Problem-solving the crises of the modern world is often characterized by an economy and architecture of exploitation and instrumentalization, viewing relationships as transactional, efficient, and calculative. But this sort of thinking leaves a remainder of emptiness.

Finding hope in a time of crises requires a more human work of covenant and commitment. Based in agrarian principles of stability, place, connection, dependence, interwoven relatedness, and a rooted economy, we can find hope in “Love’s Braided Dance” of telling the truth, keeping our promises, showing mercy, and bearing with one another.

In this episode, Evan Rosa welcomes Norman Wirzba, the Gilbert T. Rowe Distinguished Professor of Christian Theology at Duke Divinity School, to discuss his recent book Love’s Braided Dance: Hope in a Time of Crisis.

Together they discuss love and hope through the agrarian principles that acknowledge our physiology and materiality; how the crises of the moment boil down to one factor: whether young people want to have kids of their own; God’s love as erotic and how that impacts our sense of self-worth; the “sympathetic attunement” that comes from being loved by a community, a place, and a land; transactional versus covenantal relationships; the meaning of giving and receiving forgiveness in an economy of mercy; and finally the difficult truth that transformation or moral perfection can never replace reconciliation.

About Norman Wirzba

Norman Wirzba is the Gilbert T. Rowe Distinguished Professor of Christian Theology at Duke Divinity School, as well as director of research at Duke University’s Office of Climate and Sustainability. His books include Love’s Braided Dance: Hope in a Time of Crisis, Agrarian Spirit: Cultivating Faith, Community, and the Land;This Sacred Life: Humanity’s Place in a Wounded World; and Food & Faith.

Listen to Norman Wirzba on Food & Faith in Episode 49: "God's Love Made Delicious"

Show Notes

• Norman Wirzba, Love’s Braided Dance: Hope in a Time of Crisis
• How the crises of the moment boil down to one expression: whether young people want to have kids of their own.
• How Norman Wirzba became friends with Wendell Berry
• Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America
• “Love’s Braided Dance” from “In Rain”, a poem by Wendell Berry
• “You shouldn’t forget the land, and you shouldn’t forget your grandfather.”
• Return to agricultural practices
• Sacred gifts
• “An agricultural life can afford doesn't guarantee, I think, but it affords the opportunity for you to really handle the fundamentals of life, air, water, soil, plant, tactile  connection that has to, at the same time, be  a practical connection, which means you have to to bring into your handling of things the attempt to understand what you're handling.”
• Anonymity
• Norman Wirzba reads Wendell Berry’s “In Rain”
• Hyperconnectivity and the meaning of being “braided together”
• Love as Erotic Hope—”the first of God’s love is an erotic love, which is an outbound love that wants  something other than God to be and to  flourish. And that outbound movement is generated by God's desire for For others to be beautiful, to be good, and I think that's the basis of our lives, right?”
• Audre Lorde and patriarchy
• Affirming the goodness of ourselves and the world as created and loved by God
• How the pornographic gaze distorts the meaning of erotic love
• Dancing as a metaphor for God’s erotic love
• Deep sympathy and anticipation, and the improvisational movement of dance
• Woodworking: taking time and negotiation
• “Sympathetic attunement” and improvisation
• Managing the unpredictable nature of our world
• Revelation of who you are and who the other is—it’s hard to reveal ourselves to each other
• Honesty and depth that is missing from relationships
• Learning the skill of self-revealing
• Belonging and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s sense that a people could be “loved by the land”
• Physiological, material reality of our dependence on each other, from womb to tomb
• “The illusion that we could ever be alone or stand alone or survive alone is so dishonest about our living.”
• Denying our needs, acknowledging our needs, and inhabiting trust to work through struggle together
• “It’s not about solutions.”
• “Some of the needs  are profound and deep and they take time and they are  never fully resolved. But it's this experience of knowing that you're not alone, that you're in a context where you are going to be cared for, you'll be nurtured, and you'll be forgiven when you make mistakes means that you can carry on together. And that's often enough.”
• Transactional vs covenantal approach to relationships
• Granting forgiveness and receiving forgiveness
• Transformation is not a replacement for reconciliation
• Rather than denying wrongdoing or seeking to eliminate it, focusing on a renewed effort to be merciful with each other.
• Economy and architecture
• “So how is the land supposed to love you back if it has in fact been turned into a toxic dumping zone?”
• “Think about how much fear is in our architecture.”
• Building was vernacular—people were involved in the development of physical structures
• J. R. R. Tolkein, The Lord of the Rings, The Two Towers: Ents vs Saruman, natural agrarianism vs technological domination
• Joy Clarkson, You Are a Tree
• Rooted economy
• “Is anything worthy of our care?”
• When a parent chooses a phone and loses a moment of presence with children
• “Go to some one and tell them, ‘I want to try to be better at being in the presence of those around me.’”
• Be deliberate

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Norman Wirzba
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Alexa Rollow, Kacie Barrett, Emily Brookfield, and Zoë Halaban
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Can music teach us how to live? In this interview Evan Rosa invites Daniel Chua—a musicologist, composer at heart, and Professor of Music at the University of Hong Kong—to discuss his latest book, Music & Joy: Lessons on the Good Life.

Together they discuss the vastly different ancient and modern approaches to music; the problem with seeing music for consumption and entertainment; the ways different cultures conceive of music and wisdom: from Jewish to Greek to Christian; seeing the disciplined spontaneity of jazz improvisation fitting with both a Confucian perspective on virtue, and Christian newness of incarnation; and finally St. Augustine, the worshipful jubilance of singing in the midst of one’s work to find rhythm and joy that is beyond suffering; and a final benediction and blessing for every music lover.

Throughout the interview, we’ll offer a few segments of the music Daniel discusses, including Beethoven’s Opus 132 and the Ode to Joy from Beethoven’s 9th symphony, and John Cage’s controversial 4’33”—which Daniel recommends we listen to every single day, and which we’re going to play during this episode toward the end.

Show Notes

• Music and Joy: Lessons on the Good Life by Daniel Chua (https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300264210/music-and-joy/)
• Can music teach us how to live?
• The emotional relationship we have with music
• Everyone identifies with music
• How did you come to love music and write on it?
• Musicologist
• The Sound of Music soundtrack (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeSQLYs2U8X0nTi15MHjMAWim3PxIyEqI)
• Listening to music at a young age
• Love of Beethoven as a child
• What about Beethoven in particular spoke to you? Do you have memories of what feeling or challenges or thoughts or kind of ambitions were there?
• Beethoven as harder to listen to and sit through as it is quite disruptive and intellectual in style
• Beethoven and Freedom by Daniel Chua (https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/beethoven-freedom-daniel-k-l-chua/1126575597)
• What pieces in particular, or what about Beethoven’s composition was particularly moving to you?
• Beethoven’s final string quartets (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qaq881bwRI)
• “It’s very strange. It’s like the most complex and the most simple music. And somehow they speak very deeply to my soul and my heart. And you just want to listen to them all the time.”
• A Minor String Quartet, Opus 132 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUob2dcQTWA)
• A piece of thanksgiving to God
• Messages sent by music as a young person about how things come together
• Music interacts with us
• Playing to understand how it is that a piece works
• How do we replicate what music communicates in our daily lives?
• Beethoven’s Ode to Joy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0EjVVjJraA)
• Stephen Pinker - music is auditory cheesecake
• “If music is joy, then what is it? What kind of joy is it?”
• Consuming music is not the same as joy; music is not simply entertainment
• The fanfare of terror in Ode to Joy
• “Humans are strange. We are very sinful creatures so we tend to weaponize whatever we have to weaponize and we weaponize music too.”
• “Whatever we do with music as humans, there is something more in music that speaks beyond out puny human point of view of music.”
• Our view of music and joy today are too human; music is cosmic
• We tune ourselves, our virtues, our wisdom to the rhythm of the universe.
• Joy as something we obey, we listen to.
• “Music isn’t human. Music is actually creation.”
• Music, the Logos, and Wisdom
• Music as something that teaches us how to live.
• Wisdom taking delight, joy, in the universe.
• Music is deeply beautiful; there is profound goodness to it
• A lesson in flourishing found in music, in the tuning of ourselves
• Music is truthful; Christ as an instrument and salvation as being in tune
• Sheet music v performance as an analogy for incarnation
• Music as an event that is happening
• Harmony and coming together - finding one’s place within the turn; Taoist and Confucian traditions
• “Jazz offers this fantastic expression of a different kind of wisdom born through suffering and grief.”
• Improvisation in jazz; an exuberance - the weird and the spontaneous alongside the ordered
• Music as an opportunity for emotion and a way to communicate and understand; spirituals and slave hymns
• “The order of the cosmos is basically tragic. It’s a bad, bad world. And music is a kind of consolation in that.”
• “Music can’t help but be meaningful.”
• 4'33" by John Cage (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWVUp12XPpU)
• Whatever we are, music is there.
• Using music to make sense of things; really attend to the world and its music.
• Augustine’s Book of Music “De Musica” (https://archive.org/details/augustine-on-music-de-musica/page/159/mode/2up)
• The spontaneous music of the world
• Defiant joy in the music of slave hymns; a joy that will not be crushed
• A robust understanding of joy
• Music tells us something about the world, the cosmos, of creation - Music reflects the heart of God.

About Daniel Chua

Daniel K. L. Chua is the Chair Professor of Music at the University of Hong Kong. Before joining Hong Kong University to head the School of Humanities, he was a Fellow and the Director of Studies at St John’s College, Cambridge, and later Professor of Music Theory and Analysis at King’s College London. He is the recipient of the 2004 Royal Musical Association’s Dent Medal, an Honorary Fellow of the American Musicological Society, and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. He served as the President of the International Musicological Society 2017-2022. He has written widely on music, from Monteverdi to Stravinsky, but is particularly known for his work on Beethoven, the history of absolute music, and the intersection between music, philosophy and theology. His publications include The ‘Galitzin’ Quartets of Beethoven (Princeton, 1994), Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge, 1999), Beethoven and Freedom (Oxford, 2017), Alien Listening: Voyager’s Golden Record and Music From Earth (Zone Books, 2021), Music and Joy: Lessons on the Good Life (Yale 2024), ‘Rioting With Stravinsky: A Particular Analysis of the Rite of Spring’ (2007), and ‘Listening to the Self: The Shawshank Redemption and the Technology of Music’ (2011).

• Image Credit: “Beethoven with the Manuscript of the Missa Solemnis”, Joseph Karl Stieler, 1820, oil on canvas, Beethoven-Haus, Bonn (Public Domain, Wikimedia Link)
• Ludwig van Beethoven, String Quartet No. 15 in A minor, Op. 132: iii. “Heilige Dankgesang eines Genesenden an die Gottheit” (”Holy song of thanks of a convalescent to the Divinity”), Amadeus Quartet, 1962 (via Internet Archive)
• Ludwig van Beethoven, The Symphony No 9 in D minor, Op 125 "Choral" (1824), Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Otto Klemperer, Live Performance, 17 May 1956 (via Internet Archive)
• Traditional Chinese Music, Instrument: Ehru, “Yearning for Love” Remembering of The Xiao on The Phoenix Platform (via Internet Archive)
• John Coltrane, “The Inch Worm”, Live in Paris, 1962 (via Internet Archive)
• 4’33”, John Cage, 1960tr
• The McIntosh County Shouters perform “Gullah-Geechee Ring Shout” (Library of Congress)

“The whole of human existence is like some sweet parable told in the most improbable place and circumstances. … God values our humanity. … One of the things that's fascinating about the Hebrew Bible is that it declared and was loyal to the fact that God is good and creation is good.”

Novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson joins Miroslav Volf to discuss her latest book, Reading Genesis. Together they discuss why she took up this project of biblical commentary and what scripture and theological reflection means to her; how she thinks of Genesis as a theodicy (or a defense against the problem of evil and suffering); the grace of God; the question of humanity’s goodness; how to understand the flood; the relationship between divine providence and working for moral progress; and much more.

About Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson is an award-winning American novelist and essayist. Her fictional and non-fictional work includes recurring themes of Christian spirituality and American political life. In a 2008 interview with the Paris Review, Robinson said, "Religion is a framing mechanism. It is a language of orientation that presents itself as a series of questions. It talks about the arc of life and the quality of experience in ways that I've found fruitful to think about."

Her novels include: Housekeeping (1980, Hemingway Foundation/Pen Award, Pulitzer Prize finalist), Gilead (2004, Pulitzer Prize), Home (2008, National Book Award Finalist), Lila (2014, National Book Award Finalist), and most recently, Jack (2020). Robinson's non-fiction works include Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution (1989), The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998), Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (2010), When I was a Child I Read Books: Essays (2012), The Givenness of Things: Essays (2015), and What Are We Doing Here?: Essays (2018). Her latest book is Reading Genesis (2024).

Marilynne Robinson received a B.A., magna cum laude, from Brown University in 1966 and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Washington in 1977. She has served as a writer-in-residence or visiting professor at a variety universities, included Yale Divinity School in Spring 2020. She currently teaches at the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. She has served as a deacon for the Congregational United Church of Christ. Robinson was born and raised in Sandpoint, Idaho and now lives in Iowa City.

Show Notes

• Get your copy of Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson
• Marilynne Robinson’s New York Times article, “What Literature Owes the Bible” (2011)
• Reading Genesis as the singular ancient literature that it is
• The Bible (and Genesis) as theodicy
• How Calvin and Luther influenced Robinson’s approach to Genesis
• The benefit of reading Genesis as a whole
• The story of Joseph
• The fractal nature of the bible
• Unsparing, honest descriptions of the characters
• “I think that the fact that they are recognizably flawed creatures is, what that reflects is the grace of God. He is enthralled by these people that must have been a fairly continuous disappointment, you know? We have to understand humankind better, I think, in order to understand what overplus there is in a human being that God loves them despite their being so human.”
• “An amazing little theater of domestic dysfunction.”
• Abraham and Isaac: “Poor Isaac … or he could just be a plain old disappointing child.”
• “The Bible is a theodicy.”
• God’s goodness, and a defense of God
• God’s value of humanity and the conservation of the human self
• “God stands by creation.”
• Humanism in Genesis
• “Humanity sinks so deep into evil. that they become near incarnations of evil.”
• Genesis 6: “Every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was Only evil and continually.”
• Total depravity and the bleak view of humanity
• Noah and the Flood
• “… there's a kind of a strange lawlessness of Genesis.”
• “When God remakes the world after Noah, after the flood, he does not change human beings. He gives them exactly the same blessings and instructions that he did originally, which is simply another statement of his very deeply tested loyalty to us as we are.”
• “Finding a humane way to deal with the inhumanity of human beings.”
• Genesis 8: “Because human beings are evil, I will never destroy them.”
• Grace as a condition of possibility for all life
• The similarities between Hebrew Bible as a philosophic text, drawing influences from cultures around them
• “what is a greater question of theodicy than the fact that populations are wiped off the face of the earth every so often—it must have been so common in the ancient world with plagues and wars and all the rest of it.”
• “Every human, every thought, all the time: evil.”
• “Genesis is a preparation for Exodus because the solution to human wickedness, which nevertheless does not violate human nature, is law.”
• What is the moral purpose of humanity?
• The roaring cosmos and modern atheisms: Schopenhauer and Nietzsche on moral purpose is gone, humanity is just a little boat amidst a storm
• “The whole of human existence is like some sweet parable told in the most improbable place and circumstances.”
• Charles Taylor’s Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment
• Providence and moral progress
• “We’re still terribly violent. Terribly violent people.” “And terribly blind to our violence.”
• Revelation and God’s control of an otherwise nasty world
• The possibility of human encounter

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Marilynne Robinson and Miroslav Volf
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Emily Brookfield
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Rev. William Barber and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove discuss the political, moral, and spiritual dimensions of poverty. Together, they co-authored White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy, and they’re collaborators at the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School.

About Rev. William Barber

Bishop William J. Barber II, DMin, is a Professor in the Practice of Public Theology and Public Policy and Founding Director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School. He serves as President and Senior Lecturer of Repairers of the Breach, Co-Chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call For Moral Revival, Bishop with The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries, and has been Pastor of Greenleaf Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), Goldsboro, NC, for the past 29 years.

He is the author of four books: We Are Called To Be A Movement; Revive Us Again: Vision and Action in Moral Organizing; The Third Reconstruction: Moral Mondays, Fusion Politics, and The Rise of a New Justice Movement; and Forward Together: A Moral Message For The Nation.

Bishop Barber served as president of the North Carolina NAACP from 2006-2017 and on the National NAACP Board of Directors from 2008-2020. He is the architect of the Forward Together Moral Movement that gained national acclaim in 2013 with its Moral Monday protests at the North Carolina General Assembly. In 2015, he established Repairers of the Breach to train communities in moral movement building through the Moral Political Organizing Leadership Institute and Summit Trainings (MPOLIS). In 2018, he co-anchored the relaunch of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival— reviving the SCLC’s Poor People’s Campaign, which was originally organized by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., welfare rights leaders, workers’ rights advocates, religious leaders, and people of all races to fight poverty in the U.S.

A highly sought-after speaker, Bishop Barber has given keynote addresses at hundreds of national and state conferences, including the 2016 Democratic National Convention, the 59th Inaugural Prayer Service for President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, and the Vatican’s conference on Pope Francis’s encyclical “Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home.

He is a 2018 MacArthur Foundation Genius Award recipient and a 2015 recipient of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Award and the Puffin Award.

Bishop Barber earned a Bachelor’s Degree from North Carolina Central University, a Master of Divinity from Duke University, and a Doctor of Ministry from Drew University with a concentration in Public Policy and Pastoral Care. He has had ten honorary doctorates conferred upon him.

About Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove is an author, preacher, and community-builder who has worked with faith-rooted movements for social change for more than two decades. He is the founder of School for Conversion, a popular education center in Durham, North Carolina, and co-founder of the Rutba House, a house of hospitality in Durham’s Walltown neighborhood.

Mr. Wilson-Hartgrove is the author of more than a dozen books, including the daily prayer guide, Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals, New Monasticism, The Wisdom of Stability, Reconstructing the Gospel, and Revolution of Values. He is a regular preacher and teacher in churches across the US and Canada and a member of the Red Letter Christian Communicators network.

Show Notes

• Center for Public Theology and Public Policy’s ten-session online course: https://www.theologyandpolicy.yale.edu/inaugural-conference
• Get your copy of White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy: https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324094876

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Rev. William Barber and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, with Ryan McAnnally-Linz
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Kacie Barrett
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Julian of Norwich is known and loved for the lines revealed to her by God, “All shall be well and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” But beyond the comfort of this understandably uplifting phrase, what are theological and philosophical insights we might learn from this anonymous medieval Christian mystic and anchoress?

Ryan McAnnally-Linz joins Evan Rosa to discuss the historical context of Julian of Norwich, her life and vocation as an anchoress, and the story of near-death experience and subsequent mystical visions that led her to write such theologically rich and uplifting words—which comprise the earliest known writing by a woman in English. Together they have an extended discussion of a rather marvelous segment from the Long Text of the Revelation of Divine Love, sections 46-58, and in particular we look at the revelation Julian herself was most puzzled and mystified by during her own life, discovering understanding only decades after having received the vision: Section 51, the Parable of the Lord and the Servant.

Image Credit: adapted from The Lives of the Saints Gallus, Magnus, Otmar and Wiboradain German, 1451–60. St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 602, p. 303.

Show Notes

• “All shall be well” as an introduction to Julian for many
• Rowan Williams on Julian as one of the greatest English language theologians
• Who was Julian? How she thinks and what we can draw from her for the purposes of theological insight and spiritual maturity?
• Found Julian in a medieval survey course and she has remained with him
• What caught you in Julian? Why did it stick with you?
• She synthesizes a visionary experience with deep theological reflection: subtle and sophisticated theologian; simplicity, earnestness, and virtuosity
• So give us a little bit of her biography. I know that we know precious little, but what do we know? And maybe give us some of the historical context of her?
• Couple of manuscripts of her writing; the short and the long text
• Margery Kempe visits Julian to make a request in The Book of Margery Kempe (https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/publication/staley-the-book-of-margery-kempe)
• Anchoress and is attached to a church in Norwich; 1340s first and second waves of the Black Death; mass loss and trauma
• The text is less focused on herself outside of the visions that happen on what she believes is her death bed.
• What is the spiritual occupation of an anchoress or anchorite?
• Anchorite as isolated spiritual calling different from monks and hermits; life is in this one cell
• Do you know what motivations are there for that spiritual vocation in the church? Why would anyone do this?
• Anchorite ceremonies are like funeral rites; a death to the world, living only for prayer
• The showings - 16 visions; prays for mind of the passion, bodily sickness, and three wounds (contrition, compassion, and willful longing for God)
• The suffering of Christ and his wounds and their popularity in medieval devotional practice
• 16 showings that are intertwined and vary in form (visual, auditory, bodily, mental)
• The last showing, which she ponders for the rest of her life.
• What are some of the core philosophical, theological, or other concepts that are most salient for understanding Julian?
• Julian understands herself as beholden to the church, its teachings, and its tradition - wrestling with these and her visions.
• A Vision Shown to a Devout Woman by Julian (https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/0-271-02547-6.html)
• A Revelation of Love by Julian (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/261039/revelations-of-divine-love-by-julian-of-norwich-translated-by-elizabeth-spearing-introduction-and-notes-by-a-c-spearing/)
• Augustinian tradition is appealed to—his teachings on evil and sin, Christian Platonism
• Julian as a Trinitarian thinker
• What would you say about her understanding of love?
• Later visions in life and praying for many years for understanding —Love is THE thing for Julian, it’s the whole thing.
• Love as joyful communion but also a passionate willingness to sacrifice for one’s beloved
• A Short Play: The Lord and the Servant (from the long text)
• Chapter 51 of the Long Text
• Red herrings in Julian; the medieval trope of enumerating
• The perplexing vision of the servant in the hole ?
• Reconciling the goodness of the world with sin; dealing with what she is seeing from God and what the church teaches about sin—wresting with the details
• The Fall, the “Felix Culpa” or the “Happy Fault,” and the servant in the hole
• God looks without blame and that complicates church teaching on sin; layers in the narrative, God, humanity, Christ
• Being drawn into the puzzling and the pondering experienced by Julian inspired by her writing; finding comfort in a loving God that we cannot see clearly
• How God sees
• “Our life and our being are in God.”
• Chapter 49 of Julian’s Showings
• “She’s saying, sorry sin, good creatures are good creatures and their goodness qua creatures of God is kept safe and whole in God, regardless of what their concrete existential messed-upness might be.”
• Julian says: “Jesus is all who shall be saved. And all who shall be saved are Jesus and all through God's love along with the obedience, humility and patience and other virtues which pertain to us.”
• Totus Christi: Jesus as both head and body of the church
• Julian says: “All people who shall be saved while we are in this world have in us a marvelous mixture of both weal and woe. We have in us our risen Lord Jesus. We have in us the misery of the harm of Adam's falling and dying. We are steadfastly protected by Christ, and by the touch of His grace, we are raised into sure trust of salvation. And by Adam's fall, our perceptions are so shattered in various ways, by sins and by different sufferings, that we are so darkened and blinded that we can hardly find any comfort. But inwardly, we wait for God and trust faithfully that we shall receive mercy and grace, for this is God's own operation within us. And in His goodness, He opens the eye of our understanding, and by this we gain sight, sometimes more, sometimes less, according to the ability that God gives us to receive it.”
• The servant out of the hole; the mixture of weal and woe within us
• “She says at some point, ‘Peace and love are always at work in us, but we are not always in peace and love.’”
• Even when we don’t feel God, Julian wants us to know the comfort that he is there.
• Julian writes: “There neither can, nor shall be anything at all between God and man's soul. He wants us to know that the noblest thing he ever made is humankind and its supreme essence and highest virtue is the blessed soul of Christ. And furthermore, he wants us to know that his precious soul was beautifully bound to him in the making. With a knot which is so subtle and so strong that it is joined into God, and in this joining, it is made eternally holy. … Furthermore, he wants us to know that all the souls which will be eternally saved in heaven are bound and united in this union and made holy in this holiness.”
• The Beauty of the Middle English it was originally written in: “one-ing”
• “Christ's union with God is our union with God by virtue of Christ's union with us.”
• The meaning of atonement for Julian of Norwich
• The soul as an intricately woven knot; one knot that is interwoven with those of others by and through God—atonement, the one-ing of humans and God; being tied together and pulled in by the incarnation
• “It’s Julian reminding me that my blindness doesn’t have the final say, doesn’t actually say anything about what’s real and true and how God sees.”

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Ryan McAnnally-Linz
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Alexa Rollow, Kacie Barrett, and Macie Bridge
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Dallas Willard (1935-2013) was an influential philosopher and beloved author and speaker on Christian spiritual formation. He had the unique gift of being able to speak eloquently to academic and popular audiences, and it’s fascinating to observe the ways his philosophical thought pervades and influences his spiritual writings—and vice versa.

In this episode, Steve Porter (Senior Research Fellow and Executive Director of the Martin Institute, Westmont College / Affiliate Professor of Spiritual Formation at Biola University) joins Evan Rosa to explore the key concepts and ideas that appear throughout Dallas Willard’s philosophical and spiritual writings, including: epistemological realism; a relational view of knowledge; how knowledge makes love possible; phenomenology and how the mind experiences, represents, and comes into contact with reality; how the human mind can approach the reality of God with a love for the truth; moral psychology; and Dallas’s concerns about the recent resistance, loss, and disappearance of moral knowledge.

About Dallas Willard

Dallas Willard (1935-2013) was a philosopher, minister and beloved author and speaker on Christian philosophy and spiritual formation. For a full biography, visit Dallas Willard Ministries online.

About Steve Porter

Dr. Steve Porter is Senior Research Fellow and Executive Director of the Martin Institute for Christianity & Culture at Westmont College, and an affiliate Professor of Theology and Spiritual Formation at the Institute for Spiritual Formation and Rosemead School of Psychology (Biola University). Steve received his Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Southern California and M.Phil. in philosophical theology at the University of Oxford.

Steve teaches and writes in Christian spiritual formation, the doctrine of sanctification, the integration of psychology and theology, and philosophical theology. He co-edited Until Christ is Formed in You: Dallas Willard and Spiritual Formation, Psychology and Spiritual Formation in Dialogue, and Dallas’s final academic book: The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge. He is the author of Restoring the Foundations of Epistemic Justification: A Direct Realist and Conceptualist Theory of Foundationalism, and co-editor of Christian Scholarship in the 21st Century: Prospects and Perils. In addition to various book chapters, he has contributed articles to the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Journal of Spiritual Formation and Soul Care, Philosophia Christi, Faith and Philosophy, Journal of Psychology and Theology, Themelios, Christian Scholar’s Review, etc. Steve and his wife Alicia live with their son Luke and daughter Siena in Long Beach, CA.

Show Notes

• The Martin Institute for Christianity & Culture at Westmont College
• Dallas Willard Ministries (Free Online Resources)
• Dallas Willard, The Spirit of Disciplines
• Willard as both spiritual formation teacher/pastor and intellectual/philosopher
• Gary Moon, Becoming Dallas Willard
• Dallas Willard Ministries
• Conversatio Divina
• Phenomenology—“One of the principles of phenomenology is you want to kind of help others come to see what you've seen.”
• Willard “presenting himself to God” while teaching
• “The kingdom of God was in the room.”
• The importance of finding your own way into your spiritual practices
• An ontology of knowing and epistemological realism: “We can come to know things the way they are.”
• What does it mean to say that being precedes knowledge or that metaphysics precedes epistemology? What does that imply for spiritutal formation?
• What is real?
• Operating on accurate information about reality
• Dallas Willard on Husserl: “What is most intriguing in Husserl's thought to me, the always hopeful realist, is the way he works out a theory of the substance and nature of consciousness and knowledge, which allows that knowledge to grasp a world that it does not make.”
• The Cambridge Companion to Husserl
• The philosophical tradition of “saving the appearances”
• Mind-world relationship
• The affinity between concepts and their objects
• Dallas Willard on concepts and objects: “On my view, thoughts and their concepts do not modify the objects which make up reality. They merely match up or fail to match up with them in a certain way. Thus, there would be a way things are, and the realism there would be vindicated along with the possibility at least of a God's eye view.”
• Lying as a disconnection from the truth and therefore from the world
• Agency in our choice to know God and pursue knowing God
• The role of sincerity and honesty in shared reality
• Richard Rorty, “Solidarity or Objectivity”: “breaking free of the shackles of objectivity”
• Dallas Willard in “Where Is Moral Knowledge?”: “One way of characterizing the condition of North American society at present is to say that moral knowledge, knowledge of good and evil, of what is morally admirable and despicable, right and wrong, is no longer available in our world to people generally. It has disappeared as a reliable resource for living.”
• Knowledge used to justify violence versus knowledge used to counter injustice
• Moral relativism vs moral absolutism—which is the problem today?
• Moral absolutism is often not rooted in knowledge, but a feeling of certainty
• Dallas Willard, *The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge* (also available here)
• Social causes for moral knowledge having disappeared from public life
• Moral knowledge provides the place to stand for justice
• What is it to be a good person?
• Emmanuel Levinas and the face of the other
• Dallas Willard in The Divine Conspiracy, “The life and words that Jesus brought into the world came in the form of information and reality.”
• Becoming a student of Jesus
• Willard’s four fundamental questions: What is real? What is the good life? Who is the good person? How does one become good?
• Dallas Willard on how to understand Jesus’s words: “It is the failure to understand Jesus and his words as reality and vital information about life. That explains why today we do not routinely teach those who profess allegiance to him, how to do what he said was best. We lead them to profess allegiance to him, or we expect them to, and we leave them there devoting our remaining efforts to attracting them to this or that.”
• The contemporary issue of exchanging becoming more like Jesus for other ways of life.
• The real cost of changing one’s life
• Frederica Matthewes Green: “Everyone wants transformation, but no one likes to change.”
• “The good news of Jesus is the availability of the Kingdom of God.”
• Sociologist Max Picard, *The Flight From God* and philosopher Charles Taylor on “the buffered self.”
• Dallas Willard on taking Jesus seriously as a reliable path to growth
• “In many ways, I believe that we are at a turning point among the people of Christ today, one way of describing that turning point is that people are increasingly serious about living the life that Jesus gives to us. And not just having services, words, and rituals. But a life that is full of the goodness and power of Christ. There is a way of doing that. There is knowledge of spiritual growth and of spiritual life that can be taught and practiced. Spiritual growth is not like lightning that hits for no reason you can think of. Many of us come out of a tradition of religion that is revivalistic and experiential. But often the mixture of theological understanding and history that has come down to us has presented spiritual growth as if somehow it were not a thing that you could have understanding of. That you could know, that you could teach, that made sense. And so, we have often slipped into a kind of practical mysticism. The idea that if we just keep doing certain things, then maybe something will happen. We have not had an understanding of a reliable process of growth.”
• Jesus on “The Cure for Anxiety”

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Steve Porter
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Alexa Rollow & Kacie Barrett
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

What does it mean to be fully alive and at peace with ourselves and our neighbors in the anxiety and fear of contemporary life?

Joining Evan Rosa in this episode is Elizabeth Oldfield—a journalist, communicator, and podcast host of The Sacred. She’s author of Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times.

Together they discuss life in her micro-monastery in south London; the meaning of liturgical and sacramental life embedded in a fast-paced, technological, capitalistic, obsessively popular society; the concept of personal encounter and Martin Buber’s idea that “all living is meeting”; the fundamentally disconnecting power of sin that works against the fully aliveness of truly meeting the other; including discussions of wrath or contempt that drives us toward violence; greed or avarice and the incessant insatiable accumulation of wealth; the attention-training benefits of gratitude and the identify forming power of our attention; throughout it all, working through the spiritual psychology of sin and topography of the soul—and the fact that we are, all of us, in Elizabeth’s words, “unutterably beloved.”

