If you are among the millions of listeners who have tuned in to Krista Tippett’s seminal public-radio show On Being—in which she engages scholars, writers, and others on spirituality and the fundamental questions of what it means to be a human—you may be surprised to hear she’s not big on the word “belief.” In this interview with Topic, recorded in early December 2018 from a studio in Cincinnati, Tippett talks about why she longs for a definition of faith and selfhood that isn’t quite so “neck up” and why too much investment in one’s own beliefs can actually be damaging. “If we only meet each other with ‘my facts versus your facts,’ ” she says, “we don’t have a human place to begin.”
Animations by Andrew Khosravani
More from our issue on Belief: topic.com/belief
