On Being with Krista Tippett

Diane Winston holds the night chair in media and religion at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. That's at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. She edited small screen Big Picture, television and lived religion.

Well, Job is, you know, of all the books of the certainly of the Hebrew Bible, for me, by far the most powerful and interesting. Everybody knows the story. Job finds himself cursed by God. He's lying on a dung heap at the edge of town covered with oozing sores as flocks or dead as family's dead. He's, you know, he's in a world of hurt and his friends arrive to help him work through this. And he keeps lamenting what's going on and calling it unjust. And his friends keep saying, oh no, no, it's, you know, you sinned or one of your children sinned. That's, you know, this is how it works and that's why you're being punished. And Job much to his credit is not the patient Job of legend. He keeps demanding that God appear and explain why this thing has happened to him.

And God finally does. And I think the Saliliqui that God delivers in the last three chapters of Job, I think is the longest sustained speech that God gives anywhere in the Bible. That's the most likely true. And it's remarkably interesting speech because it doesn't answer any of the questions that Job has set out. Instead, God gives this incredibly beautiful biologically accurate crunchy, sexy tour of the physical universe, all the kind of interesting animals and, you know, and in very wild terms, you know, Do you have a deep gastrodo, do you hunt prey for the lion and her cubs? You know, do you help the vulture find a carrying on which to feast? If you're so smart, you tell me where do I keep the wind? Can you tell the proud waves here you shall break a no further? Do you know where the storms are, the warehouse for this storm?

Well, you know, after listening to this for two or three chapters, Job basically says, sorry, I asked, you know, and it is all about the majesty of nature, all the analogies there are. The message seems to be Job, you're not the center of things. The sort of your questions about justice and things are kind of puny. You're a small part of something very large and beautiful, and that should be enough, and for Job it appears to be enough.

And I think the Saliliqui that God delivers in the last three chapters of Job, I think is the longest sustained speech that God gives anywhere in the Bible.

And it's remarkably interesting speech because it doesn't answer any of the questions that Job has set out. Instead, God gives this incredibly beautiful biologically accurate crunchy, sexy tour of the physical universe, all the kind of interesting animals and, you know, and in very wild terms, you know, Do you have a deep gastrodo, do you hunt prey for the lion and her cubs? You know, do you help the vulture find a carrying on which to feast? If you're so smart, you tell me where do I keep the wind? Can you tell the proud waves here you shall break a no further? Do you know where the storms are, the warehouse for this storm?

Well, you know, after listening to this for two or three chapters, Job basically says, sorry, I asked, you know, and it is all about the majesty of nature, all the analogies there are. The message seems to be Job, you're not the center of things.

By mid-month we were getting a dozen tomatoes a day, that many cucumbers, first eggplants and squash in unmentioned quantities.

The harvest is bountiful and the labor's few.

I agree, of course, but the truth is I still had to go back to the garden that morning to pull about 200 onions.

Altered routines were really the heart of what we'd gained; we'd learned that many aisles of our supermarket offered us nothing local, so we didn't even push our carts down those. Frozen foods, canned goods, soft drinks--yes, that's a whole aisle--just grab the Virginia dairy products and organic flour and get out was our motto.

We'd fed ourselves organically and pretty splendidly, we thought, on about 50 cents per family member per meal--probably less than I spent in the years when I qualified for food stamps.

I think what surprised me the most is that we didn't really miss anything.

When we changed our thinking and started every meal with the question, what do we have? What's coming in right now? What's in season? What do we have plenty of? It became really a long exercising gratitude.

I think food culture and the way we look at food in this country has so much to do with why we act with us to a complete loss of control of our food system and our food sources.

In our culture we generally lack strong regional traditions of food that tie us to our place and our people, you know specific food traditions as they have an Italy for example or in India or Mexico or really almost anywhere.

It's so easy for us to have, for example, foods that were grown on the other side of the world and brought to us without any idea who grew it, who worked for what low wage to harvest it, who had to breathe the pesticides in order to put it on a truck.

By mid-month we were getting a dozen tomatoes a day, that many cucumbers, first eggplants and squash in unmentioned quantities.

