The Table Audio w/ Evan Rosa

“Humility is ultimately the gift that frees us from that selving project, as I call it. Roman Williams talks about the history of radical Christianity, focusing particularly on the desert monks as they're engaged in the crazy project of un-selfing, of trying to leave behind the ego-bound self. Trusting that reliance on God and one another is enough.”

Kent Dunnington is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Biola University. He's editor of The Uncertain Center: Essays of Arthur McGill, and the author of Addiction and Virtue: Beyond the Models of Disease and Choice*. His 2019 book just came out: Humility, Pride, and Christian Virtue Theory. In it, he presents his own account of humility and it's a radical one. So in this conversation we discuss humility—in its ancient, scriptural, monastic, and Medieval Christian contexts; some damning criticisms of Christian virtue; Jesus' radical vision of flourishing and eternal life, which includes self-sacrifice; the temptation toward ego building and self-improvement; and Dunnington's own view of humility as “radical un-selfing.”

Show Notes

• 6:37—On how he got into the study of humility and why it’s important, the lack of humility in contemporary American culture and politics, the influence of Christianity on humility, and Immanuel Kant
• 11:00—On the Nietzschean critique of humility and Christianity, conceptions of the good/eternal life, the language of wholeness, and self-sacrifice and resurrection
• 14:51—“I argue that it's important that, for Jesus, the life of glorification, to use the language in Philippians, is not separable from the life of humiliation.”
• 16:08—“The good news of the gospel, I take it, is that we really can give of ourselves without any limitation, in the hopes of discovering resurrected life, which is the discovery that endless self-sacrifice is actually eternal life.”
• 17:31—On a feminist and womanist critique of humility and self-sacrifice: do they perpetuate systems of oppression?, Christian and Pagan “wholeness,” the abuse of humility (and all of the virtues), humility as voluntary, and the monastic tradition and humility
• 20:50—“The project of embarking on the quest for humility is one that has to be undertaken voluntarily. It has to be an invitation that one receives from God. We are never in a position to recommend it or enforce it on others.”
• 22:28— On the “developmental trajectory” of humility, the penultimate and the ultimate, Bonhoeffer, Simone Weil, and pride
• 25:25—On imitation, dependence, development of the self, Augustine, and “radical un-selfing”
• 27:34—On his autobiography, the humility of his family, and the obsession with subjectivity
• 30:01—“You don't become humble by becoming interested in humility. You become humble by becoming interested in other people, and most especially, in God.”
• 32:17—On the attractiveness of humility, a positive account of humility, Simone Weil on affliction and love of others, and loving in the absence of pride
• 35:39—“If humility is a genuine virtue, where we know how to go on, even though we don't know who we are, it means that we can continue to love, even when everything we thought we needed to be an impressive self is under challenge or is gone.”
• 37:35—On “mundane humility,” dependence, Immanuel Kant on humility and beggars, and St. Francis of Assisi

Credits

• Hosted and produced by Evan Rosa
• Resource of the Biola University Center for Christian Thought, which is sponsored by generous grants from the John Templeton Foundation, Templeton Religion Trust, and The Blankemeyer Foundation
• Theme music by The Brilliance
• Production and Engineering by the Narrativo Group. More info at Narrativogroup.com
• Edited and mixed by TJ Hester
• Production Assistance by Kaleb Cohen
• Follow: @EvanSubRosa / @BiolaCCT / cct.biola.edu

“So Jesus steps inside of that and lives a life of sheer life. And that itself was the critique of the political order. So what did they try to do? Kill him. They killed him, but then they discovered that they're trying to kill what's unkillable. Christians call this the resurrection. The death of Jesus wasn't necessary. It was the cultural reflex against a form of life that did not need death or its negative other to anchor.”

J. Kameron Carter does theology with urgency. Why? Because he reads these times as urgent. His theology is responsive to the moment we're in. In this conversation, we discuss the black experience of a structurally anti-black world; the meaning of belonging and communion; how race factors in America's struggle for belonging to each other; the difference between black misery and white melancholy; and the presumption of comfort and alleviation of suffering that whiteness assumes. We also cover atonement theology; the erroneous logic of false ownership; and the unkillable, vibrant life of Jesus the slave. J. Kameron Carter is Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University Bloomington, author of Race: A Theological Account, editor of "Religion and the Future of Blackness," and is currently at work on his next book, Black Rapture: A Poetics of the Sacred.

Show Notes

• 3:50—On his name (and what the J. stands for)
• 6:44—On suffering, the tension between the wound and the blessing, and Harriet Jacobs’ “loophole of retreat”
• 9:30—“That negotiation between what we might say the tension between the wound and the blessing, it marks black existence insofar as anti-blackness is structurally the condition of possibility of the society that has come to bear the name the United States of America.”
• 9:58—Harriet A. Jacobs on her “loophole of retreat”; a reading from her Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
• 12:14—On structural and individual racism
• 12:46—Rodney King: “Can we all get along?”
• 18:10—On skepticism toward structural problems, structures that create conditions of misery, and the presumptions of whiteness
• 22:54—“What I think we have talked ourselves into is a claim that might go like this. Suffering and misery are always already, they are never not racialized.”
• 24:25— Ad Break: “Charting a Course Through Grief” A free 8-week ecourse with a variety helpful resources on grief. cct.biola.edu/grief
• 27:10—On the logic of atonement, a structure of misery and melancholy, a new cultural imagination, and the way forward
• 29:49—“What if the death of Jesus was about the destruction of an imagination that pits life against death and death against life altogether? What if it's the destruction of that?”
• 34:57—On Jesus’ incarnation and Christianity’s need to move against itself
• 37:15—On false ownership, “Christian supersessionism,” Jesus as slave within a particular structure of domination, and Dostoevsky and the illegibility of God
• 39:21—“The structure of ‘It belongs to me and not to you’ took on the veneer of colonialism, generating what we now call race. Racism is a specific iteration of Christian supersessionism of the gentiles. It's a theological problem.”

Credits

• Hosted and produced by Evan Rosa
• Resource of the Biola University Center for Christian Thought, which is sponsored by generous grants from the John Templeton Foundation, Templeton Religion Trust, and The Blankemeyer Foundation
• Theme music by The Brilliance
• Production and Engineering by the Narrativo Group. More info at Narrativogroup.com
• Edited and mixed by TJ Hester
• Production Assistance by Kaleb Cohen
• Follow: @EvanSubRosa / @BiolaCCT / cct.biola.edu

“I want to encourage Christians to stop trying to explain away evil and take people to the cross. And that is the strangeness of the Christian story. If someone has been abused, you don’t say, 'This is why it happened' or 'Look how you’re going to grow through this.' In their pain ... they ask you, 'Why would God do this? What does God think about this?' Your only answer is, 'Let me take you to a bleeding and dying savior.'”

Kelly M. Kapic is Professor of Theological Studies at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia. But, perhaps more central to this conversation, he is a human living through both the pains and the joys of being on this earth. That is what we talk about here, guided by Kelly’s newest book, Embodied Hope: A Theological Meditation on Pain and Suffering. In this episode, Kelly reflects on the linkage between theology and biography, the need for lament, the finitude and goodness of the human body, and the meaning of hope in the context of pain and suffering.

Show Notes

• 3:48—On theology and biography.
• 6:52—On pain, the goodness of human bodies, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and dependency.
• 7:15—“Pain itself tends to make us more aware of our bodies. One of the challenges for people who suffer though is then to start to hate your body, to think that your body is the problem.”
• 8:21—“We confuse dependency with sin all the time. And the way I would put it is we confuse finitude and sin all the time.”
• 9:10—“The heart of western culture in the last several hundred years where we’ve bought into this myth of rugged individualism and the autonomous self. I make myself. I am myself. No one should tell me. That just doesn’t fit with reality, of how we live. And all that happens in suffering is it makes us much more aware of that if we’re paying attention.”
• 10:31—On lament and the danger of justifying evil.
• 12:45—On the problem with theodicies, the sovereignty of God, and the meeting of pain and hope at the Cross.
• 13:25—“People often think that when their friend is suffering that they need to explain why this is happening. And I would basically say I think theodicies have a place in the classroom. It’s a legitimate philosophical discussion. Has no place in the home of the griever.”
• 16:53—“The cross and resurrection allow radical honesty about our pain while also maintaining hope. What happens is we tend to choose hope and then eliminate the honesty, or the honesty and eliminate hope. We shouldn’t choose. Lament allows us to be as brutally honest as we need to be and yet still have hope.”
• 17:34—Ad Break: “Charting a Course Through Grief” A free 8-week ecourse with a variety helpful resources on grief. cct.biola.edu/grief
• 20:24—On a “defiant hope,” Job, and the geography of suffering.
• 20:56—“We have this defiant hope, a defiant hope which is both lamenting and hopeful. And the hope does not undermine the lament, it makes sense of the lament.”
• 22:30— “In grace you don’t just have to live there all the time, but let’s not pretend it goes away.”
• 25:13—On community, faith, hope, and love.
• 26:15—“The faith is not something we generate, it’s something we receive. It’s a gift from God, it’s the faith. It’s the faith of the saints before us, the church’s faith. So I need to have faith, but it’s the community. So what happens then is when you’re suffering, often we struggle to have faith, and the people of God believe for us. And in that way they represent us to God. And they believe when we can’t. And similarly with hope, when we’re suffering, it’s very hard to generate hope, to cling to hope. But the people of God can embody hope for us and in that way they represent God to us. And then love is the context, otherwise it becomes plastic.”
• 28:03—“It would surprise a lot of Christians to realize people who are seriously suffering, whether from surgeries or from psychological or other kinds of things, they commonly will say the hardest time for them in their week is Sunday morning, actually going to church.”
• 30:35—On commitment, the myth of autonomy, and witness.
• 32:03—“The way we love those who suffer is we remain faithful, and we have to remember that it’s not just us caring for them. They actually care for us… They teach us about God. They teach us about ourselves. It’s got to be mutual.”
• 35:56—“If you have not developed the muscles of lament and of empathy, because if you yourself haven’t experienced it, you think it’s not real. And that’s a denial of our world. That’s a myth, and that’s a problem.”
• 36:34—“'God is faithful' doesn't mean that, if this is an evil thing, it's a good thing. It just means that God can and does even show up there. And His grace can be found even in the midst of the hurt and suffering.”

