Krista Tippett

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Krista Tippett, the show's host
Krista Tippett, the show's host

Krista (Weedman) Tippett (born November 9, 1960) is a Peabody Award-winning broadcaster, journalist, and author. She's best known for creating and hosting the public radio program Speaking of Faith, distributed and produced by American Public Media. The program is currently broadcast on more than 200 public radio stations in the United States and globally via NPR Worldwide, its website [1], and its podcast. In 2007, Tippett's first book, Speaking of Faith – Why Religion Matters and How to Talk about It, was published. The paperback version was released in March 2008. Of the book, the author Elizabeth Gilbert wrote, "Her intelligence is like a salve for all who have been wounded or marginalized by the God Wars."

Tippett grew up in Shawnee, Oklahoma, the granddaughter of a Southern Baptist minister. She studied History at Brown University, graduating in 1983. She was an exchange student in former communist East Germany in 1982 and later a Fulbright scholar to Bonn, the capital of the former West Germany. In 1984, she went to divided Berlin as The New York Times stringer and established herself there as a freelance foreign correspondent – reporting and writing in those years for the Times, Newsweek, the BBC, the International Herald Tribune, and Die Zeit. In 1986, the senior diplomat in West Berlin created a position for her as a special political assistant. The following year she became chief aide in Berlin to the U.S. Ambassador to West Germany.

Tippett received a Masters of Divinity from Yale in 1994. While conducting a global oral history project for the former Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research at St. John's Abbey of Collegeville, Minnesota, she developed her "first person" approach that characterizes her radio conversations on Speaking of Faith. Tippett has described this as "tracing the intersection between great religious ideas and human experience, between theology and real life." Tippett first pitched the idea of an intelligent, in-depth program about diverse religious energies and ideas to Bill Buzenberg at Minnesota Public Radio in 1998. The program became a monthly series in 2001 and a weekly national program in 2003.


[edit] Appearances