The host of Public Radio International’s Speaking of Faith found herself on the other side of the interviewer’s mike recently, in a profile on PBS’s Religion and Ethics Newsweekly. The show won a Peabody award this week, and the R&E piece took a closer look at what Krista Tippett allows might be “a ministry of listening rather than preaching”:
ABERNETHY: Most of her interviews are remotes with guests in distant cities, and when she’s doing them, alone in her studio, you can see the intensity of what she calls her “life of listening.”
What Tippett and her producers create is spiritual and theological insight expressed in everyday language without doctrinal certainty.
Ms. TIPPETT: No one who is listening to the program is hearing someone else say, “This is the truth.” But they are hearing people of integrity and wisdom say, “This is my truth. This is how I came to it. This is how I live with it,” and that’s listenable. You can disagree with a person’s doctrine. You can’t disagree with his or her experience.
Tippett, who has been an Episcopalian but considers herself in denominational limbo these days, talks about some of the things in her recent book, that shares its title with her radio program. Among the topics: depression, her divorce, conveying faith to her children:
ABERNETHY: And your divorce, along with the pain — what were there lessons there?
Ms. TIPPETT: Divorce is a death, and it’s a failure — or that’s how it feels. That’s just another way in which life is not what we wish it to be, and we have to live gracefully with what it is. I’m quite proud of how my former husband and I now are friends and absolutely co-parents to our children.
ABERNETHY: Tippett’s children are Aly, 14, and Sebastian, nine, and sometimes when she revisits St. John’s Abbey she takes them with her. I asked her why.
Ms. TIPPETT: This experience of mystery that we talked about, I have that experience in the Abbey church here. It’s a feeling. It’s — it’s a transcendent experience. I want them to experience that, that mystery.
Tune in to the interview/profile here.