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An interview and discussion with Sharon Olds was the focus of Krista Tippett’s   On Being, aired in Philadelphia on WHYY on Sunday morning, March 17. Sharon Olds is one of contemporary poetry’s leading voices. Winner of several prestigious awards, including the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award, Olds is known for writing intensely personal, emotionally scathing poetry which graphically depicts family life as well as global political events. Her work is often built out of intimate details concerning her children, her fraught relationship with her parents and, most controversially, her sex life. “The politeness and prudity of the world I grew up in meant that there were things that were important and interesting to me, [but] I had never read a poem about them,” she once said. Now, her interview was on public radio, and none of it was bleeped out according to the FCC rules; still, many of her poems are probably not the kind of readings that find their way into th...

The first poem I ever read by Naomi Shihab Nye is a poem that Nye reads in the middle of an incredible conversation with Krista Tippet. She says to Krista that the poem was given to her: “I was simply the secretary for the poem, I wrote it down, but I honestly felt as if it were a female voice speaking in the air across a plaza in Popayan, Columbia.” The circumstance that prompted the voice and the poem is chilling. At the end of the first week of her honeymoon, traveling on a bus through South America, Nye and her husband were robbed of everything. An Indian traveling on the same bus, the Indian in her poem, was murdered. As Nye and her husband were wandering around Popayan in shock, a man came up to them on the street “and was simply kind and just looked at us...and just asked us in Spanish, ‘What happened to you?’” After listening to their story, he looked so sad and said, “‘I’m very sorry. I’m very, very sorry that happened, in Spanish, and went on. And then we went to this litt...

Interfaith Philadelphia is sponsoring a year of civil conversations in association with Krista Tippett’s radio show called On Being . I have experienced five years of civil conversations, let me explain. Interfaith Philadelphia sponsors the Religious Leaders Council of Great Philadelphia (RLC) which consists of over 30 senior leaders or representatives from various faith traditions. As the senior ecclesiastical leader for the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the Philadelphia area, I have been a member of the RLC for the past five years. We meet three times a year and have enjoyed many civil conversations. We bring our unique beliefs from our faith traditions and work effectively on common ground concerns and issues in our communities and congregations.   Krista Tippett interviewed Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks in an episode of On Being that aired on Nov. 11, 2011. Sacks was Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Commonwealth for 22 years. Th...

How can we fulfill our biologically hardwired desire for belonging and restore our intrinsic human connection at a time when we are so deeply polarized by political differences? In her latest book,  Braving the Wilderness , social scientist Brene Brown, PhD, LMSW, explores the pain and fear that has driven so many to the “ideological bunkers” that are centered around a common hatred of the same people. While these groups are tribal in nature, Brown asserts that they do not meet our shared human need to be part of something greater than ourselves and have only contributed to a deepening spiritual crisis of loneliness and isolation.   A little more than a year ago, in a conversation interestingly entitled “Strong Back, Soft Front, Wild Heart,” Brene Brown and Krista Tippett discussed how we might, with integrity and authenticity, move beyond divisive antipathy and recover a sense of true belonging.  Brown asserts that this movement to satisfy our de...