Washington National Cathedral

Lloyd: Welcome to the Sunday Forum as we continue these weekly conversations all about the intersection between faith and public life and the impact that religion is having in the world, often for good but sometimes not for so much good. We are delighted to have with us today one of the very important interpreters of American religion on the scene today. Someone whose profession is doing interviews so I the amateur get to interview the professional and hope that she will help me along as we go—

Tippett: Like you are in control… (laughter) like you are the powerful.

Lloyd: Thanks for telling me that. (Laughter.) I didn’t know. Krista is coming to us by way of her very important National Public Radio program called “Speaking on Faith,” a former diplomat and correspondent and a person who has been thinking about faith and its role in personal lives and in public life for many years. She is also the author of a magnificent book, and I have now read it twice, called Speaking of Faith: Why Religion Matters and How to Talk About It, which is in paperback now and will be available during the coffee hour reception just following this gathering. So Krista, it is great to have you with us.

Tippett: Thank you. It is great to be here.

Lloyd: Well, in many ways what you were doing for the whole nation and doing week-by-week is a version of what we are still fairly new at doing here, which is having public conversations about faith and its role in our public life. But you’re doing it for the nation and you’re doing it in a studio, not in a church like this. Tell us a little bit about how you got to where you are, and how you found yourself in a position of carrying on this weekly exploration of faith on behalf of the whole country.

Tippett: Okay, well I have been a journalist in my twenties, and I was in divided Europe, and on paper I was working on the most important issues at that time, the nuclear arms race, the division of the world and communism and capitalism, but I started to ask questions which only later I would have described as spiritual and religious questions. And eventually that led me to go to divinity school.

I didn’t ever really feel that I would be ordained, but I wanted to get a theological education. And I wanted to know that if I was going to take religion seriously, if I was in fact be a religious person again, I had to be able to bring my mind to that. And I had (clears throat)—sorry—and I had to know that it could encompass all of the complexity that I had experienced in the great world out there, and I did.

My theological education was a fantastic experience. I discovered this whole world of thoughts and discourse that was hidden from our public life and even hidden from the experiences that many people in the pews of their churches or their religious institutions, and I think that was also about our culture and how our culture had dealt with this subject for many years.

You know, my favorite line of the sociologist, Peter Berger, is that after the 1960s in American culture, religion became something that was done in private between consenting adults—(laughter)—and that really sums it up. Of course, what had happened by the mid 1990s, when I came out of divinity school, is that some very strident, loud, aggressive religious voices had reasserted that religious voice, especially in our political life.

So, having had this wonderful experience of learning that religion could be reconciled with nuance and complexity and intelligence, and then coming back out into the world, I couldn’t find that represented anywhere. And instead we were generalizing in our culture about who religious people are, on the basis of what Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson said. So my longing at that point was to start a new kind of conversation, which would be diverse the way this aspect of life is diverse; which would have as much to do with questions as it does with answers; which is also how I think this part of life functions for many of us much of the time. And that was the original impetus behind what eventually became this public radio program.

Lloyd: One of the pieces of your story and this blending of memoir and reflection on religion and public life is how your own professional life began focusing really on the political and the public but some things about that experience of dealing with a divided Germany, divided Berlin and the Cold War drove you deeper, deciding that in fact the fundamental issues aren’t going to be settled at the level of political conflict but something about the affairs of the heart and matters of faith. Can you say something about how that began to emerge for you?

Tippett: And how the human condition is really the drama and the difficulty. If you drill down beneath every great political, economic or cultural crisis, that is what we are left with. And I’m not saying, and would never say, that politics is not critical and government and economics and law and medicine… but religion, theology is a place, is a rich resource in our common life, where human beings have been asking this kind of question, analyzing the human condition, analyzing what it means to be good and virtuous and to serve, and so when I say—one thing that I wanted to say to your initial question, I don’t narrowly equate public life with political life.

I think that is the next stage. I am fascinated with the whole (clears throat) how the whole word and subject of faith is now rising to the surface—in this election, for example. But our public life, our public spaces are much bigger and more interesting and diverse than just our political life. And I think, as religion has reemerged as a force in our culture, it is emerged in this political fear, which is driven by debate and sound bites and opinions and positions. And that is also the place where religion can be most dangerous.

