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20 Feb 2021
The Dignity of Work: Poverty, Property, and Fraternity in Pope Francis's Fratelli Tutti (Brothers & Sisters All) / Martin Schlag
00:37:30
"There is no poverty worse than that which takes away work and the dignity of work. In a genuinely developed society, work is an essential dimension of social life, for it is not only a means of earning one’s daily bread, but also of personal growth, the building of healthy relationships, self-expression and the exchange of gifts. Work gives us a sense of shared responsibility for the development of the world, and ultimately, for our life as a people." (Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti 162)
In the resurgence of worldwide populism, Pope Francis has said that employment is the biggest issue. And because of the global pandemic, work has become a fraught and challenging part of life. In this episode, Father Martin Schlag explores the concept of work in Fratelli Tutti, explaining the Catholic social ethic of the dignity of work and inclusion of all people into the human economy; the Pope’s perspective on private property and the suggestion that “the world exists for us all”; and the relevance of Catholic social thought and Fratelli Tutti for businesspeople, with a vision of work grounded in friendship, responsibility, dignity, justice, and love. Interview by Ryan McAnnally-Linz.
Support For the Life of the World by making a gift to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: faith.yale.edu/give
Fratelli Tutti is basically a summary of all of Pope Francis’s teaching.
Pope Francis on politics and love: “The biggest issue is employment."
"Bread and work”
Psychological and sociological catastrophe of long term widespread unemployment
Pope Francis defines poverty as the exclusion of the dignity of earning one’s own bread
Left and Right are categories that don’t work for the Catholic social tradition.
Dignity and Catholic Social Ethics and Anthropology—labor and the common good
Human dignity is grounded in the Image of God, as a representative of the absolute and unconditional; never as a means, always as an end
Human dignity formulated as friendship or fraternity
The right to work and rights in work: access, just wage, safety, rest, social security (health care, insurance, retirement benefits)
Christian perspectives on private property: St. John Chrysostom, St. Basil, St. Gregory—“your affluence belongs to the poor"
Not communism but generosity and sharing
Private Property: One of the most striking passages for the outside reader
Two Christian perspectives on private property: (1) Augustinian strand—private property as consequence of original sin and is regulated only by human law; “in paradise there was no private property” / (2) Aristotelian/Thomist tradition—private property is derived from natural law and the common good (this is the dominant Catholic tradition)
Absolute vs Derived Rights. Property is a secondary, or derived, right.
Property has a social mortgage, creates responsibility
Horizontal vs Vertical dimensions of private property
Vertical dimension of private property: “The world exists for us all”; the universal destination of all goods;
Horizontal dimension of private property: 7th commandment presupposes private property (“Thou shall not steal”); under human society, private property exists and needs to be protected by laws
“We belong to the whole.” Aquinas: Human beings exist as part of a whole, a human being stops being a human being when they leave the polis/community or whole. Aquinas corrects that: Only to God do we belong.
Catholic social teaching has four big principles: Human dignity, Common good, Solidarity, Subsidiarity
All people of good will. What two or three big takeaways are available for someone who does own property/business person?
No to the idolatry of money. You need money in the world, but it’s only a means to an end, like gas in a car
Friendship: How can you create meaningful work for others and yourself, creating variety of tasks, giving significance, give recognition, empowered, autonomously?
Oppose elitism and false universalism: does my business have an inclusive mechanism, do we listen, have regular debates, does everyone contribute to decision making?
Where societal change comes from: not come from the elites but from the peripheries
“The People”
What does a fraternal society look like in Pope Francis’ imagination?
Consider the French revolution: "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”—liberalism built a politics on liberty; socialism built a politics on equality; but who has built a politics on fraternity?
“Good politics combines love with hope and with confidence in the reserves of goodness present in human hearts.” (Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti 197)
'At times, in thinking of the future, we do well to ask ourselves, “Why I am doing this?”, “What is my real aim?” For as time goes on, reflecting on the past, the questions will not be: “How many people endorsed me?”, “How many voted for me?”, “How many had a positive image of me?” The real, and potentially painful, questions will be, “How much love did I put into my work?” “What did I do for the progress of our people?” “What mark did I leave on the life of society?” “What real bonds did I create?” “What positive forces did I unleash?” “How much social peace did I sow?” “What good did I achieve in the position that was entrusted to me?”’ (Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti 197)
About Father Martin Schlag
Father Martin Schlag is Alan W. Moss Endowed Chair for Catholic Social Thought at the University of St. Thomas and is author of The Business Francis Means: Understanding the Pope's Message on the Economy. He studies the nexus of Christian faith with markets, trade and exchange, money, private property, and their net effect on social justice.
15 Jul 2023
Claire Danes, Kate Bowler, & Kelly Corrigan / Consumption, Responsibility, Failure, Repair, & Forgiveness / Life Worth Living Book Club, Part 4 of 5
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
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
06 Feb 2021
Dreaming of a Different World: Friendship, Dignity, and Solidarity in Pope Francis's Fratelli Tutti (Brothers & Sisters All) / Nichole Flores
00:34:03
“Here we have a splendid secret that shows us how to dream and to turn our life into a wonderful adventure. No one can face life in isolation… We need a community that supports and helps us, in which we can help one another to keep looking ahead. How important it is to dream together… By ourselves, we risk seeing mirages, things that are not there. Dreams, on the other hand, are built together. Let us dream, then, as a single human family, as fellow travelers sharing the same flesh, as children of the same earth which is our common home, each of us bringing the richness of his or her beliefs and convictions, each of us with his or her own voice, brothers and sisters all." (Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti)
Last year, in the midst of a global nightmare, Pope Francis invited the world to dream together of something different. He released Fratelli Tutti in October 2020—a message of friendship, dignity, and solidarity not just to Catholics, but "to all people of good will"—for the whole human community. In this episode, social ethicist Nichole Flores (University of Virginia) explains papal encyclicals and works through the moral vision of Fratelli Tutti, highlighting especially Pope Francis’s views on faith as seeing with the eyes of Christ, the implications of human dignity for discourse, justice and solidarity, and finally the language of dreaming together of a different world.
Read the entire text of Fratelli Tutti online here
What is a papal encyclical? For “All people of good will”—not just Catholics
Examining the signs of the times, e.g., Fratelli Tutti will always be connected to its global context during a pandemic.
What is Fratelli Tutti? What does its title mean?
Brothers and Sisters All: Using Italian, a particular language, as a pathway to the universal, rather than traditional Latin title
Pope Francis’ roots in Latin America: How his particularity as Latin American gives him a universal message; local and communal belonging; neighborhoods contributing to the common good
Seeing/Gazing: Faith as seeing with the eyes of Christ (Lumen Fidei)
Undermining human dignity in social media discourse; the failure of grandstanding rather than encounter
Solidarity as a dirty word: conflicts within Catholicism about how to understand and apply justice and solidarity in real life
Solidarity requires encounter with the other
Social friendship and fraternity
Human dignity in the tradition of Catholic social ethics
Dreaming together: fighting against the temptation to dream alone, inviting us to imagine; cultivating a conversation that forms collective imagination and aesthetic reality.
About Nichole Flores
Nichole Flores is a social ethicist who is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. She studies the constructive contributions of Catholic and Latinx theologies to notions of justice and aesthetics to the life of democracy. Her research in practical ethics addresses issues of democracy, migration, family, gender, economics (labor and consumption), race and ethnicity, and ecology. Visit NicholeMFlores.com for more information.
05 Dec 2021
David Dark / Non-Violent Resistance, Robot Soft Exorcism, and the Blurry Binaries Between Christianity and Culture
01:04:32
"I wrestle not against flesh and blood." (David Dark's Ephesians 6:12 mantra) / According to David Dark (Belmont University), each of us occupy a variety of robots—roles, titles, occupations, institutions, conglomerates, ways of being, social norms, etc.—and these robots exert a cultural force, sometimes benign, but then again, sometimes violently destructive and degrading of human life. And in order to appreciate and honor our shared humanity, those of us in violent, impersonal robot systems need to be softly, humanely, respectfully, lovingly exorcised from those violent systems. David Dark joins Evan Rosa to talk about his idea of "Robot Soft Exorcism"—a metaphor-slash-parable-slash-theory-slash-way-of-life—that he uses to explain and expound non-violent resistance and prophetic witness. Along the way, they discuss the righteous skepticism he was raised on, the blurry secular-sacred divide, how he met Henri Nouwen, the technological ethics of Jacques Ellul, the real meaning of turning the other cheek, and the constant need to divest ourselves of the power of our positions, our titles, our platforms ... our robots.
About David Dark
David Dark is an American writer and cultural critic; and is Assistant Professor of Religion and the Arts at Belmont University in Nashville, TN. He's author of several books including, Life's Too Short To Pretend You're Not Religious, The Sacredness of Questioning Everything, Everyday Apocalypse: The Sacred Revealed in Radiohead, The Simpsons, and Other Pop Culture Icons, and The Gospel According To America: A Meditation on a God-blessed, Christ-haunted Idea. Follow him on Twitter @DavidDark or his Substack, Dark Matter
Righteous skepticism in David Dark's family history
Godzilla and God
Secular–sacred divide
"I don't have to settle for the given dichotomies or dualisms."
Daoism, intellectual humility and the meaning of righteous skepticism in southern (fundamentalist) Christian context
The blurry binaries of Christianity and Pop Culture
Nashville: "The post-modern Vatican of the prayer trade"
Christian music industry in the'80s
"One might want to separate Christian marketing from the January 6th attack, but you really can't because association is currency."
"On human barnyard"; "there are no unrelated phenomena"
On meeting Henri Nouwen and learning the word social justice
"There is no non-social justice. Justice is relational."
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
Power dynamics of 2018's border crisis, separating families at the border, and Sarah Huckabee Sanders at the Red Hen Restaurant
Turning the other cheek; demanding to be punched as an equal
Dramatizing the conflict as part of the task of prophetic action
"Robot soft exorcism is inviting someone to be a human being rather than just being their position."
Breaking it down: The Robot Part
Jacques Ellul and the Technological Society
Use vs Reception
"I think that Twitter can be a wonderful tool. It is the tool upon which I inscribed my Robots Soft Exorcism. But Twitter is also can be a broken fire hydrant of sadness and rage."
"I think Ellul said: We speak of a computer as a companion, but a computer is actually a vampire."
"What we do with our screens is what we do with our lives. We are never escaping relationship."
"[Insert Soul Here]"
Philip K. Dick's "disinformation"
Beck: "Don't believe everything you breathe."
Breaking it down: The Exorcism Part
Mob Spirit on January 6
"Sitting with anger until it becomes sadness." (Sarah Mason)
Exorcism as social therapy
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.
U2's "Staring at the Sun": "Armor-plated suits and ties"
"Sometimes when we skip straight to Christ, we skip over Jesus of Nazareth. I'm not saying we all do that whenever we say Christ, but w if I say Christ enough that I'm not thinking about the sermon on the Mount, that I'm not thinking of the red letter words, Christ can become a kind of personal ghost friend who excuses me from my bad behavior."
Divesting ourselves of the power we carry through the world
Claudia Rankin: whiteness as an investment in not-knowing
The centrality of listening
Ellul: "Propaganda is monologue and monologue ends when dialogue begins."
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)
Rage Against the Machine
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 author and cultural critic David Dark
Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
Hosted by Evan Rosa
Production Assistance by Martin Chan, Nathan Jowers, Natalie Lam, and Logan Ledman
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
01 May 2021
Active Mystic: How Wonder Unifies Justice and Spirituality / Sameer Yadav
00:48:04
Which is greater: action or contemplation? Which is more excellent and therefore more central and determinative in human flourishing? A life of action—focused outward in service of humanity and exterior, public, practiced love? Or a life of contemplation—focused inward in reflection and meditation and communion with God, a private, interior castle of wisdom?
