On Being with Krista Tippett
Episodes
Shai Held — On Love and Judaism
26 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
From Krista: I'm on record bemoaning across the years that “love” is the most watered-down word in the English language. I know that invoking love...
Jason Reynolds — On Hopelessness, the Virtue of Stamina, and Showing Grace to Ourselves
19 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
From Krista: I was longing for a deep dive on the radiant and common-sense hope that Jason Reynolds embodies after I interviewed him at a Georgetown e...
Arab Aramin, Robi Damelin, Liora Eilon, Mohamed Abu Jafar — Turning Unbearable Loss Into Ground of Shared Life
12 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
From Krista: A few months ago, I was invited to sit with four people sharing a very different Israeli-Palestinian story than that which comes to us in...
Gül Dölen – Psychedelic Science and Radical Healing
05 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The word “trauma” is used so widely at present, arguably too widely. But it bespeaks a tenor of our shared reality. This episode is a journey insi...
Joy Harjo and Tracy K. Smith – "This world is full of everything good, everything beautiful."
26 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
These days I sometimes have to remind myself to keep breathing. I think this is true of human beings across all of our differences and divides. But in...
A New Season for a Tender New Year
19 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Five new On Being episodes will begin to roll out next week … We begin with the delightful beloved poets (and friends) Joy Harjo and Tracy K. Smith ...
Jane Goodall, In Memoriam — What It Means to Be Human
03 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The great primatologist and humanitarian, Jane Goodall, died on October 1, 2025, at the age of 91. It is a joy and a comfort to revisit our last broad...
Joanna Macy, In Memoriam — Beauty and Wisdom and Courage (and Rilke) to Sustain Us
22 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This rich, gorgeous conversation will fill your soul. The singular and beloved Joanna Macy died at home at the age of 96 on July 20, 2025. She has lef...
Ross Gay — Hope Portal, Episode 7
10 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Ross Gay is a poet, community gardener, and teacher who brings another way of wisdom to the conviction that we have to know what we love and what deli...
Joy Harjo — The Hope Portal Ep. 6
03 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Our teacher this time is the extraordinary Joy Harjo. She is a musician, a visual artist, a member of the Muscogee Creek Nation, and she’s also form...
Joanna Macy — Hope Portal, Episode 5
26 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Our teacher and inspiration for this session is Joanna Macy. What she embodies is a wild love for the world and a fierce hope that rises irrepressible...
Ocean Vuong — Hope Portal, Episode 4
19 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
If hope is to be defining and forceful in the world we have to remake ahead of us, we must also speak hope into being. Ocean Vuong is a fascinating an...
Naomi Shihab Nye — Hope Portal, Episode 3
12 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In these next few sessions, we investigate some orientations and ways of being that are companions to hope. If hope is a muscle that can be exercised ...
Walter Brueggemann, In Memoriam — When the World We Have Trusted In Is Vanishing
11 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The great Christian scholar of the biblical prophets died on June 5, 2025. Yet, in the lineage of the prophets who called humanity to face its hardest...
adrienne maree brown — Hope Portal, Episode 2
05 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
adrienne maree brown shines a light on an emerging ecosystem in our world over and against the drumbeat of what is fractured and breaking. She works w...
Krista Tippett — Hope Portal, Episode 1
29 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Beginning today, and for the next six weeks in the On Being podcast feed and Substack, we’re opening a reflection/course experience curated by Krist...
Roberta Bondi — What is Prayer and How to Begin
22 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Buried treasure from the On Being archive!Krista writes of this conversation from the earliest pre-history of On Being: In the years in which I was o...
Yochi Fischer and Loaay Wattad–On Seeing the Trauma of the Other
15 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This episode emerged from a private gathering in The Hague in the fall of 2024 with a small group of people who live in Israel — both Jewish and Pal...
Jason Reynolds and Kessley Janvier — On Being Young In America
08 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A heavy complexity is on the shoulders of the young of our species in these years — humans growing up in this time. At the same time, from the dig...
