Browsing the Internet today, looking for some stuff on the famous South African leader Rev. Desmond Tutu, I came across the Speaking of Faith web site of American radio host Krista Tippett. Here are a few biographical details that I found on her site.
Krista grew up in Oklahoma, the granddaughter of a Southern Baptist preacher. She studied history at Brown University and went to Bonn, West Germany in 1983 on a Fulbright Scholarship to study politics in Cold War Europe. In her 20s, she ended up in divided Berlin for most of the 1980s, first as The New York Times stringer and a freelance correspondent for Newsweek, The International Herald Tribune, the BBC, and Die Zeit. She later became a special assistant to the U.S. Ambassador to West Germany.
Krista left Berlin in 1988, the year before the Wall fell. She lived in Spain, England, and Scotland for a time, then pursued a M.Div. from Yale. When she graduated in 1994, she saw a black hole where intelligent coverage of religion should be. As she conducted a far-flung oral history project for the Benedictines of St. John’s Abbey (pdf) in Collegeville, Minnesota, she began to imagine radio conversations about the spiritual and intellectual content of faith that could open imaginations and enrich public life.
In 2007, Krista published her first book, Speaking of Faith. It is a memoir of religion in our time, including her move from geopolitical engagement to theology and the cumulative wisdom of her interviews these past years. Her new book, Einstein’s God (Feb 2010) illustrates some of the important ways the program and her vision have continued to evolve.
Krista is present — listening, thinking, and responding in real time — in a way that is rare in modern media and made possible by the luxury of an hour of public radio. Her two children are at the center of her life. She also loves cooking for her children and their friends, BBC radio plays, beautiful writing, great science fiction, cross country skiing, and hot yoga.
I found all this quite interesting and I invite you to explore it for yourself.
The stuff on Desmond Tutu could be found HERE.
Note: To get a taste of the interesting programmes hosted by Krista, I would recommend listening HERE to a discussion with Ellen Davis (an Episcopalian theologian at Duke University) and Wendell Berry (a farmer and poet; I have published HERE on this blog one of his poems) on ‘Land, Life and the Poetry of Creatures’ (I thank my friend Daniel Longyne, an avid and very experienced radio listener, for the link to this).
Persona 