On Being

There is no such thing as closure. Family therapist Pauline Boss says that the idea of closure in fact leads us astray — it’s a myth we need put aside, like the idea we’ve accepted that grief has five linear stages and we come out the other side done with it. She coined the term “ambiguous loss,” creating a new field in family therapy and psychology. And she has wisdom for the complicated griefs and losses in all of our lives and in how we best approach the losses of others — including those very much in our public midst right now. Find more at www.onbeing.org/program/pauline-boss-the-myth-of-closure/8757

Sixteen Muslims, in their own words, speak about the delights and gravity of Islam's holiest month. Through vivid memories and light-hearted musings, they reveal the richness of Ramadan — as a period of intimacy, and of parties; of getting up when the world is quiet for breakfast and prayers with one's family; of breaking the fast every day after nightfall in celebration and prayers with friends and strangers. Find more at www.onbeing.org/program/revealing-ramadan/165

It was supposed to be a discussion about "culture and conscience" with two social scientists, as part of a public gathering of the Center for Humans and Nature at the American Museum of Natural History. But Jonathan Haidt is studying the relationship between capitalism and moral evolution, and our conversation took off from there in surprising directions. The liberal view of capitalism as essentially exploitative may remain alive and well, Haidt says. But the ironic truth of history is that capitalism actually generates liberal values as it takes root in societies. Our conversation preceded this American cultural-political season but offers provocative perspective on it. Find more at www.onbeing.org/program/jonathan-haidt-and-melvin-konner-capitalism-and-moral-evolution-a-civil-provocation/8704

Kevin Kling is part funny guy, part poet and playwright, part wise man. A treasured figure on the national storytelling circuit, his voice inhabits an unusual space — where a homegrown Minnesota wit meets Dante and Shakespeare. Born with a disabled left arm, he lost the use of his right one after a motorcycle accident nearly killed him. He shares his special angle on life's humor and its ruptures — and why we turn loss into story. Find more at www.onbeing.org/program/kevin-kling-the-losses-and-laughter-we-grow-into/1863

"The soul is contained in the human voice," says David Isay, founder of StoryCorps. He sees the StoryCorps booth — a setting where two people ask the questions they’ve always wanted to ask each other — as a sacred space. He shares his wisdom about listening as an act of love, and how eliciting and capturing our stories is a way of insisting that every life matters. Find more at http://www.onbeing.org/program/david-isay-listening-as-an-act-of-love/6268

This episode, a “theft of the dial.” Writer and traveler Pico Iyer turns the tables on our host Krista Tippett by asking her the questions. Her latest book, "Becoming Wise," chronicles what she’s learned through her conversations with the most extraordinary voices across time and generations, across disciplines and denominations. An illuminating conversation on the mystery and art of living. Find more at www.onbeing.org/program/krista-tippett-an-inquiry-into-the-mystery-and-art-of-living/8644

Nobel physicist Frank Wilczek sees beauty as a compass for truth, discovery, and meaning. His book, A Beautiful Question, is a long meditation on the question: “Does the world embody beautiful ideas?” He’s the unusual scientist willing to analogize his discoveries about the deep structure of reality with deep meaning in the human everyday. Find more at www.onbeing.org/program/frank-wilczek-why-is-the-world-so-beautiful/8565

The civil rights lawyer Michelle Alexander is one of the people who is waking us up to history we don't remember, and structures most of us can't fathom intending to create. She calls the punitive culture that has emerged the "new Jim Crow," and is making it visible in the name of a fierce hope and belief in our collective capacity to engender the transformation to which this moment is calling. Find more at http://www.onbeing.org/program/michelle-alexander-who-we-want-to-become-beyond-the-new-jim-crow/8603