David Bornstein — On Our Lives with the News
01 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A calming and helpful conversation for making sense of the very story of our time, and how that is coming to us and being powerfully shaped through me...
Katsi Cook — "Women are the First Environment"
24 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Katsi Cook is a beacon in an array of quiet powerful worlds — a magnetic, joyous, loving presence. The public conversation we offer up here was part...
Justin Vernon — Being Bon Iver
16 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A sweet and searching conversation between Krista and the man behind Bon Iver at this year's On Air Fest, full of wisdom and revelation. He is a pers...
A New Season of On Being
10 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
On Being is back on April 16, with a special season tethered in the persistent beauty and courage of what it can mean to be human — six conversatio...
Remembering Nikki Giovanni - ‘We Go Forward With a Sanity and a Love’
12 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The delightful Nikki Giovanni died on Dec. 9. It is a joy and a solace to relisten to this beloved conversation she had with Krista in 2016 – to ex...
Joan Baez — "This Gift of a Voice"
26 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
She is known as the voice of a generation. The Queen of Folk. A legend. An icon, the one who sang “We Shall Overcome” alongside Martin Luther King...
adrienne maree brown — On Radical Imagination and Moving Towards Life
03 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The wonderful civil rights elder Vincent Harding liked to look around the world for what he called "live human signposts" — human beings who embody...
“The End of Poetry” by Ada Limón
28 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
An impassioned plea, a yearning for connection — the poem U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón wrote when she says all language failed her. Take in Ada's r...
Atul Gawande — On Mortality and Meaning
27 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We are strange creatures. It is hard for us to speak about, or let in, the reality of frailty and death — the elemental fact of mortality itself. In...
“Ars Poetica #100: I Believe” by Elizabeth Alexander
21 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Today, a poem with a poignant question to live: “...and are we not of interest to each other?” Carry Elizabeth Alexander’s reading of her poem “...
Luis Alberto Urrea — On Our Belonging to Each Other
20 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We humans have this drive to erect barriers between ourselves and others, Luis Alberto Urrea says, and yet this makes us a little crazy. He is an exub...
Ross Gay — On the Insistence of Joy
13 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In our world of so much suffering, it can feel hard or wrong to invoke the word "joy." Yet joy has been one of the most insistent, recurrent rallying ...
Janine Benyus and Azita Ardakani Walton — On Nature's Wisdom for Humanity
06 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this all-new episode, Krista engages biomimicry pioneer Janine Benyus in a second, urgent conversation, alongside creative biomimicry practitioner ...
Befriend Your Body: A Compassionate Body Scan
31 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In a time of stress, uncertainty, and isolation, Christine Runyan turns our attention to what often evades our awareness — the response of our nervo...
Christine Runyan — On Healing Our Distressed Nervous Systems
30 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The years of pandemic and lockdown are still working powerfully on us from the inside. But we have trouble acknowledging this, much less metabolizing ...
“Joy is the Justice (We Give Ourselves)” by J. Drew Lanham
24 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We are overjoyed to share this heart-stirring performance with you, which transpired when we invited the ornithologist/poet/former On Being guest J. D...
Lyndsey Stonebridge and Lucas Johnson — On Love, Politics, and Violence (Channeling Hannah Arendt)
23 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Here is a stunning sentence for you, written by Lyndsey Stonebridge, our guest this hour, channeling the 20th-century political thinker and journalist...
New From Poetry Unbound: A Series on Conflict and the Human Condition
21 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
A taste of a special mini-season of Poetry Unbound — bringing contemplative curiosity and the life-nurturing tether of poetry to the very present m...
Colette Pichon Battle — On Knowing What We're Called To
16 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
There is an ecological transformation unfolding in the places we love and come from. On a front edge of this reality, which will affect us all, Colett...
Kate DiCamillo — On Nurturing Capacious Hearts
09 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In her writing, it is Kate DiCamillo's gift to make bearable the fact that joy and sorrow live so close, side by side, in life as it is (if not as we ...