You might be quick to point out that it's a false dilemma and of course we need both. But this is quite an old conundrum in both the history of philosophy and the history of Christianity and it continues to find expression in contemporary life as we struggle with the idea of personal morality and social justice.
The world today is as broken a place as ever; individual people are as broken as ever—and what will heal us? Meditation and mindfulness and prayer? Or doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly?
If the answer is in fact both, what unites the contemplative life with active life in your life?
Today on the show, Sameer Yadav joins us for a conversation on mysticism, activism, and wonder. He explains the history of thinking about these jointly necessary elements of human flourishing, understanding the terms in relation to spirituality and contemporary activism, and drawing together two thinkers from different cultures and times: the Cappadocian Father Gregory of Nyssa and the spiritual father of the American Civil Rights movement, Howard Thurman. They share fascinating perspectives on what it means to be human, the need for cooperative caretaking as a reflection of God's relation to the world, and an attentiveness to wonder as a hinge between the contemplative and active life, with lasting implications for everything from interpersonal relationships, to democracy, to ecological care.
Show Notes
“The basic consideration has to do with the removal of all that prevents God from coming to Himself in the life of the individual”
The ‘altar of the heart’ and Thurman’s theology
“Social action is never an end in and of itself. It is for the sake of God's life manifest in oneself”
Which is better, action or contemplation?
Public love? or inwardness, communion with God?
It’s a false question: we need both
The state of the world today: what will heal us?
“Is it meditation and prayer, or doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly? And if the answer is in fact both, what unites contemplative life with active life?”
Mysticism, activism, and wonder
Reflecting on Gregory of Nyssa and Howard Thurman
Cooperative caretaking and attention to wonder
How attention affects everything from relationships, to democracy, to ecological care
The mystic versus the prophet, according to history
“Dispell the idea that they’re at odds”
Luke 10:38, Mary and Martha sitting at the feet of Jesus in contemplation and active service
These have always been seen as two necessary components of a whole Christian life
The relationship between imagining life and responding to it
Gregory of Nyssa, a Christian thinker influenced by Greek philosophy, emphaisized virtue. The way we engage with the world is the way we engage with God.
Howard Thurman, remove all “that prevents God from coming to himself within, in the life of the individual, whatever there is that blocks this, that's what calls for action."
Social work enriches the individual
The alter to God in the community is linked to the alter to God in the individual
Direct experience versus experience mediated by God
“Be a mirror of God’s own relationship to creatures. It’s a form of caretaking”
Seeing humanity as one, as the mystics do, motivates the way we care for the world
“In self-help, attention is getting a lot of attention. The economy of our attention, how what we pay attention is driving our experience of the world”
How do you understand spiritual attention versus social attention?
Attention is not just emotion, it’s virtue. The way we perceive is shaped by the kind of person we are
Wonder versus attention
“Wonder is a kind of interest directed on the final value of a thing, not its usefulness. Final value appears to us as mysterious. It’s also attractive.”
“Wonder is like a hinge between contemplation and action”
Epistemic humility, what can we know about each other?
What does it look like to see the world of injustice through the attentiveness of the mystic?
“Seeing God manifest through the oppressor, not just the oppressed. How the oppressor’s own humanity is distorted and disfigured
The oppressor as morally injured
Forming a moral disposition requires forming a practice.
What are some of those practices?
“The formations of dispositions is not a flash of light and insight, but rather a long slow life of contemplation”
“Cultivation of wonder requires engagement with each other and the natural world. People who work on ecological ethics, it’s through positive engagements with the natural world, through exposure”
Attending to the natural world, rather than getting something done by it”
“Sometimes activism is geared towards creating the opportunity for the attention and engagement that makes contemplation possible”
About Sameer Yadav
Sameer Yadav is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Westmont College and specializes in systematic and philosophical theology, theology and race, and mysticism and religious experience. He is the author of The Problem of Perception and the Experience of God (Fortress Press, 2015), and has published in various journals including The Journal of Analytic Theology, Journal of Religion, Faith and Philosophy and Pro Ecclesia. Dr. Yadav has reading competency in biblical Aramaic, Greek, Hebrew, French and German. He is a member in American Academy of Religion, Society of Christian Philosophers, Society of Christian Ethics, and Society of Scriptural Reasoning.
Production Notes
This podcast featured Sameer Yadav
Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
Hosted by Evan Rosa
Production Assistance by Martin Chan & Nathan Jowers
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
14 Feb 2024
Renovating the Heart of Our Politics / Michael Wear
00:46:08
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
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
01 Jun 2020
The Need to Listen / Miroslav Volf
00:08:31
"Before speaking about victims and to victims I need to listen. We all who are not victims need to listen." In a follow-up to his May 30 response to the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd, Miroslav Volf speaks frankly about the necessity of listening to black perspectives about racism, police brutality, and the history and continuous experience of black suffering.
Exclusion’s specific expression in racism in this country
The book is from the perspective of the victims
Embarking on the difficult journey of embrace
Even when every fiber of their bodies and all the steerings of their souls want to counter violence with violence and exclusion with exclusion”
Miroslav’s home town in Croatia was under siege:
“I wrote the entire book primarily for myself. It's many pages are one lengthy attempt to discern what the integrity of the Christian response looks like when a third of your country gets occupied and thousands of its inhabitants get ethnically cleansed”
Anger and doing what needs to be done
“What I still believe needed to be done was to make a costly journey into what Martin Luther King called the beloved community”
The European colonial project and the inheritance of whiteness
“My whiteness is my privilege”
“Before speaking about victims, I need to listen…We all who are not victims need to listen”
“If I think that I already understand the other and their behavior, I have intellectually closed myself to them”
Betrayal and solidarity
Violent protests spreading across the country in response to the death of George Floyd
“We also failed to speak the name of Briana Taylor. A black woman who was killed by police in her Louisville, Kentucky home in March. These realities require faithful and courageous Christian response much needed exercise in public theology”
Willie Jennings, a professor at Yale and a leading theological voice in this country, will return to the podcast to offer his own commentary on our situation
He will be joined by Carrie Day, a professor of constructive theology and African-American religion at Princeton Theological Seminary
“I invite you to take time, to listen and open yourself up for what they have to say”
06 Nov 2024
Cosmic Connections: Resonating with the World / Charles Taylor & Miroslav Volf
00:54:50
Has modern humanity lost its connection to the world outside our heads? And can our experience of art and poetry help train us for a more elevated resonance with the cosmos?
In today’s episode, theologian Miroslav Volf interviews philosopher Charles Taylor about his latest book, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment. In it he turns to poetry to help articulate the human experience of the cosmos we’re a part of.
Together they discuss the modern Enlightenment view of our relation to the world and its shortcomings; modern disenchantment and the prospects of reenchantment through art and poetry; Annie Dillard and the readiness to experience the world and what it’s always offering; how to hold the horrors of natural life with the transcendent joys; Charles recites some of William Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” and Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “The Windhover”; how to become fully arrested by beauty; and the value we find in human experience of the world.
Production Notes
This podcast featured Charles Taylor and Miroslav Volf
Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
Hosted by Evan Rosa
Production Assistance by Emily Brookfield, Alexa Rollow, Kacie Barrett, and Zoë Halaban
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
17 Oct 2020
Faith 2020: Seeing Christianity in Political Context / Michael Wear & Miroslav Volf
00:48:53
Obama's 2012 director of faith-outreach, Michael Wear, joins theologian Miroslav Volf for a conversation on faith and politics in 2020 and beyond. They discuss the connection between the personal and the political in their own lives; why Christians should care about politics; the public responsibility that comes with democratic citizenship; compromise and personal integrity; the challenge of religious and political identity that converges around the common good; ambivalence and political homelessness; and the important challenge and prospect of finding joy in what is, while hoping for what seems impossible.
Michael Wear is a leading strategist, speaker and practitioner at the intersection of faith, politics and public life. He has advised a president, as well as some of the nation’s leading foundations, non-profits and public leaders, on some of the thorniest issues and exciting opportunities that define American life today. He has argued that the spiritual health and civic character of individuals is deeply tied to the state of our politics and public affairs.
As one of President Obama’s “ambassadors to America’s believers” (Buzzfeed), Michael directed faith outreach for President Obama’s historic 2012 re-election campaign. Michael was also one of the youngest White House staffers in modern American history: he served in the White House faith-based initiative during President Obama’s first term, where he led evangelical outreach and helped manage The White House’s engagement on religious and values issues, including adoption and anti-human trafficking efforts.
Today, Michael is also the founder of Public Square Strategies LLC, a sought-after firm that helps religious organizations, political organizations, businesses and others effectively navigate the rapidly changing American religious and political landscape. Michael previously served as Chief Strategist and member of the executive team for the AND Campaign, and is the co-author of Compassion and Conviction: The AND Campaign’s Guide to Faithful Civic Engagement, alongside Justin Giboney and Christopher Butler.
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 role of faith in the Obama years and how it led to the Trump era. In 2020, Michael was the co-author, alongside Professor Amy Black, of a major report on “Christianity, Pluralism and Public Life in the United States” that was supported by Democracy Fund. 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 is a Senior Fellow at The Trinity Forum, and he 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 Northern Virginia, where they are raising their beloved daughter, Saoirse.
31 Jan 2021
Radical Humility: Forgetting Oneself as a Path to Flourishing
00:41:23
Philosopher Kent Dunnington exposes the radical roots of Christian humility, exploring the centrality of humility to Christian ethics, the goal of humility in eliminating one’s own self-concern, why humility remains so appealing and so appalling, and how to respond to the abuse and weaponizing of humility to oppress. Interview with Evan Rosa.
Join us in taking hold of life that is truly life.
Will you partner with us in helping people envision and pursue lives worthy of our shared humanity?
Radical, entire sanctification and radical expressions of Christianity
Thinking about the virtues
Virtues as a way of thinking about Christian influence on culture
What makes humility a lightening rod?
Self-regard, human weakness and need
Humility: Mark of failure, or a trait that marks right relationship with God?
How human anthropology and human flourishing influences your views of humility
Pagan perspectives on humility
You’d expect that humility would lose its appeal, but many contemporary thinkers continue to laud it
Humility as pro-social, promoting horizontal relationships
Augustinian humility: Humility as central for vertical relationship with God and the gateway to Christian orientation toward the world
Love and humility: The love of God is an offense to pagan sensibilities.
Jesus’s humility as Jesus’s weakness
"We often forget just how deep Jesus’s weakness went… it’s almost like Jesus doesn’t have a self apart from the will of the Father."
"The striking thing about Jesus is that he seems to be free of this whole project of having a self that could be identified over and against someone else."
Definition of radical humility: no-concern about status and entitlements (cf., Roberts and Wood)
Humility as a balancing act between excessive pride and excessive servility
The radical humility of desert mothers and fathers—“they weren’t concerned with defining it, they were concerned with living it."
Abba Macarius and the Unwed Mother—“I discovered I had a wife."
Humiliation and serious critiques of humility as a cover for patriarchy and lauding servility and denigration
Clarifying the horizontal scope of radical humility: Desert mothers and fathers took on radical humility for themselves, not as a guide for leading others.
“If you’re someone who thinks Jesus’s life is the shape of the good life, then it becomes a pressing question: How far am I willing to go? Am I really willing to give up myself in love of other people?"
“Do I really believe that selfless love is the shape of a good human life?"
Resisting the temptation to repackage a safer humility
“Pretty much anytime you find yourself espousing the virtue of humility to someone else, you’re on the wrong track."
“I don’t think we have to be humble, but we can be. It’s a frightening invitation, but if it’s true it’s incredible that we could be freed from our concern to make ourselves significant enough to merit love."
Christianity and power
"I’m wary of turning humility into a virtue that can be leveraged for social gain. I still think of it primarily in terms of something that helps find our way into being creatures."
