The “On Being” Podcast Starter Guide
On Being is one of the all-time great podcasts. What Krista Tippett and her team have done for so long is remarkable. It’s really special.
Thinking back on the last eleven years that I’ve been living in Peru, Krista Tippett’s capacity to ask incredible questions and host life-giving conversations has been a deeply formative element in my life. I wrote about some of my favorite “religious podcasts” almost ten years ago and didn’t even mention On Being—perhaps because it’s not overtly “religious.” I wrote a follow-up post about eight years ago and mentioned On Being only in passing. Of anything I’ve listened to over the last decade plus, it has had by far the most diverse cast of interviews: poets and physicists, teachers and theologians, musicians and medical doctors, bird-watchers and historians. The archives are a treasure trove of voices, some conversations with people who have since passed—Mary Oliver, John O’Donohue, Desmond Tutu. I recommend it to people all the time.
I’ve required students to listen to episodes. I’ve recommended it to friends. I’ve shared episodes with my family. I’ve mentioned it so many times that I thought it was time to make a little starter guide, given that the backlog includes over 500 episodes. Of course you can just find On Being in your favorite podcast player (mine continues to be Marco Arment’s Overcast) and download 2 or 3 episodes that grab your attention. These are the episodes that I find myself recommending as starting points or have myself gone back and re-listened to over time.
Some Tips
A few tips before giving you my short list. Slow down. If you tend to speed up podcasts, give On Being some space to breathe. Beyond the content, there’s an artfulness to the conversation that we can learn something from. Next, I suggest you not binge these episodes. Listen to one, then sit with it for a while. Find a notebook and write down some of your reactions to it: questions, takeaways. We tend to fill our lives with noise—sit in the gift of silence for a bit. If you still have your notebook out, consider the following prompts:
- What did you learn about the world or the human condition?
- What dispositions is this episode helping you cultivate that you would like to live out?
- How do you start to answer the question, “what does it mean to be human?”
If you’re more of a visual learner, each of the episodes has an accompanying transcript, very well done, and you can read or follow along as you go.
The List
Given Walter Brueggemann’s recent passing, let’s start with this recent re-release:
Walter Brueggemann, In Memoriam — When the World We Have Trusted In Is Vanishing
The great Christian scholar of the biblical prophets died on June 5, 2025. Yet, in the lineage of the prophets, who called humanity to face its hardest realities, this profound, warm, and timeless conversation is a stunning offering straight into our present. “The amazing contemporaneity of this material,” Walter Brueggemann says to Krista in this conversation from 2011, “and we relive by relistening, is that the issues are the same: the world we have trusted in is vanishing before our eyes and the world that is coming at us feels like a threat to us and we can’t quite see the shape of it.” He embodied as much as taught a prophetic way of fearless truth telling, fierce hope, and disarming language that can break through “human hearts and human hurt.” What is the calling of the Christian in a time like this, and what is the role of the preacher?
Since we do some work with the prophets in the theology class I teach at Harding University Latin America, I’ve asked my students to listen to this episode for years and to wrestle with the concept of the prophetic imagination.
Mary Oliver, “I got saved by the beauty of the world.”
The late poet Mary Oliver is among the most beloved writers of modern times. Amidst the harshness of life, she found redemption in the natural world and in beautiful, precise language. She sat with me for a rare intimate conversation, and we offer it up anew as nourishment for now.
A former student recently shared this with me, so I thought it was time for a re-listen. The episode is full of Mary Oliver’s poems, and Krista centers just how significant poetry can be for humans.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Remembering Desmond Tutu
The remarkable Archbishop Emeritus of Cape Town and Nobel Laureate died in the closing days of 2021. He helped galvanize South Africa’s improbably peaceful transition from apartheid to democracy. He was a leader in the religious drama that transfigured South African Christianity. And he continued to engage conflict well into his retirement, in his own country and in the global Anglican communion. Krista explored all of these things with him in this warm, soaring 2010 conversation — and how Desmond Tutu’s understanding of God and humanity unfolded through the history he helped to shape.