The band Cloud Cult is hard to categorize — both musically and lyrically — though it's been called an "orchestral indie rock collective." Less in question is the profound and life-giving force of its music. Cloud Cult's trajectory was altered the day its co-founder and singer-songwriter, Craig Minowa, and his wife woke up to find that their two-year-old son had mysteriously died in his sleep. Live from our studios on Loring Park, we explore the art that has emerged ever since — spanning the human experience from the rawest grief to the fiercest hope. See more at http://www.onbeing.org/program/craig-minowa-music-and-the-ritual-of-performance/8584

“Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet / confinement of your aloneness / to learn / anything or anyone / that does not bring you alive / is too small for you.” David Whyte is a poet and philosopher who believes in the power of a “beautiful question” amidst the drama of work as well as the drama of life — amidst the ways the two overlap, whether we want them to or not. He shared a deep friendship with the late Irish philosopher John O’Donohue. They were, David Whyte says, like “two bookends.” More recently, he’s written about the consolation, nourishment, and underlying meaning of everyday words. Find more www.onbeing.org/program/david-whyte-the-conversational-nature-of-reality/8560

When Tiffany Shlain thinks of her favorite quote from naturalist John Muir, she thinks of the internet: "When you tug at a single thing in the universe, you find it's attached to everything else." As a filmmaker and founder of the Webby Awards — the "Oscars of the internet" — she is committed to reframing technology as an expression of the best of what humanity is capable, with all the complexity that entails. With her young family, she has helped popularize the practice of the "tech shabbat" — 24 unplugged hours each week. Her perspective on our technology-enhanced lives is ultimately a purposeful and enriching one: the internet is our global brain, towards which we can apply all the wisdom we are gaining about the brains in our heads and the character in our lives. See more at http://www.onbeing.org/program/tiffany-shlain-growing-up-the-internet/8545

There’s a kind of brilliance that flashes up in early adulthood: an ability to see the world whole. Nathan Schneider has been able to articulate and sustain that far-seeing eye of young adulthood. He’s also a gifted writer, chronicling the world he and his compatriots are helping to make — spiritual, technological, and communal. At the Chautauqua Institution, we explore the wisdom of a millennial generation public intellectual on the emerging fabric of human identity. Find more at www.onbeing.org/program/nathan-schneider-the-wisdom-of-millennials/6911

In the 1960s, Nikki Giovanni was a revolutionary poet of the Black Arts Movement that nourished civil rights. She had a famous dialogue with James Baldwin in Paris in 1971. Now a professor at Virginia Tech, she brought beauty and courage by way of poetry after the shooting there. Today, she is a self-proclaimed space freak and a delighted elder — an adored voice to hip-hop artists and the new forms of social change this generation is creating. See more at www.onbeing.org/program/nikki-giovanni-soul-food-sex-and-space/8501

Jean Berko Gleason is a living legend in the field of psycholinguistics — how language emerges, and what it tells us about how we think and who we are. She has helped to illustrate the remarkable ordinary human capacity to begin to speak, and she’s continued to break new ground in exploring what this may teach us about adults as about the children we’re raising. We keep learning about the human gift, as she puts it, to be conscious of ourselves and to comment on that. For her, the exploration of language is a frontier every bit as important and thrilling as exploring outer space or the deep sea. See more at http://www.onbeing.org/program/unfolding-language-unfolding-life/256

“Let death be what takes us,” Dr. B.J. Miller has written, “not a lack of imagination.” As a palliative care physician, he brings a design sensibility to the matter of living until we die. And he’s largely redesigned his sense of own physical presence after an accident at college left him without both of his legs and part of one arm. He offers a transformative reframing on our imperfect bodies, the ways we move through the world, and all that we don’t control. See more at www.onbeing.org/program/bj-miller-reframing-our-relationship-to-that-we-don-t-control/8380

One of the most extraordinary minds of American and global history, W.E.B. Du Bois penned the famous line that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.” He is a formative voice for many of the people who gave us the Civil Rights Movement. But his passionate, poetic words and intelligence continue to enliven 21st-century life on the color line and beyond it. We bring Du Bois’ life and ideas into relief — featuring one of the last interviews the great Maya Angelou gave before her death. See more at http://www.onbeing.org/program/maya-angelou-elizabeth-alexander-arnold-rampersad-web-du-bois-the-american-soul/6442