04 Jun 2022
Eric Gregory / Theology as a Way of Life
00:18:18
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.
About Eric Gregory
Eric Gregory is Professor of Religion at Princeton University. He is the author of Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship (University of Chicago Press, 2008), and articles in a variety of edited volumes and journals, including the Journal of Religious Ethics, Modern Theology, Studies in Christian Ethics, and Augustinian Studies. His interests include religious and philosophical ethics, theology, political theory, law and religion, and the role of religion in public life. In 2007 he was awarded Princeton’s President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching. A graduate of Harvard College, he earned an M.Phil. and Diploma in Theology from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and his doctorate in Religious Studies from Yale University. He has received fellowships from the Erasmus Institute, University of Notre Dame, the Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Harvard University, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and The Tikvah Center for Law & Jewish Civilization at New York University School of Law. Among his current projects is a book tentatively titled, The In-Gathering of Strangers: Global Justice and Political Theology, which examines secular and religious perspectives on global justice. Former Chair of the Humanities Council at Princeton, he also serves on the the editorial board of the Journal of Religious Ethics and sits with the executive committee of the University Center for Human Values.
Show Notes
“Part of the virtue of the humanities, I think, is to kind of dislocate us and to kind of allow us to inhabit different worlds than the ones that we have prior to encountering these texts.”
“There is a kind of healthy way in which unifying or directing the task of theology with respect to a particular vision of that good life that will be fleshed out in different ways by different theologies is one way to find a place for the discourse of theology.”
“Universities are not just places of the production of information, but are also sites where people seek to ask questions about how they should live. And if universities can't do that, it's very difficult in our current culture to find spaces of reflection that allow that possibility.”
“[Universities should have] a desire to shape whole persons and to not just view education as a commodity that we are delivering to customers, but to kind of reconsider what a liberal arts education might look like.”
Production Notes
This podcast featured religious ethicist Eric Gregory and biblical scholar Matt Croasmun
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
16 Oct 2024
Unity in Diversity, Empathic Wisdom / Christy Vines
00:56:20
In our American quest for a more perfect union, we often mistake unity for sameness. We mistake unity for conformity. But the functional unity of a system—seems to actually require diversity, distinction, and difference.
In this episode, Christy Vines (Founder/ CEO, Ideos Institute) reflects on the problem of division today; how we increasingly invest our identity in politics instead of faith or spirituality; humility and privilege; the definition of unity and the assumption of diversity in it; the centrality of empathy; and how to cultivate an empathic wisdom grounded in the life and witness of Christ.
Christy Vines is the founder, President and CEO of Ideos Institute where she leads the organization’s research on the burgeoning field of Empathic Intelligence and its application to the fields of conflict transformation, social cohesion, and social renewal.
Prior to founding Ideos Institute, she was the Senior Vice President for Global Initiatives and Strategy at the Institute for Global Engagement (IGE) where she served as the managing and coordinating lead for the development of strategic institutional partnerships and global initiatives in support of the IGE mission to encourage flourishing societies and stable states, and promote sustainable religious freedom, human rights and the rule of law globally. During her tenure at IGE she helped expand the organization’s Center for Women, Faith & Leadership which supports, equips and convenes religious women peacemakers around the globe.
Christy has held senior roles with the RAND Corporation, where she worked with the RAND Centers for Middle East Public Policy, Asia Pacific Public Policy, Global Risk and Security, and the Center for Justice, Infrastructure, and Environment, finally transitioning to interim project manager for the RAND African First Ladies Initiative (now located at the Bush Presidential Center). Christy also held the role of senior fellow at The American Security Project and served as an advisor to the Carter’s Center’s inaugural Forum onWomen, Religion, Violence and Power.
Christy is a published writer, speaker, and the executive producer of the 2022 documentary film, "Dialogue Lab: America," a moving take on the current state of division and polarization in the U.S. She has appeared on podcasts like Comment Magazine’s “**Whole Person Revolution Podcast”, “**How Do We Fix It” and Bob Goff's “Dream Big Podcast”. She has published numerous articles and op-eds with news outlets and publications, including the **Washington Post, Christianity Today,** and Capital Commentary.
Christy received her Master's Degree in Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy School. She attended both Stanford University and the University of CA, Riverside where she received her B.A. in Sociology and Qualitative Analysis. She currently resides in Pasadena, CA.
Show Notes
Howard Thurman on Unity, Meditations of the Heart (Beacon Press: 1981), 120–121
“Plotinus [205–270 CE] wrote, “If we are in unity with the Spirit, we are in unity with each other, and so we are all one.” (Plotinus, Enneads, VI.5.7.)
Christy Vines’s experience with diversity and unity in her family: differences in faith, race, gender, sexuality, and religion
How Christy Vines came to faith
The problem of division
How neuroscience illuminates scripture and offers insight into empathic wisdom
“There are so many ways to love God.” (David Dark)
How we invest our identity in politics instead of religion
Moral absolutism vs moral relativism
Abdicating our faith identity for a political identity
Technology and relationships
“Loving God differently”
“In the cosmic Christ, you have all of the space you need for the kind of diversity in unity that you're talking about.”
“It's the expectation that in order to work together, we really do have to look exactly the same, that we have to think the same things. That's the only way to collaborate. So until we can get past those of disagreements, there's just no way to work across the aisle. And that is disastrous to the concept of a democracy and the concept of the church.“
“There’s so many ways to be an American. There’s so many ways to be human.”
Humility and privilege
“There is something about desperation and need that brings, that illuminates God's beauty, majesty, and importance in such a powerful way that I think so many of us that are born into plenty will never experience until the other side of heaven.”
The definition of unity: grounded in empathy
“Unity is about finding ways to be the body of Christ with all of our diversity and difference and saying that with humility, Here is my perspective. Here's how I understand God. Here's how I live out my faith. Here's what that might mean culturally or politically and all of the other ways we express our faith. And to be unified means maybe we can all be moving in the same direction on different paths, coming at it from different directions, but recognizing we're all trying to reach the same goal. And that maybe in that shared experience, And that rubbing against one another is, our pastor used to say, heavenly sandpaper, refining one another. We may never be on the exact same path, But over time, you find that we get closer and closer together as we share our lives with one another and we influence each other from a position of trust and care. And that can only be done when we actually show up recognizing with humility that we can learn and benefit from others.”
Empathy and how to build it
Empathic Intelligence Dr. Rosalind Arnold (University of Tasmania)
Empathic intelligence (empathic wisdom) is the lived experience of Jesus
Jesus’s empathy
“Most of the time we take our own understanding of Jesus and try to impose that on somebody without ever knowing their story.”
“What is it like to be you?”
“Why is this so hard to do?”
Jesus and the woman at the well
Asking questions and listening
Empathy is contagious
Vulnerability, openness, and a space of relational trust
(Re)Union Project for Churches—Building unity in the church across lines of difference
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
25 Feb 2021
Willie Jennings's After Whiteness: Belonging, Intimacy, and Resisting White Masculinity / Matt Croasmun
00:09:21
Matt Croasmun honors theologian Willie Jennings and his work in After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging. Willie Jennings is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology and Africana Studies at Yale Divinity School.
White, self-sufficient masculinity: "a way of being that conflates knowing with owning, holding up possession, mastery, and control (vices all) as virtues” and “an ideal we cannot achieve"
Racial paterfamilias: conflating person and property
Beyond education
Mutual belonging and deep connection
Quote from After Whiteness: The cultivation of belonging should be the goal of all education. Not just any kind of belonging, but a profoundly creaturely belonging that performs the returning of the creature to the creator and a returning to an intimate and erotic energy that drives life together with God. These words, intimacy and eroticism, have been so commodified and sexualized that we, Christians have turned away from them and fear that they irredeemably signify sexual antinomianism, moral chaos, and sin, or at least the need to police, such words and the power of they invoke. But intimacy and eroticism speak of our birthright formed in the body of Jesus and the protocols of braking sharing, touching, tasting, and seeing the goodness of God. There at his body, the spirit joins us in an urgent work, forming a willing spirit in us that is eager to hold and to help, to support and to speak, to touch and to listen, gaining through this work, the deepest truths of creaturely belonging: that we are erotic souls. No body that is not a soul, no soul that is not a body, no being without touching, no touching without being. This is not an exclusive Christian truth, but a truth of the creature that Christian life is intended to witness."
Frederica Mathewes-Green / Mary Theotokos: Her Bright Sorrow, Her Suffering Faith, and Her Compassion
01:02:17
"Her hands steadied the first steps of him who steadied the earth to walk upon; her lips helped the Word of God to form his first human words." (St. John of Damascus)
Who is Mary? Why is she called "Theotokos"? Frederica Mathewes-Green, an Eastern Orthodox writer and educator, joins Evan Rosa for a discussion about Mary, the Mother of God. During the first half of the episode, they discuss the Eastern Orthodox reverence for Mary and the scriptural account of her life—from the Annunciation and Nativity, to her parenting of Jesus, through to the Wedding at Cana and witnessing the unimaginable as her son was crucified, died, buried, and risen. In the second half of our conversation, Frederica sheds light on two ancient texts: The Forgotten Gospel of Mary, also known as the Protoevangelium of James, as well as one of the oldest known manuscripts that refer to Mary as Theotokos: a very short prayer scribbled on papyrus, and known as "Sub tuum praesidium" or "Under your compassion." But that's not all, Frederica draws out the beauty of Mary's exemplarity for all Christians, her suffering faith and bright sorrow, the conjoining of humility and magnanimity in her response to God, and so much more.
Magnificat: Every line comes from the psalms, a very classic Jewish understanding of the Messiah as political revolutionary.
Mary's perplexity and expectations about Jesus's role as Messiah
Catacomb of Priscilla in Rome
Simeon's words to Mary: "This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel and to be assigned, that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed. In a sword will pierce your own soul too, and these words from Simeon to Mary, upon presenting Jesus at the temple." (Luke 2:34)
Sin in Eastern Orthodoxy: "It starts with a thought."
Epigraph: "Her hands steadied the first steps of him who steadied the earth to walk upon; her lips helped the Word of God to form his first human words." St. John of Damascus
Jesus's relationship with Mary
The leadership of Mary
The Wedding at Cana
Mary at the Cross
Mary's childhood in the Protoevangelium of James
Mary as a contemplative
Mary's achievement of theosis: "absorbing God" / "union with God"
Annunciation
Mary's anxiety when Jesus was lost at the temple
Bright sorrow in Mary—both dread and joy
Loneliness and autonomy
The practical spiritual benefits of the Protoevangelium of James
Prayer as a medium of communication; sending Mary prayer requests
The earliest prayer to Mary: "Sub tuum praesidium"
"Under your compassion we take refuge Theotokos. Do not overlook our prayers in the midst of tribulation, but deliver us from danger, O only pure, only blessed one."
Coming under the shelter of her protection
Matthew 23:37—"Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones, those who are sent to it, how often have I desired to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her brood under her wings and you were not willing."
Seeking shelter, refuge, and compassion during strident and striving times.
About Frederica Mathewes-Green
Frederica Mathewes-Green is a wide-ranging author who has published 10 books and 800 essays, in such diverse publications as the Washington Post, Christianity Today, Smithsonian, and the Wall Street Journal. She has been a regular commentator for National Public Radio (NPR), a columnist for the Religion News Service, Beliefnet.com, and a podcaster for Ancient Faith Radio. (She was also a consultant for Veggie Tales.) She has appeared as a speaker over 600 times, at places like Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Wellesley, Cornell, Calvin, Baylor, and Westmont, and received a Doctor of Letters (honorary) from King University. She lives with her husband, the Rev. Gregory Mathewes-Green, in Johnson City, TN. Their three children are grown and married, and they have fifteen grandchildren.