About Elizabeth Oldfield

Elizabeth Oldfield is a journalist, communicator, and author. She hosts a beautiful podcast called The Sacred. And she’s author of Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times. Follow her @esoldfield, and visit her website elizabetholdfield.com

Show Notes

• Intentional living community; pulling on monastic lifestyle and framework; read more about Elizabeth Oldfield’s micro-monastery here.
• People passing through the micro-monastery and the sharing of a meal and sitting in silence with others
• Celtic prayer book - The Aidan Compline (https://www.northumbriacommunity.org/offices/monday-the-aidan-compline/)
• Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times by Elizabeth Oldfield (http://bakerpublishinggroup.com/books/fully-alive/421701)
• How you see your liturgical life, the rhythms of your life however else you might describe you spirituality as providing the soil of this book?
• A personal writing experience - communicating something of her tradition with the outside world
• What it means to be fully alive to you?
• Everything is about relationships and connection; to be fully alive is to be fully connected with the soul
• Between Man and Man (https://www.routledge.com/Between-Man-and-Man/Buber/p/book/9780415278270) and I and Thou by Martin Buber - “all living is meeting” (https://www.maximusveritas.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/iandthou.pdf)
• If all living is meeting, how are we failing in that regard?
• Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense by Francis Spufford (https://www.harpercollins.com/products/unapologetic-francis-spufford?variant=32207439626274)
• Sin is disconnection; a turning inward
• “Elegy on the Lady Markham” by John Donne (https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/elegy-lady-markham-0)
• “As I Walked Out One Evening” by W.H. Auden (https://poets.org/poem/i-walked-out-one-evening)
• The Sacred podcast (https://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/comment/2017/12/06/introducing-the-sacred-podcast)
• Polarization, division, and the splitting of people - homophily and fight or flight response
• Jesus going to the margins, ignoring tribal boundaries and turning the other cheek
• Sin and Reconciliation
• The Givenness of Things: Essays by Marilynne Robinson, “I find the soul a valuable concept, a statement of the dignity of human life” (https://www.brethrenpress.com/product_p/9781250097316.htm)
• The soul is interesting and difficult to name but is so valuable
• Room for uncertainty and poetry—we beat up our souls, keep ourselves distracted
• Contemporary life is angry and greedy
• Contempt is a poison for our souls and relationships and humanity
• Stress and anxiety as a constant
• Christian non-violence tradition
• We must feel our emotions - process them through the shared rituals of our communities
• Desire by Micheal O’Siadhail (https://www.baylorpress.com/9781481320061/desire/)
• Would you like to introduce your take on greed?
• Phyllis Tickle, dogged commitment of the scripture - the love of money is the root of all evil
• The Parable of the Sower - Mark 4:19 (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark 4%3A19&version=NIV)
• Made gods of wealth, greed, comfort, and connivence
• Gratitude is a medicine for greed
• Of Gratitude by Thomas Traherne? (https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/works-of-thomas-traherne-vii/of-gratitude/161CCCE8293EE4034F65AB436AB4D3F9)
• “These are the Days We Prayed For” by Guvna B (https://genius.com/Guvna-b-these-are-the-days-lyrics)
• Notice and give thanks; misplaced desire
• Acadia, spiritual apathy, and heavy distraction
• Attention and discipline are formation
• The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt (https://www.anxiousgeneration.com/book)
• Community as accountability and rituals and set rhythms of life
• Divine Love, ultimate love
• Baptism as a reminder of our death - love remains
• Quiet space shared with others; honesty, vulnerability, emotional processing

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Elizabeth Oldfield
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Kacie Barrett and Alexa Rollow
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Elizabeth Neumann served as the Assistant Secretary for Counterterrorism and Threat Prevention at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security during the Bush Administration, and came back to the White House again in 2017 to serve in the Trump Administration.

Her job was to counter emerging right-wing extremism, fueled by long-standing anger, resentment, white supremacism, and Christian nationalism. By April 2020, she had resigned from the Trump Administration. Citing a failure of leadership and his imperiling of American security, she signed an August 2020 statement with 130 other Republican national security officials, boldly stating in no uncertain terms that Trump was unfit for office.

In this episode, Elizabeth opens up about this experience, told in her recent book Kingdom of Rage: The Rise of Christian Extremism and the Path Back to Peace. As a person of Christian faith with over two decades of experience in public service and national security, she offers a fascinating inside take on the inattention to domestic terrorism; she elucidates the emergence of a new and Christian extremism, grounded in rage and willing to take violent action; she explains the Jan 6 attack through the perspective of homeland security; and she reflects on Christian resources for responding to the chaotic, politicized anger characterized in right-wing extremism and how we might act as instruments of peace.

About Elizabeth Neumann

Elizabeth Neumann served as the Assistant Secretary for Counterterrorism and Threat Prevention at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security during the Bush administration, and came back to the White House again in 2017 to serve in the Trump Administration, publicly resigning in 2020. She is author of Kingdom of Rage: The Rise of Christian Extremism and the Path Back to Peace, and is a frequent guest on national news outlets, and the Chief Strategy Officer at Moonshot. She is based in the Denver, CO area.

Show Notes

• Kingdom of Rage: The Rise of Christian Extremism and the Path Back to Peace by Elizabeth Neumann
• Elizabeth Neumann’s faith journey and background in public service.
• Christian, North Texas/Bible Belt, more theologically conservative—an “evangelical mutt”
• Body of Christ is made up of different communities—personally gravitating towards more nerdy churches, an emphasis on Bible studies
• Public service as a way to live out the faith
• Working for George W. Bush campaigns for governor and president—federalism, conservative, to the states: faith-based community initiatives and Bush’s compassionate conservative agenda
• 9/11 as a moment of change
• Working in Homeland Security, specifically in the Domestic Terrorism Unite
• Instances of domestic violent extremism: Pittsburg Tree of Life (2018), Christ Church in New Zealand (2019), and El Paso Walmart (2019)
• Do you think of them as domestic terrorism? Do you think of it as a kind of violence that’s brewing from within? How does the Department of Security try to understand threats to America from within?
• Intelligence is used to inform responses to challenges, yet the means to collect don’t work domestically and domestic material support of terrorism is not understood as criminal
• No way to designate domestic terrorism groups
• The threat has been there all along; domestic extremists require a shift in the focus - many Americans (3%, roughly 8 million people) believe in the necessity of violence for political aims
• We don’t talk about it so people don’t know about it, but the church is equipped to discuss and address the underlying drivers that mobilize people to violence
• How did you experience perspective shifts?
• COVID in 2020, protests against COVID procedures, and the protests surrounding the murder of George Floyd
• Weaponizing of crisis by Trump administration for re-election campaign
• The ANTIFA movement; authoritarian responses from Trump that were illegal and unconstitutional; no longer anyone in the room to tell him no
• January 6 highlighted a security failure that was both day of as well as a result of 20 years of ignoring a threat from within
• Would you be willing to share a bit about what motivated your decision to leave the Trump administration?
• Presidential personnel interviews as a loyalty test; people being pushed out; how far were people willing to go for Donald Trump?
• Hatch Act: prohibits federal employees, including political appointees, from engaging in political activity
• Christian nationalist mindset—How does Christianity get radicalized?
• Extremism: when an in-group perceives a threat to its success or survival by an out-group and hostile action is necessary—this is the nature of contemporary politics which are saturated in fear and anger.
• The plausibility of violent action
• Violence is not the option taught by Jesus and the Scriptures
• Violence has a historic presence in the Christian tradition
• Change in the presence of Christianity in society that is unsettling for some, but cannot be an excuse for extremists and violent action
• What are the prospects of keeping it a peaceful community?
• Building protective factors and systems for healing brokenness
• Unmet needs cannot be allowed to be met by extremist ideology when the Church possesses the answers and the means to meet them; a call to properly investing in our communities
• The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt
• Motivated by emotions and experience—critical thinking is a vital skill
• We are in a perpetual state of anger; we are called to not stay angry
• Processing anger properly; being better at lament and grieving in a biblical way
• Tim Keller on idolatry and anger; an interfering with our idols; Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power and the Only Hope that Matters?
• What is lying more deeply within us when anger is on the surface?
• The space to lament and grieve in society in a healthy way
• The Lord can meet us in our anger; he will take it when we bring it to him and ask for help
• What does it mean to be a Christian peacemaker?
• Intentionally caring for communities; the quiet spaces in which the face of God is seen in others by loving them.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Elizabeth Neumann
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Alexa Rollow & Kacie Barrett
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Genuine disagreement is vanishingly rare. But to disagree with careful listening, empathy, respect, and independent thinking—it’s an essential part of life in a pluralistic democratic society.

In this episode, legal scholar and author John Inazu joins Evan Rosa to talk about his new book, Learning to Disagree: The Surprising Path to Navigating Differences with Empathy and Respect. He’s the Sally D. Danforth Distinguished Professor of Law and Religion at Washington University in St. Louis.

Together they discuss the challenge of disagreeing well in contemporary life, replete with the depersonalization of social media; the difference between certainty and confidence; what it means to think for oneself, freely and independently; the virtue of humility in civil discourse; the prospect for political dissent and civil disobedience; how to pursue the truth in a culture of principled pluralism; and practical steps toward empathic and respectful disagreement.

About John Inazu

John Inazu is the Sally D. Danforth Distinguished Professor of Law and Religion at Washington University in St. Louis. He teaches criminal law, law and religion, and various First Amendment courses. He writes and speaks frequently about pluralism, assembly, free speech, religious freedom, and other issues. John has written three books—including Learning to Disagree: The Surprising Path to Navigating Differences with Empathy and Respect (Zondervan, 2024) and *Liberty’s Refuge: The Forgotten Freedom of Assembly* (Yale, 2012)—and has published opinion pieces in the Washington Post, Atlantic, Chicago Tribune, LA Times, USA Today, Newsweek, and CNN. He is also the founder of the Carver Project and the Legal Vocation Fellowship and is a senior fellow with Interfaith America.

Show Notes

• "Yeah? Well, you know, that's just like uh, your opinion, man."
• Get a copy of Learning to Disagree: The Surprising Path to Navigating Differences with Empathy and Respect (https://www.jinazu.com/learning-to-disagree)
• Disagreement around civility and civil discourse particularly
• Identifying and naming disagreement
• Practical limits of human relationship as a reality of disagreement
• Why you picked up learning to disagree, disagreement in particular? And why is it important to you? What drew you now to make a comment about disagreement?
• Liberty’s Refuge: The Forgotten Freedom of Assembly (https://www.jinazu.com/libertys-refuge)
• Right of Assembly in the first amendment and what it means in groups - Madison and factions (Federalist 10?)
• Confident Pluralism: Surviving and Thriving Through Deep Difference (https://www.jinazu.com/confident-pluralism)
• Constitutional law
• The First Amendment as what secures the ability to disagree - Freedom of Religion and Freedom of Speech
• “One is, even if that was part of the, original focus, like any ongoing tradition, it can be lost or ignored. And so there's this sense in which each new generation needs to understand and appreciate it for intrinsic reasons and not just because they read it in a book.”
• Individual thinking but the reality of not doing anything individually as we are involved in embodied human relationships
• What starting points are there? You begin with empathy, what other starting points do you like to introduce to help people understand where you’re trying to take people with this?
• Complexity and compromise and recognizing that compromise isn’t always possible
• Humility in competing visions of truth and what is best for the world; no good or bad, just different persuasions
• A desire for certainty which fear and laziness underline
• I wonder if you could speak a little bit more to the legal background and why you think that is so helpful and so instructive for going through this framework of learning to disagree?
• “Maybe only prudentially in order to try to defeat it, but the work of understanding the other side's argument in the best light possible is itself a work of empathy that allows you to step into the headspace of the opponent a little bit and allows you to see why someone who is not dumb or is not You know, completely outside of society might actually think differently.”
• Supreme Court and difficult, political decisions
• Applying the approaches that are taught in law schools in every day life
• Three branches of government and checks and balances
• Loss of human relationships with colleagues in Congress and the increase of them in the Supreme Court
• Political dissent and political dissidents
• When to disagree?
• Protests, assemblies, and activism
• The privilege of dissent in the United States
• Social pressures, social stigma, and the confidence and responsibility to dissent
• How to cultivate respect for the one who you disagree with?
• Love your enemies and the Christian calling for interpersonal relationship with the person you disagree with; there is no guarantee of reciprocity
• Question of belief, right belief and orthodoxy
• Differences matter, especially in theological conversation, but that doesn’t mean we should rest in certainty
• Learning and granting grace to ourselves and one another
• Lesslie Newbigin - confidence not certainty
• How do we cultivate that ability to stay in the middle of it? To hold the tension, being able to live in the complexity, stay invested that the conversation happens without getting disillusioned or apathetic?
• The differences between Preaching and Persuasion
• How you recommended, what they can do today in the disagreements they find themselves in? What they can do at the level of mindset and what they can try to implement?
• Disagreement is something you have to practice and to know that mistakes will be made
• Let conversations linger and take time and happen over multiple meetings - making the commitment to be together and be in conversation
• Building trust in disagreeing well - acknowledging the relational
• Don’t start with family; practice with others initially
• “But regardless of sort of the relationship that you start with, go in with a full tank, right? don't don't go in when you yourself are like, impatient or exhausted or hungry, because you should go in kind of anticipating that there'll be some challenges to this. And if you can, on the front end say, you know what, in this conversation, I'm probably going to hear something that is going to offend me or annoy me.”
• Friends who disagree and the importance of friendship
• Mixing the serious with the playful and the mundane
• Friendship as an important element of discourse and disagreement

Production Notes

• This podcast featured John Inazu
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Alexa Rollow & Kacie Barrett
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

We live in a time of disillusionment. Trust is waning in the public sphere, religious affiliation is on decline, and some feel a deep tension or ambivalence about their community—whether that’s a region, family, political party, or spiritual tradition.

How should we think about the experience of disillusionment, particularly the threat of becoming disillusioned with faith?

Aimee Byrd, author of several books on contemporary issues facing Christianity. And after her own experience becoming disillusioned with the church, she wrote her most recent offering: The Hope in Our Scars: Finding the Bride of Christ in the Underground of Disillusionment.

In this conversation, Aimee Byrd joins Evan Rosa to discuss: how to diagnose and understand disillusionment—particularly disillusionment with church and the trappings of Christian faith & culture; as well as the problem of spiritual abuse and the broken forms of faith that allow it to persist. She explores the Old Testament’s Song of Songs—exploring how it honors the depth of human longing and desire. She considers how beauty validates our yearnings and invites us toward a lasting faith and gives us new sight and recognition, and ultimately takes a hard look at what it means to explore our wounds and scars in search of hope and faith.

About Aimee Byrd

Aimee Byrd is the author of many books, including her latest, The Hope in Our Scars: Finding the Bride of Christ in the Underground of Disillusionment (2024).

Show Notes

• The Hope in Our Scars: Finding the Bride of Christ in the Underground of Disillusionment by Aimee Byrd (https://zondervanacademic.com/products/the-hope-in-our-scars)
• Steven Heighton’s The Virtues of Disillusionment (free PDF download)
• Unpacking disillusionment. You spend some time thinking about disillusionment. Where do you begin to think about that?
• Experiencing disillusionment as we mature and try to figure out the meaningfulness of life
• The hustle; pursuing what we think goodness is supposed to look like
• A disrupting takes place
• Spiritual maturity; writing into a neglect in women’s discipleship
• The rejection and harassment experienced by women acting as theologians - spiritual abuse
• Help set some parameters for how you conceptualize spiritual abuse and how you came to understand and integrate with your story?
• “And yet these feelings of unsafety in the very place where you’re supposed to be shepherded.”
• Carefully using the word abuse
• Abuse: when people are okay with harming you for their own gain and power, where you are the cost
• Limiting feelings of possibility; a shrinking of the person and questioning of their belonging
• Diane Langberg on the elements of personhood (https://www.dianelangberg.com/shop-books/)
• Agency, voice, and sense of self
• Diagnosing disillusionment; a lot of dull signs leading up to it, somethings just not right
• Desperation, loss, depression, fight, panic, pretending or rejecting/deconstructing to move on
• Naming our wounds is an action of hope
• “Jesus’ wounds are a testimony.”
• Our scars are a remembering, a telling of our story.
• John 12:24 - grain of wheat falling to the ground (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John 12%3A24&version=NIV)
• Being a good witness to God, justing handing it over to him.
• “Unless a grain of wheat falls to into the ground” by Malcom Guite (https://malcolmguite.wordpress.com/2015/05/09/unless-a-grain-of-wheat-falls-into-the-ground/)
• Holding onto these resentments leaves us further alone; we must let go.
• We don’t need reform, we need resurrection.
• Maintaining a false sense of belonging through facades
• Sanctified imagination and community
• We need to recapture our imagination as a way to combat disillusionment
• Walter Brueggemann - the riddle and insight of Biblical faith is that anguish leads to life, only grieving leads to joy (https://www.walterbrueggemann.com/resources/books/textonly/)
• Lifting the Veil: Imagination and the Kingdom of God by Malcom Guite (https://www.squarehalobooks.com/lifting-the-veil)
• “Scripture is a story. It’s all kind of story of people who screw up.”
• “God is bigger than all the ways we screw up our lives.”
• Open wounds, healing, scarring
• Song of Songs and unlocking the imagination and intimate love of God
• Scripture in which a women’s voice and experiences are given center stage
• Song of Songs, chapters three (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Song of Songs 3&version=NIV) and five (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Song+of+Songs+5&version=NIV)
• Love calls to us
• Vulnerability in the position and in the naming of our experiences
• Beholding the face of Christ, and Christ looking back at us - the beauty Christ sees in us, as Christ beautifies us.
• “Beauty is an invitation into goodness.”
• The natural world develops our taste for beauty.
• A desire to feed our allusion of security, yet our hearts remain uncaptured.
• Beauty engages will and involves all of our senses; a hyper-fixation on the brain that is not holistic
• Awe and wonder; the role of the poets and the artists as the reveal what we try to hustle over the top of - they leave us feeling seen and maybe exposed.
• Speaking from a place of knowing our own value, a confidence and strength.
• Looking for the personhood that Christ is fostering in each of us.
• Being a community that beholds; our longing to be seen, known, and loved should be met by our churches as we see Christ in one another.
• We must go to Christ; yet disillusionment makes it difficult; all the disciples experienced disillusionment
• Hope is disruptive and subversive, but gloriously so.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Aimee Byrd
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Kacie Barrett
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

“Black motherhood has consistently been a contested space. Black women have just fought for their rights to be. And so when we say Black motherhood, to me, the reality of Black motherhood itself is the resistance. And we still stand and we claim what it means to be Black mothers. We've got to consistently stand firm trying to raise healthy children in spite of it all.”

Rev. Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas (Episcopal Divinity School) discusses the gift and grace of Black motherhood to the world and what we can learn from Black mothers about love and resistance. Appreciating the example they set for the meaning of justice that emerges from love, and the capacity for love that emerges from justice, Dr. Douglas offers beautiful examples and expressions of the joy and abundance that Black motherhood means.

She reflects on the impact of her maternal grandmother on her life; the Langston Hughes poem “Mother and Son”—which is a testimony of perseverance and robust agency; the glorious hush harbor sermon and ode to self-love and dignity, delivered by Baby Suggs Holy, known as “The Sermon in the Clearing" in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. It gave me chills to hear Dr. Douglas read the sermon. She looks back to the example set by Mamie Till, the mother of Emmitt Till, who as a 14 year old boy was lynched in 1955. And Dr. Douglas speaks in witness to the fear, pain, and grief of the Black mother during the Black Lives Matter era, drawing not only on her expertise in Womanist Theology, but her close relationship with her own son.

Show Notes

• Black motherhood and womanist theology; listening to the experiences of black motherhood
• Audre Lorde “to love and to resist at the same time” - Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches? (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/198292/sister-outsider-by-audre-lorde/)
• What does it mean to love and resist at the same time?
• Legacy passed on through motherhood; loving oneself while resisting that which says you are not a sacred child of God - helping black children to understand that they are somebody.
• Where have you been inspired by womanist scholars and by other sources in the Christian tradition and beyond for really strengthening the kind of love you are describing there?
• Inspired by the woman in her life - maternal grandmother especially
• The Great Migrations from the South
• Grandmother worked as an elevator operator, a job traditionally associated with with black women
• Always made a way for her grandchildren to have fun and set aside money for them after high school - making sure they felt important
• Accountable to one’s legacy, to the generations that came before.
• “You struggle for the children that you can’t see.”
• You’ve written about intergenerational dialogue, about communication and so tell me a little bit more about how you see love expressed through honest, truthful, wise communication?
• Communication as a part of love and a part of resistance; telling the story with tough truth and means of survival
• Beloved by Toni Morrison (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/117647/beloved-by-toni-morrison/)
• Would you mind quoting it and kind of giving some context for listeners that are not familiar with that sermon?
• Sermon of self love; love of the whole self as an act against those that do not love you
• To parent Black, the love and the harsh truth
• Resurrection Hope: A Future Where Black Lives Matter by Kelly Brown Douglas (https://orbisbooks.com/products/resurrection-hope)
• Having these conversations with her own son
• Philandro Castile killing
• “These are the dialogues you cannot shy away from when you’re trying to raise a Black child, that you have to have, that you have to tell them the truth, you provide them the tools for surviving, those sort of practical tools. And at the same time, you have to provide them with the inside stuff that allows them to resist all of that stuff on the outside that tells them that they aren’t worth it.”
• The tools to resist and then thrive; the world suddenly becoming knowledgable on the conversations being had with Black children
• Not thinking it as THE conversation but one piece of intergenerational dialogue
• Mother to Son by Langston Hughes (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47559/mother-to-son)
• How you see the possibility of Black motherhood passing on this love, which is resistance, this dual side of what that is? It’s kind of paradoxical holding them both together, how that might speak not just to the son but to the world?
• Black motherhood itself consistently attacked and contested
• Moynihan in 1960s
• “Black women have just fought for their rights to be. And so when we say Black motherhood itself is the resistance.”
• Moral imaginary of justice
• “Because if we don’t have that dialogue that speaks to the hard truths and pushes forward an agenda of justice, then we cannot expect the next generation to be any better than out generation or previous generations in enacting a world where all mothers, children, can be free from anything that does not affirm and respect their sacred humanity.”
• Mamie Till and the open casket of Emmett Till; the parents of Trayvon Martin
• We forget that these are people’s children, these are mothers who have lost their children.
• “We see Black bodies, but not Black human beings.”
• Rest in Power: The Enduring Life of Trayvon Martin by Sabrina Fulton and Tracy Martin (https://jacarandabooksartmusic.com/products/rest-in-power-1)
• See the humanity of Black mothers and their children

“The Sermon in the Clearing”

Toni Morrison’s Beloved

“Here,” she said, “in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in the grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don’t love your eyes; they’d just as soon pick em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face ’cause they don’t love that either. You got to love it, you*! And no, they ain’t in love with your mouth. Yonder, out there, they will see it broken and break it again. What you say out of it they will not heed. What you scream from it they do not hear. What you put into it to nourish your body they will snatch away and give you leavins instead. No, they don’t love your* mouth. You got to love it. This is flesh I’m talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved. Feet that need to rest and to dance; backs that need support; shoulders that need arms, strong arms I’m telling you. And O my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed and straight. So love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it, and hold it up. And all your inside parts that they’d just as soon slop for hogs, you got to love them. The dark, dark liver—love it, love it, and the beat and beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize.” Saying no more, she stood up then and danced with her twisted hip the rest of what her heart had to say while the others opened their mouths and gave her the music. Long notes held until the four-part harmony was perfect enough for their deeply loved flesh.

Mother to Son
BY LANGSTON HUGHES

Well, son, I’ll tell you:
Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
It’s had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor—
Bare.
But all the time
I’se been a-climbin’ on,
And reachin’ landin’s,
And turnin’ corners,
And sometimes goin’ in the dark
Where there ain’t been no light.
So boy, don’t you turn back.
Don’t you set down on the steps
’Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.
Don’t you fall now—
For I’se still goin’, honey,
I’se still climbin’,
And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

About Kelly Brown Douglas

The Rev. Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas, Ph.D., is Interim President of the Episcopal Divinity School. From 2017 to 2023, she was Dean of the Episcopal Divinity School at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Theology. She was named the Bill and Judith Moyers Chair in Theology at Union in November 2019. She also serves as the Canon Theologian at the Washington National Cathedral and Theologian in Residence at Trinity Church Wall Street.

Prior to Union, Douglas served as Professor of Religion at Goucher College where she held the Susan D. Morgan Professorship of Religion and is now Professor Emeritus. Before Goucher, she was Associate Professor of Theology at Howard University School of Divinity (1987-2001) and Assistant Professor of Religion at Edward Waters College (1986-1987). Ordained as an Episcopal priest in 1983, Douglas holds a master’s degree in theology and a Ph.D. in systematic theology from Union.

Douglas is the author of many articles and six books, including Sexuality and the Black Church: A Womanist Perspective, Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God, and Resurrection Hope: A Future Where Black Lives Matter, which won the 2023 Grawemeyer Award in Religion. Her academic work has focused on womanist theology, sexuality and the Black church.

On June 3,2024, Jürgen Moltmann died. He was one of the greatest theologians of our time. He was 98 years old. In this episode, Miroslav Volf eulogizes and remembers his mentor and friend. We then share a previously released conversation between Miroslav Volf and Jürgen Moltmann. This episode first aired in April 2021—and it includes Moltmann’s conviction that “without living theologically, there can be no theology”; it explores the meaning of joy and its connection to anxiety, fear, wrath, hope, and love; and Professor Moltmann shares about the circumstances in which he came to faith—as a 16-year-old drafted into World War II by the German Army, enduring the bombardment of his hometown of Hamburg, and being held for 3 years in a Scottish prison camp, where he read with new eyes the cry of dereliction from Jesus in the Gospel of Mark, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

This cry would lay a foundation that led to his most influential book, The Crucified God. Moltmann explains the centrality of Christ, the human face of God, for not just his theological vision, but his personal faith—which is a lived theology.

Ryan McAnnally-Linz introduces the episode by celebrating Jürgen Moltmann's 95th birthday and reflecting on his lasting theological influence.

Show Notes

• Happy 95th Birthday, Jürgen Moltmann!
• Find the places of deepest human concern, and shine the light of the Gospel there.
• “Without living theologically, there can be no theology."
• Jürgen Moltmann’s Theology of Joy (1972)—“How can I sing the Lord’s song in an alien land?"
• Joy today: Singing the Lord’s song in the broad place of his presence
• "Hope is anticipated joy, as anxiety is anticipated terror."
• "How does one find the way to joy from within anxiety and terror?"
• Seeing the face of God as an awakened hope
• Jesus Christ as the human face of God: “Without Jesus Christ, I would not believe in God."
• God is present in the midst of suffering
• Discovering and being discovered by God
• Moltmann’s story of being drafted to the Germany army at 16 years old (1943)
• In a prison camp in Scotland, Moltmann read the Gospel of Mark and found hope when there was no expectation.
• The Crucified God, the cry of dereliction, and the cry of jubilation
• Contrasting joy with American optimism and the pursuit of happiness
• Christianity as a unique religion of joy, in virtue of the resurrection of Christ
• Joy versus fun—“You can experience joy only with your whole heart, your whole soul, and all your energies."
• "You cannot make yourself joyful… something unexpected must happen."
• Love and joy
• "The intention of love is the happiness of the beloved."
• "We are not loved because we are beautiful… we are beautiful because we are loved."
• Joy and gratitude
• Love comes as a gift and surprise, and therefore leads to joy.
• Blessed, therefore grateful—receiving the gift as gift
• “Anticipated joy is the best joy.”
• The Passion of God as the foundation of joy
• Passionate God of the Hebrew Bible or Absolute God of Greek Metaphysics?
• An apathetic God makes apathetic people; the compassion of God makes compassionate people
• A Feeling God or an Apathetic God? God’s participation in suffering and joy
• “God participates in the joy of his creation."
• Luke 15: “There is more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over 99 just…"
• Lost coin, lost sheep, prodigal son...
• The wrath of God is God’s wounded love
• “My wrath is only for a moment, and my grace is everlasting."
• "Joy, in the end, wins."

Watch a video of this interview here.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured theologians Jürgen Moltmann and Miroslav Volf
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa & Ryan McAnnally-Linz
• Production Assistance by Alexa Rollow & Kacie Barrett
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

How do you find hope when you can only see yourself and your future in light of your past mistakes? When you’re certain that everyone on the outside looking in is doing the same, punishing you, immobilizing you, invisibilizing you…?

Seems the only way out of that spiral is the “God Who Sees.”

Practical theologian Sarah Farmer joins Evan Rosa to discuss her recent book, Restorative Hope: Creating Pathways of Connection in Women’s Prisons. She describes the experience of prison—the ways it constrains movement, how it abridges and threatens agency, and how the constant surveillance leaves a person breathless. She illuminates the approach to theological education she and her colleagues put on offer for these women, these incarcerated theologians whose very lives were the texts to learn from. Sarah offers a contribution from Womanist Theology: Dolores Williams’ re-narration of Hagar—from the book of Genesis—the forgotten, quote, “invisibilized” Egyptian slave of Abraham and Sarah—Hagar, the woman who named God, “El Roi”… the God who sees. And she imagines a restorative hope built around self-respect and identity, connection, and resilience—a hope that shines even into the darkness of a women’s prison cell.

Show Notes

Get your copy of Restorative Hope: Creating Pathways of Connection in Women’s Prisons

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Sarah Farmer
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Alexa Rollow
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Protests dominate the news. And while we’re familiar with freedom of speech, free exercise of religion, and freedom of the press—what about the freedom of assembly? The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution—also contains “the right of the people peaceably to assemble.”

But what exactly does that secure? How does this foundational, but often forgotten, right impact the shape of democracy, undergirding and making possible a flourishing public life? And are we prepared to defend the full application of these rights to our political rivals? Those we disagree with?

Legal scholar John Inazu (Washington University, St. Louis) joins Evan Rosa for a discussion of the freedom of assembly—its history, meaning, interpretation, and application—as well as how it impacts the ability for citizens to gather to demonstrate and protest.

Show Notes

• Read the Constitution of the United States of America (1787)
• Learning to
• Get your copy of Liberty’s Refuge: The Forgotten Freedom of Assembly
• Click here to download a free version of Liberty’s Refuge.
• The First Amendment
• Introducing peaceable assembly.
• “I was working for a federal judge and working on a First Amendment case, looked down at the text of the First Amendment and saw the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and I thought to myself, I've had three years of law school and four years of legal practice, and I've never thought about the Assembly Clause.”
• Ecclesia as a counter political entity
• “I can’t assemble alone.”
• “Know Your Rights” by The Clash
• Three historical points about interpreting the assembly clause
• The grammar of the assembly clause
• Assembly and Petition are two distinct rights
• The right of association
• The right of privacy
• Assembly is the right of association
• Where are the limits of a protest? Under assembly? Or under the free speech clause.
• “we ought to care about the values that drive different parts of the Constitution.”
• The groupness—the idea of collective expression
• Understanding the “peaceable” side of assembly
• “The best law enforcement understand that there has to be some breathing space.”
• Reform mode vs revolution mode
• Policing assembly as more of an art than a science
• Peaceable assembly and collective belonging
• “Civil liberties are for losers.”
• Practical steps to upholding peaceable assembly as a right and civil liberty
• Exercise your rights
• Defend the rights of everyone

About John Inazu

John Inazu is the Sally D. Danforth Distinguished Professor of Law and Religion at Washington University in St. Louis. He teaches criminal law, law and religion, and various First Amendment courses. He writes and speaks frequently about pluralism, assembly, free speech, religious freedom, and other issues. John has written three books—including Learning to Disagree: The Surprising Path to Navigating Differences with Empathy and Respect (Zondervan, 2024) and Liberty’s Refuge: The Forgotten Freedom of Assembly (Yale, 2012)—and has published opinion pieces in the Washington Post, Atlantic, Chicago Tribune, LA Times, USA Today, Newsweek, and CNN. He is also the founder of the Carver Project and the Legal Vocation Fellowship and is a senior fellow with Interfaith America.

Image Citation

Original caption: “Demonstrators sit, with their feet in the Reflecting Pool, during the March on Washington, 1963] / WKL."

Original black and white negative by Warren K. Leffler. Taken August 28th, 1963, Washington D.C, United States (@libraryofcongress).

Colorized by Jordan J. Lloyd.

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA https://www.loc.gov/item/2011648314/

Production Notes

• This podcast featured John Inazu
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, and Tim Bergeland
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

"Having lost a sense of the sacred, the only thing we want is acquisitiveness—more of everything. How can we break this vicious cycle of avarice? It seems to me that the only way we can possibly reign this in on ourselves is some retrieval of the sense of the sacred, something beyond ourselves. 

And I think that relearning humility—realizing that a parasitic pathogen can spread across the globe and wreak havoc as it did—brings us to the question again of the sacred.

Dare we speak of a God who is worthy of all our desire? That we as creatures might want with all of our heart, all of our mind, to contemplate. Should anything less deserve our desiring really? Clearly there's a hierarchy of desire, but what is our overarching desire? Can we gamble on reimagining the wonder of a capacious God of endless surprises?" (Micheal O'Siadhail, from the episode)

About Micheal O'Siadhail

Micheal O'Siadhail is an award-winning poet and author of many collections of poetry. His Collected Poems was published in 2013, One Crimson Thread in 2015 and The Five Quintets in 2018, which received Conference on Christianity and Literature Book of the Year 2018 and an Eric Hoffer Award in 2020. His latest works are Testament (2022) and Desire (2023). He holds honorary doctorates from the universities of Manitoba and Aberdeen. He lives in New York.