Something of a celebrity in Quaker circles, Carrie Newcomer is best known for her story-songs that get at the raw and redemptive edges of human reality. This week, a musical conversation with the Indiana-based and born folk singer-songwriter whose been called a "prairie mystic." She writes and sings about the grittiness of hope and the ease of cynicism. See more at www.onbeing.org/program/carrie-newcomer-a-conversation-with-music/7049

The Irish poet and The New Yorker poetry editor Paul Muldoon has won the Pulitzer Prize, written for other media from radio to song, and plays in a rock band. He visited us for a magical day at the On Being studios on Loring Park in Minneapolis, including a dinner salon and reading from his work. See more at http://www.onbeing.org/program/paul-muldoon-a-conversation-with-verse/8276

Actor Martin Sheen as you've never heard him before. He has appeared in over 100 films, including Apocalypse Now. He’s best known on television as President Bartlet in seven seasons of The West Wing. But Martin Sheen, born and still legally named Ramón Estévez, has had another lesser-known life as a spiritual seeker and activist. He returned to a deep and joyful Catholic faith after a crisis at the height of his fame in in mid-life. He’s been arrested over 60 times in vigils and protests. "Piety is something you do alone," he says. "True freedom, spirituality, can only be achieved in community." See more at www.onbeing.org/program/martin-sheen-spirituality-of-imagination/8257

Stay. That’s the message that philosopher, poet, and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht puts at the center of her unusual writing about suicide. She’s traced how the history of Western civilization has, at times, demonized those who commit suicide, and, at times, celebrated it as a moral freedom. She has struggled with suicidal places in her life and lost friends to it. As a scholar, she’s now proposing a new cultural reckoning with suicide, based not on morality or on rights but on our essential need for each other. See more at www.onbeing.org/program/jennifer-michael-hecht-suicide-and-hope-for-our-future-selves/6187

A transformation of medicine is underway — a transition from a science of treating disease to a science of health. Mark Hyman is a family physician and a pioneer in the new discipline of Functional Medicine. James Gordon is an expert in using mind-body medicine to heal depression, anxiety, and psychological trauma. Penny George became a philanthropist of integrative medicine after she experienced cancer in mid-life. With Krista, before a live audience at the University of Minnesota, they discuss the challenge and promise of aligning medicine with a twenty-first century understanding of human wholeness. See more at www.onbeing.org/program/mark-hyman-james-gordon-and-penny-george-the-evolution-of-medicine/8183

The philosopher Simone Weil defined prayer as “absolutely unmixed attention.” The artist Ann Hamilton embodies this notion in her sweeping works of art that bring all the senses together. She uses her hands to create installations that are both visually astounding and surprisingly intimate, and meet a longing many of us share, as she puts it, to be alone together. See more at www.onbeing.org/program/ann-hamilton-making-and-the-spaces-we-share/6147

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks is the former Chief Rabbi of Great Britain and one of the world’s deep thinkers on religion in our age. He’s just released a new book, Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence. In this intimate conversation with Krista, he speaks about how Jewish and other religious ideas can inform modern challenges. Rabbi Sacks says that the faithful can and must cultivate their own deepest truths — while finding God in the face of the stranger and the religious other. See more at www.onbeing.org/program/dignity-difference/188

The organizational psychologist Adam Grant, who many know from his New York Times columns, describes three human orientations, of which we are all capable: the givers, the takers, and the matchers. These also influence whether organizations are joyful or toxic for human beings. His studies are dispelling a conventional wisdom that selfish takers are the most likely to succeed professionally. And, he is wise about practicing generosity in organizational life — what he calls making “microloans of our knowledge, our skills, our connections to other people” — in a way that is transformative for others, ourselves, and our places of work. See more at www.onbeing.org/program/adam-grant-successful-givers-toxic-takers-and-the-life-we-spend-at-work/8058