Production Notes
This podcast featured Mathewes-Green
Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
Hosted by Evan Rosa
Production Assistance by Martin Chan, Nathan Jowers, Natalie Lam, and Logan Ledman
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
21 Nov 2024
Letters to a Future Saint / Brad East & Drew Collins
00:54:00
“For those of us who are drawn into church history and church tradition and to reading theology, there is very little as transformative as realizing that history is populated by women and men like us who tried to follow Christ in their own time and place and culture and circumstances, some of whom succeeded. … Looking at the saints, they make me want to be a better Christian. They make me want to be a saint.” (Brad East, from the episode)
In his recent book, Letters to a Future Saint: Foundations of Faith for the Spiritually Hungry, theologian Brad East addresses future generations of the Church, offering a transmission of Christian faith from society today to society tomorrow. Written as a fellow pilgrim and looking into the lives of saints in the past, he’s writing to that post-literate, post-Christian society, where the highest recommendation of faith is in the transformed life.
Today, Drew Collins welcomes Brad East to the show, and together they discuss: the importance of being passed and passing on Christian faith—its transmission; the post-literacy of digital natives (Gen Z and Gen Alpha) and the role of literacy in the acquisition and development of faith; the significance of community in a vibrant Christian faith; the question of apologetics and its effectiveness as a mode of Christian discourse; the need for beauty and love, not just truth, in Christian witness; how to talk about holiness in a world that believes less and less in the reality of sin; the difference between Judas and Peter; and what it means to study the saints and to be a saint.
About Brad East
Brad East (PhD, Yale University) is an associate professor of theology in the College of Biblical Studies at Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas. In addition to editing Robert Jenson’s The Triune Story: Collected Essays on Scripture (Oxford University Press, 2019), he is the author of four books: The Doctrine of Scripture (Cascade, 2021), The Church’s Book: Theology of Scripture in Ecclesial Context (Eerdmans, 2022), The Church: A Guide to the People of God (Lexham, 2024), and Letters to a Future Saint: Foundations of Faith for the Spiritually Hungry (Eerdmans, 2024).His articles have been published in Modern Theology, International Journal of Systematic Theology, Scottish Journal of Theology, Journal of Theological Interpretation, Anglican Theological Review, Pro Ecclesia, Political Theology, Religions, Restoration Quarterly, and The Other Journal; his essays and reviews have appeared in The Christian Century, Christianity Today, Comment, Commonweal, First Things, Front Porch Republic, The Hedgehog Review, Living Church, Los Angeles Review of Books, Marginalia Review of Books, Mere Orthodoxy, The New Atlantis, Plough, and The Point. You can found out more, including links to his writing, podcast appearances, and blog, on his personal website: https://www.bradeast.org/.
The importance of being passed and passing on Christian faith—its transmission
Spencer Bogle, the reason Brad East is a theologian
The post-literacy of Gen Z and Gen Alpha and the role of literacy in the acquisition and development of faith
The question of apologetics and its effectiveness as a mode of Christian discourse
The need for beauty and love, not just truth, in Christian witness
Christianity pre-exists you, and pre-existed literate society. So it can survive post-literacy
Tik-Tok and getting off it
“We have to have a much broader vision of the Christian life.”
The Doctrine of Scripture, by Brad East, Foreword by Katherine Sonderegger
Cartesian Christianity: me alone in a room, maybe with a flashlight and a bible
Spiritual but not religious (H/T Tara Isabella Burton)
We’re not saved individually
Alice in Wonderland and “believing 17 absurd things every day”
Is Christian apologetics sub-intellectual and effective?
Gavin Ortlund, taking seriously spiritual and moral questions with pastoral warmth and intellectual integrity—”a ministry of Q&A”
Bishop Robert Barron and William Lane Craig
“People are not going to be won to the faith through argument. They're going to be won by beauty.”
Beauty of lives well-lived, integrity, virtue, and martyrdom
“What lies beyond this world is available in part in this world and so good it's worth dying for.”
Is Christian apologetics actually for Christians, rather than evangelism?
“A person’s life can be an apologetic argument.”
James K.A. Smith: “We don’t want to be brains on sticks.”
“You’re just going to look bizarre.”
“Come and see. … If you see something unique or uniquely powerful here, then stick around.”
Saintliness and a cloud of witnesses
Why do the saints matter?
The protagonist of Augustine’s Confessions is actually St. Monica.
“I want to be like Monica…”
“For those of us who are drawn into church history and church tradition and to reading theology, there is very little as transformative as realizing that history is populated by women and men like us who tried to follow Christ in their own time and place and culture and circumstances, some of whom succeeded. … Looking at the saints, they make me want to be a better Christian. They make me want to be a saint.”
How to talk about holiness in a world that believes less and less in the reality of sin.
Is holiness just connected to purity culture?
Holiness is very difficult to describe.
Hauerwas: “Humans aren’t holy. Only God is holy.”
Holiness as being like God and being set apart and conformed to his likeness
Holiness is, by rights, God’s alone.
Appreciating the “everyday saints” among us
Sanctification as an utterly passive act
The final words of Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict), “Jesus, ich liebe dich!” (”Jesus, I love you.”)
Peter and Judas
Lucy Shaw poem, “Judas, Peter” (see below)
“There is a way to fail as a Christian. It’s to despair of the possibility of Christ forgiving you.”
What it means to journey as a pilgrim towards holiness is, is not to get everything right.
Shusaku Endo, Silence
“What I say is we're all Kichichiro. We're all Peter and Judas. We're all bad Christians. There are no good Christians.”
Kester Smith and returning to baptism
“Sometimes it might be difficult for me to believe that God loves me.”
“Judas, Peter”
by Lucy Shaw
because we are all betrayers, taking silver and eating body and blood and asking (guilty) is it I and hearing him say yes it would be simple for us all to rush out and hang ourselves
but if we find grace to cry and wait after the voice of morning has crowed in our ears clearly enough to break out hearts he will be there to ask us each again do you love me?
Production Notes
This podcast featured Brad East & Drew Collins
Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
Hosted by Evan Rosa
Production Assistance by Zoë Halaban, Alexa Rollow, Emily Brookfield, and Kacie Barrett
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
15 May 2023
Tolerating Doubt & Ambiguity: Psychological Tools to Deal with Uncertainty and Deconversion / Elizabeth Hall on Bringing Psychology to Theology
00:45:02
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.
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
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
19 Sep 2022
Adam Eitel / Character As Authority: Theology as a Lived, Embodied Experience
00:26:04
"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
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
18 Jul 2020
N.T. Wright on Weeping, Waiting, and Working with God in the Pandemic / Miroslav Volf and N.T. Wright
00:53:01
Miroslav Volf interviews N.T. Wright about his latest book, God and the Pandemic: A Christian Reflection on the Coronavirus and Its Aftermath. They discuss: Jesus, the God who weeps; the problem with focusing on rational responses to the problem of evil rather than empathic presence and action; the proper translation of Romans 8:28 (hint, it’s not “All things work together for good to those who love God"); waiting for God through the crises of human life; the patience of unknowing; lament as a way of hoping in the dark; Friedrich Nietzsche on our tendency to misinterpret the pain and secret sorrows of others; and finally, the resurrection of Jesus as the center for conquering suffering even in the midst of suffering. This episode also includes a brief remembrance of Congressman John Lewis (1940-2020).
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.
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
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
19 Jun 2024
Black Motherhood: Love & Resistance / Kelly Brown Douglas
00:27:34
“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
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
“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
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.”
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.
29 Mar 2021
You Do You: Ethics of Authenticity in Disney's Frozen and Moana / Matt Croasmun and Ryan McAnnally-Linz
00:47:47
Enroll now for our 7-week Life Worth Living Course through Grace Farms: http://gracefarms.org/life-worth-living. The course runs from May 4 to June 15, and we expect it to fill up quickly, so don’t wait to sign up!
One of the most prominent visions of the good life present in Disney films could be called "expressive individualism," perhaps best captured by the phrase "you do you." In this episode Ryan McAnnally-Linz and Matt Croasmun interpret and unpack the ethics of the authentic self, belonging, and the implicit visions of flourishing life in two contemporary classics from Disney: Frozen and Moana.
Support the For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
Show Notes
Who is my most authentic self? How can I become who I truly am?
“But freedom as ruleless-ness is too shallow a reading”
In becoming her authentic self, Elsa knows she is at risk of hurting Ana
Elsa is saved by Ana’s love, which allows her to have her powers without hurting anyone
Resolution is not isolation
Every child belting ‘Let It Go’ is missing part of the resolution
Our society tells the movie: “just be yourself, other people be damned,” missing the emphasis on love and acceptance of each other
Frozen stands in a line of post-modern reinterpretations of fables that celebrate the villain
Elsa was supposed to be the villain, but ‘Let it Go’ was so humanizing they changed the story
The Nietzschean impulse to discard moral framework
Elsa is expressing her ‘will to power’ when she sings, " No wrong, no right, no rules for me"
By making the villain the hero, the writers get beyond good and evil
The recovery of the pre-modern moralist villain
Turning to Moanna:
Moanna discovers that her true self is in tension with the way of her people. She wants to travel, but her people say, “The island gives us what we need”
When she learns that her people are actually voyagers, it draws her into relationship with her grandmother
We know what she means when she belts, ‘I am Moanna”
Taylor calls it ‘The Horizon of Significance:’ he wants to celebrate particularity, without an overemphasis on difference
What matters can’t just be random. You must give an account
The cosmology of Moanna: taking the power of nature and giving it to humans
Moanna provides an account for how magic relates to its cosmology, where Frozen’s magic comes out of nowhere
Our choices should be free and also meaningful
Frozen highlights the dignity of the return to ordinary life, whereas in Moanna, all of life is transformed into adventure. This is the heroic life. “To be truly human is to aim for something that is beyond the ordinary life” - Matt Croasman
“But what about the Hobbits!” – Ryan McAnnally-Linz
How these stories charm and influence our theology must include a critical look at the culture we are inside of
“None of us are in a vacuum.” Film as a stream of meaning that we’re already swimming in
“At the end of the day, ‘you do you’, is the thin way of finding our way into a ‘thicker meaning:’ how to live as the individual whom God created”
04 Sep 2021
Ryan McAnnally-Linz and Evan Rosa / Courage, Control, Kairos Time, and Roasting S'mores as an Exercise in Patience / Patience Coda
00:51:39
You can't just chatter about patience. If patience moderates our sorrows, then it's ultimately a deeper spiritual virtue that can't be instrumentalized to feel better—it's more deeply connected to a joy and hope that recognizes to what and to whom we are in demand, to whom we're responsible, brings closer attention to the present moment, and acknowledges our limitations and lack of control. In this episode, Ryan McAnnally-Linz and Evan Rosa review and reflect on the six episodes that made up our series on patience: why it’s so hard, what’s good about it, and how we might cultivate it.
These six episodes explored patience in its theological, ethical, and psychological context, offering cultural and social diagnosis of our modern predicament with patience, defining the virtue in its divine and human contexts, and then considering the practical cultivation of patience as a way of life.
This series featured interviews with Andrew Root (Luther Seminary), Kathryn Tanner (Yale Divinity School), Paul Dafydd Jones (University of Virginia), Adam Eitel (Yale Divinity School), Sarah Schnitker (Baylor University), and Tish Harrison Warren (priest, author, and New York Times columnist).
Show Notes
Moderating sorrows
James 5:7: "Be patient therefore beloved until the coming of the Lord. The farmer waits for the precious crop from the earth, being patient with it, until it receives the early and the late rains. You also must be patient. Strengthen your hearts. For the coming of the Lord is near."
The patient way to make a s'more
An unexpected s'mores tutorial
Kairos vs Chronos: often overdone, it applies when you're talking about patience.
Time with kids at bed time is incommensurate with work productivity time; comparing the two is a category mistake.
