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Speaking of Faith

Posted by John on November 28th, 2007 at 7:33 pm · 3 Comments

Even though I am a unabashed atheist, many of my heroes–my virtual mentors, if you will–are believers. In many ways, Krista Tippett’s (who calls herself “a person of faith”) Public Radio program Speaking of Faith sets the bar for the new Mind on Fire. Every time I listen to her interviews, she challenges my preconceptions of the religious world. Her interview with Richard Cizik, the Vice President of the powerful National Association of Evangelicals, demolished my stereotype that Evangelical Christians were blind to climate change.  She has interviewed rebels and secularists entrenched within various traditions and skeptics like Jennifer Michael Hecht, author of Doubt: A History (and one of my few atheist heroes).  Many of the people she calls her “conversation partners” are difficult to pin down–they defy easy definition.

I just started reading the book Speaking of Faith.  Here’s how she opens it:

What is faith? What is religion? What is spirituality? Each of these words is difficult for some of us and richly meaningful for others.  Together they describe an aspect of human experience that has taken our age by surprise.  I want to explore this surprise in all its complexity and variety, and to set our common encounter with it on a new footing.

What I like most about Krista Tippett is that she is anything but a reductionist.  Although I’m coming from a different part of the belief spectrum, my agenda is the same as hers.  To be human is to be complex.  While dogmatists, religious and secular, want to reduce, simplify, and caricature people, my aim, like Tippett’s, is to deepen and complicate our understanding of nature, of life, of humanity.  It’s easy to paint the world in sweeping black and white strokes; it takes insight, perseverance and patience to capture the kaleidescope of color that is the world.

Krista Tippet has done a great job of this through her radio program (and podcast).  I hope I can do the same through blogging–which has its challenges, I admit.

*Thrifty shopper tip: Amazon has the hardcover(!) on sale for $5!  Don’t pay $20+ at Borders, like I did…

Tags: Book Group · Doubt · Humanity

3 responses so far ↓

  • 1 amelia // Nov 28, 2007 at 8:13 pm

    that’s a thrifty shopper tip i can appreciate. :)

    i love speaking of faith–it’s one of my favorite npr shows. i think i first fell in love with it because it’s where i heard elie wiesel’s prayer:

    http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/wiesel/prayer.shtml

    your comments here about human complexity and attempting to deepen understanding of that complexity resonate with me. and reminded me of this article i read earlier today:

    http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html

    which was linked at the end of the badass bible verses post xJane linked to earlier (hilarious, by the way). it’s an interesting insight into why it is that human beings tend to dehumanize others so very easily. i like wong’s conclusion: that humble self-knowledge is the key to avoiding destructive simplification of the world’s incredible complexity.

  • 2 John // Nov 30, 2007 at 9:51 pm

    Thanks for the tip, amelia. I clicked once on the link when I first got to the end of the Bad Ass Verses but didn’t linger to read its content. I need to follow your recommendation and devote some time to this.

  • 3 Elise // Dec 15, 2007 at 11:44 pm

    The recognition that we are complex is obvious when stated so simply and yet an all too often ignored/neglected aspect of humanity. Something I forget on a day-to-day basis when I’m interacting with other people, at least. I like your desire ” …to deepen and complicate our understanding of nature, of life, of humanity.”

    There’s something delightful in the simplicity of a childhood understanding of life, but beautiful and profound in the depth and complexity we acquire as we get older. I’m not sure which I prefer – I like to hope that it’s possible to embrace and appreciate the simple and the complex simultaneously.

    I haven’t listened to this program (I don’t catch NPR very often – can someone remind me which radio station in OC you can find these programs on?) but it sounds like something I’d be interested in.

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