Speaking of Faith – A Study and Conversation Guide
In the vast middle, faith is as much about questions as it is about answers. It is possible to be
a believer and a listener at the same time, to be both fervent and searching, to honor the
truth of one’s own convictions and the mystery of the convictions of others.
- Krista Tippett, Speaking of Faith
Each of us has a faith story. Some involve a lifetime of going to church, and some include almost
no church at all. Some stories are full of mountaintops and some are full of valleys. Some are a
straight line in one direction, and others are so winding it is hardly possible to remember every
turn. Our stories are utterly unique, and yet deeply connected.
In 2003, Krista Tippett started a radio program, called Speaking of Faith. In the 12 years since
then, she has interviewed theologians, and scientists, musicians and imams, rabbis and doctors,
teachers and poets. Each of them speaks about their own sense of faith, spirituality, and God.
Their stories are not the same; in fact, they are remarkably different. But they are connected.
And hearing their stories is a wonderful invitation to think about and start to tell our own.
She writes, “people in our society long for a middle way between arrogance and irrelevance.
And whether they are religious or not, they long for religion to live up to its best ideals” (page
20). She begins by telling something of her own story, of the influence of her grandfather and
his devotion to his Southern Baptist faith. She tells her own story of struggle with religion and
listening for the voice of God. She evokes biblical stories about faith and doubt, devotion and
confusion.
At the heart of the season of Lent is the story of God’s deep, abiding, and unbreakable love for
humanity. That love would not be separated from us even by death. That love would not be
content with the many ways we try to separate ourselves from each other. That love is woven
into every human story. Including yours.
This Lent, we invite you to consider your own story of faith, and to begin ‘speaking of’ it. We
hope you will connect to others in a small group and share those stories with each other – to
rejoice in the connections and to marvel at the diversity. By sharing our own stories and
listening to the stories of others, we begin to see the image of God in each other. We begin to
live up to our ideals. We begin to change the world.
Pastor Katy McCallum Sachse
Pastor Michael Anderson
Pastor Mary-Alyce Burleigh
Chapter One
How We Got Here
Deuteronomy 26:1-10
The spiritual energy of our time, as I’ve come to understand it, is not a rejection of the
rational disciplines by which we’ve ordered our common life for many decades – law, politics,
economics, science. It is, rather, a realization that these disciplines have a limited scope. They
can’t ask ultimate questions of morality and meaning. We can construct factual accounts and
systems from DNA, gross national product, legal code, but they don’t begin to tell us how to
order our astonishments, what matters in a life, what matters in a death, how to love, how
we can be of service to each other. These are the kinds of questions religion arose to address
and religious traditions are keepers of conversation across generations about them. (pages 89)
Everybody starts someplace – and so does every faith. In this introductory chapter, Krista
Tippett traces some of her own origins: the faith of her grandfather; the influence of her career
in journalism and her travels; the experience of living in West Berlin during the Soviet years. She
introduces some of the themes and ideas of the book, and some of the people she has
encountered who have sparked her own thinking about faith and religion.
In Deuteronomy 26, the people of Israel are given a specific task once they enter the promised
land. After 400 years of slavery in Egypt and 40 years of wilderness wandering, they are poised
to enter this land of hope and promise, and when they do, God wants them to do two things:
make an offering, and tell a story.
The offering is to come from their first harvest. The story is to begin like this, the same for each
of them: “a wandering Aramean was my ancestor…”
The story is to be told as if it happened to you. No matter how many years elapse between
entering the promised land and the first offering – even if it’s 1500 years later – the story stays
personal. “When the Egyptians treated us harshly, we cried to the Lord, and the Lord brought
us out of Egypt.” It’s not just a history, it’s an experience to be claimed by each of us.
As we start this season of storytelling, think about your own history, your own experiences.
Who are your “wandering Aramean” ancestors? Who influenced your faith? How did your faith
story get started?
Podcast for the Week: ‘The Meaning of Faith,’ with Sharon Salzberg, Lawrence Kushner, Anne
Lamott, and Omid Safi. October 7, 2004. www.onbeing.org/program/meaning-faith/207
Discussion questions:
1. Who would you identify as your faith ancestors? How did they influence you?
2. What formative experiences, either positive or negative, still influence your faith?
3. Does your family have any stories that are told as if they just happened to you? How
have those influenced you?