"One of the things that these conversations about patients had had started to clue me into was the importance of being attuned to the proper activity or thing for which this time is—a less uniform account of time that says for instance, you know, the bedtime routine with my children that time is for that. And so thinking of it as somehow commensurate with work productivity time would be a category mistake of a sort. It would be an unfaithfulness. And so that impatience derives from a lack of attentiveness to the temporal texture of our lives in really relation to God." (Ryan)
There can be "patient hurry"
Patience is like audio compression: it sets a threshold that is sensitive to the sorrow in our life and moderates or mitigates it.
Episode summaries
Patience Part 1, Andy Root: "To say that I'm busy is to indicate that I'm in demand."
Feeling busy = feeling important
Recognition
Attending to the present, accepting a different form of "being in demand."
Patience Part 2, Kathy Tanner: "There's no profit in waiting."
Connecting economy to patience.
"Something has to hold firm in order for you to take risks."
Stability and the steadfast love of God.
Patience Part 3, Paul Dafydd Jones: "The Psalms of lament and complaint can get, as we know, incredibly dark, incredibly bleak. One operation of divine patience could be that God gives ancient Israel the time and space to accuse God. God is patient with expressions of trauma, expressions of guilt, expressions of deep anguish. And God is so patient with them that they get included in the Canon. Like, some of the most powerful, skeptical, doubtful, angry moments are found in the Psalms. So God's letting be at this moment and letting happen includes within it God's honoring of grief and trauma, such that those moments become part of the scriptures."
Psalms of complaint
Psychologist Julie Exline on anger with God
Anger with God is consistent with patience
Patience Part 4, Adam Eitel: "Moderating sorrow is not to suppress it or develop an affected callousness or disenchanted, jaded relation to the things one really loves."
It's hard to chatter about patience.
Patience and joy
Patience Part 5, Sarah Schnitker: Identify, Imagine, and Sync
Normativity and a truer cognitive reappraisal of one's emotional state
Patience Part 6, Tish Harrison Warren: "God intended man to have all good, but in his, God's, time and therefore all disobedience, all sin consists essentially in breaking out of time. Hence the restoration of order by the Son of God had to be the annulment of that premature snatching at knowledge, the beating down of the hand, outstretched toward eternity, the repentant return from a false, swift transfer of eternity to a true, slow confinement in time. Hence the importance of patience in the New Testament, which becomes the basic constituent of Christianity. More central, even the humility, the power to wait, to persevere, to hold out, to endure to the end, not to transcend one's own limitations, not to force issues by playing the hero or the titan, but to practice the virtue that lies beyond heroism: the meekness of the Lamb which is led."
Control and Meekness: Meekness is controlled strength
Production Notes
This podcast featured Ryan McAnnally-Linz and Evan Rosa
Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
Hosted by Evan Rosa
Production Assistance by Martin Chan & Nathan Jowers
Creatures are given time and space to "reward God's patience"
This is not God getting out of the way; it's non-competitive between God and world.
Colin Gunton: for the problem of evil, God's patience is a good place to start.
"God's patience occurs at a pace that is rarely congenial to us ... the world's history is not unfolding at the pace or the shape we would like."
"God gives ancient Israel the time and space to accuse. God is patient with expressions of trauma, expressions of guilt, expressions of deep anguish. And God is so patient with them that they get included in the Canon."
"Some of the most powerful, skeptical, doubtful, angry moments, are found in the psalms."
"God patiently beholds the suffering of God's creatures, particularly with respect to ancient Israel, that somehow the traumas of creaturely life are present to God, and God in some sense has to bear or endure them."
Beholding Suffering vs Enduring Suffering
God's responsibility for the entirety of the cosmos: "There's no getting God off the hook for things that happen in God's universe."
And yet God doesn't approve of everything that occurs.
Confident expectancy: "Moving to meet the kingdom that is coming towards us."
"God's patience empowers us to act."
The patience of God incarnate; Christ is patience incarnate
"Israel is waiting for a Messiah."
We cannot understand Christ as savior of the world without understanding him as Messiah of ancient Israel.
God's solidarity with us
"The pursuit of salvation runs through togetherness with creation in the deepest possible sense."
Letting Be vs Letting Happen
"Jesus has to negotiate the quotidian."
Crucifixion as the one moment of divine impatience with sin
Theology of the cross as an imperative
"Christians often are not comfortable with complexity. We want to think in terms of assurance. And we want that assurance to be comforting in a fairly quick-fire away. I think theologians have the task of exposing that as an ersatz hope and insisting that faith includes complexity. It involves lingering over ambiguity. Trying to fit together. multi-dimensional beliefs that are this lattice work—none of which can be reduced to a pithy, marketing quip."
"Theologians need to be patient in order to honor the complexity of Christian faith. ... That's called intellectual responsibility."
"Christianity is not going to cease to be weaponized by snake-oil salespeople."
Staying with complexity and ambiguity
"The capacity to tell the truth is in short supply."
"Human beings are called to respond to God's patience. Human beings are called to make good on God's patience. The covenant of grace, which is fulfilled in Christ and which is animated by the spirit, makes that a possibility. It's not an easy possibility of real life. I mean, not just because of sin and finitude, but because of the complexities of the world that we live in. But learning how to respond to God's patience, both through forms of waiting, through forms of activity, and sometimes through moments of intemperate resistance is I think at the heart of Christian life."
"People should not get in the way of human flourishing ... brought about by the empowering patience of the Holy Spirit. ... That's a gospel moment. That's a kairos moment."
Part 4 Show Notes: Adam Eitel
The context for Thomas Aquinas and his friars
"The friars are on the verge of being canceled."
What is a virtue? "To have them is to have a kind of excellence and to be able to do excellent things."
Where does patience fit in the virtues?
Matter and Object
The matter of a virtue is the thing it's about, and the matter of patience is sorrow.
Sorrow can have right or wrong objects and can be excessive or deficient.
Sorrow is elicited by evil, that is, the diminishment of good.
Patience is a moderating virtue for the passions, similar to courage.
Patience is connected to fortitude or courage in moderating our response to "the saddest things."
"Patience moderates or constrains sorrow, so that it doesn't go beyond its proper limit. When we become too absorbed in trouble or woe, alot of other things start to go wrong. That's what Gregory the Great called patience the guardian of the virtues. .... deteriorate." (or to ... guardian of the virtues in that sense.")
What does it feel like to be patient on this account?
You can't experience patience without experiencing joy.
"Joy is the antithesis of sorrow. Its remedy."
Remedies: Take a bath, go to sleep, drink some wine, talk to a friend ... and at the top of the list is contemplation of God.
Contemplation for Aquinas: prayer, chanting psalms, drawing one's mind to the presence of God.
Experientia Dei—taste and see
"This is scandalous to most virtue theorists ... but you can't have patience, or at least not much of it, without contemplation."
"Moderating sorrow is not to suppress it or develop an affected callousness or disenchanted, jaded relation to the things one really loves."
"Patience never means ignoring or turning away from the thing that's genuinely sorrowful."
Diminishment of sorrow by nesting it among the many other goods.
Modulate one's understanding of the thing that's sorrowful.
The sorrow of losing a child
You can only write about it from inside of it.
What is it? "Beneath the agitation, some kind of low grade anger, is there some sorrow? What has been lost? What have I been wanting that is not here? What's beneath the anger? What is it?"
What scripture anchors you? "Find that scripture that anchors you in patience, and let it become yours. Let God speak to you through it.
Part 5 Show Notes: Sarah Schnitker
This episode was made possible in part by a grant from Blueprint 1543.
Why study patience from a psychological perspective?
Daily hassles patience, interpersonal patience, and life hardships patience
Measuring patience is easier than measuring love, joy, or gratitude, because it isn’t as socially valued in contemporary life
How virtue channels toward different goals
Patience can help you achieve your goals by helping you regulate emotion, allowing you to stay calm, making decisions, persist through difficulties
Patience and the pursuit of justice
Patience and assertiveness
“If you’re a doormat, it’s not because you are patient, it’s because you lack assertiveness."
Aristotelian "Golden Mean” thinking: neither recklessly pushing through or giving up and disengaging. Patience allows you to pursue the goal in an emotionally stable way
Unity of the virtues: “We need a constellation of virtues for a person to really flourish in this world."
Golden Mean, excess, deficiency, too much and too little
Acedia and Me, Kathleen Norris on a forgotten vice
Acedia in relationship: “Even in the pandemic… monotony…"
The overlapping symptoms of acedia and depression
Patience is negatively correlated with depression symptoms; people with more life-hardships patience is a strength that helps people cope with some types of depression
Patience and gratitude buffer against ultimate struggles with existential meaning and suicide risk
How do you become more patient?
“It requires patience to become more patient."
Three Step Process for becoming more patient: Identify, Imagine, and Sync
Step 1: Identify your emotional state. Patience is not suppression; it begins with attention and noticing—identifying what’s going on.
Step 2: Cognitive reappraisal: one of the most effective ways to regulate our emotions. Think about your own emotions from another person’s perspective, or in light of the bigger picture. Take each particular situation and reappraise it.
Find benefits. Turn a curse into a blessing. Find opportunities.
Step 3: Sync with your purpose. Create a narrative that supports the meaning of suffering. For many this is religious faith
Reappraising cognitive reappraisal: How convinced do you have to be? You’d have to find something with “epistemic teeth”—is this something you can rationally endorse and know, and can you feel it?
Combining patience and gratitude practices, allowing for multiple emotions at once, and reimagining and reappraising one's life within your understanding of purpose and meaning.
Provide psychological distance to attenuate emotional response.
The existential relevance of faith for patience; theological background of patience
Patience and a life worth living
Love, the unity of the virtues, and "the longsuffering of our Lord is salvation" (2 Peter 3)
Part 6 Show Notes: Tish Harrison Warren
"Part of becoming more patient is noticing how impatient you are. ... It's so not-linear."
Kids will slow you down and expose your impatience
Patience often looks like other things—"it looks like contentment, it looks like trust, it looks like endurance."
Patience and humility: "We are not the President of the United States. Things can go on without us."
"Our entire life is lived in a posture of waiting."
Waiting for the eschaton, the return of Christ, and things set right
The illusion of control—James 4:13-14
Has Urs Von Balthasar: "God intended man to have all good, but in his, God's, time and therefore all disobedience, all sin consists essentially in breaking out of time. Hence the restoration of order by the Son of God had to be the annulment of that premature snatching at knowledge, the beating down of the hand, outstretched toward eternity, the repentant return from a false, swift transfer of eternity to a true, slow confinement in time. Hence the importance of patience in the New Testament, which becomes the basic constituent of Christianity. More central, even the humility, the power to wait, to persevere, to hold out, to endure to the end, not to transcend one's own limitations, not to force issues by playing the hero or the titan, but to practice the virtue that lies beyond heroism: the meekness of the Lamb which is led."
"We are creatures in time."
Robert Wilken: "singular mark of patience is hope"
Activism and patience together
"Patience can get a bad rap, that Christians are just wanting to become bovine."
Patience but not quietism, a long wait but not gradualism
The ultimate need to discern the moment
Clarence Jordan and Martin Luther King Jr.
The practices of discernment for individuals and communities
Social media trains us to be impatient
The meaning of urgent change is changing
Internet advocacy and a connected world makes us less patient people
"It takes real work to slow down and listen to another person's perspective, especially if you disagree with them."
We often don't have the patience to even understand someone else.
Real conversations with real people
Silence, solitude
"Having a body requires an enormous amount of patience."
"My kids are so slow. They're the one's teaching me to be patient!"
Little hardships of boredom and discomfort
"Life with a body and life with real people inevitably involves patience."
"Patience is something we learn our way out of through privilege and through being, you know, important adults."