Show Notes

• Micheal O’Siadhail, Desire
• Recitation: Epigraph
• Using poetry as a means to record the COVID-19 Pandemic
• Using words to process emotion
• Human desire for more; greed
• The internet as a driving force for consumption
• Consumerism feeding climate change
• Breaking the cycle by retrieving the sacred
• “Bless” is not a word used easily in our culture
• Recitation: Pest 12
• Gratitude within anxiety
• Recitation: Pest 20
• Stewarding the earth
• Recitation: Habitat 13
• What is worthy of our desire?
• The “stabilitas” of being where you are
• Wanting acquisitiveness more than the sacred
• Truly being known versus being famous
• Recitation: Behind the Screen 17
• Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation
• Recitation: Behind the Screen 20
• The temptation towards certainty
• Recitation: Behind the Screen 1
• Trusting the God of surprises
• “Dare we speak of a God who is worthy of all our desire?”
• Recitation: Desire 24 & 25
• “On Earth as it is in Heaven” as a dream
• Reordering and re-educating our desire
• Unity and Denise Levertov’s concept of “One-ing”

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Micheal O’Siadhail
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, and Tim Bergeland
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Flannery O’Connor is known for her short stories in which “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” But it’s often those ugly, mean, disgusting, scandalizing, violent, weird, or downright hateful characters in Flannery O’Connor stories that become the vessels of grace delivered.

So, how should we read Flannery O’Connor?

Jessica Hooten Wilson (Pepperdine University) joins Evan Rosa to open up about Flannery O’Connor’s life, her unique perspective as a writer, the theological and moral principles operative in her work, all as an immense invitation to read O’Connor and find the beauty of God’s grace that emerges amidst the most horrendous evils. Includes a discussion of Flannery O’Connor’s short story, “Greenleaf.”

Show Notes

• Check out Jessica Hooten Wilson’s presentation of Flannery O’Connor’s final, unfinished novel: Flannery O’Connor’s Why Do the Heathen Rage?
• Click here for an online copy of “Greenleaf” to follow along with our analysis
• Spiritual formation through the works of Flannery O’Connor
• How to read for a flourishing life
• “Greenleaf” by Flannery O’Connor
• Flannery O’Connor’s reading grounded in tradition of early church mothers and fathers.
• Paying attention to every individual word.
• First word: Mrs. Mays looses her agency.
• Europa & the Bull, Ovid’s Metamorphosis
• Mrs. May’s blinds as hiding pieces of reality, shutting out God
• The spiritual truth of the story is concealed when not read attentively and intentionally
• Flannery’s writings defying instant gratification
• “The wrong kind of horror”
• The development of American consumerism
• Showing versus enjoying violence
• Sacramental reading
• The Holy Fool
• The Violent Bear It Away as a hymn to the eucharist
• O’Connor requires spiritual reading.
• A summary of “Greenleaf”
• Pierced by the bull, a violent union of Savior and sinner
• O’Connor’s Christian characters; “A Good Man is Hard to Find”
• Characters changing and choosing faith before death.
• The final paragraph of “Greenleaf”
• Mrs. Greenleaf as the opposite of Ivan Karamazov, in The Brothers Karamazov
• Opening to the world with the knowledge of God
• Pentecostalism and zeal in “Greenleaf”
• Stabbed in the heart, medieval mysticism
• “Lord, help us dig down under things and find where you are”

About Jessica Hooten Wilson

Jessica Hooten Wilson is the Fletcher Jones Endowed Chair of Great Books at Pepperdine University (’23) and previously served as the Seaver College Scholar of Liberal Arts at Pepperdine University (’22-’23). She co-hosts a podcast called The Scandal of Reading: Pursuing Holy Wisdom with Christ & Pop Culture, where she discusses with fellow authors, professors, and theologians with Claude Atcho and Austin Carty. She is the author of Flannery O’Connor’s Why Do the Heathen Rage?: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at a Work in Progres*s (Brazos Press, January 23, 2024); Reading for the Love of God: How to Read as a Spiritual Practice (Brazos Press, 2023);* Scandal of Holiness: Renewing Your Imagination in the Company of Literary Saints (Brazos Press, 2022) which received a Christianity Today 2023 Award of Merit (Culture & the Arts) and a Midwest Book Review* 2023 Silver Book Award (Nonfiction – Religion/Philosophy); co-author with Dr. Jacob Stratman of Learning the Good Life: Wisdom from the Great Hearts and Minds that Came Before (Zondervan Academic, 2022); Giving the Devil his Due: Demonic Authority in the Fiction of Flannery O’Connor and Fyodor Dostoevsky* (February 28, 2017), which received a 2018 Christianity Today Book of the Year Award in the Culture & the Arts; as well as two books on Walker Percy: *The Search for Influence: Walker Percy and Fyodor Dostoevsky* (Ohio State University Press, 2017) and Reading Walker Percy’s Novels (Louisiana State University Press, 2018); most recently she co-edited Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: *The Russian Soul in the West* (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020).

She has received numerous fellowships, grants, and awards, including a Fulbright Fellowship to the Czech Republic, an NEH grant to study Dante in Florence in 2014, and the Biola Center for Christian Thought sabbatical fellowship. In 2018 she received the Emerging Public Intellectual Award given by a coalition of North American think tanks in collaboration with the Centre for Christian Scholarship at Redeemer University College, and in 2019 she received the Hiett Prize in Humanities from The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Jessica Hooten Wilson
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, and Tim Bergeland
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

This conversation is based on a free downloadable resource available at faith.yale.edu. Click here to get your copy today.

“We may heed the call of Jesus to follow me and find him leading us right into the home we already have.” (Ryan McAnnally-Linz)

What are the possibilities of homemaking in a world out of joint? What does it mean for Christians to be on a pilgrimage? To be sojourners in the world?

Ryan McAnnally-Linz joins Evan Rosa to discuss what it means for Christian life to be a journey not from here to there, but from here to … here. Together they discuss what it means for the world to be the home of God; the task of resisting the “dysoikos” (or the parodic sinful distortion of home); the meaning of Christian life as a pilgrimage; and three faithful ways to approach the work of homemaking that anticipates how the world is becoming the home of God—Ryan introduces examples from Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement, Julian of Norwich, and a modern-day farming family.

Help us improve the podcast! Click here to take our listener survey—5 respondents will be randomly selected to receive a signed and personalized copy of Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most.

We need the world to understand it. Human embodied experience and material life in the world has a profound effect on our thinking—not just poetry and pop music, but our intellectual reflections, philosophical theories and scientific observations, to the most mundane conversations.

Take a closer look at human language and ideas, and we’ll find we are deeply embedded, grounded, and built on a foundation of metaphor. That last sentence, for instance, depends on the metaphor KNOWLEDGE is a BUILDING. But navigating this terrain can be treacherous and we can easily get lost (another metaphor: LIFE is a JOURNEY). But to be a tree planted by streams of water, bearing fruit, flourishing with vibrant leaves, we can allow our roots to sink down into this reality and bloom and reach upward (YOU are a TREE).

Theologian Joy Marie Clarkson joins me and Macie Bridge today for a conversation about metaphor. It’s brimming and full of metaphor itself (that one’s KNOWLEDGE is a CONTAINER), but it’s not too meta.

Together we discuss: How we see ourselves as human: Are we trees? Are we machines? The beauty of language and the glory of poetry to reveal intangible or invisible wisdom and experience. Joy explains the hidden negation in metaphors and the dance between subjective convention and objective realities. We revel and play with language and its particularity. We discuss Julian of Norwich on Jesus as the source of motherhood. J.R.R. Tolkien on technology and redemption through trees and dark journeys. And we explore the many metaphors that seem to undergird Christian theological reflection on flourishing life.

About Joy Clarkson

Joy Marie Clarkson is research associate in theology and literature at King’s College London. She’s the author of Aggressively Happy: A Realist’s Guide to Believing in the Goodness of Life, as well as her most recent You Are a Tree: And Other Metaphors to Nourish Life, Thought, and Prayer. Her writing has also appeared in The Tablet, Christianity Today, and Plough Quarterly. She is the Books and Culture Editor for Plough Quarterly and hosts a podcast called Speaking with Joy. Check out her Substack here.

Show Notes

• Explore the book: Joy Clarkson, You Are a Tree: And Other Metaphors to Nourish Life, Thought, and Prayer
• Joy Clarkson’s Substack
• Metaphor embedded throughout thought and language
• Are you a machine? Are you a tree?
• Hidden negation within metaphors
• Bill Collins poem, “Litany”: “You are the goblet and the wine.”
• Aristotle on metaphor: Carry over the properties of one thing to another.
• Whispering “not really though”
• Metaphors about God and internal or hidden negation
• Complexity of the world
• Posture of humility
• Literal language is a kind of trick to think that “we actually have said the thing finally and completely.”
• Thomas Aquinas, medieval theologians and speaking about God by way of analogy
• “The words we can say about God kind of come from, the perfections we perceive and things in the world.”
• Medieval bestiaries
• “The true panther is Christ.”
• “The sweet breathed, multicolored Christ panther.”
• When language falls short
• Pseudo-Dionysus the Areopagite
• Unspeakability of things and the radical particularity of language
• Julian of Norwich, Jesus as the source of motherhood: “Jesus our true mother.”
• Bobby McFerrin’s “The 23rd Psalm”
• Metaphors about humanity
• Humanity as machines vs humanity as trees
• Mechanical metaphors for humanity fall short and become dangerous when it implies that we are only as good as our productivity
• Trees are an older and more mysterious metaphor for human beings.
• Security and success—top dog vs underdog
• Metaphor: SUCCESS is UP and climbing the corporate ladder
• “We need each other.”
• The Giving Tree and Treebeard from J.R.R. Tolkein’s, The Lord of the Rings
• *The Two Towers—*Saruman vs the Ents and ecological and technological ethics that provide insight for our humanity and lived environment
• The Christian life as a metaphor
• “You are God’s poem. You are kind of this living, breathing poem that's drawing its imagery from the goodness of God.”
• Poesis and the imago Dei
• Phenomenological description of things in everyday life
• “Paying attention to those kind of very everyday experiences just filled me personally with a sense of how densely meaningful and poetic our everyday lives are.”

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Joy Marie Clarkson
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, & Tim Bergeland
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Help us improve the podcast! Click here to take our listener survey—5 respondents will be randomly selected to receive a signed and personalized copy of Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most.

"There were a lot of people with moral courage to resist, to protest the communist revolutions, but few of them had the spiritual resource to question the system as a whole. Many intellectuals really protested the policies of Mao himself, but not the deprivation of freedom, the systematic persecution, the systematic suppression of religion and freedom as a whole—the entire communist system. So I think that's due to Lin Zhao's religious education. It's very helpful to have both moral courage and spiritual theological resource to make certain social diagnosis, which, I think, was available for Lin Zhao. So I would think of her as this exceptional instance of what Christianity can do—both the moral courage and the spiritual resource to resist totalitarianism." (Peng Yin on politically dissident Lin Zhao)

What are the theological assumptions that charge foreign policy? How does theology impact public life abroad? In this episode, theologian Peng Yin (Boston University School of Theology) joins Ryan McAnnally-Linz to discuss the role of theology and religion in Chinese public life—looking at contemporary foreign policy pitting Atheistic Communist China against Democratic Christian America; the moving story of Christian communist political dissident Lin Zhao; and the broader religious, philosophical, and theological influences on Chinese politics.

Show Notes

• Religion’s role in Chinese political thought.
• Thinking beyond Communist Authoritarianism and Christian Nationalism.
• American foreign policy framed as “good, democratic” US versus “authoritarian, atheistic” China.
• Chinese Communist party borrowing from Christian Utopianism
• Sole-salvific figure: Not Christ, but the Party
• Chinese Communism is a belief, not something that is open to verification. It’s not falsifiable.
• Did the communist party borrow from Christian missionaries?
• Communist party claiming collective cultivation over Confucianism’s self cultivation.
• History of religious influence in Chinese political thought
• Religion’s contemporary influence in Chinese public life
• Lin Zhao, Christian protestor.
• Lin Zhao as “exceptional instance of what Christianity can do: both the moral courage and the spiritual resource to resist totalitarianism.”
• “New Cold War Discourse”
• Chinese immigration influx after 1989 Tiananmen Movement.
• Inhabiting a space between two empires.
• “God's desire for human happiness is not simply embodied in one particular nation in an ambiguous term.”
• The nexus of democracy, equality, and theological principles
• Historical impacts of religion in Chinese public life—particularly in Confucianism and Buddhism and eventually Christianity
• Peng reflects on his own moral sources of hope and inspiration—which arise not from the State, but from a communion of saints.

About Peng Yin

Peng Yin is a scholar of comparative ethics, Chinese theology, and religion and sexuality. He Assistant Professor of Ethics at Boston University’s School of Theology. He is completing a manuscript tentatively entitled Persisting in the Good: Thomas Aquinas and Early Chinese Ethics. The volume explores the intelligibility of moral language across religious traditions and rethinks Christian teaching on human nature, sacrament, and eschatology. Yin’s research has been supported by the Louisville Institute, Political Theology Network, Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History, and Yale’s Fund for Gay and Lesbian Studies.

A recipient of Harvard’s Derek Bok Certificate of Distinction in Teaching, Yin teaches “Comparative Religious Ethics,” “Social Justice,” “Mysticism and Ethical Formation,” “Christian Ethics,” “Queer Theology,” and “Sexual Ethics” at STH. At the University, Yin serves as a Core Faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program, and as an Affiliated Faculty in Department of Classical Studies and Center for the Study of Asia. In 2023, Yin will deliver the Bartlett Lecture at Yale Divinity School and the McDonald Agape Lecture at the University of Hong Kong.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Peng Yin & Ryan McAnnally-Linz
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, & Tim Bergeland
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Help us improve the podcast! Click here to take our listener survey—5 respondents will be randomly selected to receive a signed and personalized copy of Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most.

What are the goals of education? Are we shaping young minds or corrupting the youth? Theologian Mark Jordan joins Matt Croasmun for a conversation about the meaning of theological education today. Mark is the R. R. Niebuhr Research Professor at Harvard Divinity School, and is the author of ten books, including Telling Truths in Church: Scandal, Flesh, and Christian Speech. He came on the show to discuss his 2021 book, Transforming Fire: Imagining Christian Teaching—along the way, he reflects on Christian pedagogical principles; the question of the teacher’s power and the potential to enact an abusive pedagogy; he looks at the enigmatic, provoking, and sometimes deliberately elusive teaching strategy of Jesus through his parables; the role of desire in learning—and a shared love for the divine between teacher and student; he acknowledges the expansiveness of theological education that occurs outside a classroom setting; and he questions the very purpose of Christian theological education.

Mark D. Jordan is the R. R. Niebuhr Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School. He is the author of ten books, including Telling Truths in Church: Scandal, Flesh, and Christian Speech. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright- Hays Fellowship, and a Luce Fellowship in Theology.

Show Notes

• Check out Mark Jordan's book Transforming Fire: Imagining Christian Teaching.
• Louis Agassiz's story of the fish exemplifies a strong pedagogy.
• Teaching should center on the text itself, not the teacher: “In the space between the text and the student, I need to just step aside as far as possible and put the fish on the table.”
• The parables of Jesus are themselves a pedagogy. They are “enigmatic, provoking, sometimes deliberately elusive” in order to “stop the hearer in his tracks or her tracks.”
• The shift of theological education primarily from monastic schools to universities suggests the site of divine revelation is also primarily confined to the university classroom.
• The shift of theological education to universities also requires theological education to follow the schedule of a university which limits the time some texts require to be read properly.
• The texts being taught intend to transform students' lives with the lessons they hold.
• Teachers of Christian theology can invite transformation, but ultimately divine action is beyond teachers' control: “Faith is a divine gift.”
• Teachers often communicate to their students in bodily and affective ways in addition to the actual words they use: “Bodies learn best from bodies.”
• Mark Jordan's thoughts on teaching are especially true of theological education, but they can be true of other subjects as well.
• “Education depends on desire.” That is, it depends on the student and teacher's shared love for the divine, for other people, and for the world.
• Using the model of Jesus, who gently corrected his students' misguided expectations of him, teachers can also gently correct a student who “is beginning to mistake [the teacher] for the actual point of the course.”
• Theological education can and is taking place everywhere, not just in the classroom setting.
• “The question is not, will there will be a future of theology? It's where will there be a future of theology?”
• In many universities and seminaries, the time and expense of formal theological education prevent potential students from undergoing academic training. How can we reimagine theological education to allow for greater accessibility, even to those not interested in professional formation as a church leader?

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Mark Jordan and Matt Croasmun
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Alexa Rollow, Macie Bridge, and Tim Bergeland
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Can you spare 3 minutes to take our listener survey? After the survey closes, we'll randomly select 5 respondents to receive a free, signed, and personalized copy of Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most. Click here to take the survey! Thank you for your honest feedback and support!

“For theology to be worth anything, it must traffic in real life, and that real life begins in the heart.”

Theologian Simeon Zahl (University of Cambridge) joins Evan Rosa to discuss his book, The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience, reflecting on emotion and affect; the livability of Christian faith; the origins of religious ideas; the data of human desire for theological reflection; the grace of God as the ultimate context for playfulness and freedom; and the role of the Holy Spirit in holding this all together.

About Simeon Zahl

Simeon Zahl is Professor of Christian Theology in the Faculty of Divinity. He is an historical and constructive theologian whose research interests span the period from 1500 to the present. His most recent monograph is The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience, which proposes a new account of the work of the Spirit in salvation through the lens of affect and embodiment. Professor Zahl received his first degree in German History and Literature from Harvard, and his doctorate in Theology from Cambridge. Following his doctorate, he held a post-doc in Cambridge followed by a research fellowship at St John’s College, Oxford. Prior to his return to Cambridge he was Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Nottingham.

Show Notes

• Explore Simeon Zahl’s The Holy Spirit & Christian Experience
• “For theology to be worth anything, it must traffic in real life, and that real life begins in the heart.”
• Theology becoming abstracted from day to day life
• “There is a tendency that we have as human beings, as theologians to do theology that gets abstracted in some way from the concerns of day to day life that we get caught up in our sort of conceptual kind of towers and structures or committed to certain kinds of ideas in ways that get free of the life that Christians actually seem to lead.”
• “Real life begins in the heart.”
• God is concerned with the heart.
• Emotion, desire, and feelings
• Where does love come in?
• Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon
• Philip Melanchthon’s 1521 Loci Communes: Defining human nature through the “affective power”
• Affect versus rationality at the center of Christian life
• Credibility, plausibility, and livability of Christianity
• Authenticity and the disparity between values and beliefs and real lives.
• Doctrine of Grace
• Enabling a hopeful honesty
• “What Christianity says and what it feels need to be closer together.”
• Evangelical conversion in George Elliot’s novella, Janet’s Repentance
• “Ideas are often poor ghosts; our sun−filled eyes cannot discern them; they pass athwart us in thin vapour, and cannot make themselves felt. But sometimes they are made flesh; they breathe upon us with warm breath, they touch us with soft responsive hands, they look at us with sad sincere eyes, and speak to us in appealing tones; they are clothed in a living human soul, with all its conflicts, its faith, and its love. Then their presence is a power, then they shake us like a passion, and we are drawn after them with gentle compulsion, as flame is drawn to flame.” (George Eliot)
• Art’s ability to speak to desire.
• T.S. Eliot: “Poetry operates at the frontiers of consciousness.”
• Exhausted by religious language
• How the aesthetic impacts the acceptance of ideas
• Durable concepts
• Where theological doctrine comes from
• Simeon Zahl: “In what ways are theological doctrines themselves developed from and sourced by the living concerns and experiences of Christians and of human beings more broadly? Doctrines do not develop in a vacuum or fall from the sky, fully formed. Human reasonings, including theological reasonings, are never fully extricable in a given moment from our feelings, our moods, our predispositions, and the personal histories we carry with us. furthermore, as we shall see in the book, doctrines have often come to expression in the history of Christianity, not least through an ongoing engagement with what have been understood to be concrete experiences of God's spirit and history.”
• “People were worshipping Christ before they understood who he was.”
• “Speaking about human experience just is speaking about the doctrine of the Holy Spirit.”
• Desire and emotion as pneumatological experience
• Sourcing emotional and experiential data for theological reflection
• Ernst Troelsch: “Every metaphysic must find its test in practical life.”
• “The half-light of understanding”
• Nietzsche: “The hereditary sin of the philosopher is a lack of historical sense.”
• Augustine’s transformation of desire
• Emotional experience as inadequate tool on its own
• Noticing our own emotional experiences
• “If you want to pay attention to the Holy Spirit in theology, that means you have to pay attention to embodied experiential realities.”
• Worshipping of God as Trinity before identifying the doctrine of the Trinity
• Karen Kilby’s “apathetic trinitarianism”
• Pentecostalism, affect, and play
• Establishing a spiritual connection between you and God
• Touch, sweat, and movement
• Nemi Waraboko’s The Pentecostal Principle: Ethical Methodology in New Spirit
• Openness to new things, dynamism
• Play and grace
• An embarrassment of play, in the best way possible
• The freedom of the Spirit: free to get it wrong in a “relaxed field”
• Grace as the ultimate “relaxed field”

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Simeon Zahl
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, & Tim Bergeland
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

There’s a 500-year history of social justice activism that emerged from Christianity in the Americas, and it comes to us through the Brown Church. Rev. Dr. Robert Chao Romero (Associate Professor of Latina/o Studies at UCLA) joins Evan Rosa to discuss the history of Christian racial justice efforts in the Americas, as well as a constructive and faithful exploration of Christianity & Critical Race Theory. He is a historian, legal scholar, author, a pastor, and an organizer who wants to bring the history of Christian social justice around race to bear on the systems and structures of racism we see in the world today. He is an Asian-Latino who straddles the worlds of Chinese and Mexican heritage; Latin American history and Law; scholarship and a pastoral ministry; and a contemplative and an activist. He’s author of Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology, and Identity—and is co-author (with Jeff M. Liou) of Christianity and Critical Race Theory: A Faithful & Constructive Conversation.

About Robert Chao Romero

Rev. Dr. Robert Chao Romero is "Asian-Latino," and has been a professor of Chicana/o Studies and Asian American Studies at UCLA since 2005. He received his Ph.D. from UCLA in Latin American History and his Juris Doctor from U.C. Berkeley. Romero has published more than 30 academic books and articles on issues of race, immigration, history, education, and religion, and received the Latina/o Studies book award from the international Latin American Studies Association. He is author of Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology, and Identity, which received the InterVarsity Press Readers’ Choice Award for best academic title; as well as his most recent book, Christianity and Critical Race Theory: A Faithful & Constructive Conversation, co-authored with Jeff M. Liou. Romero is a former Ford Foundation and U.C. President's Postdoctoral Fellow, as well as a recipient of the Louisville Institute's Sabbatical Grant for Researchers. Robert is also an ordained minister and community organizer.

Show Notes

• Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology, and Identity
• Christianity and Critical Race Theory: A Faithful and Constructive Conversation
• About Robert Chao Romero
• Asian-Latino Heritage
• Spiritual Borderlands and liminality
• The 500-year history of the Brown Church
• Fr. Antonio de Montesinos and the first racial justice sermon in the Americas
• Bartolome De Las Casas and concientización (repentance, metanoia)
• Mision Integral
• Christianity & Critical Race Theory
• The four basic tenets of Critical Race Theory and how Christians can understand them in light of the Gospel
• Hope and eschatological vision for justice and unity
• The imago Dei

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Robert Chao Romero
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, and Tim Bergeland
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

What would it mean for us to take Christianity seriously as a way of life, a set of practices and ways of being in the world—and not merely a list of beliefs?

Theologian Kevin Hector (University of Chicago Divinity School) joins Ryan McAnnally-Linz for a discussion of his latest book, Christianity as a Way of Life. Together they reflect on the practice of Christianity; the role of devotion to God in framing the importance of Christianity to a practitioner; the unique practices embedded in the life of Christians; the plausibility of Christianity today; what it means to see Jesus in people and look for the image of God in others; the practices of imitation and forgiveness; the conflicted character of Christian experience; loving God as loving what God loves; the significance of shame; and what it means to renarrate your life in light of the Gospel.

About Kevin Hector

Kevin Hector is the Naomi Shenstone Donnelley Professor of Theology and of the Philosophy of Religions; also in the College. His teaching and research are devoted largely to interpretive questions, particularly (a) how best to understand faith commitments, and (b) how the outworking of such commitments can shed light on broader cultural issues. Hector's first book, *Theology without Metaphysics*  (Cambridge University Press, 2011), thus defends a novel approach to the problem of metaphysics by developing a philosophically-informed and critically-articulated theology of language. In his second book, The Theological Project of Modernism: Faith and the Conditions of Mineness (Oxford University Press, 2015), Hector explores the idea of 'mineness,' in the sense of being able to identify with one's life or experience it as self-expressive, by tracing the development of this idea in modern theology. His third book, Christianity as a Way of Life: A Systematic Theology (Yale University Press, 2023) argues that we can understand Christianity as a set of practices designed to transform one’s way of perceiving and being in the world or, in sum, as a way of life. And in his forthcoming book-project, tentatively entitled “Life as a Theological Project: Creating a Usable Past,” Hector focuses on memoirs as a site of theological reflection, not least because memoirs shed light on issues that people wrestle with more generally.

Follow him on Twitter/X here.

Show Notes

• Check out Christianity as a Way of Life: A Systematic Theology (Yale University Press, 2023)
• Disconnect between academic theology and ordinary Christians
• Losing God to Christian practices
• Devotion as God’s importance being important to you.
• Imitation as practice for learning devotion.
• LeBron James as an example of devotion
• “The Martha Stewart effect”
• Being yourself as a form of devotion
• Mother Teresa and “seeing Jesus in people”
• Looking for the image of God in others
• The hermeneutical circle: making sense of the parts through the whole, and revising our sense of the whole through the parts.
• Nick Wolterstorff, forgiving as naming the wrong as a wrong, while excusing is ignoring the wrong.
• Indignation versus resentment
• How transparent are we to ourselves?
• Practice as building habitual reflexes
• Practices make it more and more sensible to orient towards God
• Shame in Hector’s Christian framework
• Marilynne Robinson’s Lila

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Kevin Hector
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, & Tim Bergeland
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

With unflagging and unwavering hope in our civic life Michael Wear (Center for Christianity & Public Life) wants to renovate the character of Christian political engagement. He’s a former White House and presidential campaign staffer and his new book is called The Spirit of Our Politics: Spiritual Formation and the Renovation of Public Life.

In this conversation with Evan Rosa, he reflects on what it means to seek the good of the public; the problem of privatization; what it means to be politically homeless and how to avoid angst about that; the meanings of political parties and how we end up fractured and confused when we look for an identity in them; he reflects on Dallas Willard’s epistemological and moral realism and its prospects for political life; and the virtue of gentleness and giving away the last word.

About Michael Wear

Michael Wear is the Founder, President and CEO of the Center for Christianity and Public Life, a nonpartisan, nonprofit institution based in the nation's capital with the mission to contend for the credibility of Christian resources in public life, for the public good. For well over a decade, he has served as a trusted resource and advisor for a range of civic leaders on matters of faith and public life, including as a White House and presidential campaign staffer. Michael is a leading voice on building a healthy civic pluralism in twenty-first century America. He has argued that the spiritual health and civic character of individuals is deeply tied to the state of our politics and public affairs.

Michael previously led Public Square Strategies, a consulting firm he founded that helps religious organizations, political organizations, businesses and others effectively navigate the rapidly changing American religious and political landscape.

Michael's next book, The Spirit of Our Politics: Spiritual Formation and the Renovation of Public Life, will be released on January 23, 2024. Michael’s first book, Reclaiming Hope: Lessons Learned in the Obama White House About the Future of Faith in America, offers reflections, analysis and ideas about the role of faith in the Obama years and what it means for today. He has co-authored, or contributed to, several other books, including Compassion and Conviction: The AND Campaign's Guide to Faithful Civic Engagement, with Justin Giboney and Chris Butler. He also writes for The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Catapult Magazine, Christianity Today and other publications on faith, politics and culture.

Michael holds an honorary position at the University of Birmingham’s Cadbury Center for the Public Understanding of Religion.

Michael and his wife, Melissa, are both proud natives of Buffalo, New York. They now reside in Maryland, where they are raising their beloved daughters, Saoirse and Ilaria.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Michael Wear
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, & Tim Bergeland
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

What are the economic forces that underly racist thinking? What are the theological dimensions of racism? How does the “political economic distortion of the divine economy” impacts the contemporary experience of and response to racism?

In this episode, Jonathan Tran (Baylor University) joins Matt Croasmun to discuss his book, Asian Americans & the Spirit of Racial Capitalism, focusing on the unique experience of Asian Americans, and Jonathan’s own experience growing up as a war refugee in southern California; where race and racialized thinking really comes from and how we can understand its history and its impact today; Christian moral psychology; meritocracy and capitalism; and they discuss a unique Christian community—Redeemer Community Church in San Francisco that offers a unique experiment in bearing witness to the economic and racial realities of life today, but through the theological framing of the Gospel.

About Jonathan Tran

Jonathan Tran is a theologian and ethicist, and is Associate Dean for Faculty in the Honors College and Professor of Theology in Great Texts at Baylor University. His research focuses on the human life in language, and what that life reveals about God and God’s world. Lately, that research has focused on race and racism, and his book Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism attempts to present racism as a theological problem, a political economic distortion of the divine economy, and a problem given to the usual redress, the church laying claim to God’s original revolution.

Show Notes

• The roots of Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism
• Are we thinking about racism backwards?
• Race as a self-interpreting category
• Is race just obvious? Is it just about the racialized relationships we have with each other?
• “Rather than thinking of race as basic, we want to ask the question, when and where and how did race come to capture our imaginations, such that we just now assume it as basic?”
• What is political economy?
• Connecting an understanding of economy to God’s essence and existence
• “The structure of creation is in a sense hardwired as gift.”
• “One of the first ways we talked about the gospel in the early church was as the divine economy, an economy of gratuity and grace over and against the world's privation and predation.”
• Gift economy
• Pope Francis’s “Our Common Home”
• “What is the material political economy out of which the concept and category of race began?”
• “Race was utilized in Europe and America to create a kind of ideological justification for relationships of property and labor.”
• Race and unjust labor practices
• Is capitalism coextensive with racism?
• Marxism vs theological answers to the problem of capitalism and racism
• Understanding Marxism with an example: Waco, Texas
• Black Marxism as a corrective to White Marxism
• Christianity and Moral Psychology
• Anti-racism, post-racialism, identitarianism
• Reverse engineering racism to produce Black dignity, Black power, or Black politics
• Giving race explanatory power
• “I’m not essentially Asian, but I've been racialized as an Asian person.”
• Does racism against Asian Americans count?
• Double marginalization: first by racism, then by anti-racism
• Foucault’s “history of the present”
• “[Race] is necessarily binary thinking.”
• Meritocracy and capitalism
• Case Study: Redeemer Community Church in San Francisco (https://www.redeemersf.org/)
• The Joy–Dispossession Elipse: “Joy without dispossession is escapist. Dispossession without joy is sadist.”
• The Gospel as proclamation instead of resistance
• “Marxists in our sense are waiting for the revolution to start. Christians are leaning into a revolution that's a few thousand years old.”

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Jonathan Tran & Matt Croasmun
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, & Tim Bergeland
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Imagine a future that brings personal and communal wholeness, a commitment to truth even when it hurts, and the beauty of pursuing integration in the wake of fragmentation. Anne Snyder joins Evan Rosa to talk about her vision and hopes for a whole-person revolution that honors our moral complexity, holds us accountable to virtue, and seeks a robust form of love in public life. 

In this conversation they discuss: the meaning of wholeness and what it could mean to become a whole person; the importance of character, virtue, and moral formation; our need to come to terms with violence—listening to the language of threat and safety and preservation and protection; tribalism, fear, and moral realities; the ideas at the root of democracy; the connection between cynicism, distrust, and a feeling of threat and need to survive; and Anne describes a hard-won wholeness rooted in a sober and persevering hope that doesn’t die.

About Anne Snyder

Anne Snyder is the editor-in-chief of Comment magazine and oversees our partner project, Breaking Ground. She is the host of The Whole Person Revolution podcast and co-editor of Breaking Ground: Charting Our Future in a Pandemic Year, published in January 2022.