So a part of what I am delighting in doing is bringing out a conversation which includes, at times, political voices and the political sphere, but just revealing how this aspect of life, how religious ideas and spiritual practices, can inform every sphere of our common and public life. In fact, in many other areas—in law and medicine and education—the new kind of conversation that is taking place with religious ideas and religious voices is much more constructive and generous than the one that we have all been watching unfold in the political sphere in the last couple of decades.

Lloyd: Your program and your book seem to both find and encourage very tolerant, reflective voices and a lot of that seems to have to do with the first-person nature of it. You don’t invite people in to lay out a set of dogmas and rules and practices or even traditions themselves, from any part of the faith, but you want to know what makes people tick. How did you arrive at the wisdom of the individual voice?

Tippett: I learned that through a project I did, which led to this idea. I was at a Benedictine abbey, St. John’s Abbey. The Benedictines provided a wonderful culture for new thinking about this subject, because they consider themselves to predate all the divisions of Christianity—not just Protestants, Catholic, but east, west—and they had innovated a model of international ecumenical conversation. (And actually I think that I saw Bishop Thomas Hoyt come in back there, and I am honored that he is here. He has been on the board of the Ecumenical Institute.)

They call this the first-person approach. It is a little more complicated than that, but this is also the narrative approach to theology which is behind St. Augustine’s Confessions, which is behind Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison. We all know that, when we are rediscovering in general the power of story in our culture, I think—which is a great development. And what I found when I did that oral history project for the Ecumenical Institute at St. John’s—when I invited people to speak in that place where their religious ideas and experiences meet their life—what has happened to them as a human being, how those ideas and experiences have taken on flesh and bones, how they may have been changed, what questions emerged from that intersection that then caused their spiritual life to evolve further as they grew older—those are fascinating conversations, and they are not just interesting but they are warm. There was lots of laughter.

I actually associate a sense of humor with qualities of God because of these conversations that I have had. So different—again, I was doing this in the late 1990s—so different from the hateful and strident kind of religious voice we heard in our public life. I did take that as a method for my public radio program. Now what I did not know is, could I do that with people across the world traditions? And I really have found that it is adaptable at same time as I have started this conversation, every time I have interviewed someone from a new tradition, and certainly early on when we ended up getting on the air after September 11, when I began to interview Muslims, I did have to learn in every case that there are different ways that people of different traditions speak about this part of their life, and so there is also that task, melding that with this narrative approach.

Lloyd: You talk about the two terms—religion and spirituality—and the complex interaction between the two. Say something about that. The classic line you often hear is that “I’m spiritual but not religious,” and that suggests a purer, more liberated way of being a spiritual person. Say something about that.

Tippett: I think that spirituality is the essence of truths of our sense of the sacred, but religions are containers for those. I think that they can function separately in extreme cases. I think that you can be utterly spiritual and not religious. I think that you can be religious and not spiritual. I am actually more interested in how these two work together.

Now because religions are—because religious insights are transcribed by human beings and religious institutions are built by human beings and led by human beings, these vessels of our religions can take on every flaw and failing of the human condition. And yet religions’ sacred texts carry forward conversations across generations about the most important matters of the human spirit and the human heart, and they can also be refashioned. They are refashioned in every generation and I am more intrigued by that.

I am also intrigued by how the kind of new age that we went through in the 1980s and 1990s, that has really yielded to younger people looking, turning back to the depths that religious traditions can offer, turning back to sacred texts. Religion is also about community, and about not being just an individual search. And it is about ritual, and we human beings need ritual, and religions are bearers of beauty and ritual. There is a lot of talk right now about religions being bearers of violence, but there are a lot of other things that we can look around the world at, and what religion has brought, and it is wonderful. So I am fascinated by how spirituality is carried forward by religion in that very layered and profound way.

Lloyd: One of the accusations widely made these days is that religion is a purveyor of violence, and you report some marvelous in-depth interviews with Muslims, reflecting on what is happening to their own tradition and the struggle for a moderate Muslim voice to emerge in the mist of all of that. Say something about what your experience has been of engaging the Muslim in conversation in these very difficult times.