12 Sep 2020
The Home and Homelessness of God / Miroslav Volf and Drew Collins
00:32:20
In this episode, Miroslav Volf and Drew Collins discuss home as a source of joy and humanity; the way we organize and order our homes for hospitality; and the homelessness of God and what that means for humanity.
For many, the first thought of home is the threat of its negation: homelessness. Still others think of the stress and anxiety—sometimes even at life-threatening levels—of being at home. For some home is grounding, a place of safety and growth, it is embrace. For others, home is hostile, unsafe and risky, it is exclusionary. This episode features discussions of:
The theological and moral significance of home
The meaning of Jesus's homelessness
Marie Kondo's philosophy of joy and home organization
Dorothy Day's voluntary poverty and "personal maximalism"
Home as a place for embrace, joy, and care
10 Apr 2021
Passionate God, Crucified God, Joyful God / Jürgen Moltmann & Miroslav Volf
00:36:18
"Without living theologically, there can be no theology." (Jürgen Moltmann)
Miroslav Volf interviews his mentor, German theologian Jürgen Moltmann, who reflects on the meaning of joy and its connection to anxiety, fear, wrath, hope, and love.
Moltmann tells his story of discovering (or, being discovered by) God 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."
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
30 May 2023
Made for Relationships: The Sacred Responsibilities of Marriage and Parenting / Mari Clements on Bringing Psychology to Theology
00:35:28
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)
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
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.
15 Oct 2022
Fostering the Knowledge and Love of God / Yale Divinity School Bicentennial
00:43:59
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)
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
21 Aug 2024
Poverty / Rev. William Barber & Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
00:40:40
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.
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
12 Feb 2025
The Psychology of Disaster: The Impact of Calamity on Mental, Emotional, and Spiritual Health / Jamie Aten and Pam King
00:58:28
Disaster preparedness is sort of an oxymoron. Disaster is the kind of indiscriminate calamity that only ever finds us ill-equipped to manage. And if you are truly prepared, you’ve probably averted disaster.
There’s a big difference between the impact of disaster on physical, material life—and its outsized impact on mental, emotional, and spiritual life.
Personal disasters like a terminal illness, natural disasters like the recent fires that razed southern Californian communities, the impact of endless, senseless wars … these all cause a pain and physical damage that can be mitigated or rebuilt. But the worst of these cases threaten to destroy the very meaning of our lives.
No wonder disaster takes such a psychological and spiritual toll. There’s an urgent need to find or even make meaning from it. To somehow explain it, justify why God would allow it, and tell a grand story that makes sense from the senseless.
These are difficult questions, and my guests today both have personal experience with disaster. Dr. Pam King is the Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science at Fuller School of Psychology, and the Executive Director the Thrive Center. She’s an ordained Presbyterian minister, and she hosts a podcast on psychology and spirituality called With & For. Dr. Jamie Aten is a disaster psychologist and disaster ministry expert, helping others navigate mass, humanitarian, and personal disasters with scientific and spiritual insights. He is the Founder and Executive Director of the Humanitarian Disaster Institute Wheaton College, where he holds the Blanchard Chair of Humanitarian & Disaster Leadership. He is author of *A Walking Disaster: What Surviving Katrina and Cancer Taught Me about Faith and Resilience.*
In this conversation, Pam King and Jamie Aten join Evan Rosa to discuss:
Each of their personal encounters with disasters—both fire and cancer
The psychological study of disaster
The personal impact of disaster on mental, emotional, and spiritual health
The difference between resilience and fortitude
And the theological and practical considerations for how to live through disastrous events.
About Pam King
Pam King is Executive Director the Thrive Center and is Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science at Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy. She hosts the With & For podcast, and you can follow her @drpamking.
About Jamie Aten
Jamie D. Aten is a disaster psychologist and disaster ministry expert. He helps others navigate mass, humanitarian, and personal disasters with scientific and spiritual insights. He is the Founder and Executive Director of the Humanitarian Disaster Institute and Disaster Ministry Conference and holds the Blanchard Chair of Humanitarian & Disaster Leadership at Wheaton College. And he’s the author of *A Walking Disaster: What Surviving Katrina and Cancer Taught Me about Faith and Resilience.*
Place and spirituality and the impact of disaster on sense of place
Bethlehem pastor Munther Isaac’s “Christ in the Rubble”
Finding meaning in both the restructuring or rebuilding, but also in the rubble itself
Hope embodied in service
Everything is a cognitive load
Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz’s The Home of God: A Brief Story of Everything
Psychological and trauma-informed care
”One of the things that we found was that when people received positive spiritual support, that they reported lower levels of trauma, lower levels of depression and lower levels of anxiety.”
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
14 Aug 2021
Adam Eitel / Constraining Sorrow, Contemplating Joy / Patience Part 4
00:30:41
"So here's a fact of human life. We have sorrow and, in many ways, That's neither here nor there, neither good nor bad, but we know intuitively that there are ways in which our sorrow can become excessive or misplaced.What the virtue of patience does is it moderates sorrow or constrains it, so it doesn't go beyond its proper limit. When we become too absorbed in trouble and woe, a lot of other things start to go wrong and that's why someone like Gregory the Great called patience the guardian of the virtues, because sorrow, if it's not checked, can easily devolve into anger, hatred, and fear. ... What it means to moderate sorrow isn't to suppress it, or to develop some kind of affected callousness or disenchanted, jaded relation to the things that one actually really loves."
"You'll discover really quickly that you can't think about patience—you can't experience patience—without thinking about and experiencing joy. Joy is the antithesis of sorrow—its remedy."
Though it's tempting to think patience is a correction for hurry, busyness, scarcity of time, and haste, it's ultimately about managing your sorrow. Adam Eitel is an ethicist at Yale Divinity School who specializes in the thought of Thomas Aquinas. In this episode, he reflects on the human side of the virtue of patience and its place in the moral life—examining how it moderates our passions and responses to sorrow, finding surprising connections between patience, joy, and contemplation, and opening up toward an experiential theology that must comment on patience only from inside the struggle to receive it.
Part 4 of a 6-episode series on Patience, hosted by Ryan McAnnally-Linz.
Show Notes
The context for Thomas Aquinas and his friars
"The friars are on the verge of being canceled."
What is a virtue? "To have them is to have a kind of excellence and to be able to do excellent things."
Where does patience fit in the virtues?
Matter and Object
The matter of a virtue is the thing it's about, and the matter of patience is sorrow.
Sorrow can have right or wrong objects and can be excessive or deficient.
Sorrow is elicited by evil, that is, the diminishment of good.
Patience is a moderating virtue for the passions, similar to courage.
Patience is connected to fortitude or courage in moderating our response to "the saddest things."
"Patience moderates or constrains sorrow, so that it doesn't go beyond its proper limit. When we become too absorbed in trouble or woe, alot of other things start to go wrong. That's what Gregory the Great called patience the guardian of the virtues. .... deteriorate." (or to ... guardian of the virtues in that sense.")
What does it feel like to be patient on this account?
You can't experience patience without experiencing joy.
"Joy is the antithesis of sorrow. Its remedy."
Remedies: Take a bath, go to sleep, drink some wine, talk to a friend ... and at the top of the list is contemplation of God.
Contemplation for Aquinas: prayer, chanting psalms, drawing one's mind to the presence of God.
Experientia Dei—taste and see
"This is scandalous to most virtue theorists ... but you can't have patience, or at least not much of it, without contemplation."
"Moderating sorrow is not to suppress it or develop an affected callousness or disenchanted, jaded relation to the things one really loves."
"Patience never means ignoring or turning away from the thing that's genuinely sorrowful."
Diminishment of sorrow by nesting it among the many other goods.
Modulate one's understanding of the thing that's sorrowful.
The sorrow of losing a child
You can only write about it from inside of it.
What is it? "Beneath the agitation, some kind of low grade anger, is there some sorrow? What has been lost? What have I been wanting that is not here? What's beneath the anger? What is it?"
What scripture anchors you? "Find that scripture that anchors you in patience, and let it become yours. Let God speak to you through it.
About Adam Eitel
Adam Eitel is Assistant Professor of Ethics at Yale Divinity School. He focuses his research and teaching on the history of Christian moral thought, contemporary social ethics and criticism, and modern religious thought. Dr. Eitel has roughly a dozen books, chapters, edited volumes, and articles published or in progress. These include an ethical analysis of drone strikes and a theological account of domination. His current book project explores the role of love in the moral theology of Thomas Aquinas. A 2004 Baylor University graduate and a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Fribourg, Dr. Eitel received his M.Div. and Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary, completing the latter in 2015.
Production Notes
This podcast featured theologians Adam Eitel and Ryan McAnnally-Linz
Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
Hosted by Evan Rosa
Production Assistance by Martin Chan & Nathan Jowers
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
10 Jun 2023
Human Uniqueness & the Imago Dei: Clues for Flourishing in Our Biological Niche / Justin Barrett on Bringing Psychology to Theology
00:50:15
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.
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
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.
23 Dec 2023
Advent Love: Prayer, Trauma, & the Loving Gaze of Christ / Bo Karen Lee
00:22:17
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
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
25 Apr 2020
The Art of Living and Dying During COVID-19 / Lydia Dugdale, MD
00:44:00
For the Life of the World is produced by the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. For more info, visit faith.yale.edu
Dr. Lydia Dugdale, MD is a New York City internal medicine primary care doctor and medical ethicist. She is Associate Professor of Medicine and Director of the Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at Columbia University. Prior to her 2019 move to Columbia, she was the Associate Director of the Program for Biomedical Ethics and founding Co-Director of the Program for Medicine, Spirituality, and Religion at Yale School of Medicine. She edited Dying in the Twenty-First Century, a volume that articulates a bioethical framework for a contemporary art of dying, and is author of The Lost Art of Dying: Reviving Forgotten Wisdom(forthcoming from HarperCollins Summer 2020), a book about a mostly forgotten ethical tradition and text that emerged in response to the Black Plague in the late middle ages: Ars Moriendi, “the art of dying.”
-1:10 Drew Collins: introduction to the episode.
-1:15 Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night by Dylan Thomas; hear it read by the author here.
-2:05 Drew’s introduction of Dr. Lydia Dugdale.
-3:18 Beginning of their conversation.
-4:00 Lydia’s experience of the current pandemic: "Every face is a new face ... we’re starting from scratch with everyone... What’s different right now, is that we’re managing sick people without the opportunity to get to know them or their families … we are largely monitoring by computer screens, so we’re really missing out on the human connection.”
-5:35 The impact of the lack of human connection on healthcare providers: the situation is dehumanizing for patients and the doctor-patient relationship.
-7:34 The meaning of moral injury and the impact of COVID-19 on doctors and healthcare workers’ mental health: comparing military front lines to healthcare front lines.
-8:05 Lydia: “But what we’ve experienced in New York is actually far less than what we anticipated.”
-8:32 “When you are working really hard to save people’s lives but they aren’t really human in the way that we usually think of doctor’s relating to patients. And I don’t want to suggest that the doctors are dehumanizing the patients but the situation is so dehumanizing.”
-9:45 Explication of the term “moral injury”.
-13:10 The unsung heroism of essential workers in NYC, already living at the brink of economic peril.
-14:20 Lydia describes her own personal fears:
-15:05 The non-stop nature of the pandemic impact in NYC. Never-ending ambulance sirens, refrigerated mobile morgues around the city; lack of attention on public school children and the educational impact and the importance of public schools. "We have children who are going hungry because they are dependent on school to eat”; shuttering small businesses, because closing doors for a month is impossible.
-17:20 Lydia on the macro-picture of the health-effects of the economic downturn; human flourishing.
-18:19 Lydia shares an unpopular, but important view: How the current moment of covid-19 could change the conversation about human finitude, acceptance of our mortality, and the need to prepare for our deaths.
-21:25 Ars Moriendi—the art of dying, which has been lost in modern America.