4. The Israelites wandered and struggled toward the Promised Land for 40 years. Have you
had experiences of wandering, struggling, and arriving? What have those meant for
you?
Chapter Two
Remembering Forward
Matthew 1:1-16
Hope, like love, is one of life’s redeeming experiences. Hope, or its absence, shows on you.
(page 30)
‘Remembering forward’ refers to the idea that our past shapes our present, and informs our
decisions. We learn from the past, for better and for worse. And sometimes the present we are
living in makes very little sense to us, until we get into the future and have time to look back.
In this chapter, Krista Tippett begins by remembering her own grandfather, an evangelical
minister. For all his failings, and for the fact that his theology was ultimately not satisfying for
her, what she holds on to from him and his faith was this: “above all, I understood belovedness
to be woven into the very fabric of life” (page 25).
She tells her story of leaving for university and the life of the mind she encountered there; of
living in Germany turning the Cold War and the power of experiencing huge cultural
differences; of meeting Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel, and encountering the
writings and life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
In the first chapter of Matthew’s gospel, we find a whole list of names, most of them unfamiliar
to us. (Admit: when you first took a look at that assigned reading, you wondered if it was a
mistake! Who on earth is Nahshon?) If you look closely, you will notice four unusual names in
that genealogy: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and ‘the wife of Uriah’ (Bathsheba). It was not the custom
for women’s names to appear in a family tree, but there they are anyway.
Those four women have unusual stories to go along with their unusual appearances in Jesus’
lineage. For more on each of them, here are their biblical references:
 Tamar – Genesis 38
 Rahab – Joshua 2
 Ruth – the book of Ruth
 Bathsheba – 2 Samuel 11-12
These women’s stories are ‘remembered forward’ in Jesus’ own life – a life of welcoming the
stranger, enfolding the outcasts with love, healing the broken, and widening the vision of God’s
mercy.
Podcast for the Week: ‘A Call to Doubt and Faith, and Remembering God,’ with poet Christian
Wiman. May 23, 2013. www.onbeing.org/program/a-call-to-doubt-and-faith-christian-wimanon-remembering-god/4535
Questions for discussion
1. Who are the people who have taught you about ‘belovedness’?
2. How have you experienced different cultures in your life? What have you learned?
3. Who are some of the ‘unusual’ people in your family? How have they influenced you?
4. How have you experienced a faith community throughout your life? What have you
learned?
Chapter Three
Rethinking Religious Truth
Psalm 104
Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions
themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t
search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able
to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then,
someday far into the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into
the answer. (pages 46-47)
In this chapter, Krista Tippett traces her own journey from the faith of her childhood to the
faith of her adult years. Along the way, she notes the changes in her reading and understanding
of the bible. She also notes the move in the last 100 years to read the bible in a very literal and
fundamentalist way. This way puts religion in conflict with science, but that conflict is very new.
As she says, most of us live with religion and science together every day: in doctor’s offices,
through experiences of birth, illness and death, in the technology that is ever-changing and
new.
“One of the great joys of my life of religious conversation,” she writes, “has been in speaking
with scientists themselves from many disciplines. These conversations teach me that the
insights of science and theology are complementary disciplines that can mutually enrich and
illuminate the deepest questions and frontiers of human life and faith” (page 68).
She quotes physicist John Polkinghorne about the relationship between faith and science:
“Science treats the world as an object, something you could put to the test, pull apart, and find
out what it’s made of. And, of course, that’s a very interesting thing to do, and you learn some
important things that way. But we know that there are whole realms of human experience
where first of all testing has to give way to trusting. That’s true in human relationships. If I’m
always setting little traps to see if you’re my friend, I’ll destroy the possibility of friendship
between us. And also where we have to treat things in their wholeness, in their totality. I
mean…a chemist could take a beautiful painting, could analyze every scrap of paint on the
canvas, would incidentally destroy the painting by doing that, but would have missed the point
of the painting, because that’s something you can only encounter in its totality. So we need
complementary ways of looking at the world.” (pages 82-83)
The bible is full of expressions of wonder at God’s creation. The creation stories of Genesis are
well-known for this, of course, but it is the book of Psalms which contains the most consistent
and varied witness to every human experience in creation: to birth, death, joy, grief, loss, pain,
hope, victory, defeat, and beauty. Because Psalms is a book of poetry, there is no need to argue
about whether it is ‘true’ – its truth is poetic, in describing not just the world 1000 years ago,
but the world today, and our experiences of it. Just like the author of Psalms, we experience
failure, victory, surprise, wonder, awe, despair, and everything in-between.
