by Paul Elie
from Georgetown University

Krista Tippett’s Space: A Temple of Talk in Minneapolis

      At a certain spot on Hennepin Avenue in Minneapolis, several tributaries of culture converge.  There’s the Blake School; the Walker Art Center and sculpture garden; the Beaux-Arts Basilica of St. Mary, the oldest Roman Catholic basilica in the United States; and, catty-corner from the basilica, the spacious and and woodbeamed and sunlit headquarters (if that’s the right word) of Krista Tippett Public Productions, where Krista’s weekly On Being broadcasts are created.

All this on an avenue named for Louis Hennepin, the Franciscan missionary who was the one of the first Europeans to spend time in present-day Minneapolis.  

I say “if that’s the right word” because 1619 Hennepin Avenue is not so much an office as a  public space, which opens – like the broadcasts – both onto inner space and into the wider world.

That’s certainly the case just now.  The American Pilgrimage Project is in Minneapolis, recording three days of conversations – several dozen people from the Twin Cities telling stories about how their religious beliefs have figured into crucial moments in their lives.  Krista Tippett and the On Being team are our hosts, and their casa is our casa – or so they’ve made us feel.

It’s an apt pairing.  Through On Being (formerly “Speaking of Faith”), Krista has used the art of conversation to represent religious experience in all its vitality and diversity; and through this project – a Georgetown partnership with StoryCorps – we’re trying to use the art of conversation to represent religious experience in all its vitality and diversity.

In conversation with Krista yesterday, I found myself saying, “You know, my real religion is narrative”: and if that’s the case, then 1619 Hennepin Avenue is its cathedral – or, better, its basilica.

Thanks to Krista Tippett, Trent Gilliss, and their On Being colleagues.

On “On Being”: Nathan Schneider on the Nones

Nathan Schneider has a screen saver unlike anybody else’s.  He told Krista Tippett about it in a conversation at the Chatauqua Institution over the summer, up now at YouTube and at onbeing.org:

The background screen on my cellphone – where I’m pulling up Facebook and Twitter – is a picture of what happened after Hurricane Sandy, when activists filled churches with rescue supplies. a process not organized by the state.

To me, Nathan is a neighbor in Brooklyn.  To Krista and the OnBeing staff, he is “a public intellectual for the millennial generation.”  He has earned the tag through a pair of original books, God in Proof: A Search from the Ancients to the Internet and Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse – the “God book” and the “Occupy book,” he calls them.

Krista’s point of entry into the conversation is the experience of the “nones” – young people who emphatically declare that they have no religious affiliation.  In the United States, the “nones” are a new phenomenon; but what’s especially striking about the conversation is how familiar the traits Nathan (who knows the “nones” better than anybody) are from past ages.  The “nones,” as he tells it, are “without a tether,” and yet they are framing ultimate questions more intensely than many people who do consider themselves religious; and the “nones” aren’t set against religious so much as against religion’s shortcomings.  “Church, act like a church – that’s their cry,” he tells Krista.  “Act like a church.”

That was the outlook, at different points, of (to take three examples) Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, and Walker Percy, who all – it is easy to forget – began adulthood as “nones.”

Not Common Ground, but the Common Good

I was reading the newspaper in the back of the taxi when the driver pointed out the cherry blossoms.  “There they are, professor – take a look!  That is what the tourists are here for!”  And there they were – cherry trees blossoming along the Potomac, outside the Jefferson Memorial, outside the buildings of the Smithsonian on the Mall.

It was fitting that I should see them en route to the final events of Faith, Culture, and the Common Good, the event convened by Georgetown with the Pontifical Council for Culture and the Archdiocese of Washington.  Fitting because the cherry trees in the capital are what can he called “common goods” or the “commons” – goods, belonging to no one, pleasing to all, that are there for us to enjoy in the capital.  And fitting because the cherry trees, while nature in the literal sense, suggest the status of culture in a society such as ours – an idea that blossomed in mind as the day went on.

The events were two conversations at the Library of Congress, moderated by E.J. Dionne.  By the time I reached the Library’s Jefferson Building, Reps. Wolf and Moran, both of Virginia, were well into a discussion of the erosion of the idea of public service in Washington and the powerful affirmation of service heard lately from Pope Francis.  Then, in a conversation about religion in the media, Krista Tippett made one incisive point after another, showing why she is so cherished a conversationalist: smart, tough, open-minded, and frankly optimistic.  Just as there has never been a program quite like On Being, there has never been a set of circumstances quite like ours – so there is no point pining for past times.

I especially liked Krista’s distinction between common good and common ground, which goes something like this.  In religious matters, our society is now so diverse that it isn’t sensible to strive for common ground or to expect it as a starting point.  Rather we should strive for the common good from our distinctly different points of departure, relishing our differences.  Hearing this, I thought: this is what the United States has to bring to the “courtyard,” such as it is.  Our long religious diversity, and our long sense of the common good, can be a model for nations only now seeing religious diversity emerge.

Outside, there were the cherry blossoms.  I think they are such an attraction in Washington because they are so striking a contrast to the edifices and monuments.  The old buildings of official Washington are vast, stone, classical, permanent, frank embodiments of certain Greco-Roman ideas about civilization.  The cherry trees are small, light, suggestive of Asia, vulnerable, impermanent, blossoming for a couple of weeks and then subsiding for another year.

Culture is like that: large edifices and institutions doing their thing year-round, year in and year out, so that some beautiful flowers may bloom.

Faith Fired by Literature — Krista Tippett Style

This weekend On Being broadcast my conversation with Krista Tippett about literature and religious belief, especially as it figures into the lives and work of Dorothy Day, Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Merton, and Walker Percy (and so into The Life You Save May Be Your Own).

That the conversation took place ten years ago now is hard to believe; what’s not hard to believe – and I am gratified to be able to say it – is that these four writers are more eminent, and more pertinent, than ever.  That they are so (it’s easy to forget) was no sure thing.  It has to do with their work, of course, but also with the ardor and insight of conversation partners like Krista Tippett: like those four, she has created a space for the spirit where none existed and has made it seem natural and inevitable.

Krista will at the Library of Congress for a Georgetown-sponsored conversation about religion and the media on Friday, April 11.  I’m looking forward to picking up our conversation in person there.

The photograph is of Thomas Merton and the Dalai Lama; after spending just a few hours in conversation in 1968, their empathy was such that the two of them, twenty years apart in age, had begun to look alike – or so it seems …