KRISTA TIPPETT

Fear usually looks like anger.

Buddhist mindfulness is about the present, but I also think it's about being real. Being awake to everything. Feeling like nothing can hurt you if you can look it straight on.

You are not going to be perfect every day. It's about turning up the next day and doing it again.

Mystery is a birthright of theology and faith, but you often do find religious people grasping for answers that shut things down and narrow what is possible.

One of the things I reject in our cultural divisions is the clash between faith and reason, and I would say the same about mystery and intellect. They are somehow mysteriously akin to each other.

Tolerance is not really a lived virtue; it's more of a cerebral ascent.

Intelligence alone does not get us where we need to go or even necessarily where we want to go. For that, the human creature must exercise harder-won capacities of wisdom, and wise action.

For many people who were never religious or who leave the religion of their childhood behind, it's the experience of having children of your own that brings an urgency to the question of what you believe.

Depression can kill you. It can also be a spiritually enriching experience. It's really an important part of my theology now and my spirituality that life is not perfect, and I grew up wanting it to be and thinking that if it wasn't, I could make it that way, and I had to acknowledge that I had all kinds of flaws and sadnesses and problems.

Strong religious identities survive and thrive. But more than ever before, even in their most conservative iterations, they are chosen.

Structure is something that calms our nature; we know this of toddlers.

Being intellectually hospitable is a virtue that I bring into the interview space.

I don't accept the idea that there are two sides to any issue. I think that the middle ground is to be found within most of us.

If God is God, we can't be afraid of what we can learn.

I make no apologies for the fact that I have a religious life of my own. I'm speaking as a Christian because I'm speaking as myself.

My depression is not something very special. A lot of people go through depression. My divorce is not something very special; a lot of people go through divorce.

I had been a journalist in Europe and then went to divinity school in the early 1990s, and came out as somebody who had the perspective of a journalist and was now also theologically educated.

What a liberating thing to realize that our problems are probably our richest sources for rising to the ultimate virtue of compassion.

If we can't face our losses, we can't be present either fully to everything that is. When people have cut off or not made peace with some part of themselves, they miss out on other aspects of life.

I like to say that I'm tracing the intersection between big ideas and human experience, between theology and real life.

Kindness is an everyday byproduct of all the great virtues.

Compassion also brings us into the territory of mystery - encouraging us not just to see beauty, but perhaps also to look for the face of God in the moment of suffering, in the face of a stranger, in the face of the vibrant religious other.

Silence is an endangered quantity in our time... Silence, embraced, stuns with its presence, its pregnant reality—a reality that does not negate reason and argument, but puts them in their place.

The things that go wrong for you have a lot of potential to become part of your gift to the world.

How we carry what has gone wrong for us is essential to being at home in ourselves, and present to the world with all of its failings.