-22:26 Lydia explains how her interests in Ars Moriendi were sparked--Lydia’s grandfather’s brushes with death, her family’s frank conversations about the reality of death, and her experiences of other people dying while completing her medical residency.
-25:39 “What struck me about the Ars Moriendi (art of dying) is that it was developed in the aftermath of the Bubonic plague outbreak that struck western Europe in the mid-1300s. And was a pastoral response, if you will, to the concerns of the laity--the laypeople--who said ‘look our priests are dying or they’re skipping town; there’s no one to perform burials or last rites; for all we know, this can be damning to our souls; we need some help preparing for death.’”
- 27:30 The Ars Moriendi was given to all of the community, including children. It grew out of the pre-Reformation Catholic Church, but eventually was adopted much more broadly, and ended up not being tied to a particular denomination or religion.
-29:11 "In order to die well, you’ve got to live well.” Understanding our finitude and working out questions of death in a community.
-29:27 In her book she makes the case that, of course, the art of dying is broad, but it should include the constant acknowledgement of one’s finitude that is carried out in a community that helps the person figure out these questions.
-31:09 Fear of death, grief, and tapping into the wisdom on ultimate questions about the art of dying.
-33:00 "There is a way in which the thought of death or threat of death brings into relief that which we most value."
-33:31 A view to our death helps us to answer very important questions about human life and flourishing.
-34:01 Practical and personal aspects to the reality of sickness and death during a pandemic, and its implications for personal family life.
-37:01 “It took at the very beginning [of the pandemic] an acknowledgement of our finitude. We had to be willing to having those tricky conversations with little kids from the beginning."
-37:50 The importance of community for dying well; "Right now, dying from covid-19 in the hospital means dying apart from family...the relational piece is really being challenged..."
-38:35 Some doctors have to call patients before they come to inform them of the sad reality that if they pass, they would likely be alone.
-39:50 Lydia: “Dying alone is not the same as lonely dying.”
-41:34 “The challenges of dying well during covid-19 are surmountable if we are "attended to the tasks of preparing to die well over the course of a lifetime."
-42:00 Conclusion.
26 Feb 2022
Julian Reid / How Black History Made Jazz: Suffering, Joy, and Longing for Our True Home
00:54:29
Jazz pianist Julian Reid on music, theology, and improvisation. The keys element of The JuJu Exchange uses the history of blues, gospel, and jazz to discuss how we communicate emotionally and spiritually through music, teaching an important lesson in how to live and long for home while we remain exiles. Features score from The JuJu Exchange's latest release, The Eternal Boombox. Interview by Ryan McAnnally-Linz and Evan Rosa.
Julian Reid is a Chicago-based jazz pianist and producer, writer, and performer (not to mention B.A. Yale University, and M.Div. Emory University). The JuJu Exchange is a musical partnership also featuring Nico Segal (trumpet, Chance the Rapper; The Social Experiment) and Everett Reid—exploring creativity, justice, and the human experience through their hip-hop infused jazz. Their new 5-song project is called The Eternal Boombox.
Show Notes
Music is invisible and tactile
Music as a matter of faith
How do we decide what is music and what is just sound?
Pain and hope in Blues music
“The Blues emerged as a way to communicate within the black community the pain and frustration and disappointment of failed black life post emancipation.”
How the Blues emerged as a way to talk about the sorrows of life.
The beauty of the mundane
The birth of Gospel Blues and Georgia Tom
Gospel sings about God, but carries on the pain of the blues
“Jazz was communicating freedom of expression of aspiration, of ambition, of joy, maybe even some frivolity in American life.”
The music theory behind emotion
The theological implications of Blues chord progressions
Exilic chords: how Blues denies the ear the chord resolution it wants to hear
“Frustrating the notion of going home”
Music theory and the meaning of home in Christianity
“Music is a means by which I can signal the dysfunction of society, the lack of home in society”
Jacob Blake and frustrated chords
Blues is the music that is ‘beautifying but not justifying,’ that ‘points forward to something that’s not yet’
The chord progressions of European imperialism
How American music and Christian music centers us back ‘home’ in the chords, “as opposed to contending with the fact that we are still pilgrims and in a foreign land"
Sugary chords avoid "the reality of us being in some real deep trouble”
Julian’s band The JuJu exchange, and their latest EP The Eternal Boombox
His album is on the stages of grief involved in processing the Pandemic
The first stage: shock, “I can’t see my eyes”
The second stage: anger, “Avalanche”
The third stage: bargaining, “Eternal boombox”
The fourth stage: depression, “And so on”
The fifth stage, acceptance/hope, “Glimmer”
Music, Alzheimers, and how distorting the melody conveys issues with memory
Jazz and agency
Improvised music and expression in the moment
Tension and comfort in Jazz phrasing
How God can meet us in the midst of space, how God can meet us in the midst of creating wordless music”
Do we need to articulate who God is?
Improvisation and humility
“Does the music breed honest dialogue with the Creator?”
How music plays with social boundaries
“Musicians that are just out for themselves sound like it”
If you like what you hear and want to further the exchange, join us over at Patreon. This subscription service helps The JuJu Exchange stay independent: patreon.com/thejujuexchange
Cornel West, from Race Matters: “To be a jazz freedom fighter is to attempt to galvanize and energize world-weary people into forms of organization with accountable leadership that promote critical exchange and broad reflection. The interplay of individuality and unity is not one of uniformity and unanimity imposed from above but rather of conflict among diverse groupings that reach a dynamic consensus subject to questioning and criticism. As with a soloist in a jazz quartet, quintet or band, individuality is promoted in order to sustain and increase the creative tension with the group--a tension that yields higher levels of performance to achieve the aim of the collective project. This kind of critical and democratic sensibility flies in the face of any policing of borders and boundaries of 'blackness', 'maleness', 'femaleness', or 'whiteness'.”
25 Sep 2021
David Brooks & Miroslav Volf / The Road to Character
00:38:05
The world today seem to prefer politics to morality, a personal brand to inner character, resume virtues that achieve success over eulogy virtues that reveal who you truly are... and it like this from the news to Instagram, at PTA meetings and little league fields, from the grocery store line to the protest front lines. David Brooks thinks we need to find our way back on the road to character.
Today, New York Times columnist David Brooks joins Miroslav Volf for a conversation about his 2015 book The Road to Character. Together, they reflect on the central virtues in a life of flourishing that leads to joy, the importance of reintroducing the concept of sin back into public conversation, and the challenge of finding the resolve to pursue the commitments to vocation, faith, community, and family in a culture that tempts us toward individualism and idolatry of the self.
This is part 2 of a 2-part conversation on Flourishing, Character, and the Good Life. Check out Part 1 , featuring David Brooks interviewing Miroslav Volf about his 2016 book, Flourishing: Why We Need Religion in a Globalized World.
Show Notes
Rabbi Joseph Ber Soloveitchik: Adam 1 vs Adam 2
Resume Virtues vs Eulogy Virtues
The power of a good mom for developing character
Christian Smith and the dearth of moral dilemmas in young people, reducing everything to emotivism and individualism
Sin vs "insensitive"
"How do you introduce sin into the secular conversation?"
Brooks sense of vocation: Shifting the conversation out of politics and into morality.
Tim Keller: don't talk about depravity, talk about disordered loves.
Character development requires awareness of sinfulness, correcting where we've gone wrong.
Managing the "Big Me"
How to motivate humility
Humility: Not thinking lowly of oneself, but seeing yourself accurately.
Humanity as crooked tinder: Confront your broken nature.
Flourishing is a commitment to four things: vocation, faith/philosophy, community, spouse/family
"The tree is my only friend. ... The tree talks to me and says, 'I am life, I am life, I am eternal life.'"
Biblical imagination of the world to come: Lion with lamb; everyone sitting under their own fig tree; entering into joy.
A "deeply embedded" life
"Every day in government sucks, but the whole experience is tremendously rewarding."
Flourishing and suffering, enlarging capacity for empathy
Love to enlarge our hearts
Moments where it comes together in joy
The gratuity and deficit that comes with joy
The way David Brooks writes his column: piles of papers and notes, crawling around on the floor
Joy as advent and anticipation
Market economy, competition, self-projection as a brand, selling oneself
The rise of fame in recent years: By 2 to 1, college students prefer a life of fame to a life of sex
"You need a counter-culture within yourself."
Tough interview question about character: "Name a time you told the truth and it hurt you."
"There is a vacuum for people to think and talk about their own internal lives."
People are hungry and thirsty for a discussion of character and flourishing amidst their default lives of success and individualism.
Practices and habits to form character
Experiencing great love that fuses one with another
Overcoming challenges and suffering
Deep involvement in an act of service
"Do the reading."
Latch on to a tradition, rather than build your own system.
The role of education in being drawn toward beauty and moments of transcendence
Production Notes
This podcast featured David Brooks and Miroslav Volf
Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
Hosted by Evan Rosa
Production Assistance by Martin Chan & Nathan Jowers
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
06 Mar 2021
Befriending Reality: Engaging Otherness with Hospitality, Artfulness, and Particularity at Depth / Krista Tippett & Miroslav Volf
00:42:07
“For me, the spiritual task is to befriend reality in all its mess and complexity—to do that with grace." Krista Tippett joins Miroslav Volf for a conversation on 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 in an expansive and engaging new way; the art of conversation, deep listening, cultivating hospitality; the spiritual task of befriending reality; and the challenge of being alone and being together as we seek to live a life worthy of our humanity.
Support For the Life of the World by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture:faith.yale.edu/give
The art of being human and speaking of faith in the twenty-first century
The animating questions behind the human enterprise
Creating a space for a conversations we couldn’t (but needed to) hear
Certainties and beliefs
What it means to be human, how we want to live, and what we want to be to each other
Hospitality—intellectual virtue, social art, sophisticated technology for inviting the best of other people into the room
How to invite someone into a good conversation, inviting them in their fullness
The discipline and public service of holding back your own opinions for the sake of listening
Balancing listening and speaking in a good conversation
What binds and unites various voices within the diversity of On Being?
"My primary intention is not to find similarities, but to be fascinated by particularity and go deep into that."
Abraham Joshua Heschel’s “Depth Theology”
Drawing opposites and counterintuitives even within the same person
Similar themes emerging from very different mouths—struggle for justice, struggle for wholeness, aspiring to both praise and lament
The complexity and fine textures of the melodies of humanity
Confounding ourselves
"There are no storybook heroes in the Hebrew Bible … it shows all the mess."
Befriending reality, which has a lot about it we wouldn’t choose, like, or expect—and then make a life of meaning with that and from that.
“For me, the spiritual task is to befriend reality in all its mess and complexity—to do that with grace."
Christian faith as a “mother tongue”—spiritual complexity and Krista’s conservative Baptist upbringing: “I got a lot of lived theology."
"There is an order—there is a love that infuses all of this."
“I’m not defined by what I reject, and I’m very slow to judge anyone else’s deep beliefs."
How Krista came back to Christianity while living in divided Cold War Berlin
Moral exhaustion
“I didn’t immediately head back to Christianity. First I got quiet, then I got intentionally quiet, and then I started wandered into praying ... and an imagination, and then that brought me back to my spiritual homeland."
Julian of Norwich and “All shall be well”—the cosmic sense of those words
“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well…”
"It’s a mystical statement. It doesn’t add up with what we can see and hear and touch. … At some cosmic level, which I can’t be articulate about, it makes sense for me."
What kind of life is worthy of our humanity?
We’re living in a time when we are open to hearing the truth about ourselves
We alone, and we’re together
Revisiting and grappling with binaries
Privileging the cultivation of knowing ourselves and spiritual technologies
“It’s hard to be inextricable from other human beings.”