Credits

• Hosted and produced by Evan Rosa
• Resource of the Biola University Center for Christian Thought, which is sponsored by generous grants from the John Templeton Foundation, Templeton Religion Trust, and The Blankemeyer Foundation
• Theme music by The Brilliance
• Production and Engineering by the Narrativo Group. More info at Narrativogroup.com
• Edited and mixed by TJ Hester
• Production Assistance by Kaleb Cohen
• Follow: @EvanSubRosa / @BiolaCCT / cct.biola.edu

"For me, it was always a challenge, on the one hand, to honor what I was feeling—the rage that was inside against injustice—but on the other hand, to honor the beauty of the Christian faith that has a particular way of dealing with these kinds of situations which is a reconciliation through embrace of the enemy." 

For theologian Miroslav Volf, it's important that a theologian stand in the fissures—the cracks of human life—helping to mend and tie and heal the fractures that characterize that life, directing humanity back to its telos—its animating purpose and ultimate goal. Volf is the Henry B. Wright Professor of Systematic Theology at Yale Divinity School and founding director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. He was educated in his native Croatia, the United States, and Germany, earning doctoral and post‑doctoral degrees with highest honors from the University of Tubingen in Germany. He has written or edited more than 20 books and over 90 scholarly articles, including Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation, The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World, and his latest, co-authored with Matthew Croasmun, For the Life of the World: Theology That Makes a Difference.In this interview, Volf reflects on the challenge of living a theology in the fissures of life; the often irreducible complexity of human experience; how Volf's own biography and personal experience with oppression during the Cold War impacted his theology; the centrality of memory to forgiveness; and the importance of living as a porous, open self—open to encountering and embracing the other.

Show Notes

• 3:23—On having an eros for theology.
• 5:13—A Kingdom of God theology: on the public and the private. “I want to make sure though that on the public theology, we understand something that spans the space between the most intimate desires of our hearts to the largest structures that shape the character of our world, that all is in the purview of theology.”
• 7:17—On theology as more than intellectual puzzles. “I think theology has puzzles, as I said, but it is about the mystery of God, the mystery of human existence together with God.”
• 9:25—On the job of the theologian. “It's living with this fissure. It's bridging this gap. It's leading the world to that for which it has been created, that it is a job of a theologian.”
• 12:32—A short biography of Miroslav Volf: “In some ways, I can say that in this regard my theology is trying to articulate their lives in theological terms and make the lives of these people who have shaped me and my vision, make these lives speak to others.”
• 14:30—On God’s grace even through the suffering.
• 16:22—A lie that saved the Volf family. “God of truth delivering him through a lie, that too was successfully told, that was also his experience.”
• 18:31—Ad Break: “Charting a Course Through Grief” A free 8-week ecourse with a variety helpful resources on grief. cct.biola.edu/grief21:16—On unjust interrogations, rage, and enemy love.
• 24:00—“Love of enemy is the fundamental Christian command. You take love of enemy out of Christian faith, you un-Christian Christian. There cannot be Christian faith without love of enemy. That's, I think, at the foundation, not as a moralizing stance but as a character of God and therefore as a demand and as an opportunity for us as human beings.”
• 25:06—On forgiveness and reconciliation.
• 27:04—Created in the image of exclusion: on being formed by and treating others with exclusion.
• 30:22—On the self and the other. “Open to the other means open to interactive exchanges with the other, which change you in the process of engaging the other.”
• 32:13—“This is a story of our lives at varieties of levels. I think this kind of openness to the other, this kind of sense of sturdy self that can change and yet remain itself is what we need to nurture, which is just a different way of saying of being lovingly open to another and finding one's identity in love toward the other.”
• 33:59—On reconciliation, memory, and suffering.
• 33:59—“Memory is central to forgiveness because forgiveness concerns the past”
• 36:11—“There is a tendency to being completely absorbed by suffering, to think that the entirety of the identity of the perpetrator consists in having inflicted suffering on you, that the entirety of your own identity consists in having suffered that injury.”
• 37:52—On the cross as communion for both perpetrators and victims.
• 39:34—On suffering, abandonment, and hope.
• 41:26—“There is no intellectually compelling answer to the experience of living either on Friday or on Saturday. We have to live it through, and it's only at the end of our lives and of the history that the story can be told in such a way that the suffering has not been fully senseless. I believe that that's part of Christian faith and Christian hope, Christian living with non‑understanding in the midst of suffering in which one finds oneself, in the hope that despite my non‑understanding, God is present and will lead me through the suffering to Resurrection.”

Credits

• Hosted and produced by Evan Rosa
• A resource of the Biola University Center for Christian Thought, which is sponsored by generous grants from the John Templeton Foundation, Templeton Religion Trust, and The Blankemeyer Foundation
• Theme music by The Brilliance
• Production and Engineering by the Narrativo Group. More info at Narrativogroup.com
• Edited and mixed by TJ Hester
• Production Assistance by Kaleb Cohen
• Follow: @EvanSubRosa / @BiolaCCT / cct.biola.edu

"By our nature, we are eccentric. We're off center. The world has its own center: fallen, lost, though many ways good. Christians have a different center. Christ is our center. That makes us stand out if we're faithful in ways that are odd. That's who the saints are. The saints are the odd wads who have stood out from society—cultures they would have been predicted to conform to."

Oddities, weirdos, monsters—what is the place of the strange and monstrous in literature and film? And how does can these products of the human imagination help us understand the fallen condition of humanity?—both in the great depths of sin, and in the heights of redemptive possibility.

Ralph C. Wood has served as University Professor of Theology and Literature at Baylor University since 1998, and taught at Wake Forest University prior to that. He is an expert on 19th- and 20th-century literature, especially at the intersection of Christianity and secularity. He’s author and editor of many books and articles, including Tolkien Among Moderns, Chesterton: The Nightmare Goodness of God, Literature and Theology, Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South, The Gospel According to Tolkien, and The Comedy of Redemption: Christian Faith and Comic Vision in O’Connor, Percy, Updike, and De Vries.

In this episode, Ralph Wood casts light on the monstrosity of humanity, the goodness of God, and finding grace and hope along the dark terrain of human history, all through the lens of literature and faith.