Prior to leading Comment, she directed The Philanthropy Roundtable‘s Character Initiative, a program seeking to help foundations and business leaders strengthen “the middle ring” of morally formative institutions. Her path-breaking guidebook, The Fabric of Character: A Wise Giver’s Guide to Renewing our Social and Moral Landscape, was published in 2019. From 2014 to 2017 Anne worked for Laity Lodge and the H.E. Butt Foundation in Texas, and before that, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, World Affairs Journal and The New York Times. She is a Senior Fellow of The Trinity Forum and a Fellow at the Urban Reform Institute, a Houston-based think tank that explores how cities can drive opportunity for the bulk of their citizens. She has published widely, including The Atlantic Monthly, the Washington Post, Bittersweet Monthly and of course Comment, and now serves as a trustee for Nyack College. Anne spent the formative years of her childhood overseas before earning a bachelor’s degree from Wheaton College (IL) and a master’s degree from Georgetown University. She currently lives in Washington, D.C.

Show Notes

• “Whole person revolution”
• Individual whole person as head, heart, and helping hands.
• We are porous to our contexts
• The individual as a part of a greater whole.
• Exploring fear in our societies to understand the other
• Wholeness must be considered on the granular level and broad scale
• A “hard won” wholeness
• Healing relational divides and brokenness
• Curling inward around oneself
• Watching cynicism arise in the vacuum of encounter

Production NOtes

• This podcast featured Anne Snyder
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, and Tim Bergeland
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

We often think of speaking up as an act of courage. And of course, there are times when it most certainly is. But what about the courage to listen? The best kind of generous listening is interesting because it seems to acknowledge and create a mutual agency. The courageous, generous listener grants the speaker an authority to have the floor and make a point or drop a bomb or tell it like it is. But that act of listening is itself an active mode of receptive agency. So the best kind of listening is a truly powerful thing because each party involved in this miracle of communication gets to be present in fullness.

That is not something that can be done by the speaker alone. The ability to create the conditions for that mutual agency is up to the listener. But when you apply that to a religious scenario—the preaching and hearing of the gospel, things get interesting.

Whether its from the window of St. Peter’s Basilica, or from the screams of a megaphone wielding street preacher, or the pulpit of your small, faithful community church… something profound seems to be happening when we listen to someone speak and illumine the Word of God.

Will Willimon, who has trained many preachers and written several books on preaching and homiletics, has written a book for listeners, both acknowledging and uplifting the act of listening to sermons. Will is Professor of the Practice of Christian Ministry at Duke Divinity School and he came on the show with me to talk about his book, Listeners Dare: Hearing God in the Sermon.

Together we discuss the act of listening and the rare achievement it seems to be; the definition and purpose of a sermon, and what that might mean for its listeners; how to cultivate the charity and courage to listen; and the inherent risk involved in genuinely and generously listening to the gospel.

Show Notes

• Listeners Dare: Hearing God in the Sermon
• Preaching is a demanding skill for both preachers and their audiences.
• Scripture itself pays attention to audiences as well as speakers.
• Listeners come to sermons with expectations. For sermons to most benefit the audience, preachers can guide their listeners to ask the right questions of a sermon.
• What is proclamation?
• Like the Bible itself, sermons can take a wide array of literary forms to communicate the truth of God. Because it proclaims truth about God, the Bible itself can be seen as a sort of sermon.
• “Christian sermons, ought to arise out of an encounter with scripture.”
• The gospels began a new genre of literature to communicate the truth of Christ.
• The genre or form of sermons continues to evolve and diversify today with outside influences such as TED Talks.
• Fred Craddock and the narrative unfolding sermon
• Verse-by-verse discovery in a sermon
• One definition of preaching is “a biblical preacher goes to the biblical text hoping to make a discovery. Then you announce that discovery to the congregation.”
• At times when a preacher has no audience, such as street preachers, there is still something compelling about the preacher's commitment to their message, that regardless of its reception it must be spoken.
• Preaching requires charity and risk from listeners, so they can open themselves to the possibility of hearing and being transformed by another's message.
• Listening requires daring because the gospel message presented by Christian preachers has the power to upend listeners' preexisting beliefs.
• “Preaching is a confrontation with the God who came to us, who is a Jew from Nazareth, who lived briefly, died violently, and rose unexpectedly—preaching is about that.”
• Listening, and listening to God, are skills that can be cultivated.
• “We have a revealing, talkative, loquacious God.”
• It is helpful for listeners of sermons to assume both the preacher and God hope to communicate with their listeners.
• Listeners must be willing to learn from, critique, and engage with sermons.
• “Listeners are the playground of the Holy Spirit.”
• Preachers partner with the Holy Spirit to bring sermons to their congregation, even using difficult passages of scripture to further engage listeners.
• John 6 and the “hard sayings” of Jesus
• Listeners Dare! :) Will mentions a teenagers compliment to him once: “That was the most f—ed up thing I have ever heard… it was wonderful.”
• The courage to keep listening

About Will Willimon

The Reverend Dr. William H. Willimon is Professor of the Practice of Christian Ministry at the Divinity School, Duke University. He served eight years as Bishop of the North Alabama Conference of The United Methodist Church, where he led the 157,000 Methodists and 792 pastors in North Alabama. For twenty years prior to the episcopacy, he was Dean of the Chapel and Professor of Christian Ministry at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. He is author of over 100 books, including Worship as Pastoral Care, Accidental Preacher, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony, and his most recent, God Turned Toward Us: The ABCs of the Christian Faith. His articles have appeared in many publications including The Christian Ministry, Quarterly Review, Plough, Liturgy, Worship and Christianity Today. For many years he was Editor-at-Large for The Christian Century. For more information and resources, visit his website.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Will Willimon
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Alexa Rollow, Macie Bridge, and Tim Bergeland
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

American Christianity enjoys a great deal of power and influence at home and abroad. Is the church better for it? Is the world better for it? Or is Christian Nationalism just another idolatry—a temptation to take up the sword instead of taking up the cross? Journalist Tim Alberta (The Atlantic, POLITICO) joins Evan Rosa for a discussion of his new book, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism. Tim explains his reporting on American Evangelicalism from 2019 through 2023 as well as his own Christian faith and spiritual background. He also reflects on a variety of challenging issues that influence life far upstream from political theatre, including:

• how faith matures or erodes
• the impact of Constantinian Christianity and the Christian embrace of power, influence, and glory in American public life
• the difference between Christ and Christendom, and our allegiance to one or the other
• and the meaning and unique threat of idolatry—which takes on a unique form in contemporary American life.

Show Art

Grégoire Guérard, “The Arrest of Christ”, circa 1520-1522, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dijon, France

About Tim Alberta

Visit Tim’s personal website for more of his writing, or follow him on X/Twitter.

Tim Alberta is an award-winning journalist, best-selling author, and staff writer for The Atlantic magazine. He formerly served as chief political correspondent for POLITICO. In 2019, he published the critically acclaimed book, "American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump" and co-moderated the year's final Democratic presidential debate aired by PBS Newshour.

Hailing from Brighton, Michigan, Tim attended Schoolcraft College and later Michigan State University, where his plans to become a baseball writer were changed by a stint covering the legislature in Lansing. He went on to spend more than a decade in Washington, reporting for publications including the Wall Street Journal, The Hotline, National Journal and National Review. Having covered the biggest stories in national politics—the battles over health care and immigration on Capitol Hill; the election and presidency of Donald Trump; the ideological warfare between and within the two parties—Tim was eager for a new challenge.

In 2019, he moved home to Michigan. Rather than cover the 2020 campaign through the eyes of the candidates, Tim roved the country and reported from gun shows and farmers markets, black cookouts and white suburbs, crowded wholesale stores and shuttered small businesses. He wrote a regular "Letter to Washington" that kept upstream from politics, focusing less on manifest partisan divisions and more on elusive root causes: the hollowing out of communities, the diminished faith in vital institutions, the self-perpetuating cycle of cultural antagonism, the diverging economic realities for wealthy and working-class citizens, the rapid demographic makeover of America—and the corollary spikes in racism and xenophobia.

Tim joined The Atlantic in March 2021 with a mandate to keep roaming and writing and telling stories that strike at the heart of America's discontent. His work has been featured in dozens of other publications nationwide, including Sports Illustrated and Vanity Fair, and he frequently appears as a commentator on television programs in the United States and around the world. Tim's first book, "American Carnage," debuted at No. 1 and No. 2 on the Washington Post and New York Times best-seller lists, respectively. He lives in southeast Michigan with his wife, three sons, and German Shepherd.

Show Notes

• Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory
• Intellectually re-examining the faith of childhood
• A generational disillusionment in today’s exit from Christianity
• Generational break in attitude & behavior
• Distance from the moral majority generation to evaluate critically
• Inverse relationship where the more one learns about Christ, the less they like Christianity
• The creation of the secular, evil “other”
• “They created this other, this outsider, this enemy that had to be defeated.”
• Current American Christianity is often looking to find our identities on the good side of zero-sum equation.
• Shrinking our theology into something pathetic and miniscule.
• St. Augustine, St. Paul, and C.S. Lewis
• “One way to find meaning is to locate an enemy.”
• From Cal Thomas’s Blinded by Might” —”Unless you have the power to right every wrong and cure every ill and what better way to do that than with An all powerful God on your side.”
• The church most often seems to thrive when it is at the margins.
• “We can understand the relationship between this lust for dominance in our, in a society, the inverse relationship between that lust for dominance and the health of the church.”
• Satan’s temptation of Christ in the Gospel of Luke—the temptation to bow down.
• St. Peter, “Blessed are you Simon bar Jonah…” and then… “Get behind me Satan.”
• Reaching for the sword versus reaching for the cross
• The impact of Constantinian Christianity
• John Dixon’s Bullies and Saints
• Constantine wielding Christianity to dominate—the imposition of Christian faith
• “Is Christianity an end or is it a means to an end?”
• “It's easy to forget about the teachings of Christ if you are preoccupied with the, crusades of Christianity”
• “An idol is something that starts as a good and healthy thing, but then becomes the ultimate thing.”
• America as a kingdom
• American Christendom as a source of idolatry
• Baptizing the American experience and past
• E.g., Thomas Jefferson, Donald Trump, and Paula White
• “The other part of it that I find to be uniquely problematic and sometimes just downright gross, is this willful merging of scripture with the American mythos.”
• Mike Pence, and “Let us set our eyes on Old Glory.”
• “Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever.”
• An age of gnawing unknowns
• Tim Alberta’s reflections on his father
• “Keep your eyes fixed on Jesus.”
• The influence of Jesus’s life and teaching
• “We are in sales, not management.”

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Tim Alberta
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, and Tim Bergeland
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Help the Yale Center for Faith & Culture meet a $10,000 matching challenge for podcast production; click here to donate today.

Part 4 of 4 in our 2023 Advent Series. Bo Karen Lee discusses how Ignatian spirituality, contemplative prayer, and meditating on the loving gaze and deep compassion of Christ—a love that suffers with—can be a transformative experience to heal trauma, pain, and deal with powerful emotions.

About Bo Karen Lee

Bo Karen Lee, ThM '99, PhD '07, is associate professor of spiritual theology and Christian formation at Princeton Theological Seminary. She earned her BA in religious studies from Yale University, her MDiv from Trinity International University in Deerfield, Illinois, and her ThM and PhD from Princeton Seminary. She furthered her studies in the returning scholars program at the University of Chicago, received training as a spiritual director from Oasis Ministries, and was a Mullin Fellow with the Institute of Advanced Catholic Studies. Her book, Sacrifice and Delight in the Mystical Theologies of Anna Maria van Schurman and Madame Jeanne Guyon, argues that surrender of self to God can lead to the deepest joy in God. She has recently completed a volume, The Soul of Higher Education, which explores contemplative pedagogies and research strategies. A recipient of the John Templeton Award for Theological Promise, she gave a series of international lectures that included the topic, “The Face of the Other: An Ethic of Delight.”

She is a member of the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women, and the American Academy of Religion; she recently served on the Governing Board of the Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality, and is on the editorial board of the journal, Spirtus, as well as on the steering committee of the Christian Theology and Bible Group of the Society of Biblical Literature. Before joining Princeton faculty, she taught in the Theology Department at Loyola College in Baltimore, Maryland, where she developed courses with a vibrant service-learning component for students to work at shelters for women recovering from drug addiction and sex trafficking. She now enjoys teaching classes on prayer for the Spirituality and Mission Program at Princeton Seminary, in addition to taking students on retreats and hosting meditative walks along nature trails.

Show Notes

• Help the Yale Center for Faith & Culture meet a $10,000 matching challenge for podcast production; click here to donate today.
• Macie Bridge and Evan Rosa introduce the episode
• The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola
• Christ in solidarity with me
• Who was Ignatius of Loyola?
• The Life of Christ by Ludolf of Saxony
• Four weeks: beloved, walking with Christ in his ministry, walking with Christ in his suffering, knowing the risen Christ
• “Gazing upon God who gazes upon me in love.”
• How does God look upon me? How do others look upon me? How do I look upon myself?
• Attachment Theory in Psychology
• Still Face Experiment and Trauma
• Trauma is the opposite of human flourishing
• Learned secure attachment
• Growing in confident awareness of God’s love for me through prayer, meditation, and community.
• First image of God comes through human relationships
• Anger
• Bo’s experience of dealing with trauma during 2022’s wave of violence against Asian Americans
• Prayer, doubt, and whether God is with us
• Hearing the wailing of women
• Mary holding the collapsed Christ
• “Bo, they killed me too.”
• “I was companioned in my grief.”

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Bo Karen Lee
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Help the Yale Center for Faith & Culture meet a $10,000 matching challenge for podcast production; click here to donate today.

How does the light get in? Leonard Cohen suggests, "There's a crack in everything / That's how..." Whether from our restlessness, our fear, or our trauma, to see the world rightly might start with the need to acknowledge the crack in everything.

Only then can we see a new world of understanding and belonging and well-being.

Graham Ward (University of Oxford) joins Ryan McAnnally-Linz to reflect on the purpose of theology, Christology as the place where the divine and the human come together, trauma, restlessness, fear, the human capacity for creativity and destruction (and which will we choose?), and how the Gospels offer a new sense of belonging.

About Graham Ward

Graham Ward is Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford and is author of several books, including How the Light Gets In and Another Kind of Normal.

Show Notes

• Graham Ward’s Ethical Life books under discussion in this episode: How the Light Gets In and Another Kind of Normal
• Creating inner coherence through a systematic theology
• Scripture as the common text all Christians return to
• Reading with a sense of original language
• “We do believe God speaks to us through the scriptures.”
• Writing titles that invite non-Christians to the books
• “There’s a lot of the church who are not in church on Sunday.”
• “I always think that, one, theology lost in a sense when it became professionalized. And two…theology has got to be pastoral.”
• “Good writing can find the phrasing which unlocks experiences that other people have had.”
• Theology as speaking more to being human than being divine
• Dogma (Matt Damon and Ben Affleck) and the problem with “Buddy Jesus”
• Theology that defamiliarizes Christ
• The strangeness of Christ as drawing out
• Balancing defamiliarization with the glory of Creation
• None of us actually know what the resurrection truly means
• Trauma in the early church
• “What is it we're looking for in our restlessness?”
• Restlessness as fundamentally connected to our fear
• The conflict between losing control in Christ, and being a predatory creature
• Grace breaking through in the rubbish heap, like sunlight on a violet
• “This is the hard love which demanded God's sacrifice, but also demands my sacrifice of what I think love should be.”
• Julian of Norwich
• “I was just playing with the phrase ‘because the devil is in the detail’, and it's not, it's God that's in the detail.”
• Will you be creative or will you be destructive?
• The role of the church in people who are discerning
• Mystagogy, living what you worship
• The role of liturgy in community
• Fragmentation and non-belonging within our contemporary relationships
• The gospels as incorporating a new type of belonging

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Graham Ward
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Help the Yale Center for Faith & Culture meet a $10,000 matching challenge for podcast production; click here to donate today.

Part 3 of 4 in our 2023 Advent Series. Stacey Floyd-Thomas presents a vision of Black joy—which the world can't give and the world can't take away. Looking into several depictions of female agency in the Gospels, she outlines a picture of joy that celebrates beauty, redemptive self-love, virtuous pride, and critical engagement with the world. Then Willie James Jennings offers a definition of joy as an act of resistance against despair and its forces that lead to death. He presents a creative, communal joy characterized by fullness, connected to but transcending grief and sorrow.

Show Notes

• Help the Yale Center for Faith & Culture meet a $10,000 matching challenge for podcast production; click here to donate today.
• Macie Bridge and Evan Rosa introduce the episode
• Stacey Floyd-Thomas explains Black joy
• "This Joy That I Have"
• "The world didn't give it / the world can't take it away."
• Beauty and Blackness
• Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye
• Womanist Theology
• Radical subjectivity
• Communitarian 
• Redemptive self-love
• Critical engagement
• Female agency in the Gospels
• Mary and Jesus at the Wedding in Cana
• Mary and Martha
• Syro-Phoenician Woman
• Willie James Jennings defines joy—"an act of resistance against despair"
• "Resisting all the ways in which life can be strangled and presented to us as not worth living"
• Singing a song in a strange land
• Making productive use of pain, suffering, and the absurd—taking them serious
• How does one cultivate joy? You have to have people who can show you how to sing a song in a strand land, laugh where all you want to do is cry, and how to ride the winds of chaos.
• "In contexts where your energies have to be focused on survival, it doesn’t leave a lot of energy for overt forms of complaint—you’re spending a lot of energy just trying to hold it together."
• The commercialization of joy in the empire of advertising—contrasting that with the peoples serious work of joy
• The work and skill of making something beautiful out of what has been thrown away
• Segregated joy—joy in African diaspora communities
• Joy is always embedded in community logics
• The Christological center of joy
• Pentecost joy—joy together
• Geographies of joy: Christians tend not to think spatially, but we should
• Public rituals bound to real space
• Hoping for joyous infection, where the space has claimed you as its own
• Where can joy be found? The church, the hospital room, the barber shop and beauty shops—“things are going to be better"

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Stacey Floyd-Thomas and Willie James Jennings
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Help the Yale Center for Faith & Culture meet a $10,000 matching challenge for podcast production; click here to donate today.

How do you speak to the unspeakable? How does a people connected to place retain their sense of meaning and time when they are displaced and ignored? Indigenous Australian journalist and public intellectual Stan Grant (Monash University) joins Evan Rosa for a discussion of his experience as an Aboriginal Australian, the son of Wiradjuri and Gamilaraay people in the Outback of New South Wales, Australia. He tells the story of his family’s Christian faith and Aboriginal identity—how the two work together. He shares the sense of aboriginal homelessness and displacement and his efforts to seek justice for Aboriginal people in modern Australia, a place with no memory. He teaches us the meaning of Yindyamarra Winhanganha—which is Wiradjuri concept meaning a life of respect, gentleness, speaking quietly and walking softly, in a world worth living in. He comments on declining democracy, how to live with dignity after catastrophe, what it means to be both nothing and everything—and we learn from Stan about the power of silence to speak to the unspeakable.

About Stan Grant

Stan Grant is an indigenous aboriginal Australian journalist, former war correspondent, and an award-winning author of multiple books, including 2023's The Queen Is Dead: Time for a Public Reckoning (Harper Collins). He served in high profile roles in Australia as a current affairs and news presenter with Channel 7, CNN, SBS and the ABC. He was recently appointed inaugural Director of the Constructive Institute Asia Pacific in the Faculty of Arts at Monash University.

Show Notes

• To learn more about Stan Grant and the Constructive Institute, click here.
• What is home in a place of exile?
• Coolah, New South Wales, Australia
• Entering “Australia”
• What it means to be an indigenous person—an Indigenous Australian or Aboriginal in particular
• Australia is a place with no memory.
• Stan Grant’s Christian faith: “Waiting for God”
• Simone Weil and giving voice to affliction through silence and waiting
• What it is to be nothing
• Suffering and meaninglessness
• “We find our nothingness, which is everything.”
• “I don't have to look for the meaning of affliction and I don't have to look for someone to answer for that affliction, because Christ is already there to hold the weight of that affliction.”
• Biame—Aboriginal Creator God Spirit—Rainbow Serpent
• Depth of spiritual connection to place
• “Jesus is a tribal man, living in a place of occupation.”
• Jesus’s totem: Water
• Deep time, deep silence
• A breaking point with modernity
• “We are, at our essence, spiritual people, poetic people of place. We are not political people of enlightenment, and that, that is a hard weight to bear, to live as poetic people of God in a world of politics that seeks to kill God.”
• Responsibility
• Yindyamarra winangana—”respect in a world worth living in”
• “I am not responsible for what I do. I'm also responsible for what you do. And that is the essence of what it is to be a First Nations person in Australia. That is the essence of It is a respect and a responsibility beyond who we are, but connects us to where we are.”
• 1 Peter 2:17: “Honor everyone.”
• Individual identity vs communal belonging
• Uluru Statement, “Makarrata”
• Australia is the only Commonwealth country that has not recognized First Nations peoples politically, and given them a voice to Australian Parliament.
• Secondary citizenship
• Struggle of Aboriginal Australians
• What is it to live with catastrophe?
• “The absence of love makes us know love is real.”
• The Crow People: Chief Plenty Coups: “After that, nothing happened.”
• How to live with dignity after catastrophe.
• Miroslav Volf on remembering rightly
• “This is my quest to try to understand those things. And it's the quest of an exile. It's, it's exile that I was forced into, that my people were forced into, that I share with others, that I seek to embrace as an exile of silence, an exile of love, and an exile of belonging and not identity. James Joyce, James Baldwin, Tony Morrison, these people have shared this journey, the great poets, the great writers, the great artists who have sought to give expression to that sense of what it is to be exiled from the modernity of who we are, what we all want to be something. And maybe when we are reduced to nothing, we may find what it is to be everything.”
• After Queen Elizabeth died
• A people of suffering, but not tragedy
• What it means to be human: Born from the dust
• Self-giving and Yindyamarra
• Weightlessness of liberalism
• America: Can it hold the weight?
• Declining democracy around the world
• “There’s no ancestors in Rawls. There’s no history in Rawls.”
• “For me, a life worth living is to know where I am.”

Production Notes

• This podcast featured journalist Stan Grant
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Part 2 of 4 in our 2023 Advent Series. David Dark introduces a new way of thinking about non-violent resistance, which he dubs "Robot Soft Exorcism," whereby, in an appeal to our common humanity, we call each other out of the potentially violent power structures and systems we all (knowingly or unknowingly) inhabit. 

Show Notes

• Help the Yale Center for Faith & Culture meet a $10,000 matching challenge for podcast production; click here to donate today.
• Evan Rosa & Macie Bridge introduce the episode
• Thomas Merton, “The Time of the End Is the Time of No Room” in Raids on the Unspeakable, pages 51-52 (check it out): “Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for him at all, Christ comes uninvited. But because he cannot be at home in it, because he is out of place in it, and yet he must be in it, his place is with those others for whom there is no room. His place is with those who do not belong, who are rejected by power because they are regarded as weak, those who are discredited, who are denied the status of persons, tortured, exterminated. With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in this world. He is mysteriously present in those for whom there seems to be nothing but the world at its worst.” 
• David Dark's Robot Soft Exorcism Twitter Thread: https://twitter.com/DavidDark/status/1012804184868048896
• Robot Soft Exorcism
• Ephesians 6:12: "For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places."
• Walter Wink's Powers series
• Turning the other cheek; demanding to be punched as an equal
• "Robot soft exorcism is inviting someone to be a human being rather than just being their position."
• Breaking it down: The Robot Part
• Breaking it down: The Exorcism Part
• Thoreau: "We all crave reality."
• Buddhists surrendering a spirit of conflict or difference before parting
• Karl Barth: If you don't have any solid difference with the person with whom you exchange the peace of Christ, the peace of Christ isn't there because the peace has to overcome some kind of difference."
• Opinion, Posture, Position: None ever have to be confused with one's identity.
• Divesting ourselves of the power we carry through the world
• Breaking it down: The Soft Part
• Civil Rights Movement is actually the Non-Violent Movement of America
• "One human exchange at a time."
• Mantra: "I wrestle not against flesh and blood." (Ephesians 6:12)
• Advent/Christmas as the prototypical Robot Soft Exorcism
• Bruce Coburn: "Redemption rips through the surface of time in the cry of a tiny babe."
• "We're really going against the news cycle if we insist on the meaning of human history being in this manger scene. To be alive to it, to be citizens of a better future than what is being settled for by our robot overlords."

Production Notes

• This podcast featured David Dark
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

To read is human. Even as literacy rates or the quality of that literacy make us nervous for the future, the act of reading looks like it’s somewhere near the essence of what it means to be human. Because reading doesn’t end, or even start, with books. Reading is this search for meaning. A turning and tuning of our senses outward. Looking for symbols, looking for signs of life. It’s the longing for a message in a bottle, in hopes of discovering, making, and living in a shared meaning together. Jessica Hooten Wilson (Pepperdine University) and Matthew J Smith (Hildegard College) join Evan Rosa to discuss the joys and perils of reading, how to make young readers, how to teach and cultivate mature readers in the university context, and the significance of reading as a Christian spiritual practice.

Help the Yale Center for Faith & Culture meet a $10,000 matching challenge for podcast production; visit faith.yale.edu/give to donate today.

About Jessica Hooten Wilson

Jessica Hooten Wilson is the Fletcher Jones Endowed Chair of Great Books at Pepperdine University and formerly Louise Cowan Scholar in Residence at the University of Dallas. She is the author of several books, most recently Reading for the Love of God. Her book Giving the Devil his Due: Flannery O’Connor and The Brothers Karamazov received a 2018 Christianity Today book of the year in arts and culture award  and The Scandal of Holiness received a 2022 Award of Merit. In 2019 she received the Hiett Prize for Humanities from the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. Other awards include a Fulbright Fellowship to Prague, an NEH to study Dante in Florence, a Biola University sabbatical fellowship funded by the John Templeton Foundation, and the 2017 Emerging Public Intellectual Award. She is a Senior Fellow at The Trinity Forum.

About Matthew J. Smith

Matthew J. Smith is Founder and President of Hildgard College in Southern California. He holds a Ph.D. in Literature from the University of Southern California, an M.A. from the University of Connecticut, and a B.A. from Biola University. He taught for ten years at Azusa Pacific University before founding Hildegard College. His scholarship is on medieval and renaissance literature and especially the works of Shakespeare, Milton, Herbert, Donne, and late medieval drama. Dr. Smith is the author and editor of four books: Performance and Religion in Early Modern England: Stage, Cathedral, Wagon, Street (Notre Dame), Face to Face in Shakespearean Drama: Ethics, Performance, Philosophy (Edinburgh), Literature and Religious Experience: Beyond Belief and Unbelief (Bloomsbury), and a recently finished manuscript: Shakespearean Recognitions: Philosophies of the Post-Tragic. He is also an editor of the journal Christianity & Literature and has guest-edited three special issues: The Sacramental Text Reconsidered, Sincerity, a Literary History, and The Future of Christianity and Literature in Literary Studies.

Dr. Smith founded Hildegard College in 2022 with the conviction that higher education needs a reset. Where typical universities are growing ever larger into multi-versities, abandoning the traditional liberal arts and giving students a predominantly anonymous learning experience, Dr. Smith argues that the future of quality education, especially Christian education, is focused, tight-knit, rigorous, and recommitted to the classics of the liberal arts tradition. His vision for Hildegard College is to create an environment where young people can explore the riches of the classical tradition while also exploring and gaining experience in different areas of work—part monastery and part startup incubator. Mentorship, deep learning, and personal formation are the bedrock of a classical education.

Matt Smith lives in Fullerton, CA with his wife and three children. He serves on the boards of Veritas Classical Academy and of the Classic Learning Test. When he isn’t teaching, he cooks, plays soccer, trains in jiu jitsu, mountain bikes, plays with his dog, and writes.

Show Notes

• Help the Yale Center for Faith & Culture meet a $10,000 matching challenge for podcast production; visit faith.yale.edu/give to donate today.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Jessica Hooten Wilson and Matthew J Smith
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Help the Yale Center for Faith & Culture meet a $10,000 matching challenge for podcast production; visit faith.yale.edu/give to donate today.

A special Advent bonus episode on hope. Theologian Miroslav Volf reflects on "Hope is the thing with feathers" by Emily Dickenson, comments on the dark hope of Martin Luther & the Apostle Paul, and how hope and endurance are intrinsically connected in Christian spirituality. 

Show Notes

• Evan Rosa & Macie Bridge reflect on the theme of the first week of Advent: “Hope”
• “Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul / And sings the tune without the words / And never stops at all / And sweetest in the Gale is heard / And soar must be the storm / That could abash the little bird / That kept so many warm / I've heard it in the chillest land / And on the strangest sea / And yet never an extremity, / It asked a crumb of me” – Emily Dickenson
• “In hope, a future good, which isn't yet, somehow already is”
• Luther – "just as love transforms the lover into the beloved, so hope changes the one who hopes into what is hoped for."
• The present is pregnant with the future
• But hope does not come from what is happening in the present, it is something entirely new
• Hope lives apart from reason
• Hope and God belong together
• “The God who creates out of nothing, the God who makes the dead alive, that God justifies hope that is otherwise unreasonable”
• “Genuine hope remains alive when there is no good reason to expect something positive in the future."
• Hope transfers a person “into the unknown, the hidden, and the dark shadow, so that he does not even know what he hopes for.” Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, 25:364
• "Hope is open to the difference between how we imagined fulfillment and how it arrived, openness even to recognize in the actual fulfillment what we in fact have wanted all along."
• "We are most in need of hope in threatening situations which we cannot control; but it is in those same situations that it is most difficult for us not to lose hope. That is where patience and endurance come in."
• "Hope needs endurance and endurance needs hope. Or: Genuine endurance is marked by hope; and genuine hope is marked by endurance."
• Hope is for no-exit situations.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Miroslav Volf
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

As you listen today, would you consider helping the Yale Center for Faith & Culture meet a $10,000 matching challenge for  2024 podcast production? visit faith.yale.edu/give to donate today.

"Christians are called to collaborate without compromise and to critique without dualism." (N.T. Wright, from today's episode)

What better way to secure the greatness of your political state (or maybe political party) than to invoke the name of God as being uniquely supportive of your team? It brings a sickening and divisive new meaning to Romans 8:31—”If God is for us, who can be against us?” 

In this episode, revered New Testament scholar N.T. Wright joins Miroslav Volf to discuss Monotheism, Nationalism, & Violence. Together they reflect on the history and current realities of what happens when these three elements converge. The conversation was inspired by N.T. Wright's response to a short digital booklet by Miroslav Volf entitled Monotheism, Nationalism, & Violence: 25 Theses, which is available for download at faith.yale.edu.

Click here to download Monotheism, Nationalism, & Violence: 25 Theses, a short digital booklet by Miroslav Volf, via faith.yale.edu.

“In this essay, written in form of 25 interlocking theses, I approach the problem of religiously motivated or legitimized violence by exploring the relation between monotheism and nationalism. The first is allegedly the most violent of all forms of religion and the second one of the most violent forms of political arrangements, especially when it is cut loose from universal moral commitment and tied to some form of tribal identity (“exclusive nationalism”). I argue that monotheism is a universalist creed and that it is compatible only with inclusive nationalism, a nationalism that is a form of special relations framed by a universal moral code. When monotheism is aligned with exclusive nationalism—when it becomes a “political religion” aligned with exclusivist nationalism—monotheism betrays its universality, a feature which lies at its very core, and morphs into violence, generating and legitimizing henotheism: our god of our nation in contrast and competition to other nations with their gods. Alternatively, if monotheism keeps its universality while associated as political religion with exclusive nationalism it will tend to underwrite dreams of nationalist imperialism: our god and our nation as masters of the world.”

