Let’s Talk About It
by Kate Moos, managing producer
For years we’ve heard from all kinds of people that they are using the content of this program in learning environments — formal and informal, secular and religious. Book clubs, religious groups, high schools, colleges. I’ve always taken that to mean that the Krista Tippett conversation on any given week impels people to want to have new conversations of their own. We are an audience of talkers and listeners and learners.
Early on, we decided that developing learning tools (discussion guides, tutorials, etc.) was something we should try, and we’ve done a few over the years. Episodes produced with NEH funding, like our Niebuhr show or our shows on Einstein, come with study guides as part of the production because we have funds from NEH to produce them. But we just don’t have the resources to produce materials like those routinely.
So awhile ago we created a partnership with Church Publishing, or CPI, as part of a major outreach and engagement project funded by Lilly Endowment, giving them permission to use the program as the basis for church-based curricula aimed primarily at mainline Christian denominations. We think they’ve done a lovely job, and we want to bring these products to your attention because we hear from you all the time that it’s the sort of thing you need.
Four sets of small group materials are organized by topic area: Einstein’s God features our content on science and religion; Living Islam, obviously, focuses on the many aspects of the Muslim experience we’ve covered in our program; Sustainable Faith centers around issues of environment and stewardship; and Spiritual Heros selects some of Krista’s most memorable interviews with people you will likely recognize.
We hope you’ll use these materials and then let us know what you think about them!