The harvest is bountiful and the labor's few.

I agree of course, but the truth is I still had to go back to the garden that morning to pull about 200 onions.

Our year's supply. They had bulbed up nicely in the long midsummer days and were now waiting to be tugged out of the ground, cured and braided into the heavy plaits that would hang from our kitchen mantle and infuse our meals all through the winter.

Altered routines were really the heart of what we'd gained. We'd learned that many aisles of our supermarket offered us nothing local, so we didn't even push our carts down those. Frozen foods, canned goods, soft drinks--yes, that's a whole aisle--just grab the Virginia dairy products and organic flour and get out was our motto. Before you start coveting thy neighbor's goods.

The Shia-Sunni conflict is at once a struggle for the soul of Islam, A great war of competing theologies and conceptions of sacred history, and a manifestation of the kind of tribal wars of ethnicities and identities, so seemingly archaic at times, yet so surprisingly vital with which humanity has become wearily familiar.

This interview is included in our program The Inner Lives of Children, which was originally broadcast in December 2008.

I worked in Israel too when I was doing this spiritual life book and the whole effort involved and I talked with children and all parts of the world but I made a point of going to Israel and talking with the children there Jewish children, Christian children living in Israel and Arab children living in Israel.

One of those letters she says the task of the novelist is to deepen mystery and then she pauses and she says with a comma. She says but mystery is a great embarrassment to the modern mind and there's our tragedy that we have to resolve all mystery. We can't let it be. We can't rejoice in it. We can't celebrate it. We can affirm it as an aspect of how lies because after our mystery isn't aspect of how lies.

The task of the novelist is to deepen mystery

So meaning but we I wrote a book called The Call Of Stories and Boyd did I mean that because stories call us they call us, they call to us and of course that's what religion is its stories in the best sense of the word story.

I wrote a book called The Call Of Stories and Boyd did I mean that because stories call us they call us, they call to us and of course that's what religion is its stories in the best sense of the word story.

I think it's an amazing book. I don't think there's anything else like that, like this out there with people speaking so articulately and honestly and intelligently about this subject that it's so hard even to think about.

Well, that was a book was a revelation to me as well. Even though I put the book together and met these people and now I made them as one of the other stories in all the books.

I mean, let's say one of the people who I recalmost vividly from the book from Will the Circle Pianbrook and was the man who'd spent years on death row on five.

She's not a religious person, I think, from the essay. And from the interview you did with her. But...This was one...You're interview with Uta Hogan, the actress in your book.

Faith, the miracle of creation is what a human being is capable of communicating. It's not a private thing it has to be communicated.

I think it's an amazing book. I don't think there's anything else like that, like this out there with people speaking so articulately and honestly and intelligently about this subject that it's so hard even to think about.

Well, that was a book was a revelation to me as well.

I mean, let's say one of the people who I recalmost vividly from the book from Will the Circle Pianbrook and was the man who'd spent years on death row on five.

She's not a religious person, I think, from the essay. And from the interview you did with her. But...This was one...You're interview with Uta Hogan, the actress in your book.

Faith, the miracle of creation is what a human being is capable of communicating. It's not a private thing it has to be communicated.

It's about people who are crazy. They're crazy in a wonderful celestial sense. And so that people are given their lives to make this quoted, quoted better world at risk to themselves, of course, to income as well as body.

I've heard the last book I did, the very last one that followed. I hope that I've heard the second. Who does that? It's about certain kinds of people who have put themselves out on the line. Those are called the crazy people.

It's about people who are crazy. They're crazy in a wonderful celestial sense. And so that people are given their lives to make this quoted, quoted better world at risk to themselves, of course, to income as well as body.

I've heard the last book I did, the very last one that followed. I hope that I've heard the second. Who does that? It's about certain kinds of people who have put themselves out on the line. Those are called the crazy people.