Nick Cave — Loss, Yearning, Transcendence
22 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Here are some experiences to which Nick Cave gives voice and song: the "universal condition" of yearning, and of loss; a "spirituality of rigor"; and ...
A Word from Krista
21 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
A little musing on this season, the spectacular finale headed your way — and ways to stay connected in the time ahead.Subscribe to the The PauseFind...
Sara Hendren — Our Bodies, Aliveness, and the Built World
16 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Our built world is designed around something called "normal," and yet every single one of our bodies is mysterious, and constantly adapting for better...
Christiana Figueres — Ecological Hope, and Spiritual Evolution
09 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The ecological crisis we are standing before is at once civilizational and personal — intimately close to each of us in the places we love and inhab...
Clint Smith — What We Know in the "Marrow of Our Bones"
02 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This phrase recurs throughout Clint Smith's writing: "in the marrow of our bones." It is an example of how words can hold encrypted wisdom — in this...
“Dance Party” by Clint Smith
02 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Clint Smith reads his poem, “Dance Party.” This poem is featured in Clint’s On Being conversation with Krista, “What We Know in the ‘Marrow ...
“Ode to Those First Fifteen Minutes After the Kids Are Finally Asleep” by Clint Smith
02 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Clint Smith reads his poem, “Ode to Those First Fifteen Minutes After the Kids Are Finally Asleep.” This poem is featured in Clint’s On Being co...
[Extended] Clint Smith with Krista Tippett
02 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This phrase recurs throughout Clint Smith's writing: "in the marrow of our bones." It is an example of how words can hold encrypted wisdom — in this...
Three Skills for Staying Calm, Sane, and Open in a Chaotic World | Krista interviewed by Dan Harris for Ten Percent Happier
31 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
From Krista: I loved being interviewed by Dan Harris as much as I've ever enjoyed being on the other side of the microphone (as the saying goes). He d...
Latanya Sweeney — On Shaping Technology to Human Purpose
26 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
You may not know Latanya Sweeney's name, but as much as any other single person — and with good humor and grace as well as brilliance — she has l...
[Unedited] Latanya Sweeney with Krista Tippett
26 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
You may not know Latanya Sweeney's name, but as much as any other single person — and with good humor and grace as well as brilliance — she has l...
Matthew Sanford – The Body's Grace
19 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
A wondrous, buried treasure from the 20-year On Being archive, with renowned yoga teacher Matthew Sanford. Be prepared, as you listen to what follows,...
Baratunde Thurston — How to Be a Social Creative
12 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Baratunde Thurston is a comedian, writer, and media entrepreneur. He has eyes open to the contradictions, strangeness, and beauty of being human. He l...
Reid Hoffman — AI, and What It Means to Be (More) Human
05 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this season of On Being and those to come, we are going to train the core human questions on the emerging “generative AI.” Beyond the hype and ...
Kerry Washington — Acting as a Devotional Practice
28 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
“Becoming other people” for a living, as Kerry Washington likes to describe her craft, turns out to be a revelatory lens on the high drama that is...
Kate Bowler — On Being in a Body
21 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We love the theologian Kate Bowler's allergy to every platitude and her wisdom and wit about the strange and messy fullness of what it means to be in ...
Kate Bowler — A Blessing for the Life You Didn't Choose
21 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This blessing is featured in Kate’s conversation with Krista, “On Being in a Body.” It's published in her book The Lives We Actually Have: 100 B...
A New Season of On Being Is Coming
14 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
A big conversation to live by starting NEXT WEEK — every Thursday — from September 21. Loss — and love. AI — and the intelligence that live...
"Love is still the only revenge. It grows each time the earth is set on fire."
21 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
From Krista: I have been texting this exquisite poem from our archives to my beloveds. Perhaps it will touch you — hold you — as it is touching an...