When we talk about the relationship between colleges and the world, we tend to focus on economics. But what is the place of institutions of higher education in the communities they inhabit? How can and should they nurture students as citizens and leaders for the emerging 21st century world? Two visionary college presidents of two very different institutions take up these questions with Krista at the American Council on Education's 97th Annual Meeting. http://www.onbeing.org/program/christopher-howard-nancy-cantor-beyond-the-ivory-tower/8015

The wise linguist and anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson explores the matter of life as an improvisational art, at every age. As the daughter of the iconic anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, she’s had an ability to move through the world as both an original observer and a joyful participant. She’s composed a life that is far more settled but always in dialogue with the memory of her brilliant, globe-trotting, unconventionally-coupled parents. See more at www.onbeing.org/program/mary-catherine-bateson-composing-a-life/7968

More than 30 objects on the moon are named after the Jesuits who mapped it. A Jesuit was one of the founders of modern astrophysics. And four Jesuits in history, including Ignatius of Loyola, have had asteroids named after them – Brother Guy Consolmagno and Father George Coyne being the two living men with this distinction. In a conversation filled with friendship and laughter, and in honor of the visit of Pope Francis to the U.S., we experience the spacious way they think about science, the universe, and the love of God. See more at www.onbeing.org/program/asteroids-stars-and-love-god/68

The High Holy Days create an annual ritual of repentance, both individual and collective. Louis Newman, who has explored repentance as a ethicist and a person in recovery, opens this up as a refreshing practice for every life, even beyond the lifetime of those to whom we would make amends. See more at www.onbeing.org/program/louis-newman-the-refreshing-practice-of-repentance/7923

“I grew up a witness” Mike Rose writes, “to the intelligence of the waitress in motion, the reflective welder, the strategy of the guy on the assembly line. This then is something I know: the thought it takes to do physical work.” In all our debates about standardized testing and the information economy, the value of learning to work and the future of liberal arts education, we may risk too narrow a view of the way the physical, the human, and the intellectual blend in all kinds of learning and in all work that matters. Mike Rose’s expansive wisdom could enlarge our civic imagination on big subjects at the heart of who we are — schooling, social class, and the deepest meaning of vocation. See more at www.onbeing.org/program/mike-rose-the-intelligence-in-all-kinds-of-work-and-the-human-core-of-all-education-that-matters/208

Chinese-American philosopher and civil rights legend Grace Lee Boggs turned 100 this summer. She has been at the heart and soul of a largely hidden story inside Detroit’s evolution from economic collapse to rebirth. We traveled in 2011 to meet her and her community of joyful, passionate people reimagining work, food, and the very meaning of humanity. They have lessons for us all. See more at www.onbeing.org/program/grace-lee-boggs-a-century-in-the-world/1060

Few features of humanity are more fascinating than creativity; and few fields are more dynamic now than neuroscience. Rex Jung is a neuropsychologist who puts the two together. He's working on a cutting edge of science, exploring the differences and interplay between intelligence and creativity. He and his colleagues unsettle long-held beliefs about who is creative and who is not. And they're seeing practical, often common-sense connections between creativity and family life, aging, and purpose. See more at www.onbeing.org/program/creativity-and-everyday-brain/1879

We were made and set here, the writer Annie Dillard once wrote, "to give voice to our astonishments." Katy Payne is a renowned acoustic biologist with a Quaker sensibility. And she’s found her astonishment in listening to two of the world’s most exotic creatures. She has decoded the language of elephants and was among the first scientists to discover that whales are composers of song. See more at www.onbeing.org/program/katy-payne-in-the-presence-of-elephants-and-whales/241