Podcast for the Week: ‘Quarks and Creation,’ with physicist John Polkinghorne. January 13,
2011. www.onbeing.org/program/quarks-and-creation/148
Questions for discussion
1. How do you encounter science in your everyday life? How do you experience the
relationship between faith and science?
2. How have you experienced the claim that “there are realms of human experience where
testing has to give way to trusting”?
3. Tippett also notes that “science, like religion, is about questions more than answers”
(page 85). What scientific questions do you live with? What faith questions do you live
with?
4. This chapter also confronts the problem of suffering and evil. Every person of faith
struggles with these questions. What helps you to live with those problems?
Chapter Four
Speaking of Faith
Genesis 18:1-15
One of the moral diseases we communicate to one another in society comes from huddling
together in the pale light of an insufficient answer to a question we are afraid to ask. (pages
116-117)
When we are asked what we believe about God, we often answer with descriptions: powerful,
omnipotent, loving, just. Depending on our own experiences with religion, there are other
words that can come up too: judging, angry, demanding, silent.
But when we are asked about our faith, we most often tell stories. At its heart, Christianity is a
storied faith – a faith centered in the incarnation of Jesus Christ, who came to be human and to
live the very same way we do. When Jesus was asked about God, he most often told stories:
and, even more often, he simply lived a life that expressed who he believed God to be.
When we talk about God with each other, we are almost guaranteed to disagree at some point.
Some of us believe God is judging, and others believe God is forgiving. Some of us believe God
is loving, and others believe God cannot be loving if God allows so much suffering in the world.
When we stick with theoretical descriptions about God, there is plenty of room to disagree.
But when we tell stories of our experiences with God, even when we don’t fully understand, we
are more likely to find connections.
This ability to find connections between people who appear very different becomes significant
in talking with people of different faith traditions than our own. In this chapter, Krista Tippett
introduces her conversations with Muslims, in particular the ones she has had post-9/11. “More
compellingly than words in Islam’s defense,” she writes, “my Muslim conversation partners
these past years have evoked gentleness and generosity, humility and civilization, and the
possibility of peace…they have reminded me and my listeners over and over that ‘they’ are also
‘us’” (page 152).
On the cover of this study guide is an icon—an image for God—which comes from Genesis 18. It
represents a conversation between Abraham and the three strangers who show up at his house
to announce that he and Sarah will have a child. Abraham shows hospitality by welcoming
them, even though he does not know them. His act of hospitality is a risk and an act of faith.
And it turns into a tremendous gift.
Podcast for the Week: ‘Religion and Our World in Crisis,’ with Khaled Abou el Fadl and Harold
M. Schulweis. June 9, 2005. www.onbeing.org/program/religion-and-our-world-crisis/153
Questions for discussion:
1. What experiences do you have with people of other faith traditions? What have you
learned from them?
2. On page 170, Tippett tells the story of a military chaplain faced with the death of several
Americans. How did you react to this story?
3. One page 150, she introduces Eboo Patel, who runs an interfaith youth organization. His
goal is to empower kids to make a difference in the world in a positive way. How do you
see positive work being done between religious traditions?
4. Sometimes the most difficult disagreements are within a family. In that way,
disagreements between Christians can be much more painful (and bitter) than
disagreements between different religions. How do you experience conflict between
Christians in your life?
Chapter Five
Exposing Virtue
Colossians 3:12-17
As a journalist I’m deeply aware of how strangely tricky it is to make goodness seem relevant,
or at least as perversely thrilling as evil…violent images seem altogether more solid and
substantial, more decisive and telling, somehow, than kindness, goodness, and lived peace. It
is easy to bow down before these images and give in to the despair they preach. (pages 178179)
I admit that when I first read the title of this chapter, I found it odd. “Exposing virtue?” But then
I read those opening sentences above. And I thought how many of the stories we hear on a
daily basis are stories of violence, fear, anxiety, greed, and despair. And then I read on:
Kindness – an everyday by-product of all the great virtues – is at once the simplest and most
weighty discipline human beings can practice. But it is the stuff of moments. It cannot be
captured in declarative sentences or conveyed by factual account. It can only be found by
looking attentively at ordinary, unsung, endlessly redemptive experience. (page 178)
A big part of our call as people of faith is to look at the pain and suffering in this world, to enter
into it with others, and not to turn away. This is one of the hardest things we do, whether that
pain is the illness of someone we love, or the effects of racism on every aspect of our common
life, or the reality of diseases like Ebola and malaria which can seem so far away. We cannot
simply pretend these things do not exist, or give in to the notion that there is nothing we can do
about them.
