On being with Christa Tippett is supported in part by the Fetzer Institute, helping build

the Spiritual Foundation for a loving world.

Fetzer's sharing Spiritual Heritage Report asks, how will we hold on to ancient wisdom

traditions while applying them creatively in today's time?

Learn more at Fetzer.org.

As any student of history knows, when time becomes history, very different dynamics come

into focus than the ones that are at any moment screaming for attention.

In our world of digital megaphones that privilege the immediate, it becomes harder to tell the

difference between what feels urgent and is actually important, actually poised to shift

the world on its axis.

So I was excited when Gal Beckerman's new book arrived, the title itself intrigues

and compels the quiet before.

He is a journalist with a special interest in history and words and ideas, how ideas are

past and debated and become defining in generational time, how conversation becomes culture shifting

relationship.

He attends to dynamics, we don't often take seriously enough, that every idea and discovery

that changes the world begins with seeds planted over long stretches and is always marked

by passages that look like abject failure.

Gal Beckerman offers fantastically useful insights into how our generations, media that can

scale things more rapidly than ever before can also inhibit the very ingredients that make

for lasting transformation.

At the same time, this lens on our world refreshes with its perspective on the way change happens

...