Show Notes

• 1:18—Frankenstein, "It's alive!!"
• 1:34—King Kong
• 1:48—The Wolfman
• 1:59—The Blob
• 2:17—Godzilla
• 2:20—Gremlins (mogwai!)
• 2:32—Alien
• 2:37—The Fly
• 2:44—The scariest and goriest of them all...
• 3:02—A Quiet Place
• 3:14—Stranger Things
• 5:35—Ralph Wood's early life and how he came to love books
• 7:12—Reading is under threat; "sustained imaginative sympathy"—how to be a good reader
• 11:55—Poetry as the highest of literary forms—"Above all, learn to read poetry. Poetry was once, I'm sure you know, the common pastime of every educated person. It's now almost entirely lost."
• 13:30—There is no such thing as "Children's Books"
• 14:07—On the Catholic writers of the 20th Century—the echoes of their imagination; their strange, violent, grotesque characters
• 17:39—"Catholics have a tremendous advantage over us Protestants in having at the core of Catholic faith and worship, the sacramental imagination. ... I'm glad to see that in our time, evangelicals are recovering that sacramental imagination because without it, we're doomed."
• 20:15—Ad break. "Charting a Course Through Grief"
• 22:13—What we can learn by thinking of ourselves as 'monsters'—"Not all that is monstrous is evil."
• 29:30—Christian Eccentricity; Christ as our center; man as the good monster, not just the evil monster
• 32:12—On Chesterton's fiction: "Chesterton's fiction has about it that wonderful lightness, comedy, paradox of the Christian faith. He defines paradox wonderfully. 'Paradox,' he says, 'is truth standing on its head and waving its legs to get our attention. It's truth upside down.' Of course, that's what the Kingdom is, the Kingdom is the world turned upside down."
• 32:52—Chesteron on "Nightmare" and encounter with horror
• 34:45—Is there any hope of waking from the nightmare? Chesterton as Augustinian
• 35:35—The Ballad of the White Horse—"I tell you naught for your comfort. Yea, naught for your desire, save that the sky grows darker yet, and the sea rises higher. Night shall be thrice night over you, and heaven an iron cope. Do you have joy without a cause? Yea, faith without a hope?"
• 37:25—"Christians don't live on the hope that things are going to get better. If we live by that hope, we might quote St. Paul, 'We of all men are most hopeless.' Things are not going to get better. The trajectory of history is not upward, onward, progressive, but always an undulating hope, followed by loss of hope, followed by new hope, etc."
• 38:15—Death has already been conquered
• 40:26—"My best teachers were those who really pushed my nose into the cold snows of modern horror. That's my point. Unless you face the horror, that's what the cross is, the ultimately horrible event that we call, as Elliot says, 'Good Friday,' because God made it good. Not only in the Resurrection, but of course in calling us to live out the life of the cross, being willing to die without earthly hope, but in the confidence of hope beyond hope."

Credits

• Hosted and produced by Evan Rosa
• Resource of the Biola University Center for Christian Thought, which is sponsored by generous grants from the John Templeton Foundation, Templeton Religion Trust, and The Blankemeyer Foundation
• Theme music by The Brilliance
• Additional Scoring by Una and the Sound
• Production and Engineering by the Narrativo Group. More info at Narrativogroup.com
• Edited and mixed by TJ Hester
• Production Assistance by Kaleb Cohen
• Follow: @EvanSubRosa / @BiolaCCT / cct.biola.edu

“We must re-mythologize. We must see myth not as the flight from reality, but as the flight to reality. And if we thus love and value myth, we will make them because we are creators made in the image of the Creator. And that’s what Lewis did. That’s what Tolkien did.” Peter Kreeft is Professor of Philosophy at Boston College and has written upwards upwards of 75 books of philosophy, theology, apologetics, essays, reflections, and more, not to mention his frequent public lectures and articles, though he considers his own approach to philosophy as no more than a shell full of water in the shoreless sea of God's infinity. In this episode, Dr. Kreeft’s reflections each felt like their own short and yet quite expansive essays, spanning from surfing and sanctification to C.S. Lewis and mythology. Rather than presenting it conversationally, we’ve queued up each topic to let Peter Kreeft be Peter Kreeft.

Show Notes

• 3:30—Peter Kreeft on Peter Kreeft
• 3:46—On surfing, the ocean, and heavenly life.
• 4:06—“Surfing, I think, is preparation for heaven. Because if you’re a soul surfer, instead of a hot-dogger, you just follow the wave and you become part of the greater being and in heaven we’ll surf on God.”
• 5:38—“In Perelandra, the wave is a symbol of God’s will… so you simply follow the wave of God’s will, that’s the secret of sanctity.”
• 6:04—On sanctification, perfection, and the summum bonum.
• 6:59—“That process looks different for everybody because everybody is different. The road, the story of everybody is different. That’s why God created billions of different people, not just one. And that’s why heaven is going to be endlessly interesting because we’ll share each other’s stories and enter into each other’s stories.”
• 7:17—On Gabriel Marcel, being, goodness, and personhood.
• 8:44—On becoming a saint.
• 9:53—“I personally believe that when we get to heaven we're going to be very surprised at who's there. How did you get there? Your theology was all askew. Well, yeah, but God saw deeper than that. He saw a heart that sought Him, and He Himself said, “All who seek me will find me."”
• 10:28—Ad Break: “Charting a Course Through Grief” A free 8-week ecourse with a variety helpful resources on grief.
• 12:24—On psychology and modernity.
• 13:43—On the soul, Henri Bergson and mathematical bees, science, and what human persons are.
• 17:32—“The soul is not physical, but it is the soul of a physical body, and the body is not spiritual, but it's a body of the spiritual soul. Whenever you touch one, you touch the other. Just as you can't change the meaning of a book without changing its words, or change the words without changing the meaning. Anything that affects the body as a whole affects the soul too, and anything that affects the soul also affects the body.”
• 18:39—On intellectual virtue and civil discourse. “I think the two most important virtues of the mind are also moral virtues, honesty and prudence, or the fanatical search for truth on the one hand and practical wisdom on the other hand.”
• 19:53—On love.
• 20:44—“Only if you love somebody do you really know them. This is why God is so wise because He loves. Love opens the eye, the eye of the heart, the deepest eye.”
• 20:57—On suffering, Victor Frankl, and the necessity of meaning.
• 21:54—“It's not just the will to live. It's a belief, a faith, a trust that all of life, including suffering, has a meaning, has an outcome.”
• 23:22—Ad break: “Seeking Christian Wisdom for Life’s Biggest Questions” via Biola LEARN (15% off your next course).
• 24:56—On Clive Staples Lewis and his legacy.
• 26:13— “Lewis has done more for welding Christians together and helping them to understand each other, especially by that book Mere Christianity, than anybody else has done. He has shown us what's important and what's less important. He's given us a sense of perspective. 50 years later, he remains utterly up to date, utterly relevant. He's not dated because he deals with the perennial things.”
• 27:25—On Lewis, literature, and telling the truth through fiction.
• 29:02—“Lewis tells it like it is. A lot of people hate him for that. He offended people in his own day. He continues to do so. In fact, if you're not offending anybody, you're not saying anything very important.”
• 29:15—On Peter Kreeft's favorite works of C.S. Lewis.
• 29:45—On Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold, Christianity, and mythology.
• 30:41—“Lewis, like the medievals, was fascinated with allegory and symbolism and thought of this not merely as a literary device but as something in the structure of the universe because things are also symbols. God writes with things as we write with words, and therefore the dispute between let's say the modernists and the fundamentalists about whether the Bible is symbolic or literal is a silly one. It's both. The one does not exclude the other.”
• 32:06—On why dark places are holy places, and how C.S. Lewis embodied that truth. “The holy places must be dark places for two reasons. One, because the darkness is in our own souls, and we project that on to the God that we try to find. The second reason is that there has to be faith. There has to be trust. God can't reveal Himself totally to us and still elicit from us the loving trust that He wants, above all.”
• 33:29—On what we find when we remove our armor and let down our defenses.
• 34:25—On sharks and vending machines: linking the darkness of the ocean with holiness, faith, and the risk that life is.
• 35:14—“Faith is a risk. Love is a risk. Life is a risk. It's a very dangerous thing, being born, but it's an adventure.”

Credits

• Hosted and produced by Evan Rosa
• Resource of the Biola University Center for Christian Thought, which is sponsored by generous grants from the John Templeton Foundation, Templeton Religion Trust, and The Blankemeyer Foundation
• Theme music by The Brilliance
• Production and Engineering by the Narrativo Group. More info at Narrativogroup.com
• Edited and mixed by TJ Hester
• Production Assistance by Kaleb Cohen
• Follow: @EvanSubRosa / @BiolaCCT / cct.biola.edu

“How can you know flourishing if you don't understand loss? How can you know liberation if you don't understand what it's like to have your freedom taken away? So, I think that is the hermeneutical entry point for black people of faith, the role that suffering says that something has to be gotten from it or snatched from it.”

Given the fractured state of society, the church very much included, along racial and ethnic lines, we need to seek a deeper understanding of the question of redemptive suffering. That's why we invited Stacey and Juan Floyd‑Thomas to The Table. Stacey is associate professor of Ethics in Society, and Juan is associate professor of African American Religious History, both at Vanderbilt University Divinity School and College of Arts and Sciences. Stacey's research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of ethics, feminism, womanism, black church studies, critical race theory, and postcolonial studies. Juan's work focuses on the intersections of racial identity, religion, popular culture, and political activism in American society. We cover problems of consumerism, pop culture, how we can cure the loss of cultural memory, and a deeper dive into black and womanist perspectives on flourishing, suffering, and theodicy.