Tippett: There is this complaint that one hears—where are the moderate Muslim voices—and I remember speaking with Omid Safi, who has been one of my great Muslim conversation partners over the years. He is a young professor now at Duke, and he said that “people ask, ‘where are the moderate Muslim voices?’ and I am hoarse from talking.”

The moderate Muslim voices don’t make for good headlines and sound bites. I would say, though, that the most poignant and important learning that I have had from my conversations with Muslims in past years—and we have a wonderful show coming up just this next weekend with a British Muslim, an insight into the different dynamics there. He actually became radicalized in British Muslim organizations and talks about what he saw, what the appeal of that is, what is the personality of a suicide bomber. It is very surprising what he says, and how he got out going deeper into Muslim spirituality, but what he says very clearly—and this has come through clearly in all of my interviews—the threat of Islam, al Qaeda, Islamic extremism, Islamic Puritanism, some people like to say it is first and foremost to other Muslims. That’s one thing.

Lloyd: The threat is to other Muslims themselves.

Tippett: Yes, I mean the violence that we can point at, Muslim extremist violence, the number of Muslims who have died completely eclipses the number of non-Muslims who have died. This is not first and foremost a battle of Islam versus the west. We all fell into that “clash of civilizations” language after 9/11, because we were groping for explanation and there it was, but it is not the right explanation. It is first and foremost a crisis within Islam, and there is an internal dialogue going on within Islam in this country, in every culture, and this may be something—it will be something, I think, that will be something that unfolds over the next fifty to one hundred years—not five, which is how we like to think that history is made. But if we look back at Christianity’s own internal crisis—

Lloyd: You refer to the reformation.

Tippett: —the reformation ended decades, centuries—

Lloyd: Of killing—

Tippett: —of bloodshed. So the question for me is—and I do not have an answer to this, but this is the question that I think we need to be walking around with as a nation and as citizens: how can we, non-westerners, be a constructive force? Because, unlike those centuries around the reformation, the inquisition was not televised. The beheadings were not on the internet, and the terrorists did not have airplanes and global forms of technology and weapons and communication. That is the world we live in here in the 21st century.

So Islam’s internal crisis is our internal crisis and the big question is how can we—the rest of us—be a constructive force? I am doing my little part by having this public radio program for one hour a week, where we at regular intervals try to bring out Muslim voices who are not being heard everywhere, and who can describe—as Ed Hussain in next week’s program describes—that internal dialogue and what is at stake for him, and you hear his passion.

Lloyd: Here is another “easy” area to ask you about, the engagement between religion and science. Again, you have some marvelous interviews with scientists who are reflecting on the nature of scientific knowing, and how it’s not so far from faith knowing, and you’re finding some surprising ways that they are coming together, that, again, you do not hear much about on the air these days.

Tippett: I just completely reject the idea that these are incompatible parts of life. Again, mainly because I am more interested in good questions than in firm answers, when we talk about the science/religion clash, we are pitting this scientific answer against—versus—this religious answer.

I think that in most places when it is presented that way, the way the scientific answer is being presented is too simplistic, and the way the religious answer is being presented is too simplistic. But if you just—as I often do with scientists—just listen to the question scientists are asking, what they are exploring and the mysteries they are exploring; and if you understand that science and religion in fact ask different kinds of questions of the same conundrums or mysteries of life, then you can start to have a wonderful conversation. And the goal of it is not to reconcile anything, but there are so many echoes.

Just recently, a couple of weeks ago, I had an interview with Janna Levin, who is a cosmologist, mathematician, and we had a huge response to that show. She is not a religious person, but I picked up at the bookstore her novel she had written about two great 20th-century mathematicians who were asking fundamental questions about how do we know what is true, and how do we know what is real?

Those are questions that religion and philosophy ask too, and just drawing out how she has thought that through as a scientist, as a mathematician, as someone who, in her day job, is thinking about whether the shape of the universe—which she can plot by topology—and thinking about whether the universe is finite or not. That is a conversation I want to have, and the least interesting part of it is whether I can pin her down.

I did ask her—and this is a question that she kind of dances around in her book—does God have anything to do with the fact that 1 + 1 = 2? That’s the least interesting question. (laughter) It is how we can learn from each other, how we can be stretched by each other and something I say in religious audiences is, “If God is God, we can’t be afraid of what we can learn.” If God is the Creator, God is the original evolutionary biologist, physicist, mathematician.