But alongside those realities are others, too. In this chapter, Krista Tippett reminds us of stories
of reconciliation and hope: the lives of Nobel Peace Prize laureates Wangari Maathai and
Desmond Tutu. She talks about the Jewish longing and command to ‘repair the world’ (in
Hebrew, Tikkun Olam), which ‘insists that each of us, flawed and inadequate as we may feel,
has exactly what is needed to repair the part of the world that we can see and touch” (page
184). “The ‘saints’ of every tradition,” she writes, “are rarely famous, but they are living lives of
meaning and they are repairing the world they can touch and see” (page 190).
In Colossians, the early Christians are invited to ‘clothe themselves’ with compassion, kindness,
humility, and peace. To incorporate those ways of living into the very ordinary aspects of life; as
ordinary as getting dressed in the morning. As beautiful as it sounds, this reading is really
practical. Kindness, compassion, and reconciliation happen through small, daily, ordinary acts.
Podcast for the Week: Desmond Tutu, March 20, 2014. www.onbeing.org/program/desmondtutu-god-surprises/85
Questions for Discussion:
1. How do you see goodness, kindness, and compassion at work in the world?
2. What act of goodness, kindness, or compassion do you plan to do this week?
3. Krista Tippett also writes about beauty as one of the core elements of religious
experiences. (Pages 195-198) How is beauty a part of your religious life? How could it
be?
4. What small, ordinary acts of kindness and compassion have you experienced in your
life?
Chapter Six
Confessing Mystery
Exodus 3:1-15
Every time I let myself go deeper into the mess and mystery of human loving, I am hit over the
head again by theology – an insistence that the love of God is so much fuller than we can
usually imagine or take in, just like those glimpses I try to get people to describe for me. I
keep pursuing faith, if for no other reason than because it is the place in our common life that
keeps reminding us of the necessity of love… (pages 223-224)
As the book comes to a close, Krista Tippett goes back to the beginning. “In the beginning when
I interviewed people,” she writes, “I would always say, Remember, we are talking about
something that is ineffable, trying to put words around something that will always, ultimately,
defy them. We do our best. But we are left, in the end, with arms full, minds full, of mystery”
(page 225).
In Lent, we approach one of the great mysteries of Christian faith – a God who is willing to
suffer and die as the deepest expression of love. A God who chooses poverty over power,
community over independence, reconciliation over revenge, and gift over demand.
Much of our religious conversation in this world – conversation with religions, and between
religions – comes down to argument about who is right, and who is wrong. Krista Tippett’s
experience of conversations with those of all faiths and no particular faith at all, has sent her in
a different direction: not to argument, but to awe at the depth of human experience and the
mystery present at the heart of every religious tradition. She shares toward the end of the book
a quote from Reinhold Niebuhr:
Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by
hope. Nothing which is true, or beautiful, or good, makes complete sense in any immediate
context of history; therefore, we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, could
be accomplished alone; therefore, we must be saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous
from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our own standpoint; therefore, we must be
saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness. (pages 224-225)
When Moses approached the burning bush and encountered God, he was not given many
answers. Instead, he was given work to do (“I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people out
of Egypt”), and a mystery – the name of God. “I am who I am.” God’s name is not an easily
defined thing, but a verb, an action. A mystery.
For all the certainly we seek from our faith, faith always drives us further into mystery.
Remembering this could change our conversation. “Mystery is the crux of religion that is almost
always missing in our public expressions of religion,” writes Tippett. If we remembered the
power of mystery, “we could disagree passionately with each other and also better remember
the limits of our own knowledge” (page 226).
Podcast for the Week: ‘The Inner Landscape of Beauty,” with Irish poet John O’Donohue.
January 26, 2012. http://www.onbeing.org/program/inner-landscape-beauty/203.