Show Notes

• 0:47—Can suffering be redemptive? (With the help of Ivan and Alyosha Karamazov)
• 5:45—The art of quilting. “That's what we realize in our work, that it's at those places that are life affirming, that spark cultural memory, and that transcend people out of what might be a miserable or a mundane stage to something that is larger than them, to something that gives them life.”
• 8:42—On consumerism in America. “Consumption is our worship. Consumption is our spiritual discipline as Americans. It doesn't matter whether that is a super size McDonald's Happy Meal that will kill us and not make us happy.”
• 11:50—St. Augustine, disordered loves, and people as property. “To find yourself in a situation that your standard of what it means to be successful, of what it means to be a human who flourishes at every extent is to covet what you assume other people want and to take ownership of that, losing yourself all the while.”
• 16:30—Stacey on art as a spiritual practice. “Art is about that utopia. It's about that new world making. It's about taking refuse and making something divine, using utility for the purpose of making stained glass where there aren't even windows.”
• 23:05—Ad Break: “Charting a Course Through Grief” A free 8-week ecourse with a variety helpful resources on grief.
• 25:03—The thorny terrain of theodicy and the problem of redemptive suffering through the lens of black experience. “So where theodicy in the typical Christian constructed theological moment is the end of faith for most, it's the beginning for black people.”
• 32:17—“The womanist entry point of suffering.”
• 34:07—Ad break: “Seeking Christian Wisdom for Life’s Biggest Questions” via Biola LEARN (15% off your next course)
• 35:38—Women’s resilience in the face of oppression and suffering.
• 37:36—“In many ways, the black church exists off of the suffering of black women because there's this notion of black women, oftentimes single mothers, who are giving their all to the church… That kind of suffering becomes a virtue for black women, by which black women are kept subjugated and oppressed.”
• 38:06—Can suffering be redemptive? Exploitation, ignorance, re-victimization, and radical enemy love. “What happens when you turn a blind eye to the needs and the miseries of others, but then, to make matters worse, you make them have to relive over and over and over again that source of deepest pain or most awful and miserable state of being.”
• 43:36—Moral exemplars: redemptive suffering through prophetic witness. “It's looking at those who have suffered the most not as property. Not as people without virtue or character or people without value or as problems, but looking at them as moral exemplars who can best diagnose our deficiencies.”
• 44:04—“Black people have been able to, through their suffering, because of their suffering, and seeing the backside and the underside of America, they've been able to clearly articulate the reality of our times, yet show us the promise of our ideals. Suffering is that conscience laden place of knowing the wickedness and depravity that you are presently facing, yet having a realistic hope, not that the art will just miraculously bend towards justice, but if I don't bend it, or like Bree Newsome: if I don't climb that pole to take down that flag, who will?”
• 46:17—“If we don't exemplify, quite literally, what we believe and how deeply we believe these things to be true, who will ever understand or know what the capacity for human transformation really is in this world?”
• 47:50—The sin of not bearing witness and the need for inter-generational conversation. “The greatest sin that we've realized is when there aren't those who are willing to bear witness… And there aren't people who have the audacity or the courage to speak truth to power, or in the words of my grandmother, to tell the truth and shame the devil.”
• 49:28—“If we don't have these intentional conversations, suffering will be for naught because we won't allow for the reality of our situation to help better inform the possibility of our futures.”
• 49:50—“Patchwork redemption”: closing thoughts.

Credits

• Hosted and produced by Evan Rosa
• Resource of the Biola University Center for Christian Thought, which is sponsored by generous grants from the John Templeton Foundation, Templeton Religion Trust, and The Blankemeyer Foundation
• Theme music by The Brilliance
• Production and Engineering by the Narrativo Group. More info at Narrativogroup.com
• Edited and mixed by TJ Hester
• Production Assistance by Kaleb Cohen
• Follow: @EvanSubRosa / @BiolaCCT / cct.biola.edu

“The heart of Christianity is personal relationship, persons sharing love with each other. And so for Christians, the greatest thing for human being is not character development. It's loving personal relationship. The idea in the Christian tradition is that something about suffering enables you—doesn't make you, but it enables you—to open and open and open and open more deeply to God. When you are more open to God, you are also more open to other people. So that the best thing for human beings in the world is personal relationship. And that's the thing that suffering enables you to have more of.” Eleonore Stump is an exemplar of faith seeking understanding, fides quaerens intellectum. She's a philosopher in the Thomist tradition, which she brings fiercely and beautifully to bear in her incisive philosophical commentary and analysis on difficult matters.

She is the Robert J. Henle Professor of Philosophy at St. Louis University, where she's taught since 1992. She's also an honorary professor at Wuhan University and the Logos Institute at University of St. Andrews in Scotland. She's a professorial fellow at Australian Catholic University. She's published extensively in philosophy of religion, contemporary metaphysics, and medieval philosophy. Her books include a major study of Thomas Aquinas. Her extensive treatment of the problem of evil, Wandering in Darkness, is the focal piece for this interview. Her most recent work on the atonement of Christ came out just last year.

Show Notes

• 3:22—The problem of suffering in the West: "If there is some sort of supernatural entity that watches over human beings, if that entity or entities has care for human beings, and has power and mind, why do we suffer the way we do? What's wrong with our world that it looks like this?"
• 6:07—Suffering and the desires of the heart. “Another way to think about suffering, and it's an age‑old way that is very wise, is to see suffering as a function of what we care about. We care about our own flourishing as the human beings that we are and the things that get in the way of that flourishing, those are the things that cause us suffering.”
• 7:59—A different take on the problem of suffering. “[I]t's what we care about that makes suffering. Therefore, the question is really something like this. If there is an all powerful, all knowing, all good, perfectly loving God, why wouldn't He want you to have what is good for you and what you care about? That's how you would feel toward your own child. Why wouldn't the Deity think that about his children?”
• 8:43—The starting point for the project of theodicy.
• 9:32—Early Christians and the magnificence of being allowed to suffer.
• 11:12—Suffering and the shaping of character. “It's tied to the fact that you know that the children who grow up in highly protective, over protective rich cuddled surrounding where they never face suffering and they never face challenges, you know they're not going come out very well.”
• 12:22—Ad Break: “Charting a Course Through Grief” A free 8-week ecourse with a variety helpful resources on grief.
• 14:35—Loving personal relationship as the purpose of suffering. “The heart of Christianity is personal relationship, persons sharing love with each other. For a Christian, the greatest thing for a human being is not character development, but it's loving personal relationship. The idea in the Christian tradition is that something about suffering enables you, it doesn't make you, but it enables you to open and open and open and open more deeply to God. When you are more open to God, you're also more open to other people, so that the best thing for human beings in the world is personal relationship. That's the thing that suffering enables you to have more of. That's the idea. Of course, it's just an enabling, it doesn't guarantee it. You can become bitter and hateful in suffering also.”
• 15:55—On suffering as a means to human flourishing but in itself: a poison. “The morally sufficient reason for God to allow suffering has to do with the goods that suffering brings, but those goods, closer personal relationship with a loving God and with each other, that doesn't make suffering any less awful and you must never get confused and think it does.”
• 17:40—600 pages on the Problem of Evil in 60 seconds.
• 18:28—Reaching out to others, vulnerability, and the horror of suffering. “The whole Earth is soaked with the tears of the suffering. That is a horrible fact.”
• 19:55—We are both sufferers and perpetrators of suffering. “We perpetrate such ghastly suffering on one another. That's part of the story. That's part of the vulnerability we have to recognize too. We are prone to do these things to one another. That kind of recognition is also important for the problem of suffering.”
• 21:10—Narrative, the details of human life, and the failure of philosophy to answer the problem of suffering. “It is important to understand that suffering has got a lot more human detail, a lot more human complexity to it than something as simple as intrinsic individual valuable characteristics of a person. It's also important to see the details of what a trade could be in any individual life, what you lose in suffering. Think about it this way. In suffering, you lose something that you care about. And if God is going to be justified in allowing that suffering, it has to be that somehow, you get more of what you care about than you would if you hadn't suffered.”
• 25:07—Ad break: “Seeking Christian Wisdom for Life’s Biggest Questions” via Biola LEARN (15% off your next course)
• 26:48—On the suffering of God. “When the Biblical text said, "Jesus weeps." Who's weeping? We have only one candidate. The person of the incarnate Christ is weeping. That person is divine. That's God weeping.”
• 30:22—Being face-to-face with God in uniting relationship. “Union is a matter of being in a position, you might say, to share attention with God, to share face‑to‑face interaction with God.”
• 34:32—On art and suffering. “There is grace though, and wonder on the way. Only they are hard to see, hard to embrace for those compelled to wander in darkness.”

