On Being Engages a Wide Audience in Innovative Multi-Media Exploration of Science and the Big Questions

On Being, a production of Krista Tippett Public Productions (KTPP), respectfully requests support from the John Templeton Foundation for media exploration of Science and the Big Questions. On Being is the only program American media to take up the spiritual and intellectual content of religion – and to combine this with an in-depth exploration of the insights of science in contemporary human self-understanding and spiritual growth. The program is broadcast on 337 public radio stations across the U.S., with 677,000 weekly listeners and 1.2 million monthly podcasters. On Being is known for a humanizing, innovative broadcast-online interface in a rapidly changing media landscape. In ten years of broadcast, the program has gathered an unusually diverse and engaged global audience. On Being is entrepreneurial public service media – as much social enterprise as a radio show – and has recently made a successful transition to a more nimble, dynamic, independent organizational structure. This proposal to the John Templeton Foundation requests support for new content creation that will span every core aspect of the Science and the Big Questions area. This proposal also requests support for efforts we will undertake in the coming years to leverage the cutting edge of technological advance towards deepened mission, purpose, and impact. The activities described in this proposal would equip the show and its listeners to be forces for evolving the science-religion debate of recent centuries into a more mature, constructive conversation and interplay. It would deepen cultural fluency about the positive capacities of the human condition, human purpose, and the human place in the cosmos. It would bring the intersection of scientific insights, philosophy and theology into the consciousness of exponentially expanding circles of contemporary people – so that they in turn might bring new knowledge and action into their disciplines, families, classrooms and communities.