The Irish poet and philosopher John O'Donohue was beloved for his book Anam Ċara, Gaelic for "soul friend," and for his insistence on beauty as a human calling. In one of his last interviews before his death in 2008, he articulated a Celtic imagination about how the material and the spiritual — the visible and the invisible — intertwine in human experience. His voice and writings continue to bring ancient mystical wisdom to modern confusions and longings. See more at www.onbeing.org/program/john-o-donohue-the-inner-landscape-beauty/203

Poetry is something many of us seem to be hungry for these days. We're hungry for fresh ways to tell hard truths and redemptive stories, for language that would elevate and embolden rather than demean and alienate. Elizabeth Alexander shares her sense of what poetry works in us — and in our children — and why it may become more relevant, not less so, in hard and complicated times. See more at www.onbeing.org/program/elizabeth-alexander-words-that-shimmer/246

Rami Nashashibi uses graffiti, calligraphy, and hip-hop in his work as a healing force on the South Side of Chicago. A Palestinian-American, he started his activism with at-risk urban Muslim families, especially youth, while he was still a college student. Now he’s the leader of a globally-emulated project converging religious virtues, the arts, and social action. And he is a fascinating face of a Muslim-American dream flourishing against the odds in post-9/11 America. See more at www.onbeing.org/program/rami-nashashibi-a-new-coming-together/5011

“Race is a little bit like gravity,” john powell says: experienced by all, understood by the few. He is an esteemed legal scholar and thinker who counsels all kinds of people and projects on the front lines of our present racial anguish and longings. Race is relational, he reminds us. It’s as much about whiteness as about color. And it largely plays out, as we’re learning through new science, in our unconscious minds. john powell is steeped in this new learning and offers it to us, as a form of everyday power, to animate our belonging to others that is already real. But we must claim it. See more at www.onbeing.org/program/john-a-powell-opening-the-question-of-race-to-the-question-of-belonging/7695

The Hubble Space Telescope, which turns 25 this year, has brought the beauty of the cosmos into our lives. Mario Livio works with discoveries it makes possible, studying things like dark energy, extrasolar planets, and white dwarf stars. He's fascinated with the enduring mystery of mathematics, the language of science. He describes the cosmic puzzles that accompany our greatest scientific advances. See more at www.onbeing.org/program/mario-livio-mysteries-of-an-expanding-universe/244

She became a national figure as the face of the Nuns on the Bus. Sr. Simone Campbell is a lawyer, lobbyist, poet, and Zen contemplative working on issues such as “mending the wealth gap,” “enacting a living wage,” and “crafting a faithful budget that benefits the 100%.” She is a helpful voice for longings so many of us share, across differences, about how to engage with the well-being of our neighbors in this complicated age. See more at www.onbeing.org/program/simone-campbell-how-to-be-spiritually-bold/7654

Journalist, novelist and travel writer Pico Iyer has become one of our most eloquent explorers of what he calls the "inner world" — in himself and in the 21st Century world at large. He travels the globe from Ethiopia to North Korea and lives in Japan. But he also experiences a remote Benedictine hermitage as his second home, retreating there many times each year. In this intimate conversation, we explore the discoveries he's making and his practice of "the art of stillness.” See more at www.onbeing.org/program/pico-iyer-the-art-of-stillness/7615

The philosopher and Catholic social innovator Jean Vanier is a teacher of the wisdom of tenderness. The L’Arche movement, which he founded, centers around people with mental disabilities and is celebrating its 50th anniversary this month. We experience how Jean Vanier brings the most paradoxical religious teachings to life: that there’s power in humility, strength in weakness, and light in the darkness of human existence. See more at www.onbeing.org/program/wisdom-tenderness/234

It is a story of our time — the new landscape of living longer, and of dying more slowly too. Jane Gross has explored this as a daughter and as a journalist, and as creator of the New York Times’ “New Old Age” blog. She has grounded advice and practical wisdom about caring for our loved ones and ourselves on the far shore of aging. http://www.onbeing.org/program/far-shore-aging/255