Credits

• Hosted and produced by Evan Rosa
• A Resource of the Biola University Center for Christian Thought, which is sponsored by generous grants from the John Templeton Foundation, Templeton Religion Trust, and The Blankemeyer Foundation
• Theme music by The Brilliance
• Production and Engineering by the Narrativo Group. More info at Narrativogroup.com
• Edited and mixed by TJ Hester
• Production Assistance by Kaleb Cohen
• Follow: @EvanSubRosa / @BiolaCCT / cct.biola.edu

"We're a society that rarely acknowledges death before it happens. Christianity is ongoing training in dying early. That every politic, one way or the other, is a politic that deals with death." Stanley Hauerwas is a theologian, ethicist, one of the most influential public intellectuals in the 20th century, and perhaps most importantly, Texan. He began teaching at the Notre Dame in 1970 and moved to Duke Divinity School in 1983 where he's the Gilbert T. Rowe professor of divinity and law. He's the author of many books, including The Peaceable Kingdom, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony, Living Gently in a Violent World: The Prophetic Witness of Weakness, which was written with Jean Vanier, the founder of L'Arche communities. His most recent book is The Character of Virtue: Letters to a Godson, written to his real life godson, Lawrence Wells, son of Hauerwas' student and friend, Samuel Wells. For a deeply personal approach to his life and work, read "Hannah's Child: A Theologian's Memoir." Here, "Stan the Man" was brutally honest about his take on contemporary American life, the church's political calling, vulnerable about his past pains and personal experience with disability and mental illness. He offered candid and pointed reflections on love, suffering, the practice of theology and what it means to be a Christian.

Show Notes

• 3:31—"What I try to do is to help Christians recover how odd it is that we're Christians...
  I'm in the constant business of trying to help us rediscover what an extraordinary adventure we've been put on by being full lived in God's kingdom in a way that will be very surprising to many people who think that Christianity makes them good middle class citizens of the United States of America."
• 4:33—Bricklaying, craft, and hard work that shaped his habits
• 6:35—The habits of theologians: humility and joy
• 7:20—On his marriage to Anne, mental disability, and Hannah's Child
• 8:30—"Mental illness is a black hole... you have no idea what's going on. ... What you have to remember when someone is mentally ill is they're in pain. They're perpetrating such pain on you, you have trouble remembering they're in pain. I tried to do that. To be as helpful as you can be. The more you try to make things better, things only get worse. At least that was true for me. Every person that's mentally ill is different. Her anger was volcanic. That's what finally killed me. Just absorbing the anger."
• 11:15—Suffering, lament, and grief. Naming the Silences "Silences drip off the edges of words. I think that oftentimes, we're too noisy around people who are suffering, trying to make things OK. What they absolutely need is presence. They need us to be there."
• 13:25—Wisdom for the sufferer. "It's not just the words, it's who says them. It's very important that the designated person of the community called the priest or the minister know what to say. It's very important that friends know how to be there, as well as not to say too much."
• 14:41—On our social practices of ignoring injustice, ignoring suffering for the sake of our own complacency and comfort. "I'd say, in 100 years, if Christians are people identified as those who do not kill their children or their elderly, we wouldn't have been doing something right." "I think in the name of compassion, we're living in a social order that will increasingly not know what to do with those born dying."
• 17:30—Ad Break: "Charting a Course Through Grief" A free 8-week ecourse with a variety helpful resources on grief.
• 20:22—"The idea that somehow or the other, our lives are meant to be free of suffering just doesn't make much sense."
• 22:30—The vices that stand in the way of American Christianity: lack of candid speech, and more...
• 24:09—On suffering and love.
• 26:01—Love, "apprehending the other as other," marriage. "Christians are obligated to love one another, even if they're married."
• 29:17—God is love. "God is love because what love means is that we didn't have to be... God didn't have to create, but we are as a manifestation of God's unrelenting desire to have us be His friends."
• 29:38—God is enemy. "The transformation of God from enemy to God as the one we love is part of the great challenge of living a Christian life."
• 31:24—"I prefer to cherish wrongs done to me. My sense of who I am is more determined by what I'm against rather than what I'm for. I pray that God can have my loves but not take my hates. If you take my hates, how will I know who I am?"
• 32:09—"Where would I be if I didn't have the church to criticize?"
• 32:16—Hauerwas's message to a society finding itself in hate: "Try some courage."
• 34:10—"The idea that we are Christian nation is an extraordinarily destructive one."
• 35:10—Christianity as a political religion. "Jesus is a politic and it is a politic of the formation of people who live by non resistant love across time by establishing ways of surviving in a violent world by being non violent which is a very dangerous way to be."
• 37:43—"Christianity is ongoing training in dying early. Every politic, one way or the other is a politic that deals with death."
• 38:01—Ad break: "Seeking Christian Wisdom for Life's Biggest Questions" via Biola LEARN (15% off your next course)
• 39:54—On confrontation, conflict, love, and peaceableness.
• 41:30—"Politic of the lie"
• 43:51—The experience of violence; weakness, gentleness, vulnerability, and power. "I think you don't become weak to be weak. Rather the language I refer is you discover how to be gentle. There's hardness to gentleness that makes it possible to not be overwhelmed by the violence but your refusal to let the violence defeat our ability to be friends. Gentleness, I think, is crucial for friendship."
• 47:06—The future of Christianity in America. "I believe God is making us leaner and leaner. As we continue to lose members and the church gets smaller, what I hope is we will discover unity between Christians that we haven't experienced for many centuries."
• 48:08—On writing theology. "I try to write at a very fundamental level that makes contact with what I think every Christian struggles with."

Credits

• Hosted and produced by Evan Rosa
• Resource of the Biola University Center for Christian Thought, which is sponsored by generous grants from the John Templeton Foundation, Templeton Religion Trust, and The Blankemeyer Foundation
• Theme music by The Brilliance
• Production and Engineering by the Narrativo Group. More info at Narrativogroup.com
• Edited and mixed by TJ Hester
• Production Assistance by Laura Crane
• Follow: @EvanSubRosa / @BiolaCCT / cct.biola.edu

"I'm a Protestant who loves saints," says Jessica Hooten Wilson. Why do we read and write saints' lives? Hagiography is a long-practiced depiction of the holy and often wacky stories of saints and the wondrous elements of their lives as dedicated to God. Jessica Hooten Wilson identifies one of Flannery O'Connor's primary goals in her unfinished novel Why Do the Heathen Rage? as attempting to write a saint's life. And really, from one angle, a great deal of texts are trying to do this. In attempting to articulate the narrative of a saint's life, we are exercising a spiritual imagination for the sake of understanding the fullest expression of Christ in merely human life.

What follows the suggestion of the descent and ascent of saintly lives is a rich conversation about martyrdom, iconography, what it means to understand a great or holy text, as well as an appreciation for the aesthetic side of spirituality.

Click here for images referenced in the interview: Caravaggio's "Salome Holding the Head of John the Baptist"; Marco d’Agrate, Milan Duomo, "St. Bartholomew Flayed"; Nikola Sarić, "21 Libyan Martyrs Icon"

Show Notes

• 1:15—"I'm a Protestant who loves saints." David Lyle Jeffrey's phrase "inextricably middled." How God can create a saint's life in your own life.
• 2:49—Saint Theresa of the Little Way—"Our lives don't have to make headlines to be saints lives."
• 3:50—What to do with the "white-washed" saints stories; "The reason you read the saint story is not because that person was holier than thou, but because God was holy in that person. That's where the beauty of the saint's life comes from."
• 4:33—Augustine's Confessions, Lady Continence, St. Monica
• 5:15—The three great works that everyone should read: Augustine's Confessions, Dante's Divine Comedy, and Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov
• 6:25—O'Connor's use of the Descent-to-Ascent Model of saints lives
• 7:13—Wilson defends O'Connor from the idea that O'Connor is too horrific. "Everyone has hold of the wrong horror." / Reference to "A Good Man is Hard to Find")
• 8:53—Icons, Art, and Martyrdom; Caravaggio's "Salome Holding the Head of John the Baptist"; Marco d’Agrate, Milan Duomo, "St. Bartholomew Flayed"; Nikola Sarić, "21 Libyan Martyrs Icon"
• 9:36—21 Lybian Martyrs (February 12, 2015); Matthew Ayariga: "My God is their God."
• 12:30—The moral and religious uses of art, icons, stories, books, and sacred texts. 
• 13:50—"It reads us rather than us consume it. ... It puts us in a different position in which we can be transformed. We can be read. We can be submissive. We can let go. We can be emptied of self before it, rather than trying to consume or get from it, something."
• 14:55—Flannery: "We make the wrongful assumption that anyone who can read a telephone book can read a short story."
• 15:15—How to read art, literature, and scripture: submissive, selfless, and no presuppositions. 
• 16:30—Reference to A Wrinkle in Time: "You must attempt to understand in a flash."
• 18:00—The humility required to stand under a text in order to understand it.
• 18:27—Flannery O'Connor on self-knowledge: "...self‑knowledge, for O'Connor, is acknowledging what one lacks. It's measuring one's self against the truth, not measuring the truth against one's self."
• 19:50—Self-knowledge: "Self‑knowledge cannot begin by a self-examination of self. It just sounds tautological, even when you try to explain it.
  Instead, you need the perspective of another. Preferably, a transcendent divine perspective to be an honest true perspective. Therefore, you'd be measuring yourself against the truth. You'd be seeing yourself truly as you are. I think there's a reason that Augustine cannot write an autobiography without having a conversion to Christianity."
• 21:41—Really dumb dad-joke about mimes and St. Augustine's "take up and read" passage.
• 22:20—End Interview, Credits

Credits

• Hosted, Produced, and Edited by Evan Rosa
• Sponsored by generous grants from the John Templeton Foundation, Templeton Religion Trust, and The Blankemeyer Foundation
• Theme Music by The Brilliance
• Twittering: @EvanSubRosa and @BiolaCCT

A Christmas Podcast: Evan Rosa interviews analytic theologian Oliver Crisp on the Incarnation of Christ, and how we can learn from the Incarnation about what it is to be human.