Show Notes

• Help the Yale Center for Faith & Culture meet a $10,000 matching challenge for podcast production; visit faith.yale.edu/give to donate today.
• Download Miroslav Volf’s short digital booklet, Monotheism, Nationalism, & Violence: 25 Theses
• Volf introduces Monotheism, Nationalism, & Violence
• “The price monotheism always has to pay for its alliance with exclusive nationalism is the loss of its soul. When monotheism embraces exclusive nationalism, monotheism’s God morphs from the creator and lover of all people and all creatures into a selfish and violent idol of a particular nation.”
• Instrumentalizing God
• What is religion anyway?
• Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept
• Martin Riesenbrot, A Promise of Salvation, A Theory of Religion
• Christians were regarded with suspicion, as atheists
• Wright: “…this leads some to say religion is itself a dangerous and violent thing because it leads to people saying I have this God and he's more important than your God or whatever. And all sorts of violence stem from that. Indeed, one could argue that the Enlightenment's redefinition radical redefinition of the word religion over against its, say, early centuries use, has been part of the problem. But that, that would be perhaps a more polemical thesis.”
• Religion plays an important role in political society.
• How did religion work in the ancient world?
• Is religion a force for evil in society? Working from a secularist paradigm or not?
• Monotheism revised by Christology
• Two Christian groups anathematizing each other
• “Nothing hangs on the word religion.”
• Ultimate allegiance, and to what?
• What are the political responsibilities of the state to religion?
• Naming proper allegiance
• Wright on Jesus and Political Authority in John 19: “In other words, in the famous Romans 13, um, it's not a totalitarian passage, though some have read it like that. But Paul says there is no authority except from God. In other words, there is the one God, but God wants his world to be wisely governed by human authorities. But he will then call them to account. And my favorite passage on that is in John 19, when Jesus is being interviewed by Pontius Pilate. And Pilate says, don't you realize I have the right to have you killed? And Jesus says, and it's extraordinary, think of Johannine theology, that Jesus says this to Pilate. You could have no authority over me unless it was given to you from above and then the corollary is therefore the one who handed me over to you has the greater sin and that's that's a very interesting differentiation which no doubt Pilate couldn't understand at all and of course violence enters in straight away because Pilate's response is to send him off to be crucified.”
• Polycarp (paraphrased by N.T. Wright): “Now I won't worship your God, but I will respect you enough to honor you if you want to have a conversation about this.”
• “That one God is doing justice in the world.”
• Jan Assman: creating the states in which violence in the name of God is possible
• Bringing in atonement theology
• “All three monotheisms in some sense affirm the freedom of religion.”
• Noble ideal of the post-enlightenment world: an inclusive nationalism and inclusive monotheism.
• Freedom of religion
• Christianity as trinitarian monotheism
• Romans 8: Spirit groaning
• Jesus’s cry for dereliction
• Wright: “Collaborate without compromise and to critique without dualism.”

Production Notes

• This podcast featured N.T. Wright and Miroslav Volf
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

“Gratitude enlivens the world.” 

Gratitude is the emotional expression of the interchange of love between giver and receiver. So of course we’re looking for more of that in public—it’s the very evidence of giving to one another, grace with each other, beneficence for one another. In this conversation, Miroslav Volf and Evan Rosa discuss this remarkable interchange of love between giver and receiver that leads to gratitude. 

They discuss the meaning of gratitude in emotional, moral, and theological terms; and he introduces a variety of views on gratitude, from the story of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector, to Thomas Aquinas, to Anthony Kronman’s “born-again pagan” critique of Christian gratitude, and finally Martin Luther’s take on gratitude which draws on the Magnificat of Mary, which Miroslav expounds. 

Special thanks to the Gratitude to God Project for helping to make this episode possible.

Show Notes

• Show Art: Henry Ossawa Tanner, "The Thankful Poor", 1894
• Happy Thanksgiving from the Yale Center for Faith & Culture!
• Gratitude to God Project Website: Psychological, Philosophical and Theological Investigations
• Gratitude as a moral emotion
• “identification of the good for which we should be grateful.”
• The Pharisee & the Tax Collector
• Looking inside the figures of scripture.
• The performance of gratitude
• Why does gratitude seem so important or basic in spiritual life?
• “We should be grateful to our parents for having brought us into the world, raised us, spent all these incredibly long, wakeful hours at the beginning of our lives; and many, many more, many hours and days of worries, gratitude is appropriate. How much then more not to God, to whom we owe everything?”
• Repayment of a debt
• Anthony Kronman, Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan
• Is gratitude too heavy a burden? To somehow pay back God for the gifts of the world?
• Gratitude not as repayment, but as giving an equivalent gift
• John Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost
• Abysmal Gap Between God and Creature
• Aquinas on Gratitude
• Receiving a benefit
• Feeling thankfulness
• Repaying a favor suitably, and according to our means
• The Widow’s Mites
• Joyful recognition
• Recognize that what we have received is in fact a gift
• Recognizing the moral worth of the giver on account of the moral worth of the deed
• I receive the gift not with grumpiness, but with joy—over the giver, over the gift, and spilling over into other aspects of the relationship
• Understanding Martin Luther’s Theology of Gratitude
• Kronman’s misreading of Luther
• Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation: “The love of God does not find, but creates what is pleasing to it.”
• “But if you have somebody who truly gives, selflessly, gifts—then it's a kind of insult to them if you want to treat them as if they were trying to get something out of you for that.”
• Misconstruing the relationship between giver and receiver.
• Thomas Hobbs
• “A circle of mutual benefit” where the person who has power dominates
• The dearth of gratitude in public life today
• Luther on Mary’s Magnificat and “God’s gift-giving to the nobodies of the world”
• “No one can love God unless God makes himself known to that person in the most lovable and intimate fashion. And God can make himself known only through those works of his which he reveals in us, and which we feel and experience within ourselves. But where there is this experience, namely, that he is a God who looks into the depths and helps only the poor, despised, afflicted, miserable, forsaken, and those who are nothing, there the hearty love for him is born. The heart overflows with gladness and goes leaping and dancing for the great pleasure it has found in God.” (from Martin Luther’s Commentary on the Magnificat)
• “God is the one who, in humility, always reaches to that which is lower than God in order to lift it up. And that's how he comes to the nobodies, to the despised, which are primarily the objects of God's love.”

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Miroslav Volf
• Special thanks to Robert Emmons, Pete Hill, and the Gratitude to God Project for helping make this episode possible
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Recent psychological studies find that gratitude can help us create, cultivate, and maintain the kinds of relationships that make life worth living. Other studies are finding that gratitude is far more complicated, and plays a nuanced role in our complex emotional lives. Research psychologist Jo-Ann Tsang (Baylor University) joins Ryan McAnnally-Linz to talk about the complicated emotional world that gratitude inhabits, the scientific study of giving thanks and the contexts where its prosocial or adaptive for us, the dark side of gratitude, and the role it plays in a life of flourishing. 

This episode was made possible in part by the support of the Gratitude to God Project.

About  Jo-Ann Tsang

Jo-Ann Tsang is a social psychologist, and is Associate Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychology & Neuroscience at Baylor University.

Show Notes

• Gratitude to God Project Website: Psychological, Philosophical and Theological Investigations
• Tryptophanic food coma dreams of John Madden ranting about football and turducken
• Daniel Tiger: “Sometimes you feel two feelings at the same time, and that’s okay.”
• Empirical psychological research on gratitude
• Intrinsic vs instrumental reasons for being grateful
• Self-determination theory
• The downsides of gratitude
• Gratitude in marriage: matching affective responses of support and gratitude in relationships
• Gratitude toward God
• Julie Exline on Spiritual Struggle (link)
• “It’s not always adaptive to be happy?”
• Prosocial behavior
• Find, Remind, Bind Theory
• What is pro-sociality?
• What is adaptivity?
• Happiness is not always adaptive.
• What’s adaptive depends on your goal in a certain situation.
• Happiness and adaptivity as malleable concepts that depend on your definition of the good.
• Does gratitude reduce protest?
• Increased forgiveness and willingness to accept oppression rather than oppression
• Quietism and perpetuating unjust structures
• Gratitude might put on the brakes for the motivation to protest or press for change
• “Give thanks in all things.” vs “Give thanks for all things.”
• “Life is complicated.”
• Gratitude doesn’t rule out anger
• “How can I feel happy when there’s all these bad things going on?”
• Is gratitude related to prejudice, stigma, or discrimination?
• Why is it we keep chasing after happiness?
• “If you're in a bad relationship, and gratitude's making you stick more strongly with that relationship partner, then that's not good.”
• The role of gratitude in a life worth living

Production Notes

• This podcast featured research psychologist Jo-Ann Tsang and theologian Ryan McAnnally-Linz
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge and Kaylen Yun
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Why do we like horror films? Why do we gravitate to the theatre for a collective catharsis—living out our nightmares vicariously through the unwitting victim on the screen? What draws us to the shadows? All the more poignant for the Christian who shouldn’t watch the bad movies. But let’s take the point seriously: How might we watch horror films Christianly? Which is to say: How do we watch them well?

Theologian and film critic Kutter Callaway (Fuller Theological Seminary) joins Evan Rosa for a discussion of some truly frightening horror films. His new podcast “Be Afraid” is produced by Christianity Today, and explores horror films and the theology and psychology of fearing rightly.

In addition to discussing some of our favorite scary movies Kutter Callaway and Evan Rosa discuss: The psychology of fear and why people might willingly rehearse their fears; the radical vulnerability of human life that makes us susceptible to horrors; the Bible as horror genre; the human inclination toward the numinous, unknown, mysterious, and uncanny; managing our terror about death; and ultimately, how to fear rightly.

This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information, visit tyndale.foundation.

Show Notes

• Listen to Be Afraid, with Kutter Callaway
• What’s so scary about clowns and dolls? And why is Kutter Callaway afraid of them?
• Toy Story as Horror Flick
• The Shining, psychological horror, and when children are involved.
• William James, Father of American Psychology
• Rudolf Otto
• Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans—the numinous, equal parts compelling and terrifying
• Awe and terror—”big, overwhelming, and unknown”
• Marilyn McCord Adams’ Christ & Horrors
• “It brings us to the end of ourselves”
• “There’s nothing to be afraid of” is a lie!
• Should we be afraid?
• “Perfect love casts out fear”
• The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
• Learning how to fear rightly
• Christian leverages fear all the time
• “Fear the one who can destroy both body and soul.”
• M1028—graphically violent and theologically backwards
• What have you learned about fear from a psychological perspective?
• Justin Barrett and the cognitive science of religion
• Humans have the near-universal tendency to infer agency to things that go bump in the night.
• “We don't run from a bear because we're afraid. We're afraid because we're running.”
• Practicing and rehearsing “how to be afraid”
• Storytelling and catharsis
• Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, and feeling the chills of tragedy
• Art and storytelling that traffics in empathy
• Get Out—empathy and viscerally feeling something—”that movie disturbed me on a level that I needed to be disturbed.”
• Paul Riceour on narrative and reappropriation—applied to horror and feeling empathy for the other
• The Exorcist—slow and quiet by modern standards, but outbursts of terror
• Theodicy in The Exorcist
• Are horror films beautiful?

About Kutter Callaway

Kutter Callaway is the William K. Brehm Chair of Worship, Theology, and the Arts, as well as associate dean of the Center for Advanced Theological Studies, and associate professor of theology and culture. He is actively engaged in writing and speaking on the interaction between theology and culture—particularly film, television, and online media—in both academic and popular forums.

Dr. Callaway holds two PhDs, one in theology and the second in psychological science, both from Fuller. His most recent book is Theology for Psychology and Counseling: An Invitation to Holistic Christian Practice (2022). Past books include Techno-Sapiens in a Networked Era: Becoming Digital Neighbors (2020), which he coauthored with Fuller’s Associate Professor of Church in Contemporary Culture Ryan Bolger; The Aesthetics of Atheism: Theology and Imagination in Contemporary Culture (2019); and Deep Focus: Film and Theology in Dialogue (2019). Past books include Breaking the Marriage Idol: Reconstructing our Cultural and Spiritual Norms (2018), Watching TV Religiously: Television and Theology in Dialogue (2016) and Scoring Transcendence: Contemporary Film Music as Religious Experience (2013). In addition, he contributed to God in the Movies (2017); Halos and Avatars (2010), the first book on theology and video games; and Don’t Stop Believin’ (2012), a dictionary of religion and popular culture.

Callaway cochairs the Religion, Film, and Visual Culture group at the American Academy of Religion. He also partnered with Paulist Productions to produce the YouTube series Should Christians Watch? His professional memberships include the American Academy of Religion, American Psychological Association, and the Society of Biblical Literature. He is ordained as a Baptist minister.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Kutter Callaway
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
• This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information, visit tyndale.foundation.

Activist, Pastor, and Global Leader Evan Mawarire reflects on the role of Christian faith in democratic leadership, specifically looking at three significant Gospel passages that reveal not just Jesus’s approach to leadership, but how he teaches his disciples to lead with peace, humility, compassion, and faith.

In Mark 4, we find Jesus leading from peace, rest, control, and trust, peacefully sleeping in the midst of a storm, while the disciples prematurely conclude: “Don’t you care that we are going to die?” In Mark 10, when two of the disciples play political games for their own glory, Jesus responds with a teaching of humility and a subversive glory—that the greatest will in fact be the servant of all. And in John 13, Jesus displays this humility and compassion by washing the gross and grungy feet of his friends, and teaching Peter that a leader is first a student, and the student isn’t greater than their teacher.

This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information, visit tyndale.foundation.

Show Notes

• Featured Artwork: “Study, Christ Washing the Feet of the Disciples 1898”, Henry Ossawa Tanner and “Christ Washing the Disciples’ Feet”, Jan Lievens, 1630/35
• Urgency, peace, and the exit door of fear
• The shallow sleep of anxiety
• Jesus calm’s the storm:
  • Mark 4:35-41 — 35 On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, ‘Let us go across to the other side.’ 36 And leaving the crowd behind, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. Other boats were with him. 37 A great gale arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped. 38 But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke him up and said to him, ‘Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?’ 39 He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, ‘Peace! Be still!’ Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm. 40 He said to them, ‘Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?’ 41 And they were filled with great awe and said to one another, ‘Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?’
  • See also: Luke 8:22-25, Matthew 8:23-27
• “Don’t you care that we are going to die?”
• Jesus’s goal of leadership development
• Mark 10:35-45 ****
  • 35 James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came forward to him and said to him, ‘Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.’ 36 And he said to them, ‘What is it you want me to do for you?’ 37 And they said to him, ‘Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.’ 38 But Jesus said to them, ‘You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?’ 39 They replied, ‘We are able.’ Then Jesus said to them, ‘The cup that I drink you will drink; and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized; 40 but to sit at my right hand or at my left is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared.’ 41 When the ten heard this, they began to be angry with James and John. 42 So Jesus called them and said to them, ‘You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. 43 But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, 44 and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. 45 For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.’
• Pastor Evan’s work in Zimbabwe’s Citizen’s movement
• “Lord, give us a seat at the table that decides the future of this nation.”
• Prayer: We ask for harvest, God plants a seed.
• How do we prepare our leaders?
• Luke 6: “The student is not above the teacher.”
• Reversing the roles: being served versus serving
• Leadership is not designed to be comfortable
• People are at their worst when we are in crisis, but this is when we’re supposed to see leaders at their best when we’re in crisis.
• Sheep without a shepherd
• Loss of trust and the Global Trust Barometer
• Leadership is not just about the right skill set, it’s importantly about the right heart set.
• Washing the feet of the disciples
  • John 13:1-17
  • 1 Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. 2 The devil had already put it into the heart of Judas son of Simon Iscariot to betray him. And during supper 3 Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, 4 got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. 5 Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him. 6 He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?” 7 Jesus answered, “You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand.” 8 Peter said to him, “You will never wash my feet.” Jesus answered, “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.” 9 Simon Peter said to him, “Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!” 10 Jesus said to him, “One who has bathed does not need to wash, except for the feet, but is entirely clean. And you are clean, though not all of you.” 11 For he knew who was to betray him; for this reason he said, “Not all of you are clean.” 12 After he had washed their feet, had put on his robe, and had returned to the table, he said to them, “Do you know what I have done to you? 13 You call me Teacher and Lord—and you are right, for that is what I am. 14 So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. 15 For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you. 16 Very truly, I tell you, servants are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them. 17 If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them.
• Humility
• Compassion
• It’s not easy to lead
• Starfish Story: “To that one it made a difference.”
• “Someone who knows how to lead, knows how they have been served themselves.”
• “Where can plant seeds of impact?”
• “How do we faithfully look after these sprouting of servant leadership, of people that understand that leadership is about serving are more than it is about being served.”
• Back to urgency and patience—the only way to plant seeds is to plant now and wait.
• “Where purpose is not known, abuse is inevitable.”
• “There are two most important days in your life—the day you were born and the day you discover why.”
• Patience and the crafting of leadership

About Evan Mawarire

Evan Mawarire is a Zimbabwean clergyman who founded #ThisFlag Citizen’s Movement to challenge corruption, injustice, and poverty in Zimbabwe. The movement empowers citizens to hold government to account. Through viral videos, the movement has organized multiple successful non-violent protests in response to unjust government policy. Evan was imprisoned in 2016, 2017, and 2019 for charges of treason, facing 80 years in prison. His message of inspiring positive social change and national pride has resonated with diverse groups of citizens and attracted international attention.

Evan has addressed audiences around the world, and Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the 100 global thinkers of 2016. The Daily Maverick Newspaper of South Africa named him 2016 African person of the year. Evan is a 2018 Stanford University Fellow of the Centre for Democracy Development and the Rule of Law. He is a nominee of the 2017 Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression awards and the 2018 Swedish government’s Per Anger Prize for democracy actors. He was a 2023 World Fellow at Yale University’s Maurice R. Greenberg World Fellows Program.

Visit his website or follow him on X.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Evan Mawarire
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge & Kaylen Yun
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
• This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information, visit tyndale.foundation.

“Wrestling with oneself, with one’s past, with one’s relationships, with God … These stories push us to use disability to think about the human condition more broadly.”

Longstanding narratives about disability shaped our emotional responses, our caregiving responses, and our social commentary, and our treatment of the disabled. But what if we saw disability as the site of divine revelation about God’s kingdom and our place in it? As an expression of power and wisdom and agency, rather than a merely a source of suffering and lack and ignorance.

Calli Micale (Palmer Theological Seminary) joins Evan Rosa to discuss how disability reframes our humanity in the Bible. They reflect on three passages: starting in the Old Testament—in Genesis 32—with the story of Jacob wrestling with the Angel, and walking away with much more than a limp and a new name. Continuing with the Gospel, John 9, the story of the Man Born Blind, famous for at least two reasons: the utter stupidity of the disciples to assume “Rabbi, who sinned that this man was born blind?” and the utter visceral of having Jesus make mud with his spit and rub it in the man’s eyes. And finally The Gospel of Mark, chapter 5, the story of the bleeding woman—a story of reaching out in desperate faith, an act of incredible agency and audacity, to touch the edge of Jesus’s garment and be healed.

Whether its intellectual disability or physical disability, and regardless of how its acquired, disability plays a role in what we might call God’s subversive kingdom. God’s upside-down-ness (or, maybe we should say human upside-down-ness). The least of these in the eyes of human society are chosen by God to communicate the good news of shalom and justice and salvation—that even those who are already “whole” can be saved.

This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information, visit tyndale.foundation.

Show Notes

• Artwork: “Untitled (The Bleeding Woman)”, Unknown, Fresco, 4th Century AD, Catacombs of Marcellinus and Peter, Rome, Italy
• Artwork: “The Healing of the Man Born Blind”, Duccio, 1311, Tempera on wood, National Gallery, London
• Artwork: “Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel)”, Paul Gauguin, 1888, Oil on canvas, Scottish National Gallery
• Genesis 32:22-32 (see below for full text)
• “Wrestling with oneself, with one’s past, with one’s relationships, with God”
• Disability as a plot device: exploit
• Elaborate disguise of Jacob’s impersonization of Esau
• Each of us wrestles with our identity
• “No one can see God and live”
• Jacob’s limp: a narrative and metaphorical significance
• Is disability a sign of or consequence of one’s sinfulness?
• Is disability a divine punishment?
• Subverting our understanding of disability
• “Disability extends beyond Jacob’s physical form and continues to influence the the community—how they relate with their tradition and their practices.”
• “The memory of the struggle with God and the intimate presence of God in the wrestling in the body, and then is preserved in memory of the body.”
• Is being struck on the hip socket a blessing to Jacob?
• The wounds of martyrs as battle wounds
• Disability becomes inextricable from histories of violence
• Is it Jesus that strikes and maims Jacob’s hip?
• John 9: The Man Blind from Birth
• Jesus rejects the assumption that disability is a punishment for sin.
• “Dumb and blind”
• Disability as the site of divine revelation
• Jesus spitting in the mud is kind of gross. It takes a lot of spit to make that much mud.
• Vulnerable and visceral moment of pasting dirty mud
• The question of Jesus’s sin (for breaking Sabbath law) is now in play
• An extended metaphor about where knowledge and wisdom apply.
• Mark 5: The Hemorrhaging Woman
• Agency and Power
• Mutual caregiving within disabled communities
• “These stories push us to use disability to think about the human condition more broadly.”

Genesis 32

The same night he got up and took his two wives, his two maids, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. He took them and sent them across the stream, and likewise everything that he had. Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket; and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, ‘Let me go, for the day is breaking.’ But Jacob said, ‘I will not let you go, unless you bless me.’ So he said to him, ‘What is your name?’ And he said, ‘Jacob.’ Then the man said, ‘You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.’ Then Jacob asked him, ‘Please tell me your name.’ But he said, ‘Why is it that you ask my name?’ And there he blessed him. So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, ‘For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved.’ The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip. Therefore to this day the Israelites do not eat the thigh muscle that is on the hip socket, because he struck Jacob on the hip socket at the thigh muscle.

John 9

As he walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ Jesus answered, ‘Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him. We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.’

When he had said this, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man’s eyes, saying to him, ‘Go, wash in the pool of Siloam’ (which means Sent). Then he went and washed and came back able to see. The neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar began to ask, ‘Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?’ Some were saying, ‘It is he.’ Others were saying, ‘No, but it is someone like him.’ He kept saying, ‘I am the man.’ But they kept asking him, ‘Then how were your eyes opened?’ He answered, ‘The man called Jesus made mud, spread it on my eyes, and said to me, “Go to Siloam and wash.” Then I went and washed and received my sight.’ They said to him, ‘Where is he?’ He said, ‘I do not know.’

They brought to the Pharisees the man who had formerly been blind. Now it was a sabbath day when Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes. Then the Pharisees also began to ask him how he had received his sight. He said to them, ‘He put mud on my eyes. Then I washed, and now I see.’ Some of the Pharisees said, ‘This man is not from God, for he does not observe the sabbath.’ But others said, ‘How can a man who is a sinner perform such signs?’ And they were divided. So they said again to the blind man, ‘What do you say about him? It was your eyes he opened.’ He said, ‘He is a prophet.’

The Jews did not believe that he had been blind and had received his sight until they called the parents of the man who had received his sight and asked them, ‘Is this your son, who you say was born blind? How then does he now see?’ His parents answered, ‘We know that this is our son, and that he was born blind; but we do not know how it is that now he sees, nor do we know who opened his eyes. Ask him; he is of age. He will speak for himself.’ His parents said this because they were afraid of the Jews; for the Jews had already agreed that anyone who confessed Jesus to be the Messiah would be put out of the synagogue. Therefore his parents said, ‘He is of age; ask him.’

So for the second time they called the man who had been blind, and they said to him, ‘Give glory to God! We know that this man is a sinner.’ He answered, ‘I do not know whether he is a sinner. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.’ They said to him, ‘What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?’ He answered them, ‘I have told you already, and you would not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become his disciples?’ Then they reviled him, saying, ‘You are his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses. We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know where he comes from.’ The man answered, ‘Here is an astonishing thing! You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes. We know that God does not listen to sinners, but he does listen to one who worships him and obeys his will. Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.’ They answered him, ‘You were born entirely in sins, and are you trying to teach us?’ And they drove him out.

Jesus heard that they had driven him out, and when he found him, he said, ‘Do you believe in the Son of Man?’ He answered, ‘And who is he, sir? Tell me, so that I may believe in him.’ Jesus said to him, ‘You have seen him, and the one speaking with you is he.’ He said, ‘Lord, I believe.’ And he worshipped him. Jesus said, ‘I came into this world for judgement so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.’ Some of the Pharisees near him heard this and said to him, ‘Surely we are not blind, are we?’ Jesus said to them, ‘If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, “We see”, your sin remains.

Mark 5:25-34

See also Luke 8:43-48 and Matthew 9:20-22

Now there was a woman who had been suffering from haemorrhages for twelve years. She had endured much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had; and she was no better, but rather grew worse. She had heard about Jesus, and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak,  for she said, ‘If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.’ Immediately her haemorrhage stopped; and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease.  Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, ‘Who touched my clothes?’ And his disciples said to him, ‘You see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, “Who touched me?”’ He looked all round to see who had done it.  But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the whole truth. He said to her, ‘Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.’

About Calli Micale

Calli Micale is Assistant Professor of Theology and Ethics and Director of the MDiv Program at Palmer Theological Seminary. She is a theologian with a particular interest in the ethical implications of theological talk for the whole of human life. Her research brings together the history of Christian thought with sustained attention to rhetoric as it grounds perceptions of the body and health in Western societies. She joined the Palmer Theological Seminary faculty in 2023 after earning a PhD from Yale University.

Writing and teaching correspond in Dr. Micale’s work to form students as faith leaders oriented towards gender, disability, and racial justice. She has published articles with the Journal of Disability and Religion and the Disability Studies Quarterly (forthcoming). Micale is currently working on a book manuscript, tentatively titled Crip Conversion: Narratives of Disability and Grace. The book analyzes the stories theologians tell about intellectual disability and argues that deploying intellectual disability as narrative metaphor allows one to come at the Protestant tradition from a helpful vantage point—such that the significance of sensation for the reception of grace comes to the fore.

As a candidate for ordination in the ELCA with 10+ years of preaching experience, Dr. Micale delights in the variety of ways her students take up theological resources for ministry and social justice action. In each course, she aims to take students beyond learning concepts by letting divergent beliefs shape and change their perspective on what really matters—their own intellectual and spiritual lives called to make a difference in the world

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Calli Micale
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge and Kaylen Yun
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
• This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information, visit tyndale.foundation.

Show Notes

• Salty: Lessons on Eating, Drinking, and Living from Revolutionary Women
• Creative non-fiction and “essays” as a genre
• “I guess what I was trying to do was come up with ways into the lives of these women who I find interesting. That would also be compelling to someone who had never heard of them.”
• Dinner party
• Hannah Arendt and her cocktail parties
• A subversive feast among friends
• Arguing in order to find out what you think
• Thinking as a conversation with the self
• Love in the specificity of relationship
• Amor mundi—love of the world
• “Loving the world means working on two specific tasks. The first is to doggedly, insist on seeing the world just as it is with its disappointments and horrors and committing to it all the same. The second is to encounter people in the world and embrace their alterity, or difference.”
• Arendt’s “banality of evil”
• The importance of letter-writing for sharing the self and inhabiting a years-long friendship
• Edna Lewis, Freetown, Virginia, and “The Taste of Southern Cooking”
• Farm-to-table cooking used to be out of economic necessity, not a hip or high fine dining experience
• Edna Lewis’s Southern identity: "Lewis defines Southern as the experience of an emancipated people and their descendants, a cultural and culinary heritage to be proud of a distinctly American culture. And as she offers definitions, readers are reminded, she's refusing to be defined by anyone but herself.”
• “What Is Southern?” Gourmet Magazine—reclaiming Southern cooking for Black Southerners
• The Los Padres National Forest Supper Club
• Babette’s Feast (1987)
• The menu from Babette’s Feast
• The place of joy and pleasure in a flourishing spiritual life
• Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb
• Food and recognition
• “Learning how to taste”
• “Every dinner party is an act of hope.”

About Alissa Wilkinson

Alissa Wilkinson is a Brooklyn-based critic, journalist, and author. She is a senior correspondent and critic at Vox.com, writing about film, TV, and culture. She is currently writing We Tell Ourselves Stories, a cultural history of American myth-making in Hollywood through the life and work of Joan Didion, which will be published by Liveright.

She's contributed essays, features, and criticism to a wide variety of publications, including Rolling Stone, Vulture, Bon Appetit, Eater, RogerEbert.com, Pacific Standard, The Dallas Morning News, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Books & Culture, Christianity Today, and others. I’m a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, the National Society of Film Critics, and the Writers Guild of America, East, and was an inaugural writing fellow with the Sundance Institute’s Art of Nonfiction initiative. She's served on juries at the Sundance Film Festival, DOC NYC, Sheffield Doc/Fest, the Hamptons International Film Festival, and others, and selection committees for groups including the Gotham Awards and the Sundance Documentary Film Program.

In June 2022, her book Salty: Lessons on Eating, Drinking, and Living from Revolutionary Women was published by Broadleaf Books. In 2016, her book How to Survive the Apocalypse: Zombies, Cylons, and Politics at the End of the World was released, co-written with Robert Joustra.

I frequently pop up as a commentator and guest host on radio, TV, and podcasts. Some recent appearances include CBS News; PBS Newshour; CNN International Newsroom; BBC America’s Talking Movies; NPR's Morning Edition, All Things Considered, On Point, and 1A; HBO’s Allen v. Farrow; AMC's James Cameron's Story of Science Fiction; WNYC's The Takeaway; ABC's Religion & Ethics and The Drum; CBC Eyeopener, Vox’s Today, Explained and The Gray Area; and many more. 

For 14 years, until the college ceased offering classes in 2023, she was also an associate professor of English and humanities at The King’s College in New York City, and taught courses in criticism, cinema studies, literature, and cultural theory. She earned an M.F.A in creative nonfiction from Seattle Pacific University, an M.A. in humanities and social thought from New York University, and a B.S. in information technology from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

You can read my most up-to-date work on my Vox author page, or subscribe to my mostly-weekly newsletter. 

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Alissa Wilkinson
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Liz Vukovic, Macie Bridge, and Kaylen Yun
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Show Notes

• Instructive irony: Evan’s disabling experience of setting up a microphone for a podcast interview
• Three ways to think about disability: Minority Model (Impairment of Individuals), Social Model (Societal factors create impairment), and Political Model (emerges from collective action and identity; generated from Americans with Disabilities Act)
• Chronic pain, real suffering
• All three models are important
• “Look at the arrangement of society—the conditions of possibility that empower our lives or that create obstacles to our flourishing.”
• How to Speak About Disability 101
• Care, solidarity, advocacy, and inclusion
• Understanding the ethics of disability through stories: narratives of the body, biblical narratives of healing, and theological stories
• Augustine’s City of God and moral impurity and the wounds of martyrs as glorified and amplified in resurrected bodies
• The hurt of “fixing” those with disabilities
• Doubting Thomas and exploring the resurrection wounds of Christ
• Story: Physical disability and amputation
• “It always starts with thinking about the loss”
• Hope and possibility through the loss
• Religion and spirituality as a tool to both help and also a self-critique of the “wholeness” or “normal” narrative.
• Critiquing the brokenness-wholeness narrative of disability
• “Drawing attention to the site of divine activity.”
• Is disability connected to sin?
• John 9:1-41: Jesus Heals the Man Born Blind
• Slowness, constancy, unwavering faith
• Story: Intellectual disability and autism
• Oxana’s Cymbalstern
• Cymbalstern (or Zimbelstern) is a star-shaped organ stop that makes a clanging, ringing sound during organ playing.
• Xenophobia, fear of difference, and stigma
• Calli reacts to the truism: “There are only two kinds of people: those who are disabled and those who will be disabled.”
• Visible and invisible disabilities: depression, anxiety, and mental health
• Are disabled lives worth living?
• Story: A surgeon develops multiple sclerosis
• Radical dependence on others
• Power, agency, and interdependency on others
• Start with the bare conditions of possibility, and then how those conditions of possibility change when disability emerges?

About

Calli Micale is Director of the MDiv Program; Assistant Professor of Theology and Ethics at Palmer Theological Seminary. She is a theologian with a particular interest in the ethical implications of theological talk for the whole of human life. Her research brings together the history of Christian thought with sustained attention to rhetoric as it grounds perceptions of the body and health in Western societies. She joined the Palmer Theological Seminary faculty in 2023 after earning a PhD from Yale University.

Writing and teaching correspond in Dr. Micale’s work to form students as faith leaders oriented towards gender, disability, and racial justice. She has published articles with the Journal of Disability and Religion and the Disability Studies Quarterly (forthcoming). Micale is currently working on a book manuscript, tentatively titled Crip Conversion: Narratives of Disability and Grace. The book analyzes the stories theologians tell about intellectual disability and argues that deploying intellectual disability as narrative metaphor allows one to come at the Protestant tradition from a helpful vantage point—such that the significance of sensation for the reception of grace comes to the fore.

As a candidate for ordination in the ELCA with 10+ years of preaching experience, Dr. Micale delights in the variety of ways her students take up theological resources for ministry and social justice action. In each course, she aims to take students beyond learning concepts by letting divergent beliefs shape and change their perspective on what really matters—their own intellectual and spiritual lives called to make a difference in the world.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Calli Micale
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Logan Ledman, Macie Bridge, and Kaylen Yun
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
• This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information, visit tyndale.foundation.

Where does boredom come from? Have humans always experienced boredom, or has it only come on in the entertainment age, having more time than we know what to do with? Kevin Gary (Valparaiso University) is author of Why Boredom Matters: Education, Leisure, and the Quest for a Meaningful Life. He joins Drew Collins & Evan Rosa to reflect on the discontent and disconnection that boredom constantly threatens. They discuss the phenomena of boredom, the childhood experience of it, whether its good or bad, the definition of boredom, its connection to entertainment and education, and finally the role of attention and leisure in cultivating a healthy understanding and response to being totally bored out of our minds.

