On Being Studios
500 episodes listed below
Slow conversations for difficult human questions.
On Being with Krista Tippett is a reflective interview show where public wounds become occasions for slower, more humane attention. Recent conversations move from Judaism and poetry to Israeli-Palestinian grief, psychedelic healing, ecological wisdom, and the stamina required to keep hoping.
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On Being with Krista Tippett is an interview-centered show about spiritual inquiry, imagination, and the difficult work of staying human. It moves slowly by design. Instead of racing through positions, it gives guests enough room to describe the experiences beneath their convictions: grief, fear, prayer, exhaustion, love, recovery, memory, and repair. Recent episodes show the range clearly. Shai Held speaks from Judaism, philosophy, biblical scholarship, and rabbinic life about love as something stronger and more demanding than sentiment. Jason Reynolds brings hopelessness, grace, young people, race in America, and the virtue of stamina into one lived field of attention. Arab Aramin, Robi Damelin, Liora Eilon, and Mohamed Abu Jafar bring the Israeli-Palestinian conflict away from headlines and into the shared suffering of bereaved families choosing possible reconciliation. That episode is grave, but it is not despairing. It treats healing as an experiment people practice with their whole lives. Gül Dölen's conversation shifts the lens toward neuroscience, trauma, addiction, depression, and psychedelic-assisted therapeutic treatments, emphasizing that insight is not magic and healing still asks for work. The poetry episodes deepen the same pattern. Joy Harjo and Tracy K. Smith speak of poetry as a technology for bearing witness, breathing, and rising toward a truer self amid grief and danger. The memoriam episodes with Jane Goodall and Joanna Macy return to questions of nature, ecology, courage, curiosity, and what it means to be human when not every answer can be answered. Across these conversations, the show keeps pairing intimate vulnerability with large civic and spiritual questions. Its seriousness is gentle. Its gentleness has weight. Listeners come for reflective depth rather than argument, for language that can hold contradiction, and for guests who have lived inside the questions they are asked to consider. The show is especially strong when public crisis meets private conscience. It offers not escape from the world, but a steadier way of looking at it.
Made for: For listeners drawn to spiritual depth, reflection, poetry, healing, and long-form conversations that take grief and hope seriously. It suits people who want public issues approached through conscience, story, and inner life rather than speed or debate.
What sets it apart: The show’s strength is its unusually spacious attention: theology, neuroscience, poetry, ecology, conflict, and trauma are allowed to speak to one another without being flattened into a lesson. It is less about answers than about making room for a more honest question.
Wisdom to replenish and orient in a tender, tumultuous time to be alive. Spiritual inquiry, science, social healing, and poetry. Conversations to live by. With a 20-year archive featuring luminaries like Mary Oliver, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Desmond Tutu, each episode brings a new discovery about the immensity of our lives. Hosted by Krista Tippett, Learn more about the On Being Project’s work in the world at onbeing.org.
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Krista Tippett turns conversations about faith, healing, hope, and public life into practical reflection on how people live with one another.
On Being with Krista Tippett asks how people can remain morally and spiritually awake when public life feels frightening, fractured, or exhausted.
Krista Tippett turns existential vertigo into questions you can actually sit with.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A patient conversation about hope under pressure, and the discipline of staying open to it.
Jason Reynolds comes across as a writer whose hope has been worked for, not styled. The conversation moves through grace, hopelessness, stamina, and the idea that age does not have to be the measure of wisdom.
A serious look at psychedelic healing that keeps promise in check with follow-through.
Psychedelic medicine is treated here less like a headline and more like a serious language for trauma, addiction, and treatment-resistant depression.
A steady, humane conversation about prayer that values presence, variety, and showing up.
Roberta Bondi treats prayer less like a method to master than a way of staying open to God when the path ahead is murky. The conversation moves through the Desert Fathers and Mothers and comes back to a plain point: there is no single correct way to pray.
A reflective conversation that treats young people as essential to the century ahead.
The episode frames young people as carrying a wide load, with digital change, AI, and ecological as well as social upheaval pressing in at once.
