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Her goal when she proposed the program in the late '90s was to give people in the middle of the religious spectrum a voice. "I was dismayed with the black hole where the religious dimension of life might have been on public radio," she says. "I longed to add depth to the way religious ideas made their way into public conversation. I believed that these kinds of ideas belonged in the mix of resources by which we navigate all the important issues of our common life." Exploring topics as wide-ranging as Pentecostalism and paganism, Einstein's ethics and whale songs, Tippett offers in-depth, one-on-one conversations. On air, she speaks in a warm and winsome manner, hesitating here and there, mulling over ideas, halting at times to reframe an issue as she listens to other people talk intimately about how they understand and live out their faith.
Not surprisingly, she writes in the same disarming voice, telling her story as a minor theme in relationship to the big ideas that have formed her perspective. As she travels in the "company of others"—physicist John Polkinghorne, Jewish bioethicist Laurie Zoloth, theologians Miroslav Volf and Roberta Bondi, writer Elie Wiesel, Indian journalist Pankaj Mishra, religious historian Karen Armstrong, to name but a few—Tippett melds her story into theirs. She eschews media sound bites about religion for a kind of journalism that is both more constructive and more difficult to practice.
Tippett uses her pulpit—both in print and broadcast—to preach the healing power of conversation. "Something magical happens in a real conversation," she writes, "where people bring the clearest words they can muster, and the most natural, to matter and meaning. Paradoxically, what is most personal also lands in other ears as most universal." She says she no longer looks for solutions, systems and overarching themes that "apply to all people and all places." Instead, honoring the humanity of "different others" is her task. Her goal is not to champion a particular worldview, but to "keep sense and virtue and the possibility of healing alive in the middle of the world's complexity."
A commitment to finding the truth in all religious traditions may keep the conversation going, but it can avoid facing the unbridgeable abyss that exists between many religious traditions. The tension for Christians, of course, is that personal experience is not the bedrock of faith, and a focus on first-person narratives may only contribute to the "Sheilaism" or intensive privatization of faith that Robert Bellah warned of back in the '80s. Enamored of mystery, nuance, and questioning even as she finds herself delving into faith systems that are built on certainties and absolutes, Tippett may have chosen a stance that keeps her in a sort of spiritual limbo, where she is ever encouraging of others' accounts of their faith but is left standing on the sidelines of religious experience herself.
Tippett says she has opted for a "clear-eyed faith" that asks her to confront both her own failings and the world's horrors. For her, the Hebrew phrase tikkun olam, to repair the world, is one that holds special resonance. Clearly, listening to others has become a way for Tippett to repair if not save the world—one conversation at a time.
Phyllis Alsdurf directs the journalism program at Bethel University in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today International/Books & Culture magazine.
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