Krista Tippett Biography

Krista Tippett (ne Weedman, born November 6, 1960) is a journalist, author, public intellectual, and entrepreneur. She is best known for creating and hosting the public radio program On Being. She was awarded the 2013 National Humanities Medal "for thoughtfully delving into the mysteries of human existence. On the air and in print, Ms. Tippett avoids easy answers, embracing complexity and inviting people of all faiths, no faith, and every background to join the conversation."

Early Life and Background

Tippett grew up in Shawnee, Oklahoma, the granddaughter of Reverend C.T. Perkins, a Southern Baptist minister, whom Tippett called Gaggy. He was a strict man, forbidding Tippett"?s mother to "dance, swim, go to movies, wear pants, or play cards." And yet, Tippett wrote: "I could never buy into the popular idea in our family that he was a tyrant. He was funny. He told jokes...Even as he preached hell-fire and brimstone, he had a sense of play."

Tippett studied History at Brown University, and spent a semester as an exchange student at Wilhelm Pieck University in Rostock, in then-Communist East Germany.

Career

West Germany

After graduating from Brown in 1983, Tippett was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study at Bonn University in West Germany. There, one of her professors introduced her to James Markham, the New York Times bureau chief in Bonn. He encouraged her to write about her experiences in Rostock, which she did in "They Just Say 'Over There'" published by Die Zeit later that year. In 1984, she was offered a job as a stringer for The New York Times in divided Berlin, where she established herself as a freelance foreign correspondent "? reporting and writing in those years for The Times, Newsweek, the BBC, the International Herald Tribune, and Die Zeit.

In 1986, at 25 years old, Tippett became a special political assistant to the senior diplomat in West Berlin, John C. Kornblum. The following year she became chief aide in Berlin to the U.S. ambassador to West Germany, Richard Burt. She has written that moral questions arising from that experience of seeing "high power, up close"? eventually led to the spiritual, philosophical, and theological curiosities that have defined her work since.

Radio as Social Enterprise

Tippett received a Masters of Divinity from Yale University in 1994. While conducting a global oral-history project for the Collegeville Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research at St. John's Abbey of Collegeville, Minnesota, she developed the idea for her radio show.

Tippett first proposed a show about religion to Minnesota Public Radio in the late 1990s. The program became a monthly series in 2001 and a weekly national program distributed by American Public Media in 2003. In 2013, Tippett left APM to start the non-profit production company, Krista Tippett Public Productions, "a social enterprise with a radio show at its heart"? with a 4,000-square-foot studio and live event space on Loring Park in Minneapolis. In addition to the radio program, which airs on more than 330 public radio stations across the U.S., the On Being podcast reaches a global audience of 1.5 million listeners a month. Tippett is also the creator and convener of The Civil Conversations Project, which she has described as "an emergent approach to healing our fractured civic spaces."

Interview Style

"The Tippett style," as described by the New York Times, "represents a fusion of all her parts "? the child of small-town church comfortable in the pews; the product of Yale Divinity School able to parse text in Greek and theology in German; and, perhaps most of all, the diplomat seeking to resolve social divisions." The author Elizabeth Gilbert has written about Tippett, "Her intelligence is like a salve for all who have been wounded or marginalized by the God Wars."

Awards

In July, 2014 Tippett was awarded the 2013 National Humanities Medal. She received a George Foster Peabody Award in 2008, for "The Ecstatic Faith of Rumi," and three Webby awards for excellence in electronic media. Her book, Einstein"?s God (2010), was a New York Times bestseller.

Works

Books and Articles

• Einstein's God: Conversations About Science and the Human Spirit (Penguin, February 23, 2010)
• Speaking of Faith: Why Religion Matters"?and How to Talk About It (Penguin, January 29, 2008)
• "Berlin by Night" New York Times (May 10, 1987)
• "Weimar's Poets in Residence" New York Times (March 31, 1985)
• "Alle reden blo von "?drben"" Die Zeit (October 12, 1984)

Public Talks

• Keynote Address, Political Dialogue and Civility in an Age of Polarization, Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program (March 25, 2014)
• Gaggy's Blessing on The Moth Radio Hour (February 18, 2014)
• Krista Tippett & Andrew Solomon: Einstein's God: Conversations about Science, Live from the New York Public Library (March 3, 2010)
• Krista Tippett: Reconnecting with Compassion video on TED.com (November, 2010)
• For Play: Krista Tippett & Stuart Brown in conversation with Paul Holdengrber at LIVE from the New York Public Library (January 29, 2008)