Over the course of the seven years in which the book was being produced, the Berlin Wall came down, which none of us had anticipated was going to happen as quickly as it did. And then ethnic conflicts started to blossom. And all of a sudden, this book, which sort of suggests the juxtaposition of religious reconciliation with official or unofficial diplomacy, people saw that as having greater potential than traditional diplomacy in dealing with these identity-based conflicts that take the form of ethnic disputes or religious hostilities, tribal warfare or what have you.

When I look at Religion, The Missing Dimension of Statecraft, this book that emerged, was it published in 1994? That's right. In any case, before 911.

it took seven years, it took \$354,000 to produce this book called Religion the Missing Dimension of Statecraft

in any case before 9-11, so before the world had changed yet again in terms of the big picture that we all see

I was struck as I read that even then in the early 90s, before we really, before we could see many of the implications of the end of the Cold War, you were saying that with the decline of this east-west confrontation which in fact restrained a lot of regional conflicts or kept put them in categories kept them under control, that the clashes now were going to have to do with communal identity and that religion would play a critical role in that

it was required reading for new State Department

When I look at Religion, The Missing Dimension of Statecraft, this book that emerged, was it published in 1994? That's right. In any case, before 911.

Over the course of the seven years in which the book was being produced, the Berlin Wall came down, which none of us had anticipated was going to happen as quickly as it did. And then ethnic conflicts started to blossom. And all of a sudden, this book, which sort of suggests the juxtaposition of religious reconciliation with official or unofficial diplomacy, people saw that as having greater potential than traditional diplomacy in dealing with these identity-based conflicts that take the form of ethnic disputes or religious hostilities, tribal warfare or what have you.

in the sequel to that book, which came out in 2003, the title of which is Faith-Based Diplomacy Trumping Real Politique

Douglas Johnston's most recent book is Faith-Based Diplomacy trumping realpolitik

Recently I moved from Harvard to a place near Toronto called Daybreak. That is from an institution for the best and brightest to a community where mentally handicapped people and their assistants try to live together in the spirit of the Beatitudes.

After a month of working with Adam something started to happen to me that had never happened before. The severely handicapped young man whom outsiders sometimes describe with very hurtful words started to become my dearest companion.

As I carried him into his bath and made waves to let the water run fast around him and told him all sorts of stories, I knew that two friends were communicating far beyond the realm of thought.

Before this, I had come to believe that what makes us human is our mind, but Adam keeps showing me that what makes us human is our heart, the centre of our being, where God has hidden trust, hope and love.

Because of Adam there is peace among us.

Recently I moved from Harvard to a place near Toronto called Daybreak, that is from an institution for the best and brightest to a community where mentally handicapped people and their assistants try to live together in the spirit of the Beatitudes.

In my house, ten of us form a family. Gradually I'm forgetting who is handicapped and who is not. We are simply John, Bill, Trevor, Raymond, Rose, Steve, Jane, Naomi, Henry and Adam.

After a month of working with Adam something started to happen to me that had never happened before. The severely handicapped young man, whom outsiders sometimes describe with very hurtful words, started to become my dearest companion.

Before this I had come to believe that what makes us human is our mind, but Adam keeps showing me that what makes us human is our heart, the centre of our being, where God has hidden trust, hope and love.

Whoever sees in Adam merely a burden to society misses the sacred mystery that Adam is fully capable of receiving and giving love. He is fully human, not half human, not nearly human, but fully completely human because he is all heart.

Recently I moved from Harvard to a place near Toronto called Daybreak. That is from an institution for the best and brightest to a community where mentally handicapped people and their assistants try to live together in the spirit of the Beatitudes.

After a month of working with Adam something started to happen to me that had never happened before. The severely handicapped young man whom outsiders sometimes describe with very hurtful words started to become my dearest companion.

As I carried him into his bath and made waves to let the water run fast around him and told him all sorts of stories, I knew that two friends were communicating far beyond the realm of thought.

Before this, I had come to believe that what makes us human is our mind, but Adam keeps showing me that what makes us human is our heart, the centre of our being, where God has hidden trust, hope and love.

Because of Adam there is peace among us.

Daniel Kahneman's book, Thinking Fast and Slow, brought his groundbreaking ideas, which he pioneered with his late friend and fellow psychologist Amos Tversky, into mainstream culture.

