As the baby boomers headed off from their elementary schools to religious- instruction classes, magazine covers asked: "Is God Dead?" Yet today, most people describe themselves as religious, and many focus deeply on a wide array of spiritual practices and traditions. The debates continue, however, as influential voices warn of an emerging theocracy in our country and some call for "the end of faith." In Speaking of Faith, Krista Tippett addresses these many voices and concerns, these huge cultural shifts and reversals, drawing from her own experience and her conversations across the world’s traditions with theologians, scientists, ethicists, and activists as creator and host of public radio’s enormously popular show of the same name.
A former diplomat and graduate of Yale Divinity School, Tippett grew up in an evangelical culture and spent a decade as a non-religious person. Now, as someone who for many years has reflected on and talked with others about faith, she brings deep insight and a unique vantage point as she explores religious traditions—viewing them as rich resources for our spirits, as guides to our most important modern confusions, and as correctives for the excesses of religion itself. In the story of her life and her conversations, she describes a new imagination for a new century—spiritual, political, and personal. She illustrates a way to speak about faith that defuses the usual minefields. She traces a powerful, creative, and humbling line between religious ideas and real life. This is religion as it works in the lives of the many, not in the debates and headlines of a few. Her book is an antidote to the stridencies and doomsday theories that have characterized our public discourse about religion since September 11, 2001. And it suggests models, vocabulary, and practical virtues for what Tippett calls "the vast middle" – left, right, and center between poles of competing answers that have hardened our cultural discourse.
As Tippett observes, faith is as much about questioning as it is about certainties, and faith has a tremendous capacity to nourish our lives and communities, if we can learn how to speak of it meaningfully. Doing so is vital to our lives and our society, when matters of faith and ethics are often steeped in anger, fear, and suspicion. At such a time, the story of one woman’s attempt to speak about the mysteries of life, and to listen with care to those who endeavor to understand those mysteries, is nothing short of revolutionary.