This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information, visit tyndale.foundation.

About Kevin Gary

Kevin Gary is a Professor of Education at Valparaiso University. He has a Ph.D. in cultural and educational policy studies from Loyola University Chicago with a focus in the philosophy of education and an M.A. in systematic theology from the University of Notre Dame. His teaching experience includes 10 years of teaching theology at Loyola Academy High School in Wilmette, Illinois.; seven years as a professor of education and philosophy at Goshen College in Goshen, Indiana; 8 years as a professor of education at Valparaiso University in Valparaiso, Indiana; and one year as faculty director of Goshen College’s international studies program in Lima, Perú.

Dr. Gary’s research is primarily in philosophy of education. He recently published, Why Boredom Matters: Education and the Quest for a Meaningful Life with Cambridge University Press in 2022. K-12 educators (and parents) face bored students every day. Drawing on multiple disciplines Dr. Gary makes a case for teachers guiding students to engage with boredom constructively, steering clear of restless boredom avoidance on the one hand, or passive submission to boredom on the other.

Dr. Gary has published in multiple journals, including Educational Theory, the Journal of Philosophy of Education, and Studies in Philosophy and Education.

Dr. Gary is one of the founding executives of the North American Association for Philosophy and Education (NAAPE), launched in 2018. NAAPE provides an international forum for scholars working at the intersection of philosophy and educational thought, where disciplines such as ethics, political philosophy, epistemology, philosophical anthropology, history, and others meet the practical challenges of teaching and learning.

Dr. Gary is passionate about liberal education, especially within the context of a Christian liberal arts university, which aims to cultivate practical wisdom, compassion, and a Renaissance spirit.

Show Notes

• Kevin Gary’s Why Boredom Matters: Education and the Quest for a Meaningful Life
• A quick and incomplete history of boredom
• The Preacher of Ecclesiastes laments over human toil, “everything is vanity and chasing after wind” around 250 BC. “The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear with hearing.”
• Stoic Roman philosopher Seneca noticed a nauseating tedium in his famous letter “On Tranquility,” describing a familiar quote “vacillation of a mind that nowhere finds rest, and the sad and languid endurance of one’s leisure. Thence comes mourning and melancholy and the thousand waverings of an unsettled mind, which its aspirations hold in suspense, and then disappointment renders melancholy. Thence comes that feeling which makes men loathe their own leisure and complain that they themselves have nothing to be busy with.”
• The ancient Christian monks of the desert struggled with the noonday demon of acedia, a spiritual boredom with their vocation of prayer and faithfulness.
• Aquinas and other scholastics disciplined the “roving mind.”
• Variants of the English “boredom”—including being bored to death!—show up in Lord Byron, Charles Dickens, and Herman Melville in the mid 19th century.
• Kierkegaard calls it the root of all evil.
• Heidegger sees it in a positive light, saying that philosophy begins in the nothingness of boredom.
• C.S. Lewis’s Uncle Screwtape advises that “anything or nothing is sufficient to attract the wandering attention” of Jr. Demon Wormwood’s human patient.
• The French bourgeoisie nailed it with ennui that many a suburban latchkey kid can relate to.
• In the King-Kubrick masterpiece, The Shining, boredom goes very dark when “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”
• Boredom for children: How to respond to the boredom children feel
• Is boredom bad or good?
• What’s the definition of boredom?
• Tolstoy on boredom
• Kierkegaard on living life to avoid boredom
• Kierkegaard as a form of existential despair; boredom as an indicator that we’re not comfortable with ourselves.
• Chasing novelty, looking for the new; or giving up and resigning our agency
• Heidegger was influenced by Kierkegaard; and thought you must push through it to find your true, authentic self.
• Kierkegaard’s view of the “authentic self” is the self resting in God.
• “Schola” (Latin): attentively receptive.
• Simone Weil on tedium, boredom, and attention
• Living in an “attention economy” and controlling or stewarding others’ attention
• Attention as an antidote to boredom
• Simone Weil’s experience working in a car factory and losing her sense of agency and self
• Philosopher Albert Borgmann on “focal practices” and guardrails.
• Go chop wood for an hour, and simply do it.
• Go for a walk for an hour without your smartphone.
• Boredom and entertainment in a perverse binary orbit
• Simone Weil “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God” in Waiting for God (link to PDF)
• Entertainment is, therefore, not the problem.
• “The entertainment-boredom cycle just becomes more boring.”
• Leisure as antidote to boredom
• Sabbath as oasis from work filling up our lives.
• Thomas Aquinas’s “roving mind”
• Let’s go birding!
• Liturgy as the guardrails of attention
• Be an apprentice and learn to experience and perceive in a new way.
• Mindful in the mundane
• Gordon Wood’s History of the American Revolution: politicians as “disinterested men of leisure”
• Fighting against instrumentalization.
• Intrinsic goods of doing the dishes.
• “The bored mind is missing an opportunity for leisure.”
• “I like to fish… and any fishing guide will tell you they call it fishing, not catching, for a reason.”
• “Having resources does not guarantee the experience of leisure.”
• Josef Pieper and Abraham Heschel and the tradition of Intellectus and Wonder
• How leisure as both active and contemplative, and its role in a flourishing life

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Kevin Gary and Drew Collins
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge and Logan Ledman
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
• Special thanks to the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information, visit tyndale.foundation.

The final installment of our 5-part book club series on Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most, produced and hosted by Kelly Corrigan, and featuring Claire Danes & Kate Bowler. Special thanks to the Warren Smoot Carter III and Meagan Carter Charitable Fund for making this series possible.

Show Notes

• https://katebowler.com/about/
• https://divinity.duke.edu/faculty/kate-bowler
• https://www.kellycorrigan.com/podcast

About Kelly Corrigan

Kelly Corrigan has written four New York Times bestselling memoirs in the last decade, earning her the title of “The Poet Laureate of the ordinary” from the Huffington Post and the “voice of a generation” from O Magazine.  She is curious and funny and eager to go well past the superficial in every conversation.  More on KellyCorrigan.com.

Show Notes

• This episode featured Kelly Corrigan, Kate Bowler, and Claire Danes
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Kaylen Yun, and Logan Ledman
• Special thanks to Tammy Stedman, Kelly Corrigan, and the Warren Smoot Carter III and Meagan Carter Charitable Fund
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Show Notes

• https://katebowler.com/about/
• https://divinity.duke.edu/faculty/kate-bowler
• https://www.kellycorrigan.com/podcast

About Kelly Corrigan

Kelly Corrigan has written four New York Times bestselling memoirs in the last decade, earning her the title of “The Poet Laureate of the ordinary” from the Huffington Post and the “voice of a generation” from O Magazine.  She is curious and funny and eager to go well past the superficial in every conversation.  More on KellyCorrigan.com.

Production Notes

• This episode featured Kelly Corrigan, Kate Bowler, and Claire Danes
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Kaylen Yun, and Logan Ledman
• Special thanks to Tammy Stedman, Kelly Corrigan, and the Warren Smoot Carter III and Meagan Carter Charitable Fund
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Today’s episode is part 3 of a 5-part book club series produced and hosted by Kelly Corrigan. The PBS host and author of four New York Times bestselling memoirs is taking a deep dive into the latest book from the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. Written by Miroslav Volf, Matt Croasmun, and Ryan McAnnally-Linz, Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most, the book is based on a Yale College course that takes up some of the most pressing questions of life, but doesn’t keep the implications, challenges, confusion, and demands of those questions at arms length. Both the course and the book invite life-long learners to ask, “For any idea, if that idea were true, how would your life have to change?”

In this episode, Kelly convenes a podcast book-club with two really cool friends: Kate Bowler—host of the Everything Happens podcast and Associate Professor of American Religious History at Duke Divinity School—and celebrated actress Claire Danes, who starred in the Showtime series Homeland and the 90s MTV hit series My So-Called Life.

If you’re interested in reading along with Kelly, Kate, and Claire, please visit lifeworthlivingbook.com—that’s where you can find links to buy the book and a free discussion guide when you sign up for the Life Worth Living email list.

About Kelly Corrigan

Kelly Corrigan has written four New York Times bestselling memoirs in the last decade, earning her the title of “The Poet Laureate of the ordinary” from the Huffington Post and the “voice of a generation” from O Magazine.  She is curious and funny and eager to go well past the superficial in every conversation.  More on KellyCorrigan.com.

Production Notes

• This episode featured Kelly Corrigan, Kate Bowler, and Claire Danes
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Kaylen Yun, and Logan Ledman
• Special thanks to Tammy Stedman, Kelly Corrigan, and the Warren Smoot Carter III and Meagan Carter Charitable Fund
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Today’s episode is part 2 of a 5-part book club series produced and hosted by Kelly Corrigan. The PBS host and author of four New York Times bestselling memoirs is taking a deep dive into the latest book from the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. Written by Miroslav Volf, Matt Croasmun, and Ryan McAnnally-Linz, Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most, the book is based on a Yale College course that takes up some of the most pressing questions of life, but doesn’t keep the implications, challenges, confusion, and demands of those questions at arms length. Both the course and the book invite life-long learners to ask, “For any idea, if that idea were true, how would your life have to change?”

In this episode, Kelly convenes a podcast book-club with two really cool friends: Kate Bowler—host of the Everything Happens podcast and Associate Professor of American Religious History at Duke Divinity School—and celebrated actress Claire Danes, who starred in the Showtime series Homeland and the 90s MTV hit series My So-Called Life.

If you’re interested in reading along with Kelly, Kate, and Claire, please visit lifeworthlivingbook.com—that’s where you can find links to buy the book and a free discussion guide when you sign up for the Life Worth Living email list.

About Kelly Corrigan

Kelly Corrigan has written four New York Times bestselling memoirs in the last decade, earning her the title of “The Poet Laureate of the ordinary” from the Huffington Post and the “voice of a generation” from O Magazine.  She is curious and funny and eager to go well past the superficial in every conversation.  More on KellyCorrigan.com.

Production Notes

• This episode featured Kelly Corrigan, Kate Bowler, and Claire Danes
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Kaylen Yun, and Logan Ledman
• Special thanks to Tammy Stedman, Kelly Corrigan, and the Warren Smoot Carter III and Meagan Carter Charitable Fund
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

"Your life is too important to be guided by anything less than what matters most."

Part 1 of a 5-part book club series on Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most. Written by Miroslav Volf, Matt Croasmun, and Ryan McAnnally-Linz, the book is based on a Yale College course that takes up some of the most pressing questions of life, but doesn’t keep the implications, challenges, confusion, perplexity, and demands of those questions at arms length. Both the course and the book invite life-long learners to ask, “For any idea, if that idea were true, how would your life have to change?”

Later in the series, Kelly is joined by Kate Bowler—host of the Everything Happens podcast and Associate Professor of American Religious History at Duke Divinity School—and actress Claire Danes of the Showtime series Homeland and the '90s MTV series My So-Called Life.

This series is produced and hosted by Kelly Corrigan and was originally featured on the Kelly Corrigan Wonders podcast and Kate Bowler's Everything Happens podcast.

If you’re interested in reading along with Kelly, Kate, and Claire, please visit lifeworthlivingbook.com—that’s where you can find links to buy the book and a free discussion guide when you sign up for the Life Worth Living email list.

About Kelly Corrigan

Kelly Corrigan has written four New York Times bestselling memoirs in the last decade, earning her the title of “The Poet Laureate of the ordinary” from the Huffington Post and the “voice of a generation” from O Magazine.  She is curious and funny and eager to go well past the superficial in every conversation.  More on KellyCorrigan.com.

Show Notes

• For more information about Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most, visit lifeworthlivingbook.com.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Kelly Corrigan, Miroslav Volf, Matt Croasmun, and Ryan McAnnally-Linz
• Special thanks to Tammy Stedman, Kelly Corrigan, and the Warren Smoot Carter III and Meagan Carter Charitable Fund
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

We homo sapiens sapiens are “fearfully and wonderfully made,” but why? What’s so special about being human? What makes us unique? And can we equate our uniqueness in the world with the Imago Dei? 

Experimental psychologist and cognitive scientist Justin Barrett joins Evan Rosa to discuss the image of God as a blueprint for each of us as individuals; human uniqueness as a theological and psychological category; the place of homo sapiens among other species; uniquely human capacities, such as executive function, hypersociality, and acquisition of specialized knowledge; the human biological niche construction—or changing the environment—and how our psychological traits factor; the psychological and biological underpinnings of human culture and the problem of creating cities; and how human technology interacts with our biological niche. 

This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of Blueprint 1543. For more information, visit Blueprint1543.org.

Show Notes

• Learn more about bringing psychology to theology at Blueprint1543.org.
• Download your copy of Justin Barrett’s A Psychological Science Primer for Theologians (2022)
• TheoPsych Academy
• Psalm 139: 13-14
  13 For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. 14 I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well.
• Genesis 1:1-31
  26 Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’ 
  27 So God created humankind in his image,
     in the image of God he created them;
     male and female he created them.
  28 God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’ 29 God said, ‘See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. 30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.’ And it was so. 31 God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
• The image of God as a blueprint for each of us as individuals
• Nicholas Wolterstorff’s conception of the Imago Dei in Justice: Rights & Wrongs.
• Some varieties of understanding what about us makes us imagebearers, according to scripture
• Human uniqueness as a theological and psychological category
• Considering the place of homo sapiens among other species
• Uniquely human capacities, such as executive functions of the brain, sense of self, self-regulation and awareness
• Human hypersociality and relationality, and our interpersonal theory of mind
• Attachment as an evolved biological function
• The intellectual capacities for acquiring specialized knowledge like how to use fire, cook, and teach each other
• The human biological niche construction—or changing the environment—and how our psychological traits factor
• The psychological and biological underpinnings of human culture and the problem of creating cities
• How human technology interacts with our biological niche
• Dr. Ian Malcolm "...they didn't stop to think if they should"—from Jurassic Park.

About Justin Barrett

Justin L. Barrett is an honorary Professor of Theology and the Sciences at St Andrews University School of Divinity. An experimental psychologist by training, he is concerned with the scientific study of religion and its philosophical as well as theological implications. He is the author of a number of books including Why Would Anyone Believe in God?, Born Believers: The Science of Childhood Religion, and Religious Cognition in China: Homo Religiosus and the Dragon.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Justin Barrett
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Kaylen Yun, & Logan Ledman
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
• This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of Blueprint 1543. For more information, visit Blueprint1543.org.

We tend to take these claims for granted: “Human beings are essentially relational.” “No man is an island.” “We’re created for connection.” “We’re made for relationships.” And testing the limits of this can be pretty much diabolical. Evan Rosa traces two stories of parental deprivation: Harry Harlow's "Monkey Love Experiments" and the horror of 1990's discovery of Romanian asylums for orphans, documented in the 1990 report "The Shame of a Nation,” on 20/20.

Then psychologist Mari Clements (Glenville State College, formerly Fuller School of Psychology) discusses the importance of healthy marriage dynamics for young children’s development and how it provides a secure emotional base; the relational imago Dei; the close emotional bonds that must take place early in life in order to provide the relational stability relational creatures need; we talk about important phases of human development, into adulthood; and the theological backdrop to these questions of the human drive and need for emotional connection.

This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of Blueprint 1543. For more information, visit Blueprint1543.org.

About Mari Clements

Mari Clements is Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs and Professor of Psychology at Glenville State College. Prior to this, she taught at Fuller School of Psychology and Penn State University.

Show Notes

• We tend to take these claims for granted: “Human beings are essentially relational.” “No man is an island.” “We’re created for connection.” “We’re made for relationships.” And testing the limits of this can be pretty much diabolical.
• Harry Harlow’s Monkey Love Experiments—Rhesus Monkeys (Video)
• “The Shame of a Nation,” 20/20 (1990) (Video)
• How family dynamics and marital conflict impacts children
• “If you stay in your marriage for the sake of the children, then you deserve, and your child deserves, for you to work on your marriage for the sake of the children. Just being together is actually not better for kids. The kids who look really bad are the kids whose parents are engaged in repetitive and nasty and awful conflict. And they're not getting good models for how to solve problems in their own relationships. They're not getting good models for what to expect from marriage. They're not getting good models for what that marriage relationship is supposed to be.”
• Even four-year-olds notice when parents are in conflict.
• Marriage as a secure emotional base for children.
• Parenting together as stewardship and sacred responsibility
• “In your relationship, you should glorify God better together than you would separately.”
• “There's a very important connection between how it is that children see their parents and how it is they typically see God.”
• Conditional love can produce an earning mindset in a child, not just with respect to the parent, but to God.
• Don’t be a Karen-parent who thinks their child can do no wrong.
• “That's the interesting thing about people, even when they're doing terrible things, they often are doing them for good reasons, right? In therapy you can hear couples say incredibly hurtful and awful things to each other.”
• The relational image of God
• Study of Infants in Orphanages during World War I and World War II: Infants with physical needs taken care of still wasted away and even died without human contact.
• God as Trinity, Jesus as Incarnational
• Relating rightly to our neighbors
• Impact of spousal treatment on how children treat parents and others.
• Wire Monkey vs Soft and Cuddly Monkey
• A close emotional bond must take place early in life in order to provide the relational stability relational creatures need.
• Definition of adulthood
• Babies can do amazing things.
• Still Face Experiment
• Intellectual vs Relational definitions of the Imago Dei
• Intellectual disability
• Bringing psychology into the service of theology

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Mari Clements
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge and Kaylen Yun
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
• This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of Blueprint 1543. For more information, visit Blueprint1543.org.

"Theology is truth-apt and truth-aimed." Too often the faith-science debate ends up a zero-sum game where either science or theology overstep their bounds. But analytic theologian Oliver Crisp (University of St. Andrews, Scotland) describes a tapestry of knowledge that requires the best of both worlds. In this episode he discusses the purpose and future prospects of theology in light of empirical and experimental science. How might science, philosophy, and theology can work together to help us understand human uniqueness? Can science help us better understand the imago Dei?

About Oliver Crisp

Oliver D. Crisp (PhD, University of London; DLitt, University of Aberdeen) is the Principal of St. Mary's College, Head of the School of Divinity, Professor of Analytic Theology, and Director of the Logos Institute at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. He has written or edited numerous books, including The Word Enfleshed, Analyzing Doctrine, Deviant Calvinism, and Jonathan Edwards among the Theologians.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured theologian Oliver Crisp
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge & Kaylen Yun
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
• This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of Blueprint 1543. For more information, visit Blueprint1543.org.

Is your faith a house of cards? If you were wrong about one belief would the whole structure just collapse? If even one injury came to you, one instance of broken trust, would the whole castle fall? If one element was seemingly inconsistent or incompatible—would you burn down the house?

This depiction of the psychology of faith is quite fragile. It falls over to even the lightest breath. But what would a flexible faith be? Resilient to even the heaviest gusts of life’s hurricanes. It would adapt and grow as a living, responsive faith.

This metaphor isn’t too far off from the Enlightenment-founding vision of Rene Descartes—whose Meditations sought to build an edifice of Christian faith on a foundation free from doubt, ambiguity, uncertainty, or falsehoods. Even the slightest of doubts had to be categorically obliterated in order to prove the existence of God and the reality of the soul. He was clear about this in the preface. This was a work of apologetics. And he thought a good offense is your best defense. So he went on a whack-a-mole style doubt-killing spree that he hoped would secure a faith built on certainty.

Now, here’s a question for you: Does a quest for certainty strengthen and fortify the Christian faith? Or does it leave you stranded on the top floor of a house of cards?

Today, we’re continuing our series on Bringing Psychology to Theology, with a closer look at what to do about doubt, uncertainty, and ambiguity, in all sorts of stakes, but especially when it comes to faith.

In this series we’ve been exploring the tools of psychological science that might contribute to a deeper, greater, more nuanced theological understanding of the world.

We began the series by establishing certain normative questions about the integration of psychology and theology—experimental psychologist Justin Barrett offered to Miroslav Volf the suggestion that to build your cathedral of theology, you need the tools of psychological sciences.

Then, developmental psychologist Pamela King offered a vision of thriving that expresses the dynamic, human telos or purpose throughout our lifespan. Research psychologist Julie Exline followed with a psychological exploration of spiritual struggle and one of the most embattled and suppressed of human emotions: anger at God.

In this episode, I’m joined by Elizabeth Hall of Biola University’s Rosemead School of Psychology. She’s both a clinically trained therapist, helping people deal with life’s difficulties, as well as a psychological researcher exploring human spirituality, personality and character traits, women’s mental health, and human relationships. Most recently she co-authored Relational Spirituality: A Psychological-Theological Paradigm for Transformation, and I asked her to come on the show to talk about her recent work on tolerance for ambiguity in a life of faith.

Here we discuss the domains of psychology and theology and what it means for each to “stay in their lane”; she introduces a distinction between implicit and explicit knowledge, and identifies the social- and self-imposed pressure to know everything with certainty; we reflect on the recent trends toward deconversion from faith in light of these pressures; and she offers psychologically grounded guidance for approaching doubt and ambiguity in a secure relational context, seeking to make the unspoken or implicit doubts explicit. Rather than remaining perched upon our individualized, certainty-driven house-of-card faith; she lays out a way to inhabit a flexible, resilient, and relationally grounded faith, tolerant of ambiguity and adaptive and secure amidst all our winds of doubt.

About Elizabeth Hall

M. Elizabeth Lewis Hall (PhD, Rosemead School of Psychology) is professor of psychology at Rosemead School of Psychology at Biola University, where she teaches courses on the integration of psychology and theology. She has published over 100 articles and book chapters and serves as associate editor for Psychology of Religion and Spirituality. She lives in Whittier, California, with her husband, Todd, and her two sons.

Show Notes

• Relational Spirituality: A Psychological-Theological Paradigm for Transformation
• On the integration of psychology and Christianity in life
• Vocationally; psychology is the “little area of God’s creation” where she gets to work, she attempts to bring it back to Jesus’s lordship
• Jesus as owner of all
• Intellectually; if all truth is God’s truth, she is trying to get the most complete sense of what humans are all about
• God gave us the capacity to study using psychology
• Faith, theology, and religion lend themselves into a psychological domain more than other fields, providing rich content that comes together easily with what the Bible says about humans.
• What helps the intellectual puzzle pieces come together for you?
• “I need to allow theology and psychology to stay in their lanes. I can’t expect more from each discipline than what it is constructed to offer.”
• Ex: Psychology gets in trouble when making prescriptive statements (vs descriptive)
• People are seeking clinical based advice for how to live better
• “When someone sits down with a client to help them with whatever they're dealing with, they do have notions of human flourishing in the background that, whether they've thought through it or not, are going to come up in the course of how the therapy is steered.”
• Defining flourishing is not easy, so choosing criteria becomes difficult for psychology
• What does it mean when doubt enters the mind? When we act on doubts?
• It is difficult to be a Christian with questions about your faith in this current moment.
• Social Pressure:
• We are continually being confronted with people who live and think differently than us, and who seem to be doing well in life, opposed to the homogenous communities we historically lived in.
• Intellectual pressure:
• We naturally want to seek truth that is certain.
• There is a strand of Christianity where we’ve reduced what faith is to an intellectual ascent to the affirmations of our faith.
• What is it to know something? What might psychologists be working with as definitions of knowledge that would offer alternatives to knowledge as certainty?
• A useful distinction from cognitive scientists has been the definition between the explicit and implicit knowing
• We know important things about the world at an implicit level:
• Via nervous systems, without words
• Emotions and relationships
• What are the ways that gut knowledge comes to us, relationally or culturally?
• Our initial reaction to something in our environment is immediately a “push or pull” towards or against that thing. Then it becomes refined by past experiences (culture, past relationships, etc.) This then shapes what happens on the conscious level.
• Being aware of that psychological force between our unconscious and conscious thought becomes important when breaking down doubt in a religious context.
• Hall grew up in the Evangelical church, feeling certain that faith was set of propositions about Jesus and God that was very certain.
• Early church had more of an interpersonal dimension to faith, centering on trust and loyalty.
• Relying on propositions/blanket statement of Christian faith creates a “house of cards” vision of faith: If you pull one card out, all come down.
• This relates to an intellectual need for certainty, but there is also a social dimension to this stack
• Guilt by association: disgust, remorse, shame, around the association of a particular belief with Christianity, which can feed all the way back to one’s experience of God
• This becomes particularly heightened when the larger culture is confronting/criticizing these beliefs or institutions
• Our experienced relationship of God also has implicit foundations
• Studies on deconversion show that people who turn from Christianity find that the reason is usually a perceived injury (with God, another person, the church) that sets off the process
• Many people say “science” is the reason, but it’s not actually until the betrayal of trust comes in that most people start cognitively deconverting
• Most of our shaping and life happens outside of our conscious awareness
• Psychology does not understand well how the explicit knowledge systems can influence our implicit beliefs
• Two kinds of doubt:
• Explicit: content, perceived competing claims with Christianity and (usually) science
• Implicit: betrayal of trust. God has let a person down
• Different people will encounter the same perceived discrepancy and will experience it in vastly different ways.
• It is difficult to be a thoughtful creature and not wonder at how things fit together
• Some people may meet a discrepancy and decide their whole life has been built on a lie
• The factors that allow a person to entertain doubts with more confidence:
• Solid relational attachments (such as parental) early in childhood
• Helps a person to be overwhelmed by a question because they know they have faced and managed similar situations before
• Being okay with doubt: some people can live with it, intellectual resilience
• If it’s very threatening, you have to do something because you can’t live in a state of constant tension: deconverting is one possible solution
• Tension: literal physiological arousal
• How to help people find their way through the doubt:
• Try to make what is implicit, explicit. Explore the process of the doubt.
• Provide a window into a person’s capacity for uncertainty tolerance
• Envisioning faith a different way: Rethinking our churches for relational spirituality
• There are ways to be attuned to caring for peoples relational experiences of the love of God

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Elizabeth Hall
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge & Kaylen Yun
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Sometimes things go wrong. Your British premiere league football club loses a game; maybe your dog eats the birthday party cupcakes; maybe someone cuts you off in traffic. And you get angry—looking for someone to hold responsible.

Sometimes things go wrong in even more serious ways. Your kid’s getting bullied or mistreated; the justice system fails you or someone you love; you’re betrayed or deeply hurt by a friend. And you get angry—still looking to hold them responsible, take a form of vengeance, and even if you can muster the strength to forgive and absolve, the anger might persist.

But what about when things go so seriously wrong in life that questions of meaning, purpose, and sense of existence come under doubt? When there’s no human left to hold accountable, do you then turn your eyes to God—the creator of all of this, you know: “the whole world in his hands” kinda thing?

Have you ever been angry at God?

Today, we’re continuing our series all about “Bringing Psychology to Theology” with a look at the psychology of spiritual struggles and specifically, a scientific study of what happens when we get angry at God. In this series we’ve been exploring the tools of psychological science that might contribute to a deeper, greater, more nuanced theological understanding of the world. 

We started with a conversation between Miroslav Volf and experimental psychologist Justin Barrett. Justin evokes the image of erecting a giant cathedral of theology—and how the task must be done with a variety of tools and subcontracted skills. Then we heard from Pamela Ebstyne King with a developmental approach to thinking about human spirituality, the dynamic nature of human purpose, and how relationships factor in moving from surviving to thriving. 

The hope for this series is to highlight the prospects of a science-engaged theology and how it might contribute to the most pressing matters for how to live lives worthy of our humanity. 

In this episode Ryan McAnnally-Linz is joined by research psychologist Julie Exline. She’s Professor of Psychology of Religion & Spirituality at Case Western Reserve University and author most recently of Working with Spiritual Struggles in Psychotherapy: From Research to Practice. Her research has examined forgiveness, humility, and human spirituality, and she’s widely recognized for her work on the psychology of anger at God and religious struggles. 

In this episode, Julie reflects on the meaning of spiritual struggle, as well as the possible outcomes and factors that contribute to a personal sense of healing and growth. She speaks to the anxiety and fear that seem to hover around an expression of anger toward God, dealing with objections and concerns that it’s immoral or presumes God to be guilty of wrongdoing. And she offers practical considerations in light of the psychological research around what happens when people choose to express their anger at God or not—how different responses of disapproval or acceptance can lead to positive growth or a sense of successfully dealing with the anger.

About Julie Exline

Julie Exline is Professor of Psychology of Religion & Spirituality at Case Western Reserve University and author most recently of Working with Spiritual Struggles in Psychotherapy: From Research to Practice. Her research has examined forgiveness, humility, and human spirituality, and she’s widely recognized for her work on the psychology of anger at God and religious struggles.

Show Notes

• Working with Spiritual Struggles in Psychotherapy: From Research to Practice
• Spiritual struggles
• The shadow side of religion
• Researching the more challenging side of religion and spirituality.
• Looking at the dark side of things: a defensive pessimist at heart
• Big picture: coping with challenging events around faith
• Conserving beliefs, fitting things in
• Choosing to engage struggle: approach God, seek support, or decline and disengage
• Prayer, talking to God or other trusted people
• Struggling with God versus struggling with another human being
• Growth often comes from staying engaged but addressing the problem
• Being angry at God
• Is it okay to be angry at God?
• “Are you sure you should be studying this?”
• People feel like it’s morally wrong to question God.
• Beth Moore: Questioning God's Authority vs Asking God Questions
• Questioning God's authority is sometimes thought to lead people on a path to spiritual decline.
• Asking God questions can lead people toward growth.
• Feeling angry at God doesn't imply a lack of respect for God.
• Anger and Love are independent of one another.
• "Difficulty Forgiving God"—implying that God did something wrong; now using language "resolving anger at God"
• Anger as a response to injustice.
• Finding a way to live with the problem of evil: Are people wrestling with anger toward God articulating it in a similar way as those worrying about the problem of evil?
• Theodicy
• “Why did God allow…”
• The role of theological presuppositions in anger with God
• Changing beliefs and theological tinkering
• Responding to others who wrestle with anger with God: the gift of presence
• A response of acceptance and affirmation gave people a higher likelihood of reporting they had grown from the experience of anger at God.
• A response of disapproval or moral judgment is associated with attempts to suppress the anger, making it more likely to remain, and can even increase the likelihood of substance abuse.
• Anger with God as part of a healthy, dynamic spiritual life
• Anger as a signal for what matters
• Thinking about anger as part of an ongoing conversation with God: Two-chair technique
• Anger as an approach-oriented emotion—allows you to approach a problem or issue worthy of our attention.
• Using anger as an opportunity to clarify and solve a problem
• Japanese “kintsugi”—golden repairs in the deepest fissures and cracks of life.
• Practical recommendations for resolving anger with God
• Experiential avoidance
• Clarify your feelings and give yourself space to talk about it
• “Shouldn't God be able to handle your anger?”
• You don't have to express your anger disrespectfully; you can show your care and value for the relationship.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Julie Exline
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Kaylen Yun & Macie Bridge
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Acknowledgements

• This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of Blueprint 1543. For more information, visit Blueprint1543.org.

"Usually people think of a telos as an endpoint, but what if we think of telos as a dynamic process that sustains a thriving trajectory for the individual and the world around them? The imago Dei, which is deeply and inherently relational and social—we image God by being our unique selves in unity. So there is the particularity of personhood and the relatedness with other persons, God, and all of creation. And so that was what the reciprocating self was. It's 'How do I grow as a fully differentiated person in relationship and increasing intimacy, increasing contribution with the world around me?' 

To thrive then is to pursue that fullness of self in the context of intimacy and accountability and relationships—not just with those closest to me ... that's essential—but also in contribution to the world beyond the self.

How does our faith, how does our devotion, fuel us to want to continue to reciprocate when life is hard? When there's a pandemic? We need something beyond ourselves, a power beyond ourselves, an orientation beyond ourselves to fuel that interrelatedness between our particularity and the greater good." (Pamela Ebstyne King)

Introduction

At the bedrock of our being as persons is relationality: our ability to be known, to be loved, and to know and love in return. But whoa whoa whoa. Wait a minute. What kind of claim is that? Is that theology or psychology? We’re used to hearing that from the likes of the Jewish existential philosopher and theologian Martin Buber—he’s well known for his suggestion that an intimate I-Thou relationship is what makes for our conscious personhood. It’d be impossible to become an “I” without coming into direct contact with a “You” and seeing it as a “You.” 

But how interesting that research studies in developmental psychology find just that. You can for instance turn to John Bowlby and the beginnings of attachment theory to find that this theological claim holds up once you start testing it with the tools psychological. But more than holds up, the claim that relationality is fundamental to personhood starts to expand and develop nuance by examining the most universal by application in the unique, particular circumstances. Famous psychological experiments like the “Still Face” show how central the reciprocal response of our earliest attachment figure is for our mental health, even as babies. (Check below for an excruciating video example of the Still Face Experiment.)