Credits

• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Produced by the Biola University Center for Christian Thought
• Sponsored by generous grants from the John Templeton Foundation, Templeton Religion Trust, and the Blankemeyer Foundation
• Theme music by The Brilliance
• Additional scoring by Evan Rosa
• Podcast artwork by Steven Reynolds
• Thanks to Oliver Crisp and Fuller Theological Seminary
• Special thanks to Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen; oh, ah, Comet and Cupid and Donner and Blitzen)—oh yeah, Rudolph too
• Twitter: @EvanSubRosa / @BiolaCCT
• Web: cct.biola.edu

"My first theological thought was: 'God does not owe me a long life.'" Our guest today is a theologian living with terminal cancer. Dr. J. Todd Billings is the Gordon H. Girod research professor of reformed theology at Western Theological Seminary and an ordained minister in the Reformed Church in America. In 2012, Billings was diagnosed with an incurable blood cancer. Billings and his wife had young children, just three years old and one year old. He was working hard on a book, he was on sabbatical. Things were going well and then they weren't. In this podcast episode, Billings speaks frankly and vulnerably about his diagnosis and illness, his thoughts and feeling about death, and the broader theological and cultural implications about dying.

Show Notes

• 0:00—Begin interview
• 2:25—J. Todd Billings’s story and cancer diagnosis
• 7:40—Praying for healing and praying the Psalms
• 8:42—"An abundant life in Christ is not measured in years."
• 12:07—A reading from Psalm 102
• 13:00—Theological thoughts on facing death
• 16:42—Prayer as complaint
• 25:48—Intermission
• 27:52—San Francisco's prohibition of burials and removal of cemeteries
• 29:19—How contemporary society talks about death
• 33:32—Ars moriendi, the art of dying well
• 34:00—Reference to Martin Luther: "You should think of death
  frequently."
• 37:40—Reflecting on beauty in facing death
• 48:50—Denying our creaturely limitations
• 51:28—Grace vs. loss
• 53:28—What is hope?
• 54:45—End interview, credits

Quotes From J. Todd Billings

• "My first theological thought was God does not owe me a long life.”

• "In many ways, the prayer of lament is one of the most faithful
  prayers that we can give in witness to Jesus Christ, because not only
  Christians but non‑Christians realize that the world around us is a
  mess in so many ways."

• "If we're followers of the crucified and risen Lord I think we have to believe in that strength that comes, not in spite of weakness but in weakness."

• "A part of me did not want to take risks. I kind of wanted to huddle
  up. I've had enough pain. I don't want to take risks. That
  self‑protective sensibility can become our master. That is not
  compatible with Jesus Christ as our master."

• "Ultimately, even though it's hard to say, my ultimate hope is not that I can see my kids graduate from high school. My hope is that Jesus Christ, who is Lord, will make all things right and will renew the whole creation on the last day. The hope that I taste by the Spirit is the joy that I have is a foretaste as one who belongs to Christ."

• "An abundant life in Christ is not measured in years."

Credits

• The Table is sponsored by generous grants from the John Templeton Foundation, Templeton Religion Trust, and The Blankemeyer Foundation
• Theme music by The Brilliance
• Production and engineering by The Narrativo Group
• Production Assistance by Laura Crane
• Edited and mixed by TJ Hester
• Special thanks to J. Todd Billings
• Evan Rosa on Twitter
• CCT on Twitter

"I do not know the answer to the problem of evil, but I do know love. That's the key thing. In Jesus, we cannot doubt the love of God for us if we look at the lengths to which He went." Os Guinness is a social critic, author of more than 30 books and counting and yes, as the name suggests, great‑great‑great grandson to the famous Irish brewer of beverages, Arthur Guinness. An Englishman born to medical missionaries in 1940s China, Os was exposed to dire circumstances from a young age. His early experiences formed in him an appreciation for human purpose, and calling the value of freedom for a flourishing society, a response to evil and suffering, and the meaningfulness of the Christian Gospel in contemporary life. In this episode, we discuss his latest thoughts on American public life today, the meaning of love, the human response to unspeakable suffering and evil around the world, and legacy.

Show Notes

• See Os’ Website for more information and content
• 3:04—Begin interview
• 3:50—Are we too aware of suffering in the digital age? How should we
  deal with it?
• 7:32—Christians’ distinctive response to suffering
• 9:00—A selection of Elie Wiesel's Night
• 12:10—Interlude #1
• 13:20—Should we try to explain evil?
• 14:46—Central questions pertaining to the problem of suffering
• 15:20—The God that suffers with us
• 16:50—"'I do not know the answer to the problem of evil, but I do know love.' That's the key thing. In Jesus, we cannot doubt the love of God for us if we look at the lengths to which He went."
• 17:12—"The Second Coming," by W.B. Yeats
• 18:35—How do you explain the centrality of love in Christian theology
• 20:00—Covenantal Love
• 20:45—“Evangelicals today have lost their covenant love loyalty”
• 21:00—The three elements of the Sinai Covenant
• 23:00—The state of covenant loyalty in contemporary America and the
  church
• 25:40—What hope is there in the midst of the chaos of public life?
• 27:55—The failure of the religious right
• 28:20—What policies or philosophies emerge from the Christian love
  commands?
• 28:55—Os mentions his most recent book on freedom: Last Call for Liberty
• 30:29—Is there hope for civility in public life?
• 33:09—Interlude #2
• 34:30—Interview resumes
• 35:00—The crisis of accountability
• 37:00—Legacy, the end of life and end of work
• 38:55—How do we contemplate our own deaths?
• 40:48—End interview, credits

Quotes from Os Guinness

• "'I do not know the answer to the problem of evil, but I do know love.' That's the key thing. In Jesus, we cannot doubt the love of God for us if we look at the lengths to which He went."
• "In suffering, there are two big questions — God's existence and God's character. Is He there? Is He absolutely good? Obviously, for followers of Christ, both those are answered not by a theistic proof. I don't personally put much weight on those...At the end of the day, they're answered in Jesus. If God is the Father of Jesus, and I've come to put my trust in Him, I can trust for His existence and His goodness, although I've never seen the Father."
• "The suffering servant is Jesus. When we see Him on the cross, truly, our God hanging there, we can never go so low in life our Lord has not gone lower to express His love and to save us. That's wonderful."
• "That's Christian realism. If you say, 'Is there anything wrong with the world?' Absolutely. We Christians are realistic. We know there's something deeply wrong with the world. As GK Chesterton said, 'It's me.' We all say the same."
• "Legacy is when the Lord says, 'Well done.'"

Credits

• The Table is sponsored by generous grants from the John Templeton Foundation, Templeton Religion Trust, and The Blankemeyer Foundation
• Theme music is by The Brilliance
• Production and engineering by The Narrativo Group
• Edited and mixed by TJ Hester
• Production Assistance by Laura Crane
• Special thanks to Os Guinness
• Evan Rosa on Twitter
• CCT on Twitter

Yes, vanity of vanities. You probably think this show is about you. Well, it is about you; and me; and all of us. But, as our guest today, explains: "This is not a sin and guilt, beat‑yourself‑up exercise. I'm not in the shaming and blaming game at all. What I'm trying to do is move people forward toward liberation and freedom." In this episode, "Queen of the Vices" Philosopher Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung talks about vainglory, pride, hypocrisy, authenticity, and the human longing for recognition and being known. Her emphasis on grace motivates us toward a life of healing and freedom, and calls us to live up to the dignity and respect that we already have.

Show Notes

• 0:00 — Podcast intro
• 3:22 — Begin interview, the role of philosophers in contemporary culture and diagnosing ailments of the soul
• 4:40 — Vice as a “mirror” or “diagnosis” so that we can move to life and healing
• 6:19 — The historical role of self-knowledge in flourishing
• 6:59 — Problems from the desire for and pursuit of self-understanding
• 10:00 — Today’s culture of authenticity
• 12:04 — The self-defeating cycle of humility and vainglory
• 14:15 — John Cassian's story of the preaching monk in the wilderness
• 15:06 — Vainglory in celebrity and social media culture
• 19:47 — Intermission
• 20:57 — “Gift language” that keeps us from being preoccupied with performance
• 25:44 — Faking it and hypocrisy: reference to Jennifer Herdt's book Putting on Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices
• 29:42 — Wanting to be loved vs. wanting applause: vainglory and the need to be loved
• 34:34 — Reference to Stephen Darwall's view of recognition self-respect and appraisal self-respect
• 26:13 — The roots of vainglory
• 42:00 — Habits, practices, and spiritual disciplines that fight against vainglory
• 48:13 — End interview, credits

Quotes from Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung

• "Evil is a great mystery. Goodness is a great mystery, and they're all sort of tangled up in our hearts. I would caution people about being both too cavalier about not needing to do that deep excavation, but also being too confident that they're able to do it fully and finally in one go."

