Name: Becoming Wise
Rating: 4.428571428571429 (21 reviews)
ISBN: 9781594206801

Krista Tippett

Offers guidance on the art of living drawn from the stories of extraordinary people whose work inspires wonder and insight into life, finding common ground between a wide variety of thinkers on how to be present in the world.

An Inquiry Into the Mystery and Art of Living

Becoming Wise

Luke Leighfield

As the host of the On Being podcast, Krista Tippett gets to have conversations with some of the most inspiring artists and spiritual teachers in the world – from the Dalai Lama to Anne Lamott, Mary Oliver to Eckhart Tolle, and most people in between.

Thankfully, Tippett's chosen to present a gift to the world in the form of 'Becoming Wise'. It's a distillation of some of her most memorable conversations, and acts as a kind of guide to living – how to be. The richness of the book is almost overwhelming – it's sumptuously written, full of wisdom from some of the greatest thinkers of our time, ambitious in its scope – and I wanted to underline almost every word. It's one of the best books I've read all year.

"And so in choosing how we are in the world, we shape our experience of that world, our contribution to it. We shape our world, our inner world, our outer world, which is really the only one we'll ever know. And to me, that's the substance of the spiritual journey. It's not an exasperating idea but an infinitely emboldening one, and it's taken me many years to come to that without resistance."

Jeremy Cote

I thought the book was quite good. I find Krista Tippett to be a great interviewer, and you can see that during these sections of the book. I found the text to be quite uplifting, and it gives one may things to think about. I would recommend the book to anyone who enjoys the podcast.

Les Reynolds

Such an amazing book. So full of wisdom, as per the title. I really enjoyed the first 1/2 of each chapter, which was her writing. The second 1/2 of each (Endnotes) were excerpts from her interviews, which still contained lots of great nuggets, but did drag on a bit. Overall, this is the best book I've read in a while, I was constantly sending quotes to my wife.

Emma Bose

Sarah Morris O’Keefe

Zoe Stricker

Maddie

jordan

Sabine Delorme

Jenny Mikac

Lance Willett

Sunelle Chamberlain

Peabody Award-winning broadcaster and National Humanities Medalist Krista Tippett has interviewed the most extraordinary voices examining the great questions of meaning for our time. The heart of her work on her national public radio program and podcast, On Being, has been to shine a light on people whose insights kindle in us a sense of wonder and courage. Scientists in a variety of fields; theologians from an array of faiths; poets, activists, and many others have all opened themselves up to Tippett's compassionate yet searching conversation. In Becoming Wise, Tippett distills the insights she has gleaned from this luminous conversation in its many dimensions into a coherent narrative journey, over time and from mind to mind. The book is a master class in living, curated by Tippett and accompanied by a delightfully ecumenical dream team of teaching faculty. The open questions and challenges of our time are intimate and civilizational all at once, Tippett says - definitions of when life begins and when death happens, of the meaning of community and family and identity, of our relationships to technology and through technology. The wisdom we seek emerges through the raw materials of the everyday. And the enduring question of what it means to be human has now become inextricable from the question of who we are to each other. This book offers a grounded and fiercely hopeful vision of humanity for this century - of personal growth but also renewed public life and human spiritual evolution. It insists on the possibility of a common life for this century marked by resilience and redemption, with beauty as a core moral value and civility and love as muscular practice. Krista Tippett's great gift, in her work and in Becoming Wise, is to avoid reductive simplifications but still find the golden threads that weave people and ideas together into a shimmering braid. One powerful common denominator of the lessons imparted to Tippett is the gift of presence, of the exhilaration of engagement with life for its own sake, not as a means to an end. But presence does not mean passivity or acceptance of the status quo. Indeed Tippett and her teachers are people whose work meets, and often drives, powerful forces of change alive in the world today. In the end, perhaps the greatest blessing conveyed by the lessons of spiritual genius Tippett harvests in Becoming Wise is the strength to meet the world where it really is, and then to make it better.

Becoming Wise An Inquiry Into the Mystery and Art of Living

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