Lloyd: You love the word mystery. You celebrate it in saying how many other people you talk to love it, but it’s obviously a word that is very important in the way you think about things. You have a marvelous section in your book about theodicy, how people try to make sense of terrible evil and tragedy; and you weave into it that beautiful book by an Anglican woman theologian reflecting on her experience, Margaret Spufford. And then you go to Elie Wiesel and his experience with the Holocaust, and then to John Pulkinghorn who is now an Anglican priest but was a physicist, biochemist, something like that along the way. People probing the same mystery from different directions. Do you think that this leads to an answer? Or is mystery about dwelling with unanswerable things with varying amounts of illumination along the way? What do you find as you probe?

Tippett: I think that mystery is the answer to a lot of our problems. I say that it could be a context that could help open up, and make more generous, our public dialogue. Because mystery at the very—at the very heart, at the core of the great traditions, and this is certainly true of Christianity and it is true of others as well… We are asked to discern truth as best we can to pursue truth, and at the very same time to acknowledge that there are things that we will never fully understand in this lifetime.

I feel that something that went wrong in my generation growing in the post-Sixties world, where religion was done in private and we were taught that we had to be tolerant, and somehow that to be tolerant meant that you shouldn’t have truth, and that to hold anything—or to believe anything—strongly might somehow mean that you are dismissing the truth of others.

But we human beings cannot live that way, we just can’t live that way. We are called to discern truth. It changes in the course of our lifetime, and so I think that in this globalized world, if we can take mystery seriously as a part of human life, we can reclaim identity. And the fact that we do walk around discerning what is true and holding to that—that helps to define us and helps us move forward in this complicated world. And we can also live honoring the mystery of the difference of others, just that—isn’t that amazing?—and the fact that I am Christian, right, and the fact that the Muslims that I speak with are some of the holiest people. In their presence I know that they are holy and I do not need to reconcile their sacred text with my sacred text and that is in the realm of mystery. I do know that they and I are called to compassion, kindness, and if nothing else, that is the ground that we should meet on as human beings.

Lloyd: I want to ask you one more of these big questions and then allow some questions to come from our audience. You did a series not so long ago on the air on the new evangelicals, what is happening in that world. And we were honored to have Rick Warren with us last week talking about the exciting things that he is doing and the way he sees what is happening in the evangelical world; but in a way the whole landscape of American Christianity seems to be shifting. The evangelicals are undergoing something like a conversion to the needs of the world that is very exciting. Meanwhile the mainline traditions are wrestling with the numbers of people they have lost, and beginning to find new and fresh ways to reclaim the core of their faith, which is something like conversion back to the core of their faith is happening. So that things can emerge in a different way, and so things are happening in and across the landscape pretty rapidly that both old religion and new sort of rambunctious religion are both discovering new dimensions of their own practice and finding ways closer to each other. Do you see any of that from where you sit?

Tippett: Oh yeah, I had Rick Warren and his wife Kay, and also Jim Wallace, on the show back in December and we called that “The New Evangelical Leaders,” but I have been watching this for years. I have to say that Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times today had a column, and I don’t know if you read that—

Lloyd: That’s right, yes, about these evangelicals—

Tippett: —I want to say humbly he has caught up with what we have been talking about on the show for a couple of years. (laughter) The New York Times has been slow on this subject, ’cause they were back in the Peter Berger era. Great newspaper, I don’t—(laughter)—I just remembered this being telecast. (Laughter.) You know what I’m so impressed with in evangelicals—and this again has been an untold story; the press and my fellow journalists stayed focused on Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and people like them way, way beyond the day that they had a lot of influence. And again, they were great guests on Sunday morning talk shows, but they did not represent the people.

You have someone like Richard Cizik, who is the vice president in Washington of the National Association of Evangelicals, who in 2004, I think, was invited by a very clever (somebody else we have on the show a guy by the name of Cal DeWitt, who has been an evangelical conservationist for thirty years. He has been transforming a Wisconsin wetland for thirty years, completely visionary. He see the Bible as a work of Christian ecology, and so he and another somebody at Cambridge, who is also evangelical—and these are the people that you never hear about—scientists at Cambridge invited a bunch of leading evangelicals to Cambridge to present to them the science of global warming, the scientific explanation of this.