• "When it comes to healthy self‑love, in some respects, the truth that many of us can't hear, or can't register, or can't take in is the fact that we're already unconditionally beloved by God. In some respects, grace is just too good a news for us."

• "The great thing about the spiritual disciplines, or maybe the not‑so‑great thing, is that God will do whatever work needs to get done to bring you into a more virtuous state."

• "This culture tends to like to just put itself on display. In some respects, it's a way of being authentic. 'See, here I am. No holds barred. I'm filming it live. There's no editing,' that kind of stuff. That's a shallower version of authenticity than the Christian tradition calls for."

• "This is not a sin and guilt, beat‑yourself‑up exercise. I'm not in the shaming and blaming game at all. What I'm trying to do is move people forward toward liberation and freedom."

Credits

• The Table is sponsored by generous grants from the John Templeton Foundation, Templeton Religion Trust, and The Blankemeyer Foundation
• Theme music by The Brilliance
• Production and engineering by The Narrativo Group
• Production Assistance by Laura Crane
• Edited and mixed by TJ Hester
• Special thanks to Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung
• Evan Rosa on Twitter
• CCT on Twitter

Gratitude is deeply woven into the Christian way. Believers and non-believers alike, representing many wisdom traditions, have all long practiced the act of giving thanks. Our station in life is one of utter dependence, gift, and grace. So thankfulness is fitting and right. But gratitude has deep and often instantaneous impact. Just look at the celebrity stars Fred Rogers has weeping after 10 seconds of grateful silence. It's easy to forget the utter simplicity of being from the perspective of gratitude, especially with all those irresistible Black Friday deals in your inbox (thanks for clicking this email instead). May you live in the lightness of God's grace this week, and enjoy this little reflection on the impact gratitude has on well-being, struggle, meaning, and the human good. This Season 2 bonus episode features UC Davis psychologist Robert Emmons, one of the world’s leading researchers of Gratitude, on the power of saying thanks. From our Table to yours, Happy Thanksgiving from those of us at CCT.

Show Notes

• 0:00—Podcast introduction
• 4:42—Begin interview: Robert Emmon's work and research on studying happy people and gratitude
• 11:30—Intermission
• 12:50—Resume interview: The role of empirical evidence and giving advice in our self-help and productivity driven culture
• 16:22—Gratitude in the context of suffering
• 22:14—How gratitude shapes our identity and makes meaning in life
• 25:45—End interview, credits

Credits

• Produced by the Biola University Center for Christian Thought
• Sponsored by generous grants from the John Templeton Foundation, Templeton Religion Trust, and the Blankemeyer Foundation
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Laura Crane
• Theme music by The Brilliance
• Edited by a Turkey named Stewart
• Sound FX by Mashed Potatoes
• Additional scoring provided by a Bowl of Gravy
• Production assistance by Stuffing, with some additional tape edits by Cranberry Sauce
• Follow Evan Rosa on Twitter @EvanSubRosa
• Follow the Center for Christian Thought on Twitter @BiolaCCT
• Visit our website cct.biola.edu

What is love? For something so familiar to the human experience, love is notoriously difficult to define, explain, and articulate, and even harder to embody. Our guest Thomas J. Oord has spent the last two decades thinking about the theology, science, and philosophy of love. In this episode, we cover a variety of themes and questions related to the theology of love, including: love's definition and expression, the nature of divine love, the connection between love and fear, and Christian understanding of the science and psychology of love. Oh, and a few pop-culture love song references, too. Enjoy.

Show Notes

• 0:00—Podcast intro
• 2:50—Begin interview, a man in the business of big ideas
• 7:24—For the love of wisdom and the wisdom of love
• 8:19—The problem with defining love
• 11:38—Dr. Oord’s three-part definition of love: intentionality, relationship, promotion of overall well-being
• 13:07—Reference to The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis, Wolterstorff's work on love
• 13:25—Is there only one love, or different kinds with different definitions?
• 13:39—Types of love: Agape, Philia, Eros
• 16:34—Love in pop culture and music
• 17:38—Different natures of love: loving an enemy vs. loving a child
• 20:28—Anxiety over the mysterious nature of love
• 23:00—Connecting love to shalom
• 24:24—Real examples of shalom in communities
• 27:10—Love in manners and habits of kindness
• 29:15—Intermission
• 31:07—The science of love
• 38:42—Does the lover receive benefit from his/her own loving?
• 41:24—"As you wish..." means "I love you"; how The Princess Bride explains the relationship between obedience is love
• 42:44—Loving God; does God benefit from our love and obedience?
• 44:28—Loving through suffering and the relationship between fear and love
• 52:20—End interview, credits

Quotes from Thomas J. Oord

• "We may not think alike, but we can love alike."
• "For me, this in spite of love, because of love, alongside of love, is a way to think about general ways in which love, as an overarching word, is expressed in our lives day‑to‑day."
• "Love is the kind of word that has many aspects and dimensions that a person can describe rightfully or truthfully and yet not capture everything they want to say about love."
• "Love has one definition but many forms. If an activity is truly loving, it must fit the general definition, but there are lots of different ways in which we can love."
• "We oftentimes want to judge others based upon what we think is the right thing and what we're capable of and what the 'normal' person is capable of. We need to open ourselves up to the possibility that what some people are capable of is different than others because of their bodies, because of their histories, because of the communities they're a part of."

Credits

• The Table is sponsored by generous grants from the John Templeton Foundation, Templeton Religion Trust, and The Blankemeyer Foundation
• Theme music by The Brilliance
• Production and engineering by The Narrativo Group
• Production Assistance by Laura Crane
• Edited and mixed by TJ Hester
• Special thanks to Thomas J. Oord
• Evan Rosa on Twitter
• CCT on Twitter

On living and finding meaning in the "in-between"—featuring Diane Glancy, an American poet, author, and playwright of Cherokee descent on embracing liminality.

What would it feel like to live constantly in the "in-between"—to feel caught in the margins, to be stuck on the causeway, at the threshold, held in the foyer, neither here nor there? There is ambiguity and disorientation in the liminal space, and it's a more common experience than you might think.

Diane Glancy, an American poet, author, and playwright of Cherokee descent has come to embrace this experience of liminality. She gathers voices in her novels and poems, sometimes completely nameless, forgotten or silenced by history. Her embrace reveals a commitment to finding meaning in holiness, even in the vague, unnoticed margins, in the negative space. Join us as we explore with Diane the meaning that lies in the in-between.

Show Notes

• 3:35—Diane’s shares her “Origin story”
• 4:20—Diane introduces her experience of adjacency throughout her journey
• 5:15—Diane shares an early Cherokee creation story
• 7:45—Evan asks Diane about the spiritual and cultural background of her upbringing
• 9:15—Diane elaborates on adjacency as a Christian and a Native American woman and an academic
• 11:50—Evan asks Diane about how she fills in the spaces of her own adjancency
• 12:22—Diane mentions her book, In-Between Places
• 12:30—Evan asks Diane what she means by “liminality” and “adjancency”
• 14:25—Diane shares her experience of liminality in her own divorce
• 15:35—Evan asks Diane about her perception of space, but figurative and physical
• 17:40—Diane elaborates on her experience of “land”
• 17:58—Location of pull quote from beginning
• 18:45—Evan invites listeners to check out other Table content at https://cct.biola.edu/the-table/
• 19:54—Diane introduces us to Ada Blackjack
• 21:40—Evan draws connections between poetry, liminality, and the life of faith
• 22:45—Diane picks up Ada’s story again
• 24:56—Evan brings up poet Scott Cairns as a helpful conversation partner, and speaks about Diane’s openness to empty space.
• 25:52—Diane reads her poem "Asylum in the Grasslands"
• 27:35—Diane reflects on "Asylum in the Grasslands" and introduces her study on Job
• 28:40—Diane addresses the loveliness of suffering
• 30:00—Evan introduces the book of Job and its themes
• 30:27—Diane expands on her new work on Job
• 32:10—Evan introduces the further story of Job’s wife and Glancy’s recent interest in her

Credits

• The Table is sponsored by generous grants from the John Templeton Foundation, Templeton Religion Trust, and The Blankemeyer Foundation
• Theme music is by The Brilliance
• Production and engineering by The Narrativo Group
• Edited and mixed by TJ Hester
• Production Assistance by Laura Crane
• Special thanks to Diane Glancy
• Evan Rosa on Twitter
• CCT on Twitter

Quotes from Diane Glancy

• "The liminal and the multivalent and the adjacency is always where I have found my being. Through writing, I have made it substance. There's one word. Then you put down another word. Then you put down another word. Pretty soon, it's solid ground."
• "It just comes. It's like a muscle or something that you use. You have a certain calling. Mine was to suffering and to the importance of the past, and to give historical voices to those that did not have a chance to speak."

