I just finished Speaking of Faith by Krista Tippett and reading it was like consuming a piece of fudge — I had to go slowly to savor every part of it. Her writing is like her speaking (duh) and she is an incredible wordsmith, making every word count in a way that caused me to slow down my reading speed so that I wouldn’t miss anything she said. Having been a semi-faithful listener of hers, I could hear her saying the words on the page (OK… maybe that was due to one of the shows on my iPod being her reading from her book) but her way of speaking is so unique that only she could phrase things the way she does.

The premise of the book (and her radio show) is that speaking of faith is something that transcends language and that what we know of someone’s beliefs is what we see manifested in that person. The Muslims she has interviewed are radically different than the Muslims we see plastered all over the news when it comes to speaking of Iraq or Afghanistan. She parses the things that we see in journalism (as she is trained as a journalist) and talks about how misleading much of the normal reporting is. She wants to promote understanding and much of that is done in first person interviews with people like Jimmy Carter, Ingrid Matson (first female president of the Islamic Society of North America), Leila Ahmed, Bruce Feiler, Sister Joan Chittister, Jaroslav Pelikan, Joe Carter (by far, my favorite show), and Richard Mouw. (By the way, I think everyone needs to download and listen to the conversation with Richard Mouw in light of the recent California Supreme Court ruling. It shows both sides of the issue very gracefully.)

The best part of the book for me (and it was all wonderful) was the last chapter in which she describes her struggles with depression very exquisitely. It was one of those passages (very short too in the grand scheme of the book) where she just captures the essence of what living with it is like — the numbness, the inability to feel joy, the thought that you might never really feel anything again… It was only maybe 5 pages of the 200 pages of the book but I just really resonated with it and it is probably the most real and accurate description that I have ever seen.

I highly recommend the book to anyone who approaches their faith intellectually in addition to emotionally.