Study and work abroad After graduating from
Brown University in 1983, Tippett was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study at the
University of Bonn in
West Germany. She wrote about her experiences in
Rostock in "They Just Say 'Over There'" published by
Die Zeit. In 1984, she became a
stringer for
The New York Times in divided Berlin, where she established herself as a freelance foreign correspondent. She reported and wrote for
The Times,
Newsweek, the
BBC, the
International Herald Tribune, and
Die Zeit. In 1986, Tippett became a special political assistant to the senior United States diplomat in West Berlin,
John C. Kornblum. The next year she became chief aide in Berlin to the U.S. ambassador to West Germany,
Richard Burt. She has written that moral questions arising from that experience of seeing "high power, up close" eventually led to the spiritual, philosophical, and theological curiosities that have defined her work since.
Radio and non-profit media Tippett received a
Master of Divinity degree from
Yale University in 1994. Tippett proposed a show about religion to Minnesota Public Radio in the late 1990s. The radio program became a monthly series in 2001 and a weekly national program distributed by
American Public Media in 2003. In 2013, Tippett left American Public Media to co-found a non-profit production company, Krista Tippett Public Productions, which she described as "a social enterprise with a radio show at its heart". Tippett is also the co-creator and convener of the Civil Conversations Project, which she has described as "an emergent approach to healing our fractured civic spaces".
Interview style "The Tippett style", as described by the
New York Times, "represents a fusion of all her parts—the child of small-town church comfortable in the pews; the product of Yale Divinity School able to parse text in Greek and theology in German; and, perhaps most of all, the diplomat seeking to resolve social divisions".
Awards In July 2014, Tippett was awarded the 2013
National Humanities Medal at the White House for "thoughtfully delving into the mysteries of human existence." She received a
George Foster Peabody Award in 2008, for "The Ecstatic Faith of Rumi,"and three
Webby awards for excellence in electronic media. Her book, ''Einstein's God
(2010), was a New York Times'' bestseller. == Personal life ==