Another Way to Talk About Faith

BOOK OF THE WEEK

Public radio host Krista Tippett models constructive conversation.

Reviewed by Jeff Crosby | posted 8/20/2007

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Though it is not the focus of Speaking of Faith, Tippett's own journey adds important texture and context to the book and has no doubt marked her desire for understanding the contours and depths of religious faith among those she calls her "conversation partners."

Born on the night John F. Kennedy was elected president, Tippett was reared in Oklahoma, the granddaughter of a Southern Baptist preacher she called Gaggy and through whom she "experienced the drama of faith." Early in Tippett's life her parents set aside Gaggy's stern rules for a fallen creation. Though the family went to church on Sunday, "Monday through Friday I was raised to win, to perfect myself, and to do so in the American way of accomplishment and accumulation," she writes. Tippett continued her accomplishments at Brown University and then worked as a journalist in Berlin in the days before the wall dividing east and west was chipped away with mallets both literal and ideological. In the days after her move from Germany to Codford St. Mary in England, she encountered the medieval mystical writings published as The Cloud of Unknowing and her spirituality was re-awakened in a very different form.

At Yale Divinity School she was challenged by New Testament professor Leander Keck to "read the text as a whole and see it in all its complexity." Subsequent readings in Bonhoeffer, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Kierkegaard further shaped her quest to lean into questions and be suspicious of "isms" and certainties.

In the closing words of Speaking of Faith, Tippett writes that her "head is full of many voices, elegant, wise, strange, full of dignity and grief and hope and grace. Together we find illuminating and edifying words and send them out to embolden work of clarifying, of healing. We speak because we have questions, not just answers, and our questions cleanse our answers and enliven our world."

Speaking of Faith should be required reading for all who are interested in effective public discourse around issues of faith in their broad expressions in contemporary North America. I plan to mail a copy to my public discourse professor, with the hope that she'll assign this book next time around—and let it inform the conversation on faith.

Jeff Crosby is director of sales and marketing at InterVarsity Press in Downers Grove, Illinois. He is the editor and compiler of Days of Grace through the Year, a collection of meditations drawn from the writings of Lewis B. Smedes.

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