"This is where O'Connor scandalizes people. God redeems the moment, so violence doesn't become nihilism the way it would maybe in a Tarantino film. In her world, God is there."

Flannery O'Connor is an American novelist, essayist, and short-story writer known for her sardonic Southern Gothic style with grotesque characters and violent scenes. Our guest today, Jessica Hooten Wilson, is a Flannery O'Connor expert and is currently preparing O'Connor's unfinished novel Why Do the Heathen Rage? for publication. Dr. Hooten Wilson shares her intimate knowledge of O'Connor, her writing, and the Gospel message that emerges from the pages of her dark and twisted stories.

Show Notes

• 0:00—Podcast intro
• 2:34—Excerpt from Jessica Hooten Wilson on "A Temple of the Holy Ghost" (from her lecture at The Table Conference, September 2017, "Resilience: Growing Stronger Through Struggle")—"Dear Lord, I want to be a saint, because that is the vocation in which you know everything... but I will never be a saint, because I'm a born liar, and I'm slothful, and sass my mother and I'm ugly to almost everybody. Now I can't be a saint, but I might be a martyr if they kill me quick."
• 5:14—Introduction: Jessica Hooten Wilson
• 6:14—Begin interview, Flannery O'Connor's writing
• 9:12—Jessica Hooten Wilson's biography in terms of Flannery O'Connor
• 11:07—Flannery O'Connor's focus on the "dark" realities in the world
• 15:00—How Flannery O'Connor portrays the Gospel
• 16:24—Literary use of violence and suffering
• 20:00—Redemptive suffering
• 22:50—Intermission
• 24:05—Jessica Hooten Wilson's favorite Flannery O'Connor character, Mrs. Greenleaf
• 26:41—Discussion of Mrs. Greenleaf's "prayer healings" and her famous line, "Jesus, Jesus! Stab me in the heart!"
• 34:45—What it means to be "Christ-haunted"
• 35:33—Audio recording of Flannery O'Connor on the South being "Christ-haunted" (from "Flannery O'Connor Reads 'Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction' (c. 1960)"
• 43:47—Flannery O'Connor's battle with Lupus: "I'm sick of being sick." and "I can with one eye squinted, take it as a blessing." "If suffering is a grace, then perhaps it could be prayed for."
• 45:09—Further discussion on O'Connor's own suffering and how it shaped her writing and thinking
• 49:58—End interview
• 50:20—Audio recording of Flannery O'Connor reading excerpt from "A Good Man is Hard to Find", credits

Quotes from Jessica Hooten Wilson

• "This is where O'Connor scandalizes people. God redeems the moment, so violence doesn't become nihilism the way it would maybe in a Tarantino film. In her world God is there. You're able to then accept grace instead and allow God to redeem violence for another purpose. That scandalizes people because violence in itself is awful, ugly, and disturbing."
• "She's not praying to withstand cauldrons of boiling pitch or arenas of lion. It's a different kind of suffering that she's praying about, one that would actually be a conduit for grace."
• "For O’Connor, if you’re a Christian, you should be suffering in some way. If you’re not suffering in some way, then maybe you’re not following Christ as closely as you wish you were."

Credits

• The Table is sponsored by generous grants from the John Templeton Foundation, Templeton Religion Trust, and The Blankemeyer Foundation
• Theme music by The Brilliance
• Production and engineering by The Narrativo Group
• Edited and mixed by TJ Hester
• Production Assistance by Laura Crane
• Visit Jessica Hooten Wilson's website
• Evan Rosa on Twitter
• CCT on Twitter

In October 2016 just prior to the Presidential Election, we interviewed Dr. Russell Moore—an Evangelical ethicist, theologian and preacher who has been named one of the top 50 influence-makers in Washington. Dr. Moore was dubbed by then-Presidential candidate Donald Trump on Twitter as "truly a terrible representative of American Evangelicals and all of the good they stand for. A nasty guy with no heart!" Well, we disagree. Listen as Dr. Moore shares his thoughts on love, humility, and power in American political life.

Show Notes

• 0:00—Show introduction and all about Russell Moore (including a shout out from @realDonaldTrump)
• 3:22—Russell Moore on his vocation
• 4:00—The 2016 presidential election and beyond
• 6:45—Nicholas Carr, Utopia is Creepy
• 7:00—The 2016 election and other elections—what’s different?
• 8:25—Humility and the presidential office
• 11:35—What’s the role of the church in public life?
• 11:46—Reference to Dr. Moore's book Onward: Engaging the Culture Without Losing the Gospel
• 13:00—Mentions Pope Francis’ culture of disposable people (his first major statement as pope)
• 15:25—The current state of Christianity in America
• 15:40—Christians and the Moral Majority
• 17:04—“A genuinely authentic Christian witness is always going to be counter to the way of the flesh and the way of the world.”
• 18:00—Christian hypocrisy
• 19:00—Jesus’ definition of power and ours
• 19:33—Intermission
• 20:50—Christian "engaged alienation": What is it? How does civic friendship fit in?
• 21:55—Proper ordering of love
• 23:25—Original pull quote at intro
• 24:00—Why does religious liberty matter?
• 28:10—How should the church interact and cooperate with the state?
• 29:06—Christians and the major issues: homosexuality, family
• 31:17—Loving those we disagree with
• 36:04—End interview, start credits

Quotes by Russell Moore

• "We can be Americans best when we're not Americans first.
• "We've seen 'we' as being the United States of America first, rather than seeing 'we' first as the global body of Christ, as a member of the church of Jesus Christ.' That changes the way that we see people on the outside. It changes the priorities that we have."
• "Our love has to be defined primarily in terms of who we are as the kingdom of God."
• "If we have an unbounded patriotism, then we end up with an alternative religion and we end up with an idol. If we have the patriotism that is bounded, the patriotism that is a subordinate love, then it's something that is deeply powerful and quite right."

Credits

• The Table is sponsored by generous grants from the John Templeton Foundation, Templeton Religion Trust, and The Blankemeyer Foundation
• Theme music by The Brilliance
• Production and engineering by The Narrativo Group
• Edited and mixed by TJ Hester
• Production Assistance by Laura Pelser
• Special thanks to Russell Moore
• Follow: @drmoore @BiolaCCT @Evan_Rosa

How shall we think about the apparent conflict between the call to humility and the call to greatness and honor? Is it demeaning to be humble given that we are made in the image of God? Or is humility it the ultimate regard for humanity? How can we put on Christ without being guilty of "acting" or "faking it"? How can we be magnanimous, or have greatness of soul, without pride interfering? Professor of Christian Ethics Jennifer Herdt responds to these questions and helps us navigate the balancing act between humility and magnanimity.

Show Notes

• 0:00—Podcast intro
• 3:49—Begin interview, Jennifer's intellectual conversion story
• 4:44—Herdt's Putting on Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices book and putting on Christ vs. "faking it"
• 7:53—17th century interest in virtue
• 9:52—The court and virtue vs. performance to influence
• 10:43—Reference to Socrates' concern for reality vs. appearance
• 11:54—Reference to Rousseau
• 12:24—Unpacking Augustinian phrase "splendid" or "glittering" vices
• 16:42—Humility as a virtue or as a vice?
• 20:00—Modern critiques of humility as a virtue
• 23:04—Friedrich Nietzsche's perspective on humility
• 25:24—Interlude 1
• 26:42—Historical and philosophical views of magnanimity
• 31:55—Balancing magnanimity and humility; Jesus as the exemplar
• 35:14—The "great things" that we are called to
• 36:05—Interlude 2
• 38:25—Infused vs. acquired virtues
• 42:30—Goodness by imitation or hypocrisy?
• 44:36—Jesuit theatrical tradition, reference to book Silence and feature film Silence
• 47:33—Humility and joy
• 51:30—End interview, credits

Quotes from Jennifer Herdt

• "We are called to befriend the sinner and the outcast. We're called to relationship with one another. We're called to connection. Pride separates us from that connection. Insecurity separates us from that connection."
• "If humility enhances friendship because it takes down those barriers that separate us from one another in our tendency to always compete with and compare ourselves to one another, then humility is a path to friendship."

Credits

• The Table is sponsored by generous grants from the John Templeton Foundation, Templeton Religion Trust, and The Blankemeyer Foundation
• Theme music is by The Brilliance
• Production and engineering by The Narrativo Group
• Edited and mixed by TJ Hester
• Production Assistance by Laura Pelser
• Special thanks to Jennifer Herdt
• Evan Rosa on Twitter
• CCT on Twitter