Reviews for Speaking of faith

The average rating for Speaking of faith based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-04-24 00:00:00 Brent S Adkins I am currently obsessed with listening to Krista Tippett's On Being podcast, and was thrilled to stumble onto one of her books at the library! I can't believe I just discovered the podcast/radio show; it is a show with a wide ranging subject matter. It was more faith based in the past, but now the show is comprised of conversations about what it means to be human. I also like to think of it as demonstrating the ways we (humanity) love God (or holiness, or reverence, or whatever you want to call it.) They can be talking about Mozart and it is spiritual to me. Or physics or immunology or folk music. Or all the religions and wisdom traditions. This is my tribe. I love it. Her book is an interesting mix of conversations she has had that have inspired her as well as part memoir, how she got on this path, a listening path, or a life of conversations as she calls it. Her voice and perspective is so needed and so very beautiful. She was raised in an evangelical family, lost her faith for many years and then lived a non-religious life before finding her way back through divinity school. I read something like this, or something like Huston Smith's The World's Religions, and the plurality of it, the reverence for each wisdom tradition makes it impossible to choose one religion: I refuse to. So I believe them all, or respect them all. It amazes me that Tipper can maintain hers; she said being with Thich Knat Hanh was like being in the presence of God. Exactly, I believe God or holiness or divinity can be anywhere and each religion chooses to interpret it differently. Regardless, beautiful writing and I love that she quoted Annie Dillard near the end: "You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment." Tippett talks about reclaiming words as I love to do: holiness, reverence, amen, sacred, etc. I love the idea of my life's astonishments, and the call to share them either with poetry or photography. I didn't focus on many quotes from the book, it is all wonderful and has a conversational style to it versus a quotable style; I think of future rereadings the quotes might show themselves more clearly. We can construct factual accounts and systems from DNA, gross national product, legal code- but they don't begin to tell us how to order our astonishments, what matters in life, what matters in a death, how to love, how we can be of service to one another. These are the kinds of questions religion arose to address, and religious traditions are keepers of conversation across generations about them. I've seen a tapestry unfurled, both ancient and in progress like the whole of creation, a bearer of truths that arguments can't contain. I must tell of these things, and how they meet my own deepest longings for truth, beauty, and hope. Krista Tippet. God speaks to each of us as he makes us. Then walks with us silently out of the night. These are the words we dimly hear: You, sent out beyond your recall, Go to the limits of your longing. Embody me. Flare up like flame. And make big shadows I can move in. Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don't' let yourself lose me. Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness. Give me your hand. Rainer Maria Rilke

Review # 2 was written on 2009-06-14 00:00:00 Arpan K Das To read this book is like being given permission to exhale, to let go of the various furies that religious extremism can engender in us, and look instead at the vast middle ground in which faith is discussed, wrestled with, and applied among the majority of the world's peoples. Krisat Tippett is the anchor of NPR's Speaking of Faith, a show she proposed to Minnesota Public Radio in an attempt to model conversation about religion - actual conversation, with a lot of listening involved, in partnership with individuals practicing every faith imaginable. This book is a reflection of that - a distilling down of Tippet's impulse to create such a show, her goals in sustaining it, and the ways that conversation about ethics, spirituality, and religion has created change in her life. There's a great deal of wisdom in this book - common, everyday wisdom from people doing common, everyday things - and equally, a wholesale rejection of anyone or any practice that would suggest religious practice or spiritual belief can be reduced to dogma, to simplistic rules. Instead, Tippett suggests (with quotes from many people she's interviewed) religion is about doubt, about wrestling with texts, about understanding the breadth of expression people give to their impulse to have faith, about seeing commonality and treasuring difference. This is a swift read that offers a peaceful, compassionate, eloquent defense of faith in all its forms. A perfect Sunday experience for me.