From Poetry Unbound: Benjamin Gucciardi — The Rungs
08 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Hello friends, it is a joy to introduce the new season of Poetry Unbound, which is underway. As Krista shares at the top, this episode has everything ...
Patronage and Love: On Being's Becoming
20 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Pádraig makes an announcement, and we listen to a few lovely moments from the On Being season we've just brought into the world. We're inviting the ...
Vivek Murthy — To Be a Healer
13 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We need a modicum of vitality to simply be alive in this time. And we're in an enduringly tender place. The mental health crisis that is invoked all a...
Vivek Murthy — A Meditation for Moments of Despair, and To Feel Less Alone
13 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
An excerpt from the On Being episode, "To Be a Healer." The extraordinary physician and public servant stilled a raucous room full of storytellers and...
[Unedited] Vivek Murthy with Krista Tippett
13 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We need a modicum of vitality to simply be alive in this time. And we're in an enduringly tender place. The mental health crisis that is invoked all a...
Barbara Brown Taylor — “This Hunger for Holiness”
06 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
"I like it much better than ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’ — to be a seeker after the sacred or the holy, which ends up for me being the really ...
[Unedited] Barbara Brown Taylor with Krista Tippett
06 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
"I like it much better than ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’ — to be a seeker after the sacred or the holy, which ends up for me being the really ...
Ruth Wilson Gilmore — “Where life is precious, life is precious.”
30 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
To say that Ruth Wilson Gilmore is a geographer, which she is, is not to convey the vast and varied ways in which she is influencing the makings of th...
Janine Benyus — Biomimicry, an Operating Manual for Earthlings
23 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
There is a quiet, redemptive story of our time in this conversation — a radical way of approaching the gravest of our problems by attending to how o...
Rick Rubin — Magic, Everyday Mystery, and Getting Creative
16 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The flow and the ingredients by which an idea becomes an offering — and life practices which call that alchemy forth. The mystery of it all that can...
Isabel Wilkerson — "We all know in our bones that things are harder than they have to be."
09 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this rich, expansive, and warm conversation between friends, Krista draws out the heart for humanity behind Isabel Wilkerson's eye on histories we ...
James Bridle — The Intelligence Singing All Around Us
02 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
You might want to take a walk with this one. It is big and full of brain food and an enlivening opening of imagination to possibilities that are emerg...
[Unedited] James Bridle with Krista Tippett
02 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
You might want to take a walk with this one. It is big and full of brain food and an enlivening opening of imagination to possibilities that are emerg...
Nick Offerman — Working with Wood, and the Meaning of Life
23 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Nick Offerman has played many great characters, most famously Ron Swanson in Parks and Recreation, and he starred more recently in an astonishing epis...
Ada Limón — “To Be Made Whole”
16 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
An electric conversation with Ada Limón's wisdom and her poetry — a refreshing, full-body experience of how this way with words and sound and silen...
“A New National Anthem” by Ada Limón
16 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Ada Limón reads her poem, “A New National Anthem.” This poem is featured in Ada’s On Being conversation with Krista, “To Be Made Whole.” Fi...
“The Quiet Machine” by Ada Limón
16 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Ada Limón reads her poem, “The Quiet Machine.” This poem is featured in Ada’s On Being conversation with Krista, “To Be Made Whole.” Find m...
“Dead Stars” by Ada Limón
16 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Ada Limón reads her poem, “Dead Stars.” This poem is featured in Ada’s On Being conversation with Krista, “To Be Made Whole.” Find more of ...
Amanda Ripley — Stepping out of "the zombie dance" we're in, and into "good conflict" that is, in fact, life-giving
09 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Amanda Ripley began her life as a journalist covering crime, disaster, and terrorism. Then in 2018, she published a brilliant essay called “Complica...
Dacher Keltner — The Thrilling New Science of Awe
02 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
One of the most fascinating developments of our time is that human qualities we have understood in terms of virtue — experiences we've called spirit...
Emergence: On Being Is Back!
26 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
We are immensely grateful for your patience in our season of podcasting pause. But enough already. Starting Thursday, February 2, we'll come to you wi...