In his 2011 book, Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman brought a core idea from academic psychology into mainstream cultural dialogue. The notion that human behavior at any given moment is an interplay between two forms or systems of thinking.

Before he wrote Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics for helping create the field of behavioral economics.

Many have loved his book, Thinking Fast and Slow, and he's just releasing a new book he's co-authored titled Noise, A Flaw in Human Judgment.

I did not make the distinction and I didn't even coin the term system one and system two. They pre-existed my work. I picked them up because I saw that they would help us resolve many controversies in my field.

The idea, which is, I think, I find it compelling and many other people find it compelling, is that there is a very big difference in what happens in your mind when I say two plus two and what happens in your mind when I say 24 times 17.

What makes this story, I think, interesting to some people is that it's the idea that in many situations it's not system two that's in charge.

But in fact, system one runs the show a lot of the time except you never know it.

And the people who came back to life really in some sense had less survivor guilt sometimes or had suffered differently or were able to reconnect with a certain fervor that basically said, I'm not here for nothing. I'm going to make the best of it. And they understood the erotic as an antidote to death.

My book and my work is about eroticism. It is about how people connect to this quality of aliveness, of vibrancy, of vitality, of renewal. And that is way beyond the description of sexuality. And it is mystical. It is actually a spiritual, mystical experience of life. It is a transcendent experience of life because it is an act of the imagination.

And the people who came back to life really in some sense had less survivor guilt sometimes and they suffered differently or were able to reconnect with a certain fervor that basically said, I'm not here for nothing. I'm going to make the best of it.

And from that moment, I began to actually think my book is not about sexuality. My book and my work is about eroticism.

It is about how people connect to this quality of aliveness, of vibrancy, of vitality, of renewal. And that is way beyond the description of sexuality.

Much, much, much later. It came in a very roundabout way where I was talking with my husband, Jack Saul, about his work with torture survivors and asking him, what's the process and how do you know when a person comes back and what kind of coming back does a person do after they have been in solitary confinement for years or away, dislocated, etc.?

And over the next few months I was drawn to the book of Job because I felt something resonating inside

I felt that if I could somehow understand what was going on at the end of the book of Job, I would have reached that place of insight and breaking through into something else.

And so what happens to him in my version, which I feel is in the Hebrew, is very far from what happens in the King James version where he becomes a kind of kind of penitent, sniveling little worm at the end who's given into God's authority.

There's a great difference between submission and surrender. Surrender is an opening of the heart into what the Western tradition calls the divine.

I've entered into a process with each of these texts that I fall in love with or could be an image when I've written fiction.

And over the next few months I was drawn to the book of Job because I felt something resonating inside the end of the book of Job that seemed to me a true encounter with human suffering and the deepest insight and western tradition.

And I felt that if I could somehow understand what was going on at the end of the book of Job, I would have reached that place of insight and breaking through into something else.

And so what happens to him in my version, which I feel is in the Hebrew, is very far from what happens in the King James version where he becomes a kind of kind of penitent, sniveling little worm at the end who's given into God's authority.

There's a great difference between submission and surrender. Surrender is an opening of the heart into what the Western tradition calls the divine.

So in the context of that, in your life at that time, how did you think about prayer then? I mean was that a text that you would meditate upon?

And it was also as I started to prepare this, this question that James Weldon Johnson raises in the book that you gave me from 1925, A Book of Spirituals, you know, about who wrote this music, that there must have been Bard, that there were great artists at work.

That there must have been Bard, that there were great artists at work.

That question that James Weldon Johnson raises in the book that you gave me, from 1925, A Book of Spirituals, you know, about who wrote this music?

And I have also been fortunate to read a bit of a book in Becoming, a manuscript, which, and I feel very fortunate, and I'm not going to quote from it too much here because it will come out and you can all read it one day.

And I have also been fortunate to read a bit of a book in Becoming, a manuscript, which and I feel very fortunate. And I'm not going to quote from it too much here because it will come out and you can all read it one day.

The book that does not exist yet. The book does not exist. The book in becoming.