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I came back to religion - to taking it seriously in my own life, and finally to spending my days thinking and speaking with others about it - after a decade as a non-religious person. I spent most of my 20s, in the 1980s, in divided Berlin. It was fun for me to recall and make new sense of that in the process of writing the book. I found myself in amazing circumstances at a young age, living and working with people who were literally running the world and driving the most important issues of the age: the division of the world into Communism and Capitalism, the Wall in Berlin, the nuclear arms race.

But ultimately I saw that if you drill down to the heart of the grandest geopolitical crises, you are left with that same conundrum we grapple with in the most basic aspects of our daily lives - the complexity, frailty and promise of the human condition. I turned away from politics, and towards immersion in religious and spiritual traditions, because they analyze that. They are rich repositories for enduring questions and wisdom and practices to engage it. I love Reinhold Niebuhr's succinct, perfect line: "Man is his own most vexing problem." And more recently I discovered mystical, intriguing counterpart to it in the writing of Irish poet and philosopher John O'Donohue: "It's strange to be here. The mystery never leaves you."

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We are overwhelmed in our time by images of suffering from far away - devastation unfolding in real time in digital resolution and Dolby sound, lives being ruined before our eyes - that we don't know what to do with, how to live with. It's a kind of relief then to turn to another genre of dramatic images that bombard us: the lives of celebrities, people who by contrast "have it all." We can admire their excess of beauty and fashion and parties and love affairs and then, when their marriages end or they head into treatment, we can follow their plight knowing that they require nothing of us, not even guilt. They have the resources and all the opportunity in the world to fix for themselves what has gone wrong.

All this is by way of saying that I don't worry overly about our cultural interest in celebrities per se. I understand and participate in it and suspect it is as old as time. But as I've watched Britney Spears unravel before our eyes, in real time, with no end in sight, I have begun to think it's time now for a pause, a moment of cultural soul-searching. I've been profoundly disturbed by the numerous reports I've heard - not in People or Us but in major news outlets - gleefully tallying all the money she continues to make for paparazzi and other people around her, noting with amusement that the profits only rise as she sinks to ever-lower depths.

I made the transition from writing for radio to writing a book, and now I'm writing a blog. I'm fascinated - and more than a little daunted - by the way basic forms of language and discourse are evolving so rapidly. And I'm frankly amazed at how my primary subject - the vast spectrum of human experience we anchor in terms of religion, faith, and spirituality - has become a more fluid force in our culture in a relatively short period of time. It - or talk about it - is everywhere. And yet "fundamentalist" voices are not as prominent and defining as they once were. All the candidates for President this year - Democrats as well as Republicans - are open about their lives of faith. At the same time, non-religious people have joined their voices and perspectives to the new cultural adventure I believe we're on - of reimagining and re-engaging the act of "speaking of faith." Traveling around with the paperback these past few weeks I've experienced less fear than at this time last year, and a greater sense of possibility. I am most delighted when people tell me that reading the book gives them hope - that together we can begin to navigate this vital, messy, and important aspect of our common life with generosity, creativity, and grace.

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Krista Tippett is our guest blogger during the week of February 4th. If you have any questions for Krista Tippett, add a comment to any of her posts. Here is some brief information about Speaking of Faith:

Krista Tippett, widely becoming known as the Bill Moyers of radio, is one of the country’s most intelligent and insightful commentators on religion, ethics, and the human spirit. With this book, she draws on her own life story and her intimate conversations with both ordinary and famous figures, including Elie Wiesel, Karen Armstrong, and Thich Nhat Hanh, to explore complex subjects like science, love, virtue, and violence within the context of spirituality and everyday life. Her way of speaking about the mysteries of life—and of listening with care to those who endeavor to understand those mysteries—is nothing short of revolutionary.