And what Richard Cizik says is that he came out of that as a convert to the science of climate change, and he proceeded to put that at the top of the agenda of the National Association of Evangelicals. There was conflict. He and the people who were working with him also started putting global poverty at the top of that agenda. They didn’t take abortion and gay marriage off, but they broadened it, and there was conflict. James Dobson and others tried to get him removed, and they lost, and hey, that is the story of what has been going on in evangelical Christianity.

What impresses me is that this emergence of the evangelical voices in Republican politics is an electoral force with new, absolutely new, development in the history of evangelical Christianity in the last century. What impresses me is how, with that, came an experience of power. And so Richard Cizik, people like him—and there are many others, he is just a good example—get flown in a plane over parts of Africa where the desert is encroaching, and they see that. They have experiences. They meet with Gordon Brown, the head of Great Britain as the prime minister, but for the last G-8 meeting and they, here these leaders talk about issues of global poverty, sex trafficking, and these are really the pressing moral issues before humanity, and they learn and grow and incorporate that into their theology.

Cal DeWitt said to me, something people do not pay attention to is, I grew up in this world. I had a Southern Baptist grandfather. In evangelical Christianity, conversion is a core virtue. Conversion means that, if you suddenly see something as something that God cares about, and that you can find in the Bible—and you can absolutely find poverty as a concern of God in the Bible—you can stop in your tracks and walk in another direction that moment. And we have really seen a lot of conversion. And then, of course, what’s fascinating also is that young evangelicals are not in a box, unlike, I think, other members of their generation. This is something that comes through so clearly in my interviews. They connect the dots between local need and global crisis. They care about the environment. They care about the poverty. They want to be leading lives of service. Young evangelicals are no different. So I guess my advice is, don’t rely on the news for what is happening in this part of life because it is evolving rapidly, and I use that word evolving with delight. (Laughter)

Lloyd: Let’s go to the audience.

Davis: You will come down if you have a question. We have two microphones, mine down front and Meredith in the back. We will start with my microphone and go to question two in the back.

Question #1: Krista, this is what I hope is a good question. Don’t know if it is new or profound, but I am told that we do have a battle going on now. I am told that my enemy is something called an Islamic extremist. I’d like your reaction as a member of the media. Aren’t we in need of a new label for this enemy that does not wear a uniform and is tough to find?

Tippett: Yeah, and Muslims also don’t know what to call this. The question is, Islamic extremism is named as the enemy, but what is that, and do we need new language? I think we do. Khaled Abou El Fadl is a Muslim human rights lawyer that I have interviewed a few times, and he is an amazing thinker, and also figure, for Muslims around the world. He is at UCLA, and he likes to use the term Islamic Puritans or Fantasists.

The work fundamentalism, that we threw around a lot after 9/11, is really a Christian term, and it really doesn’t work. And I know a lot of Muslims are concerned with this idea of Islamic extremism, because it still suggests that this is just one place on a spectrum that you could get to pretty quickly.

What I want to say also about this… the language of the enemy—so I am kind of saying that I do not have an answer to that question. I do think one of the most disturbing things to me in our culture the years since 9/11 has been how we have talked about enemies, and the language we use—of hunting down, hunting down terrorists, or we get a name of a new enemy, the guy in Afghanistan and we are going to hunt him down—I do not care what he did, we don’t hunt down human beings. That to me is a slippery slope. That is what I want to say.

I wish Christian voices, religious voices, would inject—we have a role in our public life of helping us think about the enemy and how we treat the enemy—however we define him, whatever we call him, whatever he has done—and of course the danger that was implied a minute ago, when we start. And this is the fear for Muslims: when Islamic is part of the adjective or part of the word—then we can very easily begin to demonize people who seem like that but in fact aren’t the enemy.

Question #2: Thank you so much for what you are doing. Going back to the fundamentals, if you will, I believe that we look across our faith lines and demonize each other. Can you give us, say, the top three quotes say for the people of the Book, in the New Testament, the Talmud and Koran versus where we are enjoined to talk across our faith lines with respect and tolerance?

