On Being with Krista Tippett

He's just published a wondrous new book called Fundamentals, Ten Keys to Reality.

I've read Composing a Life and I read With a Daughter's Eye years and years ago

In a stable society, Composing a Life is somewhat like throwing a pot or building a house in a traditional form. The materials are known, the hands move along familiar tasks, the fit of the completed whole in common life is understood.

I like to think of men and women as artists of their own lives, working with what comes to hand through accident or talent to compose and recompose a pattern in time that expresses who they are and what they believe in, making meaning even as they are studying and working and raising children, creating and recreating themselves.

Composing a further life?

We are indebted to one another, and the debt is a kind of faith. A beautiful, difficult, strange faith. We believe each other into being.

Your Staying alive means so much more than you really know or that anyone is aware of at this moment. But we're in it together in this profound way and you can take some strength from that.

I spoke with Jennifer Michael Hecht in 2014 after she published Stay, a history of suicide and the philosophies against it.

I'm grateful to you who is listening, who feels tempted to suicide. I'm grateful that you're sticking it out for the sake of other people and I know many people are and you're my hero.

We are indebted to one another and the debt is a kind of faith, a beautiful, difficult, strange faith. We believe each other into being.

When the first friend did it, I had just started to come out of a very dark period myself.

And then when the second friend did it, who was also a friend with the first... Was that Rachel? Rachel? Yeah. And Rachel Whetstone.

And that's when I started to think very seriously because I was getting emails from people who were saying that these very little things I'd done had helped them tremendously.

So it was really... Then it was a mission. I had to track down... I'm a historian and I read a great deal of philosophy through history.

And so I shouldn't do it. And within seconds, I was on the other side of that, seeing that if I'm so important, if I could hurt people so much by doing this, that means if I Stay, even if I get nothing done, even if I'm crying and useless, I'm doing something, I'm making a contribution, a real contribution.

When did your book come out, Doubt? 2003.

And also Lily said you have a new book of poetry coming out? It just came out in November, yeah.

His last book, published in 2020, was Morality, Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times.

It's a book and a collection that has traveled and it's photographs of lynchings that include postcards. And those postcards are photographs of white people who have paid a photographer to come and take a picture of them standing, smiling or next to the body of a black human being who has been murdered.

many and varied are the interpretations dealing with the teachings and the life of Jesus of Nazareth. But few of these interpretations deal with what the teachings and the life of Jesus have to say to those who stand at a moment in human history with their backs against the wall.

For Thurman, Jesus was this human being who was so deeply divinely connected at a level that no other human being in history has ever been.

he was the teacher, he was the mentor, he was the spiritual sage. He was not the one who was on the front line, but he was the one where people would retreat to, to be filled.

with sure artistry and great power, he depicted what happens when a man responds directly to human need across the barriers of class, race and condition. Every man is potentially every other man's neighbor.

the doom of the children is the greatest tragedy of the disinherited. They are robbed of much of the careless rapture and spontaneous joy of merely being alive.

many and varied are the interpretations dealing with the teachings and the life of Jesus of Nazareth. But few of these interpretations deal with what the teachings and the life of Jesus have to say to those who stand at a moment in human history with their backs against the wall.

For Thurman, Jesus was this human being who was so deeply divinely connected at a level that no other human being in history has ever been.

God places a crown above our heads that we grow... That we spend the rest of our lives growing tall enough to wear.

with sure artistry and great power, he depicted what happens when a man responds directly to human need across the barriers of class, race, and condition. Every man is potentially every other man's neighbor.

the doom of the children is the greatest tragedy of the disinherited. They are robbed of much of the careless rapture and spontaneous joy of merely being alive.

And before Novar was born, we finished the Light Chasers album, and that was a song written specifically for him.

Bless the children safe sleeping. Bless the parents heart aching. Bless the wakeless on their journey. Travel safely, travel safely. We're the sleepless, always searching, light chasing, light chasing.

Yeah, that one, it's interesting that you bring that one up in that context because that came, that line came in the middle of the night.

The Light Chasers album was a figurative and literal journey.

the light chasers album

the light chasers album

the whole light chasers album

bless the children safe sleeping bless the parents heart aching bless the wakeless on their journey travel safely travel safely

light chasing light chasing

So your new album is called The Seeker, right?

We were made to walk through fire in our dance shoes. God gave us words, they were I love you, please and thank you. God gave us thirst and it's a hunger for the universe. God gave you feet so you could find your own way home.

Yeah, it's called The Seeker because that's what we're here to do.

the new album that we're just releasing

the new album is called The Seeker

it's called The Seeker

The Seeker is actually like that word