Becoming Wise
On Being Studios
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The Becoming Wise podcast offers depth and discovery in the time it takes to make a cup of tea. Each episode is curated from hundreds of big conversations with wise and graceful lives. Reset your day. Replenish your sense of yourself and the world. On Being Studios is the producer of On Being, This Movie Changed Me, and more to come. Krista Tippett is the author of the New York Times bestselling Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living. President Obama honored her with the National Humanities Medal for “thoughtfully delving into the mysteries of human existence.”
Episode results
Becoming Wise
Jul 8, 2019
Releasing Anger as an Act of Self-Compassion | Sharon Salzberg and Robert Thurman
The last episode of season two. Robert Thurman and Sharon Salzberg are icons of American Buddhism, and they are joyful, longtime friends. They challenge us to reframe our anger by seeing love for our enemies as an act of self-compassion. “It’s very hard to see love as a force, as a power rather than as a weakness, but that is its reality,” Salzberg says.
Sharon Salzberg is a meditation teacher and the cofounder of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts. She is the co-author of “Love Your Enemies.” Her other books include “Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness,” “Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation,” and “Real Happiness at Work: Meditations for Accomplishment, Achievement, and Peace.”
Robert Thurman is the president of the Tibet House U.S. and the co-author of “Love Your Enemies.” His latest book is “Man of Peace,” an illustrated biography of the Dalai Lama.
Find the transcript at onbeing.org.
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Becoming Wise
Jul 15, 2019
What did you love? What would you like to hear?
Season two of Becoming Wise is a wrap! We’re so grateful you joined us for these months of reflection and recentering. Before we go away to work on our next season, we’d love to hear from you. What did you love? How can we make the podcast even better? Go to onbeing.org/bwsurvey to tell us a little about yourself and what you’d like to hear next. Stay tuned for more episodes when we’re back with season three.
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On Being with Krista Tippett
Apr 6, 2023
[Unedited] Barbara Brown Taylor with Krista Tippett
"I like it much better than ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’ — to be a seeker after the sacred or the holy, which ends up for me being the really real."
– Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor
From Krista, about this week's show:
It's fascinating to trace the arc of spiritual searching and religious belonging in my lifetime. The Episcopal priest and public theologian Barbara Brown Taylor was one of the people I started learning about when I left diplomacy to study theology in the early 1990s. At that time, she was leading a small church in Georgia. And she preached the most extraordinary sermons, and turned them into books read far and wide. Then in 2006, she wrote _Leaving Church _— about her decision to leave her life of congregational ministry, finding other ways to stay, as she's written, "alive and alert to the holy communion of the human condition, which takes place on more altars than anyone can count.”
She's written other books since, with titles like _An Altar in the World_, _Learning to Walk in the Dark_, and _Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others_. Being in the presence of Barbara Brown Taylor's wonderfully wise and meandering mind and spirit, after all these years of knowing her voice in the world, is a true joy. I might even use a religious word — it feels like a "blessing." And this is not a conversation about the decline of church or about more and more people being "spiritual but not religious." We both agree that this often-repeated phrase is not an adequate way of seeing the human hunger for holiness. This is as alive as it has ever been in our time — even if it is shape-shifting in ways my Southern Baptist and Barbara's Catholic and Methodist forebears could never have imagined.
Barbara Brown Taylor is the author of many books, including _An Altar in the World_, _Leaving Church_, _Holy Envy_, and _Learning to Walk in the Dark_. Her 2020 book is _Always a Guest_, a compilation of recent sermons. She is the former rector of Grace-Calvary Episcopal Church of Clarkesville, Georgia, and she taught for two decades in the religion department at Piedmont College.
This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the _On Being_ episode "Barbara Brown Taylor — ‘This Hunger for Holiness’." Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org.
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Becoming Wise
Jul 1, 2019
Healing Through Story | Desmond Tutu
Archbishop Desmond Tutu is one of our wisest models on the territory of reckoning with past wrongs that infuse and haunt the present. In the 1990s, he helped galvanize South Africa’s peaceful transition to democracy after decades of white supremacy as the law of the land. He tells a story from his time chairing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which granted amnesty to those who would fully confess their crimes — of how healing and human redemption unfold. “Human beings can leave you speechless, really. They can leave you speechless by the horrible things they do, but they also leave you speechless with the incredible things,” he says.
Desmond Tutu is an Anglican archbishop emeritus of Cape Town, South Africa and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. He has written numerous books for adults and children — including “The Rainbow People of God” and, together with his good friend the Dalai Lama, “The Book of Joy.”
Find the transcript at onbeing.org.
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On Being with Krista Tippett
Apr 6, 2023
Barbara Brown Taylor — “This Hunger for Holiness”
"I like it much better than ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’ — to be a seeker after the sacred or the holy, which ends up for me being the really real."
– Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor
From Krista, about this week's show:
It's fascinating to trace the arc of spiritual searching and religious belonging in my lifetime. The Episcopal priest and public theologian Barbara Brown Taylor was one of the people I started learning about when I left diplomacy to study theology in the early 1990s. At that time, she was leading a small church in Georgia. And she preached the most extraordinary sermons, and turned them into books read far and wide. Then in 2006, she wrote _Leaving Church _— about her decision to leave her life of congregational ministry, finding other ways to stay, as she's written, "alive and alert to the holy communion of the human condition, which takes place on more altars than anyone can count.”
She's written other books since, with titles like _An Altar in the World_, _Learning to Walk in the Dark_, and _Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others_. Being in the presence of Barbara Brown Taylor's wonderfully wise and meandering mind and spirit, after all these years of knowing her voice in the world, is a true joy. I might even use a religious word — it feels like a "blessing." And this is not a conversation about the decline of church or about more and more people being "spiritual but not religious." We both agree that this often-repeated phrase is not an adequate way of seeing the human hunger for holiness. This is as alive as it has ever been in our time — even if it is shape-shifting in ways my Southern Baptist and Barbara's Catholic and Methodist forebears could never have imagined.
Barbara Brown Taylor is the author of many books, including _An Altar in the World_, _Leaving Church_, _Holy Envy_, and _Learning to Walk in the Dark_. Her 2020 book is _Always a Guest_, a compilation of recent sermons. She is the former rector of Grace-Calvary Episcopal Church of Clarkesville, Georgia, and she taught for two decades in the religion department at Piedmont College.
Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.
___________
Do you love what you're hearing? Our invitation to patronage is happening now. Participate in all that On Being is and is becoming. Give and more: onbeing.org/LoveUs.
Sign up for The Pause to receive our seasonal Saturday morning newsletter and advance invitations and news on all things On Being.
And: if you can, please take a minute to rate On Being in this podcast app — you'll be bending the arc of algorithms towards this adventure of conversation and living.
playlist_add
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