Tippett: Oh boy! That’s like a test. (Laughter)

Lloyd: Why don’t you say something generally about how they all call for that? You are in an Episcopal Church after all

.

Tippett: Right, exactly. I can tell you what the Book of Common Pray says about it. I don’t know that I can do the top three. One that come to mind is a Muslim verse that has been quoted at me a lot by my Muslim guests—and I am not going to be able to quote it, but it is essentially a verse in the Koran—that God made you into diverse nations, male and female, and to diverse nations, so that you may come to know each other. The Koran, like the Bible, has a lot of contradictory verses. And you find a verse that says that you should kill each other—and you can do that in the Bible too, but this is a verse that many of my Muslim conversation partners say that for them it is really pivotal in terms of the spirit of the book, of the text as a whole.

Lloyd: I would like to interject a question that came in from the internet today, just before our next questioner. Here is a question about the engagement between religious believers and nonbelievers. This is from Brian out in Annandale. He says that, “I am very concerned about the rift between religious believers and nonbelievers, and the number of voices on either side seems to encourage thinking of the other as the enemy. How can we encourage genuine friendship, the desire for understanding and working together on common goals, both on an individual level and in our media?”

Tippett: Again I would want to say, don’t rely entirely on either the debates that get set up on news shows, or what is on the New York Times best seller list. I don’t think that the stridency of a Christopher Hitchens and a Richard Dawkins represents all atheists, any more than I think that the stridency of a religious voice represents all religious people.

One of the most fascinating things for me—and this is part of the territory we are in now—is, non-religious people—we have lots and lots and lots of listeners who are not religious, who describe themselves as agnostic or atheists, but they want to be part of a conversation that is called “Speaking of Faith.” I have an interview coming up with a humanist chaplain at Harvard who was at a gathering I went to of young people, the Interfaith Youth Corps—this amazing organization that is based in Chicago—and he said there, humanists want to be part of the interfaith movement. I would like think that is what we are going to be talking about in five years, rather than the new atheists or the religious fundamentalists.

Lloyd: And without all the noise and yelling.

Tippett: Without all of the noise. Atheists do not stop having a spiritual life even in the absence in the belief of God. You do not stop having an ethical life.

Lloyd: So many atheists that I read about are deeply embarrassed by the noisy new atheists and the thinness and argumentativeness and aggressiveness of their attack.

Tippett: It is not the whole story. It is clever and catchy and got great marketing. (Laughter)

Lloyd: Back to you.

Question #3: Thank you for mentioning Peter Berger. I am in a book-reading group at Politics and Prose, and this month our selection is The Sacred Canopy. Berger suggests that religion holds together society’s important values. I wonder if asking the question, “Why religion matters,” goes beyond this canopy of protection for values, and imposes other values on religion itself, and maybe suggests that there are more fundamental values than religion. Could possibly a non-sacred canopy evolve that would hold together our important values?

Tippett: Sorry, what was the question, could a non-sacred canopy—

Question #3: Yes, could we evolve toward a point where religion is no longer necessary for holding together our important values?

Tippett: —I don’t think… Yeah that is a big question. Following on what I just said, I don’t think that to be a moral person, to hold important values, to even put into practice core values, core religious values such as compassion and kindness and forgiveness, that you have to be a religious person. The Sacred Canopy was one of Peter Berger’s early books, wasn’t it?

Lloyd: Yes.

Tippett: In a sense, when I am talking about us re-integrating these values, these practices, and this religious voice, for example, that helps us think about our enemies. And that provides wisdom about something like that, that is not going to happen under a sacred canopy. It is going to happen in the secularized public sphere, but acknowledging that religious and spiritual insights belong in a mix of the way we approach all of the big questions, the important questions of our time. A lot may belong in the mix alongside political prospective, other cultural perspectives.

Lloyd: One of the realities is in Peter Berger’s book—he was talking about a time when there seemed be a sacred canopy, a set of assumptions that were religious, that made the world make sense to everybody. One of the things that is true is—even though he was wrong and religion has not receded away the way he thought it would—the common set of assumptions about religion doesn’t exist anymore. And religion has to be owned and developed in smaller communities, because a broad nation or the broad Western civilization alone is not going to do it.

