pandemic is, is like a collective example of that. It laid everything out for us of this century that we have to deal with at a species level. So, I mean, one of the things I do is wherever I go, I bring the pandemic into the room. I notice that the more months pass, I will be at events for days and no one mentions the fact that we just went through this thing that is still all the way through our bodies.

We haven't even begun to metabolize this. It's like people let that in and then it just creates this crack where maybe we do a little bit more of this work.

[00:31:17] Chris Duffy:
It, it goes back to what we've been talking about in so many ways too, which is that, you know, spirituality and religion and these questions, they create space for mourning and for grief.

[00:31:28] Krista Tippett:
Yes.

[00:31:28] Chris Duffy:
And, for dealing with suffering in a way that is really different than many of the ways in which we deal with those things in the secular world. Spirituality and science are not opposed that they are complimentary that they're, they're addressing different things, right? It's like.

[00:31:47] Krista Tippett:
Yeah.

[00:31:47] Chris Duffy:
One thing I, this is kind of related in the sense that I, I just wanted to share, you know, I grew up in, in New York City and I grew up in a household, which I didn't think of as kind of unique at the time, but I, I realize now is where my mom is a practicing Jew and my dad is a practicing Christian, and they both believe different things, but yet the, I think the biggest, most important lesson that I learned from them is that you don't have to agree with someone on everything to love them and to…

[00:32:15] Krista Tippett:
Right.

[00:32:15] Chris Duffy:
…respect what they believe. The very unique nature of where I grew up, my, my parents literally went to services in the same building, right? 


Like, my mom's synagogue was physically my dad's church. It was just, she went on Saturday and he went on Sunday.

[00:32:28] Krista Tippett:
Oh, that's so funny.

[00:32:29] Chris Duffy:
Uh, which is incredible. But…

[00:32:31] Krista Tippett:
Yeah.

[00:31:32] Chris Duffy:
…there's something important about what they're both finding. The thing that strikes me as really important is that you can grapple with these questions about like, why do we suffer? 
Why are things hard? What is the meaning of it?

And, I just feel like I don't really see those answers coming in a lot of, uh, I feel like a lot of my, my friends who don't have any sort of religious or spiritual tradition struggle with those questions and don't feel like they have any place to find guidance on. 


[00:32:58] Krista Tippett:
That's the downside of, of, you know, just religious formation automatically, or, you know, or, or, or places of ritual being, being part of our life together, even if there were profound flaws. And, also I think those institutions as they came out of the 20th century, like most of the institutions we have, have to be totally reimagined for, for the way we live now. It's just a, a form issue.

There are, there are deeper issues, but the other thing I'll, I'll add to that, that I've thought a lot about lately is just, I mean, we, we have language of grief, but I think, you know, the language of mourning and lamentation, right? Like rituals of lamentation, there's a heft to that and there's act, there're actually practices that go with it, that have been, that are not there for people that are not being passed on or not being shared. You know, for me, words, you know, the ancient rabbi said words make worlds right?

And, I, I believe that words are important. They have heft. They have power. And, so there, there's, there's just a whole vocabulary that is held within theology and when within religious tradition that we actually need, and I, I'm feeling strangely now, more than 20 years ago, I think there's this whole array of theological words that feel more relevant to our just general life together than I feel like they ever have in my lifetime. You know, and it is a word like lamentation, or a word like repentance or, or redemption. And, the practices go along with that language, like the, the way those words and the fullness of their meaning like ask us to reorient to the world, we need that.

I don't know what's gonna happen with religion as we've known it. You know? There's nothing in me that thinks we're ever gonna go back to this world I grew up in where everybody's going to some religious, in, almost everybody's going to some religious institution on the weekend, right? 


That's not the world we're gonna live in, but like that there's a place for actual theology in this secular world we've entered because we need, we need repentance, redemption, confession, and these very nerdy, you know, theological truths.

[00:35:21] Chris Duffy:
Well, Krista, it has been such an absolute pleasure talking to you. 
Really, I, I can't tell you what an honor it was. Thank you so much for making the time to be on the show.

[00:35:28] Krista Tippett:
Oh, it's been so fun. Thank you. 


[00:35:34] Chris Duffy:
That is it for today's episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to today's guest, Krista Tippett. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find more from me, including my weekly newsletter and other projects at chrisduffycomedy.com.

How to Be a Better Human is brought to you on the TED side by Daniella Balarezo, Banban Cheng, Cloe Shasha Brooks, and Joseph DeBrine, who are all very comfortable living with the questions. 


This episode was fact checked by Julia Dickerson and Matheus Salles, who both appreciate leaps of faith, but also appreciate footnotes and citations.

On the PRX side, our show is put together by a team of genuinely good people who restore my faith in humanity. No joke there. Just a sincere earnest statement. 

Morgan Flannery, Noor Gill, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzalez.

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It's been so fun to see your answers and responses. I love how many people are sharing their thoughts. Please keep going on that. No matter where you are listening, we will be back next week with even more episodes of How to Be A Better Human. Thank you so much and please take care.