Questions for Discussion:
1. How do you encounter mystery in your life?
2. How has your relationship with mystery changed in your life?
3. Tippett ends the book with these words: “we speak because we have questions, not just
answers, and our questions cleanse our answers and enliven our world.” What
questions do you live with?
4. What one or two insights have you appreciated most from this book?
Appendix
In matching a podcast of Krista Tippett’s radio program, ‘Speaking of Faith,’ to each week of
Lent, we came across many more fascinating episodes to recommend! These are listed just in
case you’d like more on each topic, or find a particular theme you’d like to explore.
You can search the archives for all the free podcasts at www.onbeing.org, under ‘episodes.’
‘The Power of Fundamentalism,’ with Khaled Abou ed Fadl, Richard J. Mouw, and Yossi Klein
Halevi. August 19, 2004. www.onbeing.org/program/power-fundamentalism/218
‘The Courage to be Vulnerable,’ with Brene Brown. January 29, 2015.
www.onbeing.org/program/brene-brown-on-vulnerability/4928
‘Exoplanets and Love: Science that Connects Us to One Another,’ with Natalie Batalha, NASA
researcher. August 29, 2013. www.onbeing.org/program/on-exoplanets-and-love/5029
(This program is part of a longer series called, “Science on Human Frontiers.”)
‘Finding God in All Things,’ with Father John Martin. December 18, 2014.
www.onbeing.org/program/james-martin-finding-god-in-all-things/7121
‘Seeing the Underside and Seeing God: Tattoos, Tradition, and Grace,’ with Pastor Nadia BolzWeber. October 23, 2014. www.onbeing.org/program/nadia-bolz-weber-seeing-the-undersideand-seeing-god-tattoos-tradition-and-grace/5896
‘The Evolution of the Science-Religion Debate,’ with Jim Bradley and Michael Ruse. June 26,
2014. www.onbeing.org/jim-bradley-and-michael-ruse-the-evolution-of-the-science-religiondebate/6403
‘No More Taking Sides,’ with Ali Abu Awwad and Rob Damelin. Awwaid is a Palestinian who lost
a brother to an Israeli soldier; Damelin is an Israeli who lost her son to a Palestinian sniper.
November 29, 2012. www.onbeing.org/program/no-more-taking-sides/134
‘Seeing Poverty After Katrina,’ with Dr. David Hilfiker. August 24, 2006.
http://www.onbeing.org/program/seeing-poverty-after-katrina/173
About the Lenten Book Project
For the past three years, the congregation at Holy Spirit Lutheran Church has been invited to
read a common book, and to gather in small groups for conversation during the season of Lent.
We started by reading 12 Steps to a Compassionate Life, by Karen Armstrong, in 2013, and last
year, read An Altar in the World, by Barbara Brown Taylor.
This year, we are inviting you to pick up Speaking of Faith, by Krista Tippett. Starting on
February 8, you can sign up to join a small group, or an email conversation. You can follow the
blog on our website, at www.hslckirkland.org, starting on Ash Wednesday. The chapters
outlined in this study guide will be used in worship on Sunday mornings, and during Lenten
worship on Wednesday nights at 7:00pm.
While we hope you will read the book, you can also be part of this project just by using the
study guide. On March 25, all the small groups will be invited to have dinner together at Holy
Spirit, and we’ll host a ‘big group’ conversation about our Lenten experiences.
This guide is designed to be used for small group discussion as well as personal reflection. In it,
you’ll find a short description of the six chapters in the book. Each chapter is partnered with a
scripture reading, which you are invited to use as a devotional reading for the week, and which
will be read on Sunday morning. You’ll also find questions, both for small group conversation
and for personal consideration. There’s space on each page for your own notes and reflections.
This year’s conversation includes a new twist. Speaking of Faith is not only a book, but a radio
program—an ongoing conversation which started in 2003. By visiting www.onbeing.org, you
can find Krista Tippett’s recorded conversations with many of the people featured in the book.
Each week, we have suggested one podcast to complement the reading. If you prefer, you can
listen to the podcast rather than read the chapter and participate in the small groups with the
same discussion questions. (Or you can do both!) We hope this will enable you to participate by
listening as well as reading.
This study guide was created by Pastor Katy McCallum Sachse of Holy Spirit Lutheran Church. You are welcome to use it in congregational settings with this
acknowledgment.