Question #4: You both spoke about the current conflict going on within Islam, and I read an Atlantic Monthly article a while ago that was very fascinating about religion. And on the other hand, the search for terrestrial intelligence in this universe that is visible to three hundred billion trillion light years, and it came up with a theme: that if other thinking life was found on other planets, Christianity would have the most difficult time reconciling the new discoveries or ET’s or what have you, compared to Buddhism and other religions. What do you think?

Tippett: I’ve never understood that argument. I mean, even as a child, I didn’t understand why, if there was life on other planets, it would say anything about the God of the universe—if you believe in a God of the universe, unless you say in the Bible that it is only the God of this solar system. I don’t know. (Laughter) I just don’t understand that; I feel that that’s kind of a manufactured crisis. Maybe there is something I don’t know.

Question #4: I appreciate your affirmation of mystery as being important, and I wanted to know if you could say something more about the challenge of honoring mystery, and at the same time having a world that has to make decisions together about what we are going to actually do.

Tippett: I think that I am going to slip out of that by saying that is going to happen on a case-by-case basis. But I do not think that it is as much of a problem as it might sound in the abstract. I think that it is a way that we can be bold with what we know, what we believe and yet very… Like respect—for me, a lot of the words that we use, like being respectful and tolerant—those are not big enough words for religious people. We are called to honor others as children of God, as Christians. And Muslims and Jews are called to that as well. And Hindus and Buddhists have their own versions of that, which would also necessitate that kind of honoring others—not just respecting them, which is kind of a head trip.

And I just feel that, if we approached each other in that different spirit, it wouldn’t necessarily make the issues different, but I think it would change the way we deal with each other. And it would change the tenor of our decision-making process. I mean, look at the Episcopal Church, about how the tenor of some of the struggling with of the issue of homosexuality—I feel that what really went wrong with the tenor about how people talk to each other, right? It made all the issues worse, and it pushes the resolution further away. So perhaps I am being optimistic, but let’s try it. Let’s try it and see what happens.

Question #5: In Virginia and across the country, there is this awful violent anti-immigrant rhetoric that is going on. Now this great Cathedral and my Roman Catholic faith certainly don’t teach that. They teach “welcome the stranger,” but somehow it does not seem to get to our congregations or to the public at large. So what can we as people of faith do to do a better job of welcoming the stranger?

Tippett: That is a big question, and I feel that this whole subject of immigration, which has just exploded, is something I need to think about more. And we need to find ways to have conversations on the show that are relevant, but not necessarily in the center of our public discussion. Sorry, I don’t have an answer for that.

That is probably a really good example of what the previous questioner raised. Because that is a place where we have to talk about welcoming a stranger, and we also have to work with the laws of the land, and we have to find the balance between those things. So how can we then—but what I would say is, how can we construct, how can we get the tenor of that right, so that we are navigating that line.

Lloyd: Clearly what you have been saying is the first move is the gesture of welcome. A lot has to be sorted out in terms of laws and what is sustainable, but the first gesture is one that emphasizes these too are children of God, and these too deserve all the dignity and respect that we can afford them, as we deal with what is possible for us. So back to your comment about honoring the other, the ones who are different from us but who also have a claim on God’s love and life, and figure out how we can respond responsibly to that.

Tippett: One of the great virtues that the Benedictines really celebrate—but it is, again, at the heart of Christianity—is hospitality, and this may be a place—and I know that some churches have taken it up in this way. The whole issue of immigration may be a place where churches are counter cultural institutions. I am not prescribing that. But I am saying our discernment may be that religious people find that, in exercising what are their core values, they are at odds with some of the cultural discussion, or—putting it in a more positive way—have a really distinctive contribution to make to that difficult public discussion.

Lloyd: The texts are overwhelmingly in that direction, so the question is, what do we do to respond to those?

Question #6: Krista, if I am not mistaken, you are suggesting that to be beautifully human is to be religious. So why do you—why do we—bother putting a name to different religions?

Tippett: Did you say to be what human?

Questioner #6: To be beautifully human, leave the adjective out if you like, but then you can be an unbeautiful human.

Lloyd: So what was the question at the end of that?

Tippett: Why do we need different religions?

