Krista Tippett, Host of Public Radio's On Being, Here for Mendenhall Lecture Thursday

November 13, 2017

Krista Tippett -- a Peabody Award-winning broadcaster and New York Times best-selling author who hosts public radio's On Being -- will come to the campus of DePauw University this week. Tippett will present the Mendenhall Lecture this Thursday, November 16, at 7:30 p.m. in Gobin Memorial United Methodist Church. Her talk is titled "The Adventure of Civility" and is free and open to all.

Tippett, who studied history at Brown University, went to Bonn, West Germany in 1983 on a Fulbright Scholarship to study politics in Cold War Europe. In her twenties she worked in divided Berlin as a stringer for the New York Times and as a freelance correspondent for Newsweek, the International Herald Tribune, the BBC, and Die Zeit. She later became a special assistant to the U.S. Ambassador to West Germany.

She later lived in Spain, England, and Scotland for a time, then earned a M.Div. from Yale.

Tippett first proposed a show about religion to Minnesota Public Radio in the late 1990s. The program became a monthly series in 2001 and a weekly national program distributed by American Public Media in 2003. In 2013, Tippett left APM to start the non-profit production company, Krista Tippett Public Productions, which now distributes On Being to more than 400 public radio stations across America.

In 2014, Tippett received the National Humanities Medal at the White House for "thoughtfully delving into the mysteries of human existence. On the air and in print, Ms. Tippett avoids easy answers, embracing complexity and inviting people of ​every background to join her conversation about faith, ethics, and moral wisdom."

Tippett is the author of Speaking of Faith, a memoir of religion in our time. In 2010, she published Einstein’s God, drawn from her interviews at the intersection of science, medicine, and spiritual inquiry. Her New York Times best-seller Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living opens into the questions and challenges of this century. Maria Popova called it "a tremendously vitalizing read -- a wellspring of nuance and dimension amid our Flatland of artificial polarities, touching on every significant aspect of human life with great gentleness and a firm grasp of human goodness."

DePauw's Mendenhall Lectures, which were inaugurated in 1913, were endowed by the Reverend Doctor Marmaduke H. Mendenhall. His desire was to enable the University to bring to campus "persons of high and wide repute, of broad and varied scholarship" to address issues related to the academic dialogue concerning Christianity. Although Mendenhall was a pastor in the North Indiana Annual Conference of what was then called the Methodist Episcopal Church, one of the parents of the United Methodist Church, he explicity dictated that lectures be selected without regard to denominational divisions. The endowment has allowed DePauw to bring theological and religious scholars of international repute to campus for a century.

Back