Krista
Tippett

CEO, broadcast journalist

Krista writes about: Culture, Religion, Spirituality

Krista Tippett founded and leads the On Being Project, a groundbreaking media and public life initiative pursuing “deep thinking and moral imagination, social courage and joy, to renew inner life, outer life, and life together.” The Peabody award-winning On Being radio show that she created and hosts, now heard on 400 public radio stations across the US, takes up the great questions of meaning as they are being reframed in 21st-century lives and disciplines: what does it mean to be human, how we do want to live, and who will we be to each other? The On Being podcast has been downloaded over 200 million times. The Civil Conversations Project, which Tippett curates, has been lauded across the US political and cultural spectrum and is inspiring and resourcing initiatives across the globe.

Tippett grew up in a small town in Oklahoma, attended Brown University, and worked as a young journalist and diplomat in Cold War Berlin. After returning to the US and pursuing a Masters of Divinity at Yale University in the early 1990s, she saw a black hole where intelligent public reflection and conversation about the religious and spiritual aspects of humanity might be. President Obama awarded her National Humanities Medal at the White House in 2014 for “thoughtfully delving into the mysteries of human existence. On the air and in print, Ms. Tippett avoids easy answers, embracing complexity and inviting people of every background to join her conversations about faith, ethics, and moral wisdom.”

Tippett’s third book, Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living, was a New York Times bestseller and named a best nonfiction book of 2016 by the Washington Post and The Library Journal. She is also the author of the New York Times bestselling Einstein’s God: Conversations about Science and the Human Spirit and Speaking of Faith: Why Religion Matters and How to Talk About it, a memoir of religion in our time.

In recent honors, Tippett was a 2019 recipient of the Four Freedoms Medal of the Roosevelt Institute at Hyde Park. She received an honorary doctorate from Middlebury College in 2019, and was Mimi and Peter E. Haas Distinguished Visitor at the Hass Center for Public Service at Stanford University.

We can discover how to calm fear and plant the seeds of the robust civil society we desire and that our age demands.

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