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In Speaking of Faith, Krista Tippett's account of her odyssey as a public radio host, the former member of the U.S. diplomatic corps and international news correspondent admits to a "habitual longing to save the world." It's an impulse she has tempered over the years by cultivating the discipline of listening. The book offers a forthright chronicle of her "adventure in conversation" as creator and host of American Public Media's program Speaking of Faith, weaving together spiritual memoir with reflections on her interactions with radio guests and some of the many intellectual and spiritual influences in her life. The book also serves as an apologetic for the style of narrative journalism that she practices.
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One of a small cadre of broadcast journalists who speak intelligently about the religious dimension of public life, Tippett knows that listening is as much a professional necessity as a spiritual exercise. And as fans of her radio program will attest, listening and asking smart questions that get people to talk openly about their faith is something that Tippett does very well. The granddaughter of a Southern Baptist preacher who espoused a stern fundamentalist faith, Tippett left that brand of Christianity behind in Oklahoma when she headed east to attend Brown University. (A study-abroad program took her to East Germany in the 1980s.) Subsequently involved as a Fulbright Scholar in the high-powered world of international journalism and American diplomacy, Tippett for a time was energized by the conviction that the world's problems could best be addressed in the political realm. Soon, however, she began to find this perspective too confining: "There is at any given moment much reality we do not see, and more change possible than we can begin to imagine," she writes, citing the dismantling of the Iron Curtain as a case in point.
She had worked as a stringer for the New York Times, Newsweek, and the BBC while in Europe and as special assistant to the U.S. ambassador to West Germany, experiences that left her disillusioned not only with the crossfire approach to journalism that tends to "simplify and flatten" spiritual content but also with the "impoverished inner lives" of so many of the powerbrokers with whom she had contact. Tippett's search subsequently took her to Yale Divinity School, where she explored how narrative theology could be translated into a journalistic paradigm.
Written in response to the many questions Tippett has received over the years from her listeners, the book chronicles her loss of faith and its recovery, her divorce and struggles with depression, but it isn't primarily about her own life. Tippett has declined in most interviews to reveal her own religious affiliation other than to say that she is a Christian. "I'm immersed," she said. "I'm involved. This part of my life is well developed, and I don't apologize for it."
Rather, the book tells of Tippett's efforts to rethink the religious dogmatism of her youth and learn to live with "seemingly unanswerable questions." Among the spiritual values she clings to is the humility to approach any idea that is "new and other with a sense of curiosity and wonder" and an acceptance of mystery as "the crux of religion." She writes: "We are talking about something that is ineffable, trying to put words around something that will always, ultimately, defy them. We do our best. But we are left, in the end, with arms full, minds full, of mystery."
On her hour-long program, heard each week by half a million public radio listeners, Tippett interviews theologians, scientists, and social activists, police officers, politicians, and poets. They talk in the first person about how they live out their faith. The program is not about religion, Tippett is quick to point out, but about "how religion flows through and infuses and informs all aspects of individual and public life."
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