But this is just one way that developmental psychology might offer some interesting tools to theological reflection. 

And today we’re continuing a new series of episodes on For the Life of the World all about “Bringing Psychology to Theology”—we’re exploring the tools of psychological sciences that might contribute to a deeper, greater, more nuanced theological understanding of the world. Last week we introduced the series with a conversation between Miroslav Volf and experimental psychologist Justin Barrett. Justin evokes the image of erecting a giant cathedral of theology—and how the task must be done with a variety of tools and subcontracted skills.

Well, whether theology is the grand architect of a cathedral of human knowledge or the benevolent and humble Queen of the Sciences—either way we hope this series highlights the prospects of a science-engaged theology and how it might contribute to the most pressing matters for how to live lives worthy of our humanity.

My guest in this episode is Pamela Ebstyne King. She’s the Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science at Fuller School of Psychology and is Executive Director of the Thrive Center for Human Development. An ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church USA, her research has focused on the intersections of developmental and positive psychology, human thriving, and spirituality.

In this episode, we discuss developmental psych as the observational study of human change and plasticity in the midst of a whole complex life; relational attachment for the sake of intimacy and exploration and ultimate purpose or meaning; the proper place of self-love; God’s enabling and loving presence as the ultimate secure attachment figure; the importance of learning, gaining skills, and the pursuit of expertise; The prospects of regaining emotional regulation through relationships; the game changing impact of deliberate psychological and spiritual practices to move us well beyond surviving to a life of thriving.

About Pamela Ebstyne King

Pamela Ebstyne King, Ph.D. joined Fuller Theological Seminary as assistant professor of Marital and Family Studies in 2008, after serving in the School of Psychology for eight years as an adjunct and research professor. She was installed in 2014 with a professorship named for her mentor, Peter L. Benson. In 2021 she was promoted to the position of Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science. Dr. King is also executive director of the Thrive Center for Human Development.

Dr. King’s academic and applied efforts aim to promote a movement of human thriving that contributes to flourishing societies. Her primary academic interests lie at the intersection of thriving and spiritual development. She is passionate about understanding what individual strengths and environments enable humans to thrive and become all God created them to be. She holds particular interest in understanding the role of faith, spirituality, religion, and virtues in this process. To this end she has led in building an empirical field of study of religious and spiritual development within developmental psychology that provides a psychological scientific perspective of spiritual formation.

She has extensively studied and written on conceptualizations of thriving and positive youth development. Her work on telos is noted to provide an interdisciplinary framework for human thriving and flourishing from different philosophical, theological, and cultural perspectives and to provide a structure for understanding practical concepts like purpose, vocation, and joy. Her work combines theology, empirical research, and community engagement to further understand what contexts and settings enable people to thrive. She has conducted research funded by Biologos Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation, the Fetzer Institute, Compassion International, and Tyndale House, among others. In addition to her scholarship, she finds deep joy in teaching and mentoring students at Fuller.

Dr. King is coauthor of The Reciprocating Self: Human Development in Theological Perspective and Thriving with Stone Age Minds: Evolutionary Psychology, Christian Theology & Human Flourishing, coeditor of The Handbook of Spiritual Development in Childhood and Adolescence, and coauthor of the inaugural chapter on research on religious and spiritual development in the seventh edition of the Handbook of Child Psychology and Developmental Science. She has served on the editorial boards of Developmental Psychology, Journal of Positive Psychology, Applied Developmental Science, the Encyclopedia of Applied Developmental Science, and the Encyclopedia of Spiritual Development in Childhood and Adolescence. She has also published articles in the Journal on Adolescent Research, Journal of Early Adolescence, New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, and Journal of Psychology and Christianity. King is a member of the Society for Research on Adolescents, Society for Research on Child Development, and Division 36 of the American Psychological Association.

In addition to her studies at Fuller, Dr. King completed her undergraduate studies at Stanford University and a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford’s Center on Adolescence; she was a visiting scholar under the divinity faculty at Cambridge University. Ordained in the Presbyterian Church (USA), she has led high school and college ministries, and regularly speaks, preaches, and consults for various community organizations and churches. She lives in Pasadena with her husband and three children.

Show Notes

• Martin Buber’s I and Thou
• John Bowlby and Attachment Theory
• Trolick’s Still Face Experiment (Video)
• Justin Barrett & Pamela Ebstyne King, Thriving with Stone Age Minds: Evolutionary Psychology, Christian Faith, and the Quest for Human Flourishing
• Developmental psych as the observational study of human change in the midst of a whole life of complexity
• Plasticity of the human species
• Relational attachment for the sake of intimacy and exploration
• The Impact of environment on genetic expression
• Law if reciprocity
• Fullness of creation, redemption and consummation
• Theology as establishing ends, and psychology as developing towards gods purposes
• How psychology aids in the process of becoming our full selves as selfhood
• The proper place of self-love
• God’s enabling and loving presence
• Thriving as psychological, vs Flourishing as philosophical
• Meaningful life in eudaimonic and hedonistic terms
• Imago dei
• “Back to the future”—understanding the end toward the beginning
• Reading psychology through a teleological lens
• Linear stage theories of development
• Life as a series of cycles
• We can have a telos as a dynamic process
• Thriving as pursuing the fullness of self
• Reciprocity beyond ourselves when life is hard
• Colossians and Jesus as the perfect image of God
• Conformity is not uniformity
• Parenting as helping children to become their unique selves
• Telos as inhabiting the self, the relational, and the aspirational—purpose is found at the intersection of all three
• William Damon on purpose
• Purpose as enduring actionable goal, meaningful to the self and contributing beyond the self
• Learning, gaining skills, and pursuit of expertise
• Meaning making as a dynamic life-long project
• Orienting life in the present moment by tethering to a consummate vision of the future
• Sociality as inherent to human nature
• Goals: self, expertise acquisition, and what we aspire to
• Roles: who we are in our social networks
• Souls: what ideals are most dearly held and most meaningful
• The fundamental rejection of pre autonomy and independence; embrace of our relational selves
• How malleable our brains are through intentional practices
• Making meaning can change your brains
• Surviving vs thriving
• Attachment and regulation
• Regaining emotional regulation through relationships
• The game changing impact of deliberate psychological and spiritual practices—intention, motivation, and goals
• Possible cutoff point — The relation of psychological science and theology
• Psychology as a God-given tool to enable thriving and flourishing
• Known, loved, and loving others
• The role of suffering and loss as part of the thriving process
• For the cynical and jaded: thriving that is real to loss, grief, vulnerability, and daring to thrive

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Pamela Ebstyne King
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge and Kaylen Yun
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Acknowledgements

• This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of Blueprint 1543. For more information, visit Blueprint1543.org.

Imagine building a cathedral with just a hammer and nails. How might theologians today continue to build the grand cathedral where human knowledge meets divine revelation by implementing the tools of psychological science? Experimental psychologist Justin Barrett joins theologian Miroslav Volf for a conversation on how psychology can contribute to theology. This episode is made possible by Blueprint1543.

Introduction

To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Yep, we’ve heard that before. But imagine trying to make that work. Imagine, for instance, the visionary builder of a medieval cathedral… building it only with a hammer and nails.

And you know there’s an analogy coming here. Suppose the cathedral you’re trying to build is nothing less than the human inquiry into the nature of the cosmos and the nature of the God who created them—from the dark matter at the edges of the expanding universe, to the recycled space dust that’s found its way into the pristine fingernails of a newborn baby.

Artfully articulating the nature of reality with nuance and care—saying something true and meaningful about God, people, and thriving in the world we share—the task of theology could be just like that extravagant building project.

But imagine if the theologian only had one tool.

Experimental psychologist Justin Barrett tells a story like this to make a suggestion to theologians to consider how they might incorporate the tools of science—and psychological science in particular—into the building of their theological cathedral.

Justin is long-time researcher in cognitive science of religion. He’s author of a number of books, including Why Would Anyone Believe in God? and Born Believers: The Science of Childhood Religion. He just edited the Oxford Handbook of the Cognitive Science of Religion.

And in 2019 he co-founded Blueprint1543, an organization that’s bringing theologians and scientists together to accelerate better contributions to life’s biggest questions.

And today we’re launching a series of episodes on For the Life of the World that will explore the tools of psychological sciences that might contribute to a deeper and greater theological understanding of the world. By bringing a science-engaged theology to bear on the most pressing matters for how to live lives worthy of our humanity.

Throughout the series, we’re featuring conversations with psychologists who can offer insightful tools for crafting the cathedral where human knowledge meets divine revelation.

About Justin Barrett

Justin L. Barrett is an honorary Professor of Theology and the Sciences at St Andrews University School of Divinity. An experimental psychologist by training, he is concerned with the scientific study of religion and its philosophical as well as theological implications. He is the author of a number of books including Why Would Anyone Believe in God?, Born Believers: The Science of Childhood Religion, and Religious Cognition in China: Homo Religiosus and the Dragon.

Show Notes

• Blueprint1543.org
• Download your copy of Justin Barrett’s A Psychological Science Primer for Theologians (2022)
• TheoPsych Academy
• Normative vision the good life
• Psychology as among the most secular of academic disciplines
• Psychology’s historical (but non-necessary) anti-religious tendencies
• There are plenty of Christian psychologists who are deliberate in thinking about the integration of Christianity and psychology
• Comparing instrumental, explanatory psychology and purposes, meaning, and teleology in theology
• How the purposes of our lives—normative visions—how do they then shape psychological inquiry
• Are questions of the good life matters for science to determine, or are religious and theological perspectives essential to thinking about the purpose and meaning of human life?
• When can theologians and philosophers be helped by psychological science?
• Theologians often make use of psychological claims fairly uncritically—how human minds work, how emotions work, how social relationships work
• Miroslav’s book The End of Memory
• Is the theologian making descriptive psychological claims?
• Are you the theologian making normative claims supported by descriptive psychological claims?
• Are you making claims about what affects texts and rituals and practices have on people?
• Are you constructing an argument that uses intuition as premises?
• Experimental philosophy: Are philosophers’ intuitions universal?
• Can there be an “experimental theology”?
• Being careful about descriptive psychological claims—especially for practical theological questions or lived theology
• Psychology needs to do its own inspecting
• “The science of psychology has a great self-awareness of how we can't trust ourselves. … The entire method is built around, to put it in theological terms, a conviction about total depravity.”
• Methodological rigor in sciences—checking findings with the community
• Cultural situatedness
• E.g., “How well do we know ourselves?”
• Ludwig Wittgenstein: “The world of a happy man is not the same as the world of a sad man.”
• “Affective states shape how we perceive the world.”
• Mary Magdalene’s breaking a precious jar or oil on Jesus’s feet—the smell is refracted through how Judas and Jesus see the world. Judas finds the smell a terrible waste, and Jesus finds the smell beautiful.
• “What we perceive in the world around us is set by our expectations.”
• “Every Christian is a theologian because theology accompanies the life and situatedness of each individual in the world.”

Production Notes

• This podcast featured cognitive scientist Justin Barrett and theologian Miroslav Volf
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Acknowledgements

This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of Blueprint 1543. For more information, visit Blueprint1543.org.

Micheal O'Siadhail reflects on his latest collection of poetry, Testament. A confession of faith through Psalms refracted through his experience, and the Gospel story retold through rhyme, O'Siadhail's vibrant faith manifests as complaint, longing, grief, mourning, and doubt. With mountains and oceans of poetry written over the past 45 years, he writes on love, loss, modernity, music—all an experiment of drawing the universal down into the particular and right back up again. From Psalm 1, his opening verses, he writes, "Uncloseted, / Things once unsaid my life declares: / My words are prayers my being plays; / Through you I gaze at all I love."

This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information, visit tyndale.foundation.

Show Notes

• Click here to get your copy of Micheal O'Siadhail's Testament (link)
• Listen to Micheal O'Siadhail and David Ford in Episode 75: "Life Riffs: Improvisation in Poetry, Theology, and Flourishing" (link)
• Religion versus spirituality
• Micheal’s spiritual background
• Psalm 1—”through you I gaze at all I love”
• Time and temporality, finitude and mortality
• John Donne—from sensual love poetry to devotional poetry
• “This God remains on scene.”
• Psalm 46—”all my life depends on friends … You are coring me, hollowing me out to love you more.”
• Dependency in social and spiritual dimensions
• Carapace = a shell, something to hide in
• Individualism and independence: “We are ourselves only in relation to others.”
• The “black hole of the self”
• Hollowing out - “cored out by suffering”
• Psalm 80: “You, not I, stretched out the sky”
• Mourning and grieving loved-ones lost
• Complaining, groaning, doubting—but alongside belief that God is there.
• “Most only groan to those they love.”
• Psalm 80: “Why does your night thief keep ambushing me?
• The tandem psychology of compliant and dependence—and the acceptance of both.
• “Madam Jazz” in Micheal O’Siadhail’s poetry—wild, unpredictable, improvisational nature of God
• The history of jazz and the God of surprises, riffing on creation.
• David Ford and The Gospel of John
• The environmental message of Testament
• Psalm 124: “I cry for us in my intensity.”
• T.S. Eliot: “Old men ought to be explorers”
• “Distracted by distraction from distraction” (T.S. Eliot, from “Burnt Norton”)
• Poetry and universal down to particular
• Hebrew morning prayer
• The connection between Psalter and Gospel in Testament
• Going from mystical poetry to particular incarnation
• “Letting the story tell itself.”
• “I” disappears in Gospel.
• Two thieves
• Legacy
• “Years to leave love’s legacy behind”
• Tetelestai—finishing one’s calling

About Micheal O'Siadhail

Micheal O'Siadhail is a poet. His Collected Poems was published in 2013, One Crimson Thread in 2015 and The Five Quintets in 2018, which received Conference on Christianity and Literature Book of the Year 2018 and an Eric Hoffer Award in 2020. He holds honorary doctorates from the universities of Manitoba and Aberdeen. He lives in New York.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured poet Micheal O’Siadhail
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Logan Ledman, and Kaylen Yun
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
• This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information, visit tyndale.foundation.

Imagine war becoming your new normal. Imagine getting used to things like airstrike sirens. Imagine sleeping through the distant bombs. Imagine passing through the rubble on your way to work, or school, or church.

Over the past year, war has become the new normal for Ukrainian pastor and theologian Fyodor Raychynets. Most of the expectations for how tthis war might go have fallen through. Worst case scenarios have come to pass. And the precarity and fragility of life outside of wartime—well, that continues too.

A year ago, 20 days into the war, Fyodor joined Miroslav Volf to catch up with his former professor for a conversation on the immediate impact of Russia’s invasion on Ukrainian life and culture. At the time, uncertainty filled the globe. Now, after 387 days of war, the shock has numbed into weariness. But a consistent message of presence pervades Fyodor’s mindset. Providing humanitarian aide, friendship, and surrogate family in the wake of so much destruction and loss, his church in the outskirts of Kiev has grown.

In this episode, Ukrainian pastor and theologian Fyodor Raychynets provides an update on life during wartime, in a war zone—which includes not only the pain of war, but the grief of losing his wife prior to the war, and his adult son just months ago. His faith persists in the face of all the cold reminders of how little control any of us exert on world events such as this. He now turns to the minor prophets—Nahum and Habakkuk in particular—to hope for justice, to complain and express his anger toward God, even with God. And he continues to minister to soldiers and civilians, holding their questions with presence and patience, while preaching a message of hope in the good and resistance to evil.

Thanks for listening friends, even on this 387th day of war in Ukraine.

About Fyodor Raychynets

Fyodor Raychynets is a theologian and pastor in Kyiv, Ukraine. He is Head of the Department of Theology at Ukrainian Evangelical Theological Seminary, where he teaches courses in Leadership and Biblical Studies, particularly the Gospel of Matthew. He studied with Miroslav Volf at Evangelical Theological Seminary in Osijek, Croatia.

Follow him on Facebook here.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured theologians Fyodor Raychynets and Miroslav Volf
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge & Kaylen Yun
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

It’s not a popular idea, but secular America is pretty damn religious. Pretty damn liturgical. Pumpkin spice lattes and apple cider donuts are the eucharistic elements of autumn. The militaristic pageantry of the 4th of July. Our children love asking about the next big event. Color coordinated myths drive the year along, shaping us into …. well, I’m not quite sure what this secular American liturgy is shaping us into. But I bet you and I could have had a great conversation about during a Super Bowl party earlier this month—where the eucharistic elements have changed—it’s Buffalo wings and light beer—but it even comes with a sacred gathering of fanatical religious nuts, worshipping the high priest as he barks his coded sermon, and singing along with the high priestesses at halftime, praying all along to the gods of the gridiron to grant victory. When you put it that way, observing Lent—which starts today, Ash Wednesday—seems pretty tame and sensible.

Joining me today on the show is Esau McCaulley—for a discussion of Lent. Esau is associate professor of New Testament at Wheaton college and a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times.

He’s author of Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope, which won Christianity Today’s book of the year award in 2020, as well as a new book, Lent: The Season of Repentance and Renewal, which is part of a series entitled “The Fullness of Time”—which features other authors discussing different seasons of the Christian liturgical year and how it contributes to a Christian understanding of flourishing.

During our conversation, Esau McCaulley and I discuss the Christian practice of Lent—he speaks about it as both a collective wisdom, passed down through generations of Jesus followers, as well as a spiritual rebellion against mainstream American culture. He construes Lent as a season of repentance and grace; he points out the justice practices of Lent; he walks through a Christian understanding of death, and the beautiful practice of stripping the altars on Maundy Thursday; and he’s emphatic about how it’s a guided season of finding the grace to find (or perhaps return) to yourself as God has called you to be.

This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information, visit tyndale.foundation.

Show Notes

• Lent: The Season of Repentance and Renewal
• Commodifying our rebellion—the agency on offer is a thin, weakened agency.
• Repentance, grace, and finding (or returning to) yourself
• Examination of conscience
• The Great Litany: “For our blindness to human need and suffering, and our indifference to injustice and cruelty. Except our repentance, Lord.”
• The beauty of Christianity
• “Liturgical spirituality is not safe. God can jump out and get you at any moment in the service.”
• “The great thing about the, the, the season of Blend in the liturgical calendar more broadly is it gives you a thousand different entry points into transformation.”
• Lent is bookended by death. Black death, Coronavirus death, War death.
• Jesus defeated death as our great enemy.
• “Everybody that I know and I care about are gonna die. Everybody.”
• “I, as a Christian, believe that because we're going to die. our lives are of infinite value and the decisions that we make and the kinds of people we become are the only testimony that we have and that I have chosen to, to, in light of my impending death, put my faith in the one who overcame death.”
• Two realities: We’re going to die and Jesus defeated death.
• Stripping of the Altars on Maundy Thursday.
• Silent processional in black; Good Friday celebrates no eucharist.
• “I'm, like, the one Pauline scholar who doesn't like to argue about justification all of the time.”
• Good Friday’s closing prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, son of the living God, we pray you to set your passion cross and death between your judgment and our souls.”
• “You end Lent with: Something has to come between God’s judgement and our souls. And that thing is Jesus.”
• “Lent is God loving you enough to tell you the truth about yourself, but not condemning you for it, but actually saying that you can be better than that.”

About Esau McCaulley

Esau McCaulley, PhD is an associate professor of New Testament at Wheaton College in Wheaton, IL and theologian in residence at Progressive Baptist Church, a historically black congregation in Chicago.  His first book entitled Sharing in the Son’s Inheritance was published by T & T Clark in 2019. His second book Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope was published by IVP academic in 2020.  It won numerous awards including Christianity Today’s book of the year. His most recent work was a children’s book entitled Josey Johnson’s Hair and the Holy Spirit for IVP kids. His latest book is *Lent: The Season of Repentance and Renewal.* He is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. His writings have also appeared in places such as The Atlantic, Washington Post, and Christianity Today. He is married to Mandy, a pediatrician and navy reservist. Together, they have four wonderful children. Check out his website at https://esaumccaulley.com/.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Esau McCaulley
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Luke Stringer, and Kaylen Yun.
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

The primal scene of domination and slavery inevitably produces struggle. It must. Because domination is the idolatrous effort of one to exert control over the will of the other, and we are compelled as free beings to realize and always live that freedom. So the struggle produces dignity, and that dignity, declared and acted and performed and practiced and sung and chanted and screamed and whispered—when enacted by all human beings against various and sundry forms of domination, it leads to joy and love.

Vincent Lloyd (Villanova University) joins Evan Rosa to discuss his book Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination. We start with what struggle against domination is, especially how it’s expressed in Black life. We entertain the feeling of struggle psychologically and culturally; the ugly and vicious temptation to idolatry that seeking domination and mastery over others entails; how the humanity of both the master and the slave are lost or found; how struggle produces dignity; and an understanding of the debate between seeing dignity as purely intrinsic as opposed to performative. We close by thinking about how the Black struggle for dignity can inform all of us about what it means to actualize our humanity, embrace the power our freedom entails, culminating in joy and love.

This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information, visit tyndale.foundation.

About Vincent Lloyd

Vincent Lloyd is Associate Professor of Theology and Religious Studies and Director of the Center for Political Theology at Villanova University. He is the author of Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination (Yale University Press, 2022), Break Every Yoke: Religion, Justice, and the Abolition of Prisons, with Joshua Dubler (Oxford University Press, 2019), In Defense of Charisma (Columbia University Press, 2018), Religion of the Field Negro: On Black Secularism and Black Theology (Fordham University Press, 2017), Black Natural Law (Oxford University Press, 2016), The Problem with Grace: Reconfiguring Political Theology (Stanford University Press, 2011), and Law and Transcendence: On the Unfinished Project of Gillian Rose (Palgrave, 2009). Visit his personal website here.

Show Notes

• What is struggle?
• Augustine’s approach to struggle in Confessions: with oneself, with others, with the world, with the powers that be
• Phenomenology of human struggle: What are the features of struggle that land on the human consciousness?
• Struggling against not flesh and blood but powers and principalities.
• Righteous indignation against idolatry
• Rejecting humanity by presenting oneself in a position of mastery
• Making distinctions between individual persons, the vice of the will to dominate, and the system those vices create
• The struggle of a community
• Ontological struggle: Aimed at defeating domination
• “Is struggle dependent on the existence of some prior will to dominate?”
• Understanding oneself as “master” and setting oneself up as a god.
• Mastery is a particularly vicious form of idolatry.
• The primal scene of master and slave is always behind the amorphous systems we struggle against.
• What is the psychology of the will to dominate?
• Is domination a special vice? Or is it a more ubiquitous vice?
• Black theology, Black philosophy, and the experience of the Middle Passage
• Enslavement continues to fuel anti-Blackness
• The humanity of master and slave are both lost
• Black rage and Audrey Lorde’s 1981 “The Uses of Anger”
• Emotion as a symphony, not a cacophony
• Airing rage next to each other and clarifying our vision of the world
• Rethinking Human Dignity
• Retelling the story of democratizing and Christianizing the aristocratic beginnings of “dignity”
• “When we perform dignity, we’re struggling.”
• Distinguishing dignity from respectability (and turning away from respectability)
• “That's where dignity is truly democratized, right? What we all have in common as human is our capacity to turn away from domination, and turn toward the divine. That's where dignity has a universal quality.”
• Understanding the debate between seeing dignity as intrinsic vs dignity as performative or extrinsic.
• “We’re all dominated.”
• How exactly does struggle produce dignity?
• Emmanuel Levinas and responding to the Jewish Holocaust, giving morality new content by tethering it to encounter—seeing the infinite shine through in the face of the other, allowing new concepts to flow through like love and justice.
• How do we finally move from domination, to struggle, to dignity, to joy and love?

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Vincent Lloyd
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

A conglomeration of Advent people: Drew Collins on how the Magi were pushed willingly to the edge of their knowledge, open to the giving spirit of God. Frederica Mathewes-Green with an illustration of Mary, living in prayer, which proves just enough to know to say "yes" when met with her call. Jeff Reimer on W.H. Auden's common Joseph, asked only and profoundly to believe. And Matt Croasmun on St. Paul, offering an invitation to Christian joy that, well, differs from Santa's offer just a little.

Show Notes

• EPISODE 44: The Reason We Follow the Star: Learning from the Magi How to Give, How to Receive, and How to Be Human / Drew Collins
• EPISODE 98: Frederica Mathewes-Green / Mary Theotokos: Her Bright Sorrow, Her Suffering Faith, and Her Compassion
• EPISODE 97: Jeff Reimer / W.H. Auden's For the Time Being: Post-Christmas Blues, the Darkness of Modernity, and the Human Response to Incarnation
• EPISODE 43: Matt Croasmun / Santa, God, and the Obligation to Rejoice

Production Notes

• This podcast featured art historian Matthew Milliner
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Art historian Matthew Milliner (Wheaton College) reflects on one of the most powerful and moving Christian icons: “The Virgin of the Passion,” AKA, “Our Lady of Perpetual Help,” which he develops in his book, Mother of the Lamb: The Story of a Global Icon. First painted as a response to failed Christian Empire and the violence of the Crusades, then mass produced and proliferated as a norm of Christian aesthetic worship, the icon offers a unique filter for contemporary understanding of faith and power; the Christian temptation to nationalism, empire, and violence; the meaning and visual expression of suffering love; and the beauty of engaged, solidarity and prophetic witness. 

This episode was made possible by a grant from the Tyndale House Foundation.

Support the Yale Center for Faith & Culture's $25,000 End of Year Matching Campaign by giving online today: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Show Notes

• Click to view: “Virgin of the Passion, late 15th century” Andrea Rico di Candia, Cretan, active 1451–1492, tempera on wood panel (Princeton University Art Museum)
• Click to get a copy of Matthew Milliner’s Mother of the Lamb: The Story of a Global Icon

About Matthew Milliner

Matthew Milliner is Associate Professor of Art History at Wheaton College. He holds an M.A. & Ph.D. in art history from Princeton University, and an M.Div from Princeton Theological Seminary. He is author is author most recently of The Everlasting People: G.K. Chesterton and the First Nations and Mother of the Lamb: The Story of a Global Icon. His scholarly specialization is Byzantine and medieval art, with a focus on how such images inform contemporary visual culture. He teaches across the range of art history with an eye for the prospects and pitfalls of visual theology. He is a five-time appointee to the Curatorial Advisory Board of the United States Senate, and a winner of Redeemer University’s Emerging Public Intellectual Award. He has written for publications ranging from The New York Times to First Thing_s. He recently delivered the Wade Center’s Hansen lecture series on Native American Art, and was awarded a Commonwealth fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. to complete his forthcoming book, _Mother of the Lamb (Fortress Press). Follow @Millinerd on Twitter

Production Notes

• This podcast featured art historian Matthew Milliner
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production assistance by Macie Bridge
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

[Help us reach our $25,000 end of year goal! Give online to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture today.]

We often think that telling the truth only applies to words. But American painter Winslow Homer (February 24, 1836 – September 29, 1910) told the truth in pencil, water color, and famously, oil paintings. Coming of age in antebellum America, starting his artistic career as the Civil War began, and dramatically painting truth to power during the complicated and failed Reconstruction era—Winslow Homer looked long and hard at America in its moral complications and struggle toward justice. But he also looked long and hard at the natural world—a harsh, sometimes brutal, but nonetheless ordered world. Sometimes red in tooth and claw, sometimes shining rays of grace and glory upon human bodies, Homer's depiction of the human encounter with the world as full of energy and full of spirited struggle, and therefore dignity.

William Cross is author and biographer of Winslow Homer: American Passage—a biography of an artist who painted America in conflict and crisis, with a moral urgency and an unflinching depiction of the human spirit's struggle for survival and search for grace.  As a consultant to art and history museums, a curator, and an art critic and scholar, when Bill sees the world, he's looking long for beauty and grace, and often finding it in art. 

In this conversation, Bill Cross and I discuss the morally urgent art and perspective of Winslow Homer. We talk about the historical context of American life before, during, and after the Civil War. Including the role of Christianity and religious justification of the Confederacy and the institution of slavery. Bill comments on the beautiful and bracing expression of Black life in Winslow Homer's work—truly radical for the time. But Homer's work goes beyond human social and political struggles. We also discuss the role of nature in his work—particularly the human struggle against the power and indifference of the ocean and the wild, untamed animal kingdom.

Throughout, you might consider referencing each of the paintings we discuss, all of which are available in the show notes and can be found online for further viewing and reflection.

Show Notes

• Give toward the Yale Center for Faith & Culture $25,000 matching campaign. Donate online here, or send a 
• William R. Cross, Winslow Homer: American Passage (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022)
• Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents

Paintings

Click below for painting references

• Prisoners from the Front (1866)
• The Brush Harrow (1866)
• Dressing for the Carnival (1877)
• Visit from the Old Mistress (1876)
• The Gulf Stream (1885)
• Fox Hunt (1893)

About William Cross

William R. Cross is an independent scholar and a consultant to art and history museums. He served as the curator of Homer at the Beach: A Marine Painter’s Journey, 1869–1880, a nationally renowned 2019 exhibition at the Cape Ann Museum on the formation of Winslow Homer as a marine painter. He is the chairman of the advisory board of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Cross and his wife, Ellen, the parents of two grown sons, live on Cape Ann, north of Boston, Massachusetts.

About Winslow Homer: American Passage

The definitive life of the painter who forged American identity visually, in art and illustration, with an impact comparable to that of Walt Whitman and Mark Twain in poetry and prose—yet whose own story has remained largely untold.

In 1860, at the age of twenty-four, Winslow Homer (1836–1910) sold Harper’s Weekly two dozen wood engravings, carved into boxwood blocks and transferred to metal plates to stamp on paper. One was a scene that Homer saw on a visit to Boston, his hometown. His illustration shows a crowd of abolitionists on the brink of eviction from a church; at their front is Frederick Douglass, declaring “the freedom of all mankind.”

Homer, born into the Panic of 1837 and raised in the years before the Civil War, came of age in a nation in crisis. He created multivalent visual tales, both quintessentially American and quietly replete with narrative for and about people of all races and ages. Whether using pencil, watercolor, or, most famously, oil, Homer addressed the hopes and fears of his fellow Americans and invited his viewers into stories embedded with universal, timeless questions of purpose and meaning.

Like his contemporaries Twain and Whitman, Homer captured the landscape of a rapidly changing country with an artist’s probing insight. His tale is one of America in all its complexity and contradiction, as he evolved and adapted to the restless spirit of invention transforming his world. In Winslow Homer: American Passage, William R. Cross reveals the man behind the art. It is the surprising story of a life led on the front lines of history. In that life, this Everyman made archetypal images of American culture, endowed with a force of moral urgency through which they speak to all people today.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured William R. Cross
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Help Miroslav Volf and the Yale Center for Faith & Culture reach our end-of-year goal $25,000 Matching Challenge for 2022! 

How to donate to YCFC and support the For the Life of the World podcast:

• Click here to give online
• Mail a check made out to "Yale Center for Faith and Culture" (409 Prospect St., New Haven, CT 06511).

"If the goal of God in creating the world is to make it the home of God and humans together, then it is the intention of God to make this place as beautiful and as humane—as hospitable—to human life as it can possibly be." Miroslav Volf reflects on why he wrote his latest book, The Home of God: A Brief Story of Everything.  He also celebrates and eulogizes his friend Phil Love, to whom the book is dedicated.

Click here to buy The Home of God for 30% off!

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Miroslav Volf
• Special thanks to Patty & Phil Love
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

The mission of Yale Divinity School is "to foster the knowledge and love of God through scholarly engagement with Christian traditions in a global, multifaith context." A variety of Yale Divinity School faculty and alumni have been featured as guests on For the Life of the World, and this episode highlights some of those contributions, including Krista Tippett, Willie Jennings, Keri Day, Kathryn Tanner, and David Kelsey (not to mention Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz). Current Yale Divinity Student Luke Stringer introduces each highlight segment. Special thanks to Harry Attridge and Tom Krattenmaker.