Questioner #6: Why do we name religion by different names, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist? Why bother?

Tippett: I don’t think I would say it that way: that to be beautifully human is to be religious. I think that I am saying that religious traditions and people and experiences have a lot of beauty and some essential beauty to offer the world.

Why do we name different traditions? Why are we so different? We possess different vocabularies for talking about everything, including this part of our lives. And I feel that there was a lot of interest—Joseph Campbell raised a lot of interest, for example, in identifying myths, ideas, and images that are common across the traditions, and I absolutely hear echoes. My ears are full of echoes now, after these years of doing this program, where we’re really talking about the same thing. But I am absolutely fascinated by the different ways we have of talking about the same thing—

Lloyd: Different stories or encounters.

Tippet: Different stories, and I think that all of those different vocabularies add richness to what we can understand. And it is sometimes in speaking with someone from a different tradition—even though they may be describing something that resonates deeply within me from my own religious experience, but they make it richer for me. They add something by using a different word, by describing a different practice. And that is in the realm of mystery, and it’s a mystery I delight in. I delight in our religious differences.

Lloyd: So we could say that we, as Christians, embrace, profoundly as we might, this Christian faith as the heart of truth. But there are also pieces of truth that come from God that are in the Buddhist tradition and the Hindu tradition, Muslim tradition, and as we want to know the fullness of who God is, we need their pieces of truth as well, or something like that.

Tippett: And isn’t that an interesting way to move through the world?

Question #7: Krista—as I myself also hold a master of divinity degree as you, do but chose to continue on with interfaith studies, and will soon be ordained as an interfaith minister—I would like to ask you pragmatically—for there are many of us who have taken this course—pragmatically, how can we as interfaith ministers without an institution behind us, without a congregation or a pulpit in many instances, be leaders and facilitators of interfaith dialogue, maintaining our own personal faith while holding the integrity of other traditions?

Tippett: I can’t remember who I was speaking with recently—oh it was Jean Vanier, who is the founder of the l’Arche movement, who talked about how a struggle in his organization, which is all about small communities of people modeling a whole different way to live together, and these communities have people with mental disabilities at their core—how there is a struggle, because the world sends the message that what is valid is only what is big and what is national and what is global. I actually think that there is a really intriguing aspect to me of globalization, is that I feel that there is a way in which what happens locally becomes more significant paradoxically because it is connected to what is happening out there. And so I think the only answer to that kind of question—or to the question of how any of us can make a difference doing our little thing that we do in our family or our neighborhood or our religious community—is to absolutely know, although our culture sends us a different message, that is, ultimately what matters is the good that we can do, the change that we can effect in the world immediately around us. That is the question for all of us, and to me also the question of how these new kinds of interfaith initiatives can begin to make an impact.

Lloyd: One more question.

Question #8: I was wondering how your own faith has been enhanced over the years you have been doing this job?

Tippett: That’s the kind of question—I wrote the book because I get asked that question and I cannot do it in two minutes. I will just say one thing: it does not make my struggles any easier. I still have to have those struggles in the context of my life. I will say—and we have talked a lot about mystery—I just have this larger and larger and deeper and deeper sense of mystery, and I sink into that more. I am comfortable with the mystery, and I would have to say that’s the most tangible way—that’s not the right word—but that is where my mind goes when I think about how this journey is changing me as a person of faith.

Lloyd: You talk about praying the Psalms at some point in your life, and so there are structured pieces that feed your own spiritual life.

Tippett: That I am more and more comfortable with what I will never know in this lifetime, and I find it so interesting, and I do not feel that it is threatening. It is not at all threatening to my faith.

Lloyd: Wonderful conversation. We hope you will linger just following this gathering here, as Krista will be happy to come to coffee hour in the west end of the Cathedral for just a few minutes. And also there will be copies of her book there on hand.

We hope you come back next week, as we have a significant conversation about the impact of stem cell research. Maria Finitzo’s documentary on stem cells was aired on PBS and has won several awards. The film itself will be screened on Saturday afternoon here at four o’clock, and then we will have the conversation in the Forum on Sunday morning, a very complex and very important issue for Christians and people of faith to be thinking about. But now join me in thanking Krista Tippett for this marvelous conversation. (Applause)