He’s been called a "post-millennial Schubert": Mohammed Fairouz has composed four symphonies and an opera while still in his 20s. He invokes John F. Kennedy and Anwar Sadat, Seamus Heaney, and Yehuda Amichai in his compositions — seeing "illustrious language" as a form of music too — and a way, just maybe, to shift the world on its axis. See more at www.onbeing.org/program/mohammed-fairouz-the-world-in-counterpoint/7511

What would it take to make our national encounter with gay marriage redemptive rather than divisive? David Blankenhorn and Jonathan Rauch came to the gay marriage debate from very different directions — but with a shared concern about the institution of marriage. Now, they’re pursuing a different way for all of us to grapple with the future of marriage, redefined. They model a fresh way forward as the subject of same-sex marriage is before the Supreme Court. See more at www.onbeing.org/program/future-marriage-david-blankenhorn-and-jonathan-rauch/4883

Steeped in the cutting edge of research around the social lives of networked teens, danah boyd demystifies technology while being wise about the changes it’s making to life and relationship. She has intriguing advice on the technologically-fueled generation gaps of our age — that our children’s immersion in social media may offer a kind of respite from their over-structured, overscheduled analog lives. And that cyber-bullying is an online reflection of the offline world, and blaming technology is missing the point. See more at www.onbeing.org/program/danah-boyd-online-reflections-of-our-offline-lives/7449

From the moment of his diagnosis with ALS, Bruce Kramer began writing — openly, deeply, and spiritually — about his struggle, as he puts it, to live while dying. He died while we were in production on this show. His words hold abiding joy and beauty, and reveal an unexpected view opened by this disease. See more at www.onbeing.org/program/bruce-kramer-forgiving-the-body-life-with-als/7420

Alzheimer's disease has been described as "the great unlearning." But what does it reveal about the nature of human identity? What remains when memory unravels? Alan Dienstag is a psychologist who has led support groups with early Alzheimer's patients, as well as a writing group he co-designed with the novelist Don DeLillo. He's experienced the early stages of Alzheimer's as a time for giving memories away rather than losing them. See more at www.onbeing.org/program/alan-dienstag-alzheimers-and-the-spiritual-terrain-of-memory/64

For several hundred years, much of scientific advance has been about exploring human beings, including their actions and choices, in terms of mechanism — our bodies, our brains, physical processes. Research psychologist Michael McCullough believes that understanding our minds as mechanistic creates moral possibility. He’s led groundbreaking studies on the evolution and cultivation of moral behaviors such as forgiveness and gratitude. Arthur Zajonc is a physicist and contemplative, who believes that the farthest frontiers of science are bringing us back to a radical reorientation towards life and the foundations for our moral life. See more at www.onbeing.org/program/arthur-zajonc-and-michael-mccullough-mind-and-morality/7316

Eve Ensler has helped women all over the world tell the stories of their lives through the stories of their bodies. Her play, "The Vagina Monologues," has become a global force in the face of violence against women and girls. But she herself also had a violent childhood. And it turns out that she herself was like so many of us western women, obsessed by our bodies and yet not inhabiting them — without even knowing we're not inhabiting them. Until she got cancer. See more www.onbeing.org/program/a-second-wind/6050

Wisdom for how we can move and heal our society in our time as the Civil Rights Movement galvanized its own. Lucas Johnson is bringing the art and practice of nonviolence into a new century, for new generations. Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons was an original Black Power feminist and a grassroots leader of the Mississippi Freedom Summer. See more at www.onbeing.org/program/gwendolyn-zoharah-simmons-and-lucas-johnson-the-movement-remembered-forward/6101

Courage is borne out of vulnerability, not strength. This finding of Brené Brown’s research on shame and "wholeheartedness" shook the perfectionist ground beneath her own feet. And now it’s inspiring millions to reconsider the way they live, parent, and navigate relations with members of the opposite gender. See more at www.onbeing.org/program/brene-brown-on-vulnerability/4928