For someone in the media, Krista Tippett harbors decidedly against-the-grain notions about personal religion and public discourse. She, for one, believes they belong together. And for the last five years, she has been busy making a home for both on Public radio.

As the on-air host of public radio’s Speaking of Faith, Tippett leads a weekly conversation about belief, meaning, ethics, and ideas in an hour-long show that is gaining national stature for its fresh approach to religion and its role in American life.

Whether she is speaking with cosmologist and 2004 Templeton Laureate George Ellis, author and psychiatrist Robert Coles, or the oft-quoted scholar of American religious history Martin Marty, Tippett’s talent for making connections between disparate ideas and points of view often elicits insights far beyond the range of conventional wisdom.

Her September 23 show “Science and Being,” for instance, culminated with a reminder that current public perception of a divide between science and religion is a relatively recent aberration in the larger context of human thought.

Indeed it was Charles Darwin himself who, Tippet reminded her listeners, placed opposite the title page of On the Origin of Species Francis Bacon’s admonition that “no man…can search too far or be too well studied in the book of God’s word, or in the book of God’s works; divinity or philosophy; but rather let men endeavour an endless progress or proficience in both.”

Currently airing on 109 stations across 28 states, Speaking of Faith has traveled far from its experimental beginnings as a series of one-off specials originally produced for a regional audience on Minnesota Public Radio. With an award-winning, three-part series “Where was God?,” “The Spirit of Islam” and “Justice and a Just War” the show caught the wave of America’s quest for meaning in a post 9/11 world. Bolstered by major funding from the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the John Templeton Foundation, Speaking of Faith made the ambitious jump to a weekly schedule and a national audience in 2003.

Nearly half way through its fifth year, the show’s gift for illuminating the world of belief, meaning, ethics, and ideas in listenable, hour-long segments is generating broadcast buzz and listener loyalty. With a lively mix of interviews, spoken word, sound and music that is easy on the ears yet challenging for the mind, Tippett and her producers set about bringing disparate approaches into fruitful engagement.

The “Science and Being” show, for example, drew upon biology, artificial intelligence and genetics — three distinct disciplines that are rapidly advancing a scientific understanding of what it means to be human.

“If you really look at human experience,” argues Lindon Eaves in the show’s first segment, “the truth is that we’re all living a life of experiment, in every aspect of our lives.” In his day job, Eaves, a geneticist at Virginia Commonwealth University, is the principle investigator on some of the nation’s largest ongoing studies of twins. He is also an Anglican priest. Both professions, Eaves suggests, “are about passionately pursuing what we know we can’t pin down.

“As a thoroughgoing scientist, I am compelled in the short term to entertain a real belief that everything we believed in the past might turn out to be wrong.”

Eaves cites a favorite passage in one of Einstein’s essays, where he asks ‘What is it that motivates the scientist to work the long hours of the night trying to find the answer to the most complex puzzles of life when most people have long ago given up?’

“That’s a profoundly spiritual question. When John of the Cross talks about setting out on the dark night with only the fire of longing in his heart, that is something that is very close to the spirituality of the scientist.”

Tippett supplies the segue that enlarges the frame: “In the end it’s about exploring the mysteries of life - by hurtling yourself towards them, if you will, through the darkness. And that’s one way to describe the religious endeavor as well.”

For Tippett, enlarging the frame is what it’s all about.

“We’re not doing a program about religion,” she explains. “We’re doing a program about how religion flows through and into and infuses and informs all aspects of individual and public life.”

Where the media tends to polemicize the subject and present religious people as though they have all the answers, Tippett proceeds from her core conviction that religion as it is lived and experienced by most people is as much about questions as it is about answers.

“Until now, in order to enter the public sphere and to be quoted by journalists, religious people have had to squeeze themselves into political boxes and political modes of discourse which in fact diminished what they had to say and impoverished our common life.”

Tippett aims Speaking of Faith at “the vast middle between the two extremes,” in her determination to showcase voices about the way religion really works and the interesting questions it raises in people’s lives.

“Whether you are talking about marriage or about bioethical challenges raised by subjects like cloning or reproductive technologies, or being at war, or about raising children, religious people in that vast middle can really enrich our deliberation on issues of interest to us all.”

For Tippett, learning is a two-way street, and conversation is the best vehicle in which thoughts can travel and great ideas can be talked into comprehension. Which explains why she is constantly on the hunt for moments of dialogue, for instances and encounters where information is being exchanged.

“I don’t accept the debate, for example, between intelligent design and evolution, as the religion/science divide has been set up politically and received in the media. I do have a real interest in exploring ways in which the spirituality of the scientist and the spirituality of the mystic both resemble and inform each other. Each grapples with the awareness of truth and the awareness of mystery in ways that can’t be captured by the contemporary media penchant for contrasting viewpoints and over simplification.”

The show’s polished professionalism and state of the art production values combine in a way that seems almost effortless, but Tippett is the first to acknowledge that making big subjects accessible to a wide audience without dumbing them down is hard work.

Tippett’s weekly quest stands in stark relief against a media landscape increasingly driven by the marketability of polemical entertainment, and wedded to the broad stereotypes derived from the notion that conflict equals news. And working against the grain of common stereotypes about public discourse, Speaking of Faith draws an audience of believers of many faiths, including liberal and conservative Christians, atheists and secularists, to judge by the outpouring of listener response via postings to the show’s ambitious website.

Which is just what Krista Tippett wants.

“Contrary to common wisdom, this is one subject where people are willing for us to put really big ideas out there that don’t immediately make sense. Just as a good sermon leaves you with something to chew on for the rest of the week, I intentionally weave in big thoughts that are a little bit dense but exciting nonetheless.”

As one listener, echoing many others, said in an e-mail, “You seem to think your listeners are intelligent enough to figure this out and think for themselves. Thanks for that compliment.”

Links of Interest
speakingoffaith.publicradio.org
offers station listings and show archives:
• “Heart and Soul: The Integrative Medicine of Dr. Mehmet Oz”
• “Science and Hope” George F.R. Ellis on Ethics and Cosmology
• “A Theological Perspective on Cloning with Laurie Zoloth”
• “Science and Being” three scientists’ understanding of what it means to be human

Chris Bugbee is a freelance writer and consultant on public affairs and communication strategy for independent sector institutions. Diane Winston is the Knight Chair in Media and Religion at the Annenberg School for communication at the University of Southern California.

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