Foundations 4: Calling and Wholeness
03 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In the modern western world, vocation was equated with work. But each of us has callings, not merely to be professionals, but to be friends, neighbors...
Foundations 3: Taking a Long View of Time, and Becoming “Critical Yeast”
27 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We inhabit a liminal time between what we thought we knew and what we can’t quite yet see. But time is more spacious than we imagine it to be, and i...
Foundations 2: Living the Questions
20 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We live in a world in love with the form of words that is an opinion, and the way with words that is an argument. Yet it is a deep truth in life — a...
Foundations 1: Seeing the Generative Story of Our Time
13 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The first of four short offerings, more wisdom practice than podcast: life-giving, hope-generating words, ideas and practices that can literally shape...
A Listening Ritual for this Fall: Poetry Unbound
06 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Three years ago, Krista texted Pádraig Ó Tuama with a simple question: what if he were to start a poetry podcast that listened as much as it shared?...
A Season of Emergence with Krista
29 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Krista returns from her summer in Berlin, where her present-day self reunited with the 25-year-old of the 1980s, at large in the divided city. Hear th...
BONUS: An On Being Listening Party — Celebrating 20 Years
30 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
A special offering from Krista Tippett and all of us at On Being: an incredible, celebratory event — listening back and remembering forwards across ...
[Unedited] adrienne maree brown with Krista Tippett
23 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The beloved civil rights elder Vincent Harding liked to look around the world for what he called "live human signposts" — human beings who embody w...
Ocean Vuong – A Life Worthy of Our Breath
16 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Krista interviewed the wise and wonderful writer Ocean Vuong on March 8, 2020 in a joyful, crowded room full of podcasters in Brooklyn. A state of eme...
[Unedited] Ocean Vuong with Krista Tippett
16 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We are in the final weeks as On Being evolves to its next chapter — in a world that is evolving, each of us changed in myriad ways we’ve only begu...
Ayana Elizabeth Johnson — What If We Get This Right?
09 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Amidst all of the perspectives and arguments around our ecological future, this much is true: we are not in the natural world — we are part of it. T...
[Unedited] Ayana Elizabeth Johnson with Krista Tippett
09 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Amidst all of the perspectives and arguments around our ecological future, this much is true: we are not in the natural world — we are part of it. T...
Rachel Naomi Remen – How We Live With Loss
02 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The conversation of this hour always rises as an early experience that imprinted everything that came after at On Being. Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen is one...
[Unedited] Rachel Naomi Remen with Krista Tippett
02 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The conversation of this hour always rises as an early experience that imprinted everything that came after at On Being. Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen is one...
David Whyte — Seeking Language Large Enough
26 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
It has ever and always been true, David Whyte reminds us, that so much of human experience is a conversation between loss and celebration. This conver...
"Everything is Waiting for You" by David Whyte
26 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
David Whyte reads his poem, “Everything is Waiting for You.” This poem is featured in David’s On Being conversation with Krista, “Seeking Lang...
"Working Together" by David Whyte
26 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
David Whyte reads his poem, “Working Together.” This poem is featured in David’s On Being conversation with Krista, “Seeking Language Large En...
"Sweet Darkness" by David Whyte
26 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
David Whyte reads his poem, “Sweet Darkness.” This poem is featured in David’s On Being conversation with Krista, “Seeking Language Large Enou...
[Unedited] David Whyte with Krista Tippett
26 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
It has ever and always been true, David Whyte reminds us, that so much of human experience is a conversation between loss and celebration. This conver...
BONUS: A Defining Moment from Krista — Celebrating Our First 20 Years
24 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
As we approach nearly two decades of On Being, Krista shares a moment from the earliest years of the show that imprinted everything that followed. Hea...
Kimberley Wilson — Whole Body Mental Health
19 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The British psychologist Kimberley Wilson works in the emergent field of whole body mental health, one of the most astonishing frontiers we are on as ...