Show Notes
From Krista:
On April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech at Riverside Church in New York City called “A Time to Break Silence.” This is often referred to as his “Beyond Vietnam” Speech. His own allies criticized it as a risky departure from a focus on civil rights. But Dr. King had never seen his calling confined to those two words. The Vietnam War needed to end, he believed, and he needed to say that plain. And in the waging of this war — and all of its consequences for people at home, especially the poor — he saw an underlying crisis that threatened the very soul of our nation.
On that same date this year, the 59th anniversary of this speech, hundreds gathered again at Riverside for reflection, song, and a reading of portions of the speech. It was drafted by Dr. King’s friend and comrade Vincent Harding, a beloved former On Being guest, and many of his friends and family joined this year.
None of the words of this speech is as famous as the sentence “I have a dream.” This speech altogether gives voice to the less remembered and heeded evolution of the vision of Dr. King and Vincent Harding and others. It invokes the work that endures beyond leaders and events of the day, and that can be neglected at our peril if too many of us too narrowly focus our imaginations and creativity and callings on what transfixes and demoralizes in the moment. It calls for a “revolution of values” in the face of glaring contrasts of poverty and wealth and the human cost of a world order that settles differences with wars. That our world is broken, it tells us, should come as no surprise. There were deep moral and spiritual underpinnings to the events of 59 years ago, which we did not acknowledge, much less have risen to as a nation.
A line from this speech seems directly aimed at our ears and our hearts: “We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now.” What are the callings now, finally, for us to pick up in creating the world we want to inhabit in the beyond of this moment of great peril and an equal magnitude of possibility?
This is a conversation with two human beings who loved Vincent Harding and whom he loved and formed: Michelle Alexander and Lucas Johnson.
More from On Being with Krista Tippett
From Krista: I'm on record bemoaning across the years that “love” is the most watered-down word in the English language. I know that invoking love feels very soft for our hard realms of politics and war. Yet it is an enduring truth that love is the only force as powerful in a human body as fear. And we inhabit a world that calls us to grow up our capacity to love — and to redeem our relationships to neighbors, strangers, and enemies — as never before, both in the present and for the sake of the world beyond this age of violence we've come to inhabit. Rabbi Shai Held has written an epic theological work called Judaism is About Love. And, as he interrogates Judaism's complicated history with love, he makes an offering that is of relevance to us all.
From Krista: I was longing for a deep dive on the radiant and common-sense hope that Jason Reynolds embodies after I interviewed him at a Georgetown event last year. I got my chance at the 2025 Aspen Ideas Festival. Jason’s perspective is so urgent for the world we've now walked into: on giving ourselves grace to be hopeless, the virtue of stamina, and the hope that stays strong in him from his life in relationship with the very young in our midst — "the arbiters and purveyors of the future" — as well as an occasional stranger in a bar. Jason himself is preternaturally wise as well as talented and kind and humble. He's become a friend across the years and is one of my favorite people in the world.
From Krista: A few months ago, I was invited to sit with four people sharing a very different Israeli-Palestinian story than that which comes to us in headlines. They are members of the Parents Circle - Bereaved Families Forum, a very special community. It's composed of hundreds of Palestinian and Israeli families, who despite having paid the highest price of the conflict between their peoples, choose to metabolize their loss as ground of shared suffering and possible reconciliation. I’m so grateful to share that conversation with you now. You will hear their various stories of a transformation of perspective and path. You will hear me invoke a notion of "deep truth" from physics that is vividly with me in this time. Terrible ruptures and escalating violence are part of the truth of what we see ourselves capable. But they are not the whole truth, not the inevitable future. Courageous experiments in healing and transformation are also a reality of our time. In a packed room in New York City, I think we all felt like we were witnessing something unimaginable if you only judge the potentials of humanity from the extreme actions that shape what we call the news. The Bereaved Families Forum is extremism in a life-giving, heart-opening key. We left that room — and may you leave this listening — feeling a little bit healed ourselves, with a hopefulness become more magnetic and more reasonable. This event was hosted by the American Friends of the Parents Circle – Bereaved Israelis and Palestinians for Peace. My conversation partners were Robi Damelin, Arab Aramin, Mohamed Abu Jafar, and Liora Eilon. Liora, who lost her son in their kibbutz on October 7, 2023, is one of the newest members of this group. __ Listen to Krista’s original conversation with Robi Damelin and Ali Abu Awaad in the On Being podcast feed; the episode is called “No More Taking Sides”. And learn much more about this beautiful community at theparentscircle.org. The American Friends community website is parentscirclefriends.org. Find an excellent transcript of this show, edited by humans, on our show page.
From Krista: This episode is a journey inside what I've come to see as a parallel universe unfolding, where our species is unlocking knowledge about ourselves and capacities for radical healing of the most extreme trauma and distress. These findings are even giving rise to dramatic healing alliances across political and social lines that are inflamed in the culture at large. At universities and research laboratories around the U.S. and the world, there are countless clinical studies, yielding results it’s hard not at times to call miraculous — for complex PTSD, long-term addiction, treatment-resistant depression. What I’m talking about are therapeutically-administered treatments with plant medicines and chemical compounds we call psychedelic or empathogenic. Use those words, and many of us — including me until not that long ago — might become wary. Like all forces of great power, these can cut in every direction — the dark and the light of the human condition. But the conversation you are about to hear, with one of the leading neuroscientists in this field, revolves around serious, important research in settings designed for careful, beneficial human effect. Gül Dölen's groundbreaking contribution to all of us is in her fascinating insight into what psychedelically-assisted therapies are revealing about the workings of the human brain and the brain's capacity to change and the human capacity for major transformation altogether. The potential consequences of this science are intimate and civilizational at once. I see them as a stunning ray of hope in a struggling world. I interviewed Gül Dölen at the 2025 Aspen Ideas Festival. Find an excellent transcript of this show, edited by humans, on our show page.