One of my favorite quotes, that I’ve included in my syllabus for humanities for at least the last five years:
Hope says, Man, hey, things can, things will be better, because God has intended for it to be so. You know? At no point will evil and injustice and oppression and all of the negative things have the last word. And, yes, there’s no question about the reality of evil, of injustice, of suffering. But, you know, at the center of this existence is a heart beating with love; that you, and I, and all of us are incredible. I mean, we really are remarkable things — that we are, as a matter of fact, made for goodness.
John O’Donohue: The Inner Landscape of Beauty
No conversation we’ve ever done has been more beloved than this one. The Irish poet, theologian, and philosopher insisted on beauty as a human calling. He had a very Celtic, lifelong fascination with the inner landscape of our lives and with what he called “the invisible world” that is constantly intertwining what we can know and see. This was one of the last interviews he gave before his unexpected death in 2008. But John O’Donohue’s voice and writings continue to bring ancient mystical wisdom to modern confusions and longings.
This is the episode I’ve listened to most, perhaps. Every couple of years I need to listen again and it’s such a gift. I’ve read a few of his books, which are captivating.
I just had to pull a quote from the interview:
When I think of the word “beauty,” some of the faces of those that I love come into my mind. When I think of beauty, I also think of beautiful landscapes that I know. Then I think of acts of such lovely kindness that have been done to me by people that cared for me in bleak, unsheltered times or when I needed to be loved and minded. I also think of those unknown people who are the real heroes for me, who you never hear about, who hold out on lines, on frontiers of awful want and awful situations and manage, somehow, to go beyond the given impoverishments and offer gifts of possibility and imagination and seeing.
I also think — always, when I think of beauty, because it’s so beautiful, for me — is I think of music. I love music. I think music is just it. I mean, I think that’s — I love poetry, as well, of course, and I think of beauty in poetry. But I always think that music is what language would love to be, if it could.
Isabel Wilkerson: This History Is Long; This History Is Deep
Go to the doctor and they won’t begin to treat you without taking your history — and not just yours, but that of your parents and grandparents before you. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson points this out as she reflects on her epic work of narrative nonfiction, The Warmth of Other Suns. She’s immersed herself in the stories of the Great Migration, the movement of six million African Americans to northern U.S. cities in the 20th century. The book is a carrier of histories and truths that help make sense of human and social challenges at the heart of our life together now.
There are two interviews that are both worth listening to: this one on Wilkerson’s book The Warmth of Other Suns, and another on her next book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. On Being is the reason I first picked up The Warmth of Other Suns and I was blown away. A massive book, masterful storytelling, and it’s a history I didn’t know.
Pádraig Ó Tuama, “This fantastic argument of being alive”
Pádraig Ó Tuama is a friend, teacher, and colleague to the work of On Being. But before that was true, Krista took a revelatory trip to meet him at his home in Northern Ireland, a place that has known sectarianism and violent fracture and has evolved, not to perfection, yet to new life and once unimaginable repair and relationship. Our whole world screams of fracture, more now than when Krista sat with Pádraig in 2016. This conversation is a gentle, welcoming landing for pondering and befriending hard realities we are given.
Knowing the flourishing relationship that was to come between Krista and Pádraig, this episode is particularly moving. They sat down years later for a short 16-minute conversation about the power of poetry.
Clint Smith: What We Know in the “Marrow of Our Bones”
This phrase recurs throughout Clint Smith’s writing: “in the marrow of our bones.” It is an example of how words can hold encrypted wisdom — in this case, the reality that memory and emotion lodge in us physically. Words and phrases have carried this truth forward in time long before we had the science to understand it.
Clint Smith is a poet, whose book Above Ground I recently wrote about. Smith also reads a couple of his poems from that book: Ode to Those First Fifteen Minutes After the Kids Are Finally Asleep and Dance Party—just delightful.
Time to Listen
There are incredible interviews with Suzanne Simard, Ta Nehisi Coates, Barbara Brown Taylor, Martin Sheen, Justin Vernon (Bon Iver), Avivah Zornberg, Bryan Stevenson—I could go on and on, but then it wouldn’t be a starter pack.
If you’re looking for more thoughtfulness, depth, hope, and beauty as you think about your own humanity, I hope you’ll give one of these a try.
And if you find another episode that is meaningful to you, please let me know.