Show Notes

• Our first segment features Yale Divinity School alum Krista Tippett, the founder and CEO of the On Being Project. She's a nationally syndicated journalist who has become known for curating conversations on the art of being human, civil conversations, and social healing. Miroslav Volf invited Krista onto the show to talk about the importance of engaging otherness on the grounds of our common humanity, her personal faith journey from small town Baptists in Oklahoma, to a secular humanism in a divided Cold-War Berlin, and then back to her spiritual homeland and mother tongue of Christianity.
• For the Life of the World launched in 2020 during an immensely chaotic and troubling year. The painful and confusing early days of the pandemic gave way to the horrifying footage of George Floyd's murder. In the days following this event, we aired a reflection by Yale Divinity School professor Willie Jennings and a conversation with Princeton Theological Seminary theologian and Yale Div school alum Keri Day. First, an excerpt from Willie Jennings' reflection on the murder of George Floyd. And then, theologian Keri Day shares the core motivations of Christians to embrace the other across lines of difference.
• This next segment features theologian, Kathryn Tanner, who spoke to Ryan McAnnally-Linz about the virtue of patience through the lens of economy and capitalism. She's the Frederick Marquand Professor of Systematic Theology at Yale Divinity School and her latest book is Christianity in the New Spirit of Capitalism.
• This final highlight segment features theologian David Kelsey, who is the Luther A. Weigel Professor Emeritus of Theology at Yale Divinity School, where he taught for 40 years. Ryan McAnnally-Linz, himself an alum of Yale Divinity School, brings Kelsey onto the show to talk about the wild and inexplicable grip of evil on earthly creatures, and the analogously wild and inexplicable nature of God's grace—and God's immediate, if silent, witness and presence to human anguish.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Krista Tippett, Willie Jennings, Keri Day, Kathryn Tanner, and David Kelsey (not to mention Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz)
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa and Luke Stringer
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

“We’ve become experts at means but amateurs at ends.” Miroslav Volf and Kelly Corrigan discuss the role of education in seeking a flourishing life; the risks and rewards endemic to asking questions of meaning and existential import in the higher educational context; the meaning of success to college students, and how the specter of success drives our cultural narrative; what it takes to live a life based on one's deepest -held values; Miroslav shares his own personal experience of approaching what makes life worth living within a particular Christian vision; what made him decide to be the only openly Christian kid in his high school; and how suffering grief, forgiveness, and living faith informed his early childhood and shaped his family's life.

Show Notes

• Listen to Kelly Corrigan Wonders on Apple Podcasts

About Kelly Corrigan

Kelly Corrigan has written four New York Times bestselling memoirs in the last decade, earning her the title of “The Poet Laureate of the ordinary” from the Huffington Post and the “voice of a generation” from O Magazine.  She is curious and funny and eager to go well past the superficial in every conversation.  More on KellyCorrigan.com.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Kelly Corrigan and Miroslav Volf
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Special thanks to Kelly Corrigan and Tammy Stedman
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

"Somewhere is better than anywhere." (Flannery O'Connor, as quoted by Wendell Berry in Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community) Today, Christian ethicist Adam Eitel (Yale Divinity School) sits with Matt Croasmun for a conversation on ethics and theology. Eitel is Assistant Professor of Christian Ethics at Yale Divinity School. Together, he and Matt discuss the demands of teaching and learning theology on personal character—holiness even; the relationship between ethics and theology; the locatedness and situatedness and particularity of Christian ethics; and the rooted, framing question, that animates Adam Eitel's writing and teaching: "What sort of life does the Gospel enjoin?"

About Adam Eitel

Adam Eitel is Assistant Professor of Christian Ethics at Yale Divinity School.

Show Notes

• Teaching theology as a vocation
• "Authority is linked to character"
• Instruction in holiness
• The millennial demand for personal character to matter in academic authority
• Formation
• "I see my work as a professor of Christian ethics as a theological vocation."
• Millennial entitlement, juxtaposed with vulnerability
• Theology as a lived, embodied enterprise
• The lines between the personal and the pedagogical
• Problems for Christian ethics
• It's hard for Christian ethics to stay theological
• Can Christian ethics appropriately express social criticism?
• "The temptation for Christian ethics to bracket the theological commitments, that fund a specifically Christian moral imaginary."
• Dichotomy between tradition and critique
• "So we end up sawing off the branch that we're sitting on..."
• Declaration of Independence's "All men are created equal." as both the impetus for reform and the object of reform.
• "When we're doing theology, when we're doing ethics, we are always looking backwards in some respect, concatenating texts, bringing their different manners of speaking together and to, in order to see what can now be said on the basis of what's been said, that doesn't require an uncritical attitude toward the text or the social arrangements they endorse."
• Locatedness and situatedness and particularity of Christian ethics
• "What sort of life does the Gospel enjoin?"

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Adam Eitel and Matt Croasmun
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

"If you don't really understand religion, if you don't understand faith, if you don't understand theology, you can't really understand the modern world."

"Words make worlds," says one of my podcasting heroes, Krista Tippett. Ask any poet, priest, or politician, and they'll agree. Language does have that power, for better or for worse.

But whatever power our words have to make a world that we can then ourselves inhabit—that power is drawn from the archetypal Word—the Word made flesh, by whom all things are made and in whom all things are held together, and for whom all tongues confess.

So this simple definition offered by Bishop Graham Tomlin, that theology is just "words about God" is actually quite expansive. When our words about God are directed first toward God, but then toward the church and the world, theology lives up to its purpose of worship, reform, and witness. Graham Tomlin is President of St. Mellitus College and author of many books of theology and Christian spirituality. He recently completed his tenure as Bishop of Kensington and now leads the Church of England's Center for Cultural Witness. He joins Matt Croasmun today for a conversation about the meaning and potential of theology. Thanks for listening.

About Graham Tomlin

The Rt Revd Dr Graham Tomlin is President of St Mellitus College and Bishop of Kensington. He served a curacy in the diocese of Exeter, and among past roles he has served as Chaplain of Jesus College, Oxford and Vice Principal of Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, where he taught within the Theology Faculty of Oxford University on Historical Theology, specializing in the Reformation period. He was closely involved in the foundation, and was appointed the first Dean, of St Mellitus College, a position he held for the first eight years of the College’s life, before being made Bishop of Kensington in 2015. He has spoken and lectured across the world, and in 2016 was awarded the Silver Rose of St Nicholas, a global award recognizing a significant contribution to theological education and learning. He was very involved in the response to the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017. He is married to Janet and has two married children and three grandchildren. He is a keen follower of various kinds of music and sport, suffering a lifelong addiction to Bristol City Football Club.

Show Notes

• The Rt Revd Dr Graham Tomlin is President of St Mellitus College and Bishop of Kensington.
• What's going well with theology
• Theology connecting in the church; the church as context for theology
• Spiritual theology deepening and nurturing human life
• Ellen Charry and thinking about eudaimonia in theological context
• Challenges to theology
• Fragmentation
• Three audiences for theology: God, Church, and World
• Audience 1: God. Theology as prayer and worship
• Audience 2: Church. Theology as reform and referendum, enabling the church to be the church
• Audience 3: World. Theology as witness, declaring what life looks like, seen through the lens of the gospel.
• Theology for the World: Pluralism and Secularity
• "If you don't really understand religion, if you don't understand faith, if you don't understand theology, you can't really understand the modern world."
• Religious studies and objectivity vs subjectivity in studying religion
• Lived experience and inhabiting faith to understand it.
• Theology's connection to every other academic endeavor
• Theos, Logos: Words about God
• God as the source of our being and the one to which we return.
• Three aspects of Theology: Worship, Reform, and Witness
• The God who reveals himself to us
• Thinking holistically about the world
• Engaging heart and mind
• About St. Mellitus
• Theology in the church doesn't mean dumbing it down or removing academic seriousness.
• Theologians with a passion for the church and see the connection between theology and Christian life.
• Churches don't always see the need for theology; they stay pragmatic.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Graham Tomlin
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Food and meals are hidden in plain sight throughout the Bible, providing a background context for Christian spirituality and flourishing. Matt Croasmun joins me on the podcast today to talk about his new book co-authored with Miroslav Volf, The Hunger for Home: Food and Meals in the Gospel of Luke. For them, a meal is a site of nourishing mutual encounter. It's this definition of a meal that makes that riddle work I think. It's also incredibly illuminating (and even delightfully surprising, really) to consider how that nourishing mutual encounter—a meal—provide a context that spans thousands of years and the whole of human history from creation to fall to redemption. It can all be understood as a site of nourishing mutual encounter with God, family, neighbor, world—everything. From the fruitful multiplying of living creatures to the forbidden fruit—from the passover seder, manna from heaven, water from the rocks, and feasts in the fields—to the Lord's table prepared before our enemies, turning water into wine, multiplying loaves and fish—from the Last Supper before the Crucifixion, and the final wedding supper of the Lamb. It's all a meal that we hunger for always; it's a meal that wherever we are, we're still home.

This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information, visit tyndale.foundation.

About

Matt Croasmun (PhD, Yale University) is Associate Research Scholar at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. He is the co-author, with Miroslav Volf, of For the Life of the World and The Hunger for Home and directs the Yale Life Worth Living Initiative. Follow him on Twitter @MattCroasmun.

Show Notes

• Buy the book: The Hunger for Home: Food and Meals in the Gospel of Luke (Enter 17FALL22 for 20% off + Free Shipping)
• What is home?
• What is hunger?
• Jesus fasting in the wilderness: "One does not live by bread alone..."
• The human needs bread that is not only bread.
• Word and world is one thing. Allow your bread to become an encounter with the creator of all good things.
• Life, staying sustained, and feasting
• Material life, sustained by the life of the Lord
• False choice: word or bread. It's actually one thing, issuing from the mouth of the Lord.
• Sinners at the Table: "The only kind of meals are meals among sinners."
• "Sinners all."
• Jesus dines with sinners because he's a doctor who comes to heal sinners. We dine with sinners because we're all patients of that doctor.
• Rich and Poor at the Table
• The eschatological feast
• The Rich Man and Lazarus
• The Unjust Steward (or, The Dishonest Manager)
• "We're looking for homes to be invited into. And it may be the poor who have these homes."
• Mutuality
• Leveraging houses and the wealth they represent for entry into homes.
• The Last Supper / Eucharist
• "Made known in the breaking of bread"
• The Road to Emmaus: "We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel."
• Jesus as the ultimate Bible Study Leader: "The best bible study ever."
• The eucharist is making sense later.
• Recognition: It wasn't the bible study with Jesus on the road. It was the meal.
• Norman Wirzba, Food & Faith
• "Made known in the breaking of bread"

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Matt Croasmun
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Special thanks to David Aycock and Baylor University Press
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

A pervasive anti-intellectual tradition seems to haunt American Christianity. Paired with nationalism, xenophobia—a fear of the other, and an hypersensitive oscillation between defensiveness and jingoism in the culture war—it's worth asking what in the world happened to this religion which was founded by a peaceful, humble homeless preacher who healed the poor, the lame, and the blind.

But the over-correction to an intellectualizing of theology, to the exclusion of lived experience, swings the pendulum back in another erroneous direction. A merely cognitive theology that stays relevant only at abstract academic levels would be stale and dead—unlivable.

Perhaps what this moment needs is a widened perspective on the global, universal potential of theology, especially as it meets particular contexts and communities and the individual human life, where the transcendent meets the immanent and real human concerns inform the theological task. In other words, theology for the life of the world.

In today's conversation, Matt Croasmun discusses the purpose of theology with George Marsden, professor emeritus of history at the University of Notre Dame, and author of many books, including his celebrated biography of Jonathan Edwards, The Soul of the American University, and The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship. Together they discuss the relationship between theology and the church, the meaning of theological education in the university, the definition of human flourishing, pluralism and representation in higher education, the danger of privilege and prejudice in Christian theological teaching, and ultimately how theological perspectives gain plausibility in public life.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured George Marsden and Matt Croasmun
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

"You can be, at least according to Christian thought, the only sinless person in human history, and you can still be tortured and crucified in your early thirties."

From the perspective of Christian theology, it's probably not going too far to say that both the moral exemplarity and the suffering life of Jesus should be central to the Christian understanding of flourishing. Here's another way to put it. Jesus was morally perfect and sinless, but encountered immense suffering, poverty, marginalization, and eventual torture and death. Tempted, yet without sin. But also counted among the sinners, according to Isaiah 53's "Suffering Servant" theme. He is acquainted with grief, familiar with sorrow, anguished in his soul.

And so the big question here is: What kind of flourishing do we envision when we follow Christ toward that flourishing?

Today, we're sharing a conversation between Matt Croasmun and Katie Grimes, Assistant Professor of Theological Ethics at Villanova University. Together they discuss the social context of theology, trying to make sense of the role of Christ in approaching theology from the perspective of flourishing. For Katie, thinking about flourishing means thinking about virtues and vices, and that means thinking about the habits that pull us along toward the fully realized human good. But it also means pursuing a theological vision that accounts for the most troubling social realities.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Katie Grimes & Matt Croasmun
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

You can't understand our globalized world without understanding religion. But that's easier said than done. For any given person, it's sometimes hard enough to understand your own religious perspectives. They often change throughout life, modified by experience and ideas. Modified by people and events. Modified by an encounter with the world and an encounter with God. Then go ahead and multiply that challenge by about 7.7 billion people and the ways that some of them collide and interact. Then we see a few things: we see that diversity is both a promise and a peril, we see that approaches to religious studies, sociology of religion, and the practice of theology all must be grounded in an "informed empathy," and we see that the only way to make progress is to accept responsibility and limits as an individual, and hope and commit to the necessity of collaboration.

Show Notes

• Diversity and creativity are one of the strengths of theology today.
• Sometimes diversity of thought and methodological practice can lead to fracturing.
• Strine on one of the challenges of working in theology: “You know, my current project is on the book of Genesis, about which there's just a massive amount of literature from all manner of different perspectives. And that's really, really great. But at least once a week, I think about my book project as a fool's errand.”
• Theology is more diverse and more creative than it ever has been, so it has to change and adapt. One person cannot keep up with everything going on.
• There is a debate within theology about what to even call itself.
• “Rather than building a new, different, hopefully improved theology, we may be building a lot of little different ones that go by a similar name, but don't look like anything that is the same when you get into more detail.”—Strine
• Croasmun asks, given those challlenges, why should a student study theology?
• “In a globalized world where religion isn't going away, the study of theology--of understanding, when we think about that term as how people think about God, what people say about God, how that impacts what they actually do, is as important or more important than it ever has been.”—Strine
• Theology needs practitioners of religion and critical outsides talking with students.
• Strine seeks “robust engagements” in theology that give students and others the opportunity to “[hear] strengths and weaknesses…from inside and outside, both to learn about it sort of in that third person view, but also then to make some decisions about what it is that they believe themselves.”
• One of the challenges to robust engagements—”theology is a lonely vocation,” Croasmun points out.
• Strine on the need for collaboration: “We're all finite, we're all human. There's only so much we can read. There only so many, so many hours we can work, no matter how hard we'd like to push ourselves, no matter how much coffee we drink.”
• One vision of collaboration: “that might take the form of like-minded people from different areas, picking a question that's bigger than what any one sort of individual feels like they can do and, and kind of networking their brains together.”—Strine
• Another vision of collaboration: “But it might equally be people from very different perspectives, putting their positions in dialogue, either with the hope that they find common ground they didn't know they had before, or simply they understand better where they agree and they disagree.”—Strine
• There are powerful social and institutional pressures against collaboration in academia.
• Strine warns against “cosmetic collaboration” which does not actually foster robust engagement and dialogue.
• To build a theology of collaboration and community, “what's required is for those of us who are in the academy who would like to do that sort of work to be making an argument for why philosophically, epistemologically, and pragmatically there's value in that.”—Strine

About Casey Strine

Casey Strine is Senior Lecturer in Ancient Near Eastern History and Literature at The University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom. He specializes in Old Testament biblical studies, but thinks deeply about the historical connective tissue that links people and societies over time and through space. Casey is also a project partner with the Yale Center for Faith & Culture's Life Worth Living initiative. Follow him on Twitter @CaseyStrine.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Casey Strine and Matt Croasmun
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Willie Jennings defines joy in a surprising and profoundly physical way—as an act of resistance against despair and death. He explains joy as, "Resisting all the ways in which life can be strangled and presented to us as not worth living." Here, in a 2018 talk for the Theology of Joy and the Good Life Project, Willie Jennings comments on the powerful, embodied act of resistance that joy calls for, examining its scope and cultural context, exploring the musical form of the blues as a space for commonly held joy, and envisioning a pathway of life through the valley of the shadow of death.

About Willie Jennings

Willie Jennings is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology, Africana Studies, and Religious Studies at Yale University; he is an ordained Baptist minister and is author of The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race,Acts: A Commentary, The Revolution of the Intimate, and most recently, After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging. You can hear him in podcast episodes 7, 13, and 57 of For the Life of the World.

Show Notes

• Watch Willie Jennings's 2018 lecture "Gathering Joy"—from the Theology of Joy and the Good Life Project, sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation
• From The Fellowship of the Ring, by J.R.R. Tolkien: "‘Despair or folly?’ said Gandalf. ‘It is not despair, for despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not. It is wisdom to recognize necessity, when all other courses have been weighed, though as folly it may appear to those who cling to false hope. Well, let folly be our cloak, a veil before the eyes of the enemy! For he is very wise and weighs all things to a nicety in the scales of his malice. But the only measure that he knows is desire, desire for power; and so he judges all hearts. Into his heart the thought will not enter that any will refuse it, that having the Ring we may seek to destroy it. If we seek this, we shall put him out of reckoning.’ ‘At least for a while,’ said Elrond. ‘The road must be trod, but it will be very hard. And neither strength nor wisdom will carry us far upon it. This quest may be attempted by the weak with as much hope as the strong. Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.’”
• “The first thing that must be said about joy is that it is a work.”
• “The Black church folks I knew understood that joy work begins with renouncing despair, renouncing despair by angling one's body against it.”
• James C. Scott: Domination and the Arts of Resistance
• “Despair has always been a currency born of death.”
• “This is the art of making pain productive without ever trying to justify or glorify suffering.”
• Hebrews 12:2
• “Jesus's joy was a joy found in contradiction, not in the resolution of contradiction.”
• “Joy work, my friends, always lives close to addiction. Addiction is the anti-side, the shadow side of joy work.”
• “Even faith, any religious faith can be captured in addiction once it aligns itself with death.”
• “Joy work rooted in Jesus is always work of the creature, vulnerable, fragile, and unstable, and in need of community and communion.”
• “Music and joy have a long and celebrated history together among Black diaspora peoples. This sonic space often becomes a womb for joy, where it could live and breathe, take flight through sound, weaving together bodies and places in joy and habitation, the joy of the body and the joy of the place becoming one.”
• “The blues at essence is a method of working contradiction and dissonance into a statement of pain.”
• “We are yet to fully appreciate the role of the blues in creating sonic space, a space that many people can inhabit at the same time.”
• “Too many Christians however, continue to promote segregated joy work through the limited ways we imagine life together bound as it is by racial reasoning and geographic segregation.”
• John 15: 8-13
• Albert J. Raboteau: “Slave Religion”
• “A joy that moves through boundaries and overcomes social fragmentation requires the desire to locate joy work in new spaces that become more than a search for new commodities to consume.”

Production Notes

• This podcast featured theologian Willie Jennings
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Martin Chan, Nathan Jowers, Logan Ledman, and Annie Trowbridge
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

As we're knit in the womb, a primal cry emerges from the very fact of our being, the very fact of our dependence, the fact of our contingency, the fact of our ultimate need: Do you love me? Jamie Tworkowski, the founder of To Write Love on Her Arms and bestselling author of If You Feel Too Much: Thoughts on Things Found and Lost and Hoped For, joins Evan Rosa for a discussion about the hope and resilience and human identity that emerges from being known and loved; what it means to live a life worth living; his own struggle with mental illness and therapy; the connection between mystery, not knowing, and the sort of surprise that makes life worth another day.

In this episode, we talk in some detail about the beautiful and heartbreaking founding story that led Jamie to start To Write Love on Her Arms, which includes references to self-harm and contains an expletive, which in Jamie's words is "more about identity than profanity". And if you are or anyone you know is struggling with thoughts of suicide, self-harm, or if you need help even right now, call or text 988. 988 is the new nationwide number for the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.

This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information, visit tyndale.foundation.

Show Notes

• jamietworkowski.com
• Follow Jamie Tworkowski on Twitter
• If You Feel Too Much: Thoughts on Things Found and Lost and Hoped For
• Suicide & Crisis Lifeline
• To Write Love on Her Arms
• “Being loved looks like being known.”
• Rebecca Solnit’s 2020 article describing hope as a commitment to the future.
• “I've really come to believe that getting help, asking for help, recovery counseling for some people, sobriety, that it's not easy, but it's worth it.”
• Giving up the need for control.
• Clem Snide, “I Love the Unknown”
• Looking past the things we feel are missing.
• To Write Love On Her Arm: “that phrase at first, it was a, a goal for one person and pretty quickly because of this growing audience, it became a goal on a bigger scale.”
• “And I hope that other people, in this case the listener who might be struggling, I hope that you would stay for the surprises: to be surprised by life, by love, by joy, by God; that there would be moments that you will experience and, and as a result, be so glad that you chose to keep going, that you chose to stay.”

Production Notes

• This podcast featured author Jamie Tworkowski
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance and Episode Art by Luke Stringer
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

How do you heal from trauma—whether individual, familial, or collective? Can Christian spirituality help? 

The tumultuous time we find ourselves in serves up regular doses of the suffering and pain of others—war wages destruction, migrants are left to die of heat exposure, hate crimes based in bigotry and fear of ethnicity or orientation or identity leave us all feeling numbed to our humanity; and with the aid of our phones, we even risk a dependency relationship with that trauma. It's constantly leveraged for political gain, power, money, or ugly fame. If we see the game of human culture as a zero-sum struggle for power, someone's political gain is always another's loss. Someone's joy another's sorrow.

How are we supposed to find our human siblings? Add to this the unspoken trauma that haunts so many of us—myself, you listeners, that person in your life who seems strong and impervious to harm—we all carry our lifetime's worth of trauma even if we act like it's not there. But as Bessel Vander Kolk's best selling title captures so well, even when your conscious mind does that surreptitious work to ignore, deny, suppress, or forget trauma—"the body knows the score." But perhaps so too the spirit knows the score.

Today, Bo Karen Lee joins Ryan McAnnally-Linz for a conversation on trauma and Ignatian spirituality. Bo is Associate Professor of Spiritual Theology and Christian Formation at Princeton Theological Seminary, and has written and taught contemplative theology, prayer, and the connection between spirituality and social justice.

This conversation is a beautiful and sensitive—and sometimes quite raw—exploration of trauma and the human experience. But the clarity and courage reflected in Bo's presentation of how trauma threatens the human mind and body is matched by a powerful empathy and peace, as she reflects on moving through a spiritual journey from victim or bystander of trauma to a beloved, seen, known, and loved by God and other deeply caring helpers. The discussion that follows offers a concise introduction to the Ignatian spiritual tradition, as well as a holistic comment on how trauma at the individual, genetic, family, and national level can be acknowledged, addressed, and acted on.

This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information, visit tyndale.foundation.

About

Bo Karen Lee, ThM '99, PhD '07, is associate professor of spiritual theology and Christian formation at Princeton Theological Seminary. She earned her BA in religious studies from Yale University, her MDiv from Trinity International University in Deerfield, Illinois, and her ThM and PhD from Princeton Seminary. She furthered her studies in the returning scholars program at the University of Chicago, received training as a spiritual director from Oasis Ministries, and was a Mullin Fellow with the Institute of Advanced Catholic Studies. Her book, Sacrifice and Delight in the Mystical Theologies of Anna Maria van Schurman and Madame Jeanne Guyon, argues that surrender of self to God can lead to the deepest joy in God. She has recently completed a volume, The Soul of Higher Education, which explores contemplative pedagogies and research strategies. A recipient of the John Templeton Award for Theological Promise, she gave a series of international lectures that included the topic, “The Face of the Other: An Ethic of Delight.”

She is a member of the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women, and the American Academy of Religion; she recently served on the Governing Board of the Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality, and is on the editorial board of the journal, Spirtus, as well as on the steering committee of the Christian Theology and Bible Group of the Society of Biblical Literature. Before joining Princeton faculty, she taught in the Theology Department at Loyola College in Baltimore, Maryland, where she developed courses with a vibrant service-learning component for students to work at shelters for women recovering from drug addiction and sex trafficking. She now enjoys teaching classes on prayer for the Spirituality and Mission Program at Princeton Seminary, in addition to taking students on retreats and hosting meditative walks along nature trails.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Bo Karen Lee and Ryan McAnnally-Linz
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Annie Trowbridge and Luke Stringer
• Special thanks to the Tyndale House Foundation for their generous support.
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Seldom do we think of the study of history as a journey of self-discovery. And if that claim has any truth, it's because we modern people tend to see ourselves as autonomous, independent, untethered, and unaffected by our biological and cultural genealogies. But there's a story in our DNA that didn't start with us. And Lisa Sharon Harper has been on a decades-long journey of self-discovery, piecing together her family's lineage from their arrival on America's shores—via slave boats, through the twists and turns of slavery and indentured servitude, through America's post-civil war attempt at Reconstruction, down into the shadowy valley of Jim Crow and twentieth-century Civil Rights struggle, all to her life in the present. Her book is Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World—and How to Repair It All. Evan Rosa recently spoke with Lisa at length about how race broke her world and how she traced her family line back beyond the founding of America. And in continued celebration of Juneteenth and the Black joy which has transcended centuries of oppression, the Black history that deserves to be named and known, and the Black freedom which is real and yet still not fully realized and repaired—thanks for listening today friends.

How to Buy Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World—and How to Repair It All:

• lisasharonharper.com
• Online Retailers

About Lisa Sharon Harper

From Ferguson to New York, and from Germany to South Africa to Australia, Lisa Sharon Harper leads trainings that increase clergy and community leaders’ capacity to organize people of faith toward a just world. A prolific speaker, writer and activist, Ms. Harper is the founder and president of FreedomRoad.us, a consulting group dedicated to shrinking the narrative gap in our nation by designing forums and experiences that bring common understanding, common commitment and common action.

Ms. Harper is the author of several books, including Evangelical Does Not Equal Republican…or Democrat (The New Press, 2008); Left Right and Christ: Evangelical Faith in Politics (Elevate, 2011); Forgive Us: Confessions of a Compromised Faith (Zondervan, 2014); and the critically acclaimed, The Very Good Gospel: How Everything Wrong can be Made Right (Waterbrook, a division of Penguin Random House, 2016). The Very Good Gospel, recognized as the “2016 Book of the Year” by Englewood Review of Books, explores God’s intent for the wholeness of all relationships in light of today’s headlines.

A columnist at Sojourners Magazine and an Auburn Theological Seminary Senior Fellow, Ms. Harper has appeared on TVOne, FoxNews Online, NPR, and Al Jazeera America. Her writing has been featured in CNN Belief Blog, The National Civic Review, Sojourners, The Huffington Post, Relevant Magazine, and Essence Magazine. She writes extensively on shalom and governance, immigration reform, health care reform, poverty, racial and gender justice, climate change, and transformational civic engagement.

Ms. Harper earned her Masters degree in Human Rights from Columbia University in New York City, and served as Sojourners Chief Church Engagement Officer. In this capacity, she fasted for 22 days as a core faster in 2013 with the immigration reform Fast for Families. She trained and catalyzed evangelicals in St. Louis and Baltimore to engage the 2014 push for justice in Ferguson and the 2015 healing process in Baltimore, and she educated faith leaders in South Africa to pull the levers of their new democracy toward racial equity and economic inclusion.

In 2015, The Huffington Post named Ms. Harper one of 50 powerful women religious leaders to celebrate on International Women’s Day. In 2019, The Religion Communicators Council named a two-part series within Ms. Harper’s monthly Freedom Road Podcast “Best Radio or Podcast Series of The Year”. The series focused on The Roots and Fruits of Immigrant Labor Exploitation in the US. And in 2020 Ms. Harper received The Bridge Award from The Selma Center for Nonviolence, Truth and Reconciliation in recognition of her dedication to bridging divides and building the beloved community.

Show Notes

• “I never really understood the power of family history in scripture until I had done my own family history and understood the power of the context within which people live. So I used to look at the list of names that Jesus came from--Jesus is, you know, son of Mary, son of doo, son of Joseph, depending on who you're reading, and, and this is, and this is his lineage.”
• “When we look at the context of American life, you cannot divorce it from the laws that were crafted to shape the flow of American life.”
• Colonial laws legislating mixed-race marriage.
• “Because on the first page of the Bible, we actually see very clearly: all humanity is created in the image of God.”
• “But normally we think of repentance in the personal like, oh, I did somebody wrong so now I need to repent of that. But what would it look like for a society to repent? What would it look like for the church to repent of the assumptions we've had about who we are and how we should operate as the church?”
• “The only way for people of European descent to find true peace is to lay down your arms and trust God to be God.”

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Lisa Sharon Harper
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Special thanks to Lisa Sharon Harper and Katie Zimmerman at FreedomRoad.us
• Production Assistance by Annie Trowbridge and Luke Stringer
• Episode Art by Luke Stringer
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Does your approach to theology bring healing and reconciliation? Does it introduce Christianity as a way of life and peace, flourishing, justice, and shalom? Does your theology have space for diverse and difficult questions to occupy the same space? That kind of hospitable theology would indeed make a difference in our world. Today on the show, we're playing a conversation between Matt Croasmun and Amy Brown Hughes, Associate Professor of Theology at Gordon College and author of Christian Women in the Patristic World. Amy and Matt reflect on the promise and hope of a hospitable theology, grounded in a way of life, sensitive to the difference theology makes for the most pressing issues of our lives today.

About Amy Brown Hughes

Amy Brown Hughes is Associate Professor of Theology at Gordon College. She received her Ph.D. in historical theology with an emphasis in early Christianity from Wheaton College and is the author (with Lynn H. Cohick, Wheaton College) of Christian Women in the Patristic World: Their Influence, Authority and Legacy in the Second Through Fifth Centuries (Baker Academic). Amy also received a M.A. in history of Christianity from Wheaton College and her B.A. in theology and historical studies from Oral Roberts University. While at Wheaton, she worked with the Wheaton Center for Early Christian Studies, which encourages dialogue about the interplay between our modern world and early Christian texts. The overarching theme of Amy’s work as a historical theologian is that early Christian writers continue to be fruitful interlocutors in modern discussions of theology. Her research interests include Eastern Christianity, Trinitarian and Christological thought, Christian asceticism, theological anthropology, the intersection of philosophy and theology, and highlighting the contributions of minority voices to theology, especially those of women. Her dissertation, “‘Chastely I Live for Thee’: Virginity as Bondage and Freedom in Origen of Alexandria, Methodius of Olympus, and Gregory of Nyssa,” explores how early Christian virgins contributed substantively to the development of Christology. She regularly presents papers at the annual meeting of the North American Patristics Society.

Recently, Amy contributed to an edited volume of essays from a symposium on Methodius of Olympus at Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany,Methodius of Olympus: State of the Art and New Perspectives(De Gruyter) and co-authored a series of essays about early Christian writers with George Kalantzis (Wheaton College) for the early Christianity section of a volume for Protestant readers of the Christian tradition (T&T Clark).

Show Notes

• Brown Hughes’s experience with theology students: “they're making the connection now much more than I've experienced in the past with, oh, this actually has to matter.”
• A growing hunger for theology in churches: “The stuff that I do is not only mattering pedagogically in the academy for students, but also with the church as well, that it's starting to be something that they're starting to, like, want books and they want things recommended to them.”
• A discussion of one challenge in modern theology: an inclination for saying "I have more theology on my side or more on this side. And so therefore I'm more right.”
• A vision of theology: “I feel like theology can be a really hospitable place for people to actually access Christianity, where there are some big ideas and some values there that we can talk about.”
• Brown Hughes’s vision of a participatory theology focused on the flourishing of life: “with the United Nation's global goals, for instance like gender equality, no poverty, these different goals, they're worldwide conversations about how humans can flourish, largely speaking. So how can theology with how we think about humanity--how can we participate in those conversations? And I think that sort of requiring ourselves to think, "can we actually participate in that conversation" and say, "yes, I think we can." So how can we do that? Like what can we bring to bear on the conversation of eradicating poverty in the world?”
• Learn more about Gregory of Nyssa
• A summary of the field: “theology's a little bit wilder, a little bit messier, but I think that's actually an opportunity for the future.”

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Amy Brown Hughes and Matt Croasmun
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

If we all weren't so cynical, we might expect professional ethicists—or say a professor of ethics or morality at a university—to also be a really morally virtuous and good person. And by extension, you might also expect a theologian to be a person of deeper faith. And that's because intellectual reflection about matters of justice, right and wrong, God and human flourishing all cut to the core of what it means to be human, and the things you discuss in an ethics or theology course, if you took those ideas seriously, just might change the way you live.

Today, in our series on the Future of Theology, Matt Croasmun hosts Eric Gregory, Professor of Religion at Princeton University and author of Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship. Eric reflects on what it's like to teach theology in a secular institution—the good, the bad, and the ugly of that exercise; the complications of making professors of humanities, ethics, and religion into moral or spiritual exemplars; the centrality of the good life in the purpose of higher education; and the importance of discerning and articulating the multifarious visions of the good life that are presumed by the institutional cultures in which we live, and move, and have our being.