A calm, searching talk about news fear, civic trust, and how to stay hopeful without tuning out.
This conversation looks at what happens when journalism is built around danger, and what that does to trust, citizenship, and fear. David Bornstein answers plainly, while Krista Tippett keeps pulling the discussion back to the human question inside the policy one: how to stay…
Krista Tippett opens by calling love “the most watered-down word in the English language” and still “the only force as powerful in a human body as fear.” She speaks with Shai Held, a philosopher, biblical scholar, rabbi, and president and dean of the Hadar Institute in Manhattan, about his March 2024 book, Judaism is About Love.
Hope arrives under pressure here.
This episode features a conversation with members of the Parent Circle Bereaved Families Forum, who share their stories of turning personal loss from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a foundation for shared suffering and reconciliation.
Krista Tippett interviews Gül Dölen at the 2025 Aspen Ideas Festival, where Dölen argues that psychedelics are teaching neuroscience to rethink depression, trauma, and learning.
This episode features a conversation with poets Joy Harjo and Tracy K.
The podcast On Being returns with a new season featuring diverse guests exploring healing, love, hope, and transformative topics like psychedelic-assisted therapy.
Krista Tippett revisits a conversation with Jane Goodall about her moral and spiritual convictions, exploring what it means to be human.
This episode honors the late Joanna Macy, a Buddhist teacher and ecological philosopher, through a conversation about her translation of Rilke's poetry and her enduring legacy of beauty, wisdom, and courage.
Krista Tippett explores the idea of joy as a resilience-making birthright, not a privilege, through a conversation with poet Ross Gay.
Krista Tippett interviews former U.S.
Krista Tippett introduces philosopher and environmental activist Joanna Macy, exploring the intersection of love, grief, and ecological awareness.
Krista Tippett introduces a conversation with writer Ocean Vong, exploring the power of words to create worlds and the need to speak hope into being.
Krista Tippett explores hope as a muscle, with poet Naomi Shihab Nye teaching how writing gives shape to emotions and fosters resilience.
This episode features an interview discussing Walter Brueggemann's religious upbringing as the son of a German evangelical pastor in rural Missouri and the cultural tensions within his immigrant church community during World War II.
Prayer begins without mastery.
Krista Tippett hosts a conversation between an Israeli Jewish historian and a Palestinian Arab lecturer about intergenerational trauma and healing in the Israeli-Palestinian context.
Young people are not cast as lost.
The news has changed us.
Krista Tippett hosts a conversation with poet Nikki Giovanni about her life, work, and perspective as a black American writer.
Krista Tippett interviews Sarah Hendren about the built world's design for 'normal' bodies and the beauty of human adaptation and vulnerability.
Krista Tippett introduces a conversation with Christiana Figueres about transforming climate grief into hope and spiritual evolution.
Krista Tippett explores the physicality of memory and history through poet Clint Smith's work on slavery and place.
Host Krista Tippett introduces an upcoming conversation with poet Clint Smith, sharing a personal connection through a mutual acquaintance.
Krista Tippett introduces a cross-promotional episode featuring her interview on the 10% Happier podcast, discussing happiness as a skill and the pandemic of certainty.
Krista Tippett interviews LaTanya Sweeney about data privacy, AI ethics, and the history of computer science.
Krista Tippett interviews public interest technologist LaTanya Sweeney about her early passion for mathematics and computer science.
Krista Tippett introduces a conversation with Matthew Sanford, who shares insights on grace and presence gained from living with paralysis.
A conversation with Baratunde Thurston about befriending reality, finding joy in nature, and being fully human.
Krista Tippett introduces a season exploring AI through the lens of the human condition, beginning with a conversation with Reid Hoffman.
Krista Tippett interviews actor Kerry Washington about her memoir and her approach to acting as a devotional practice, exploring themes of identity, race, and the human condition.
Krista Tippett interviews theologian Kate Bowler about her journey with stage 4 colon cancer and the wisdom she gained about life, suffering, and faith.