We’re just as shaped by how we treat our enemies as how we treat our friends
Nurturing the interior life as we’re tempted to focus on external appearances
Invest in ourselves in order to be present to the world
About Krista Tippett
Krista Tippett is a Peabody Award-winning broadcaster, a National Humanities Medalist, and a New York Times bestselling author. She grew up in a small town in Oklahoma, attended Brown University, and became a journalist and diplomat in Cold War Berlin. She then lived in Spain and England before seeking a Master of Divinity at Yale University in the mid-1990s.
Emerging from that, she saw a black hole where intelligent public conversation about the religious, spiritual, and moral aspects of human life might be. She pitched and piloted her idea for several years before launching Speaking of Faith — later On Being — as a weekly national public radio show in 2003. In 2014, the year after she took On Being into independent production, President Obama awarded Krista the National Humanities Medal at the White House for “thoughtfully delving into the mysteries of human existence. On the air and in print, Ms. Tippett avoids easy answers, embracing complexity and inviting people of every background to join her conversation about faith, ethics, and moral wisdom.”
Krista has published three books at the intersection of spiritual inquiry, social healing, science, and culture: Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living; Einstein’s God, drawn from her interviews at the intersection of science, medicine, and spiritual inquiry; and Speaking of Faith, a memoir of religion in our time. In recent honors, she is a recipient of a Four Freedoms Medal of the Roosevelt Institute. She also received an honorary degree from Middlebury College, and was the Mimi and Peter E. Haas Distinguished Visitor at Stanford University.
Krista has two grown children. She is currently at work on a new book about moral imagination and the human challenges and promise of this young century.
23 May 2023
Tapestry of Knowledge: Theology and Psychology as Truth-Seeking Partners / Oliver Crisp on Bringing Psychology to Theology
00:34:13
"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
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.
11 Sep 2024
Music & Joy / Daniel Chua
00:56:31
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.
“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.”
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)
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 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.
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.
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
29 Jun 2022
Bo Karen Lee / Trauma and Spirituality: From Bystander to Beloved, From Alarmed Aloneness to Gazing Upon the God Who Gazes Upon Me With Love
00:38:28
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.
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
02 Oct 2021
Charles Taylor & Miroslav Volf / What's Wrong with Our Democracies?: Fear of Replacement, Post-Truth, and Entrenched Tribal Factions (Part 1)
00:40:37
Philosopher Charles Taylor joins Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz for a two-part conversation about what's gone wrong with our democracies and finding common moral understanding. They discuss Christian nationalism, authoritarian government, the future viability of Christian faith and practice, the chaos of the post-truth epistemic crisis that’s rampant in political dialogue today, the role of social media in that crisis, and Taylor's most recent thinking about the growth of common ethical understanding in a world that often fails to live up to those shared moral principles of respect, dignity, and care.
(Part 1 of a 2-part series)
This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information, visit tyndale.foundation.
Introduction: Ryan McAnnally-Linz
The human world today is not the same as it was three hundred years ago. Far from it. Technology, economics, politics, art, culture—all have seen transformations, even revolutions, around the globe. Thirty years ago, a triumphalist narrative of these changes was in vogue: “modernity,” it was said, had solved humanity’s perennial problems, broken through our narrow-minded ethical traditions, and set us towards a future of comfort and perpetual peace after, in Francis Fukuyama’s phrase, “the end of history.” Even three years ago, we thought the world was different. I mean, I did.
No wonder so many of us are trying to understand the revolutions and mechanics of human society. If you’re paying attention, you’re driven to understand. And so columnists and talking heads—academics and public intellectuals—not to mention your radicalized high school friend on Facebook—we all have these theories about ideal human society and culture, and, like how the hell we wound up here. Unfortunately, our desire to know and understand often exceeds our abilities to perceive and explain.
Charles Taylor is our guest for the next two episodes of For the Life of the World. He sees human life and action not as something to be explained, but to be elucidated, lived with, and made sense of. Over 7 decades, he's produced an astonishing and magisterial body of work, spanning social theory, religion, epistemology, history, politics, the self, aesthetics, science, technology, and more.
But you might be surprised to know that 30 years ago he described himself as a "monomaniac"—he meant that his ultimate concern is really singular: human life. The one issue that motivates his entire body of work is "philosophical anthropology." But answering the questions of what human persons are and what it means to live a life worthy of that humanity, he says, requires thinking along the borders and intersections of the massive diversity of human society and culture.
He has a long history of political engagement as well. As an undergraduate at Oxford in 1955, he launched one of the first campaigns to ban nuclear weapons. During the '60s he ran several times for Canadian parliament as a major-party candidate, but fell short by a small margin each time. The result for us, of course, is gratitude for the incredible body of work that came in the wake of his attempts to gain office, including Sources of the Self, The Ethics of Authenticity, A Secular Age, The Language Animal—all the way up to his 2020 book, Reconstructing Democracy: How Citizens Are Building from the Ground Up.
Taylor graciously joined Miroslav and me this summer for a long conversation about what's gone wrong with our democracies and finding common moral understanding. We cover a lot of ground, discussing Christian nationalism, authoritarian government, the future viability of Christian faith and practice, the chaos of the post-truth epistemic crisis that’s rampant in political dialogue today, the role of social media in that crisis, and Taylor’s most recent thinking about the growth of common ethical understanding in a world that often fails to live up to those shared moral principles of respect, dignity, and care.
We'll run this conversation in two parts, this week and next. Special thanks goes to many of you listeners and friends who responded with thoughtful and important questions. Those questions helped to frame this conversation. Thanks for listening.
Show Notes
Introduction: Ryan McAnnally-Linz
Charles Taylor's history of political engagement and his interest in philosophy
What role did Vatican II, especially on freedom of religion, play on Taylor's politics?
Catholic intellectuals: French philosopher and theologian Emmanuel Mounier and French priest Henri de Lubac
Integralism and Dominionism
From Constantine on, we've lived with Christendom
Christendom is a "straight jacket for spiritual growth of the Christian faith."
What is the telos of history?
The Pope Francis approach: "Stop worrying about defending what's there and you reach out and just be a Christian."
Democracy isn't functioning the way it should be.
Voting for Trump: "It'd be laughable if it weren't cryable."
"If Trump pulled off his coup d'etat, that would be so catastrophic for the Western democratic world."
Democracies worldwide aren't in good shape: in what respects and what's underlying that?
Are we seeing the erosion of (1) common sense of identity and (2) universal principles of democracy?
"Even common human nature is being called into question."
"Democracy is no longer perceived as a moral ideal, but is simply a tool of governance."
"The fear of White replacement": The problem with political alignment that resists White minoritization.
"The fear of being replaced is very profound."
Question from Peng Yin (Emory University): "In A Secular Age, you described a rather uplifting modern social imaginary. Society is a realm of mutual benefits where our purposes mesh. In the present moment, however, society is increasingly seen in conflictual terms, as no more than a theatre of competing interests. Has that social imaginary you captured more than a decade ago vanished in our current crises of democracy? If so, do you see any prospect for its recovery?"
Question from listener Lynette Roth: "In a polarized world, where the divisions are falling along religious lines (and the religions are black-and-white, take no prisoners), how is democracy (where every voice counts) possible? How can democracy and religious conservatives live together?"
Entrenched in political tribal factions.
"Fear that we're going to disappear—that our version of Christianity is going to leave the earth."
Second only to "Follow me" in the scriptures is the phrase: "Be not afraid."
"This is not the end of the story."
Hope for the future: "The evangelical virtue that we need."
Production Notes
This podcast featured philosopher Charles Taylor, theologian Miroslav Volf, and theologian Ryan McAnnally-Linz
Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
Hosted by Evan Rosa
Production Assistance by Martin Chan & Nathan Jowers
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
03 Oct 2022
Kelly Corrigan & Miroslav Volf / Experts at Means, Amateurs at Ends: Talking About Success & Flourishing at College
00:58:52
“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.
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
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
01 Aug 2020
Elizabeth Bruenig: Chronicler of the Human Condition / Interview with Ryan McAnnally-Linz
00:33:52
Elizabeth Bruenig (New York Times) joins the podcast to discuss the ethical and theological commitments that underlie her political and cultural commentary; work, labor, and employment; and how to be opinionated and very online at a time when most Americans are afraid of what other people think of their beliefs.
Show Notes
“If you’re someone who sits between two well-defined ideological modes, it's going to be hard to find your place in the order of things”
“What lets me sleep at night; what do I really believe is good and true?”
What is a Catholic socialist?
What does a Catholic socialist think about work? How we can be suspicious about the importance of work?
Speaking ones mind comes with fear in today’s world
The difference between a ‘take’ and reporting
"I'm a chronicler of the human condition. This is also my explanation for why I retweet really bizarre stuff that I find”
How understanding the character of God relates to an understanding of justice
“Why be out there online? Does your faith have anything to say about being in that space?”
Bringing your following to your publication
“A friend of mine once said that there are two types of stupid in the world, there's happy stupid, and angry stupid. And I'm totally fine with happy stupid. It's the angry stupid stuff that's frustrating”
Cancel culture
“They shouldn't lose a job or whatever or be unable to find new work because of the wrong politics they have. That's a core tenant of liberalism”
“I don't fight with people on Twitter... I don't swing at every pitch”
How we equate work and employment
“Are there ways you're re-evaluating work from a theological perspective in this moment?"
“The types of work we do in modernity, especially, are alienating. And this is about 20,000 times as true for working class people”
The childcare problem
“People have felt like I'm either a poor Catholic or a poor socialist, and I'm absolutely certain both of those things are true, but I’m doing my best”
What got her here?
A study of Christian theology centered on Saint Augustine, and a study of the Christian approach to private property
“I'm not terribly thrilled about the prospects for the American Left at the moment”
Joe Biden and candidacy for the Left
How are you trying to live faithfully in this moment?
“What I've been trying to do is find a little bit more courage, be a little bit more sympathetic, be a little bit more compassionate”
“Living faithfully is morally performing the task in front of you every day at this point”
Giving others the leeway you would want
Dorothy Day and finding the devotional life right where you are: "the devotional life has to be here"
“I have an embarrassment of riches in terms of my husband, my kids, the opportunities I have with my job. These are all beautiful things that God has given me, and I didn't earn them. I don't deserve them, but I'm grateful for them”
The idea that people who aren't working don't deserve money or security: “Everybody deserves the capacity to live a dignified life”
“When it comes to the necessary things for living a dignified life, I don't think 'deserve' has anything to do with it"
20 Sep 2024
Love's Braided Dance / Norman Wirzba
01:04:53
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.
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
Jemar Tisby, author of the NYT bestseller The Color of Compromise, explains the complicity and compromise of American Christians; the narrative war that confederate monuments wage (and how they were erected much later than you might think); the ugly theological justifications of racism and the shameful history of Christian white supremacy; the fraught project of selectively naming heroes and villains and then memorializing them; and the practical problem of how to go forward rightly from this moment of increased attention to racial injustice.
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
24 Apr 2021
Have You Eaten Yet?: Hospitality, Solidarity, and the Great Banquet of Justice / David de Leon & Matt Croasmun
00:36:17
"Kumain ka na ba?”—Have you eaten yet? (Tagalog) This beautiful phrase of welcome and care and intimacy evokes and offers more than just the pleasure and nourishment of a meal. It calls out to the hunger, the thirst, and the need for love that we can greet in one another. David de Leon joins Matt Croasmun for a discussion of hospitality and solidarity and justice, applying the parable of the Great Banquet to cultures of inhospitality, and especially to the context of the increased targeting, discrimination, marginalization, and violence against the Asian American community over the past year.
Show Notes
“I think it can be really easy to believe that joy and justice, or even our grief--that expressing that comes at the expense of other people, that there isn't enough space for all of our joy to be together”
“Life together in the family of God, at the banquet of God is…a radical conviction that God has enough for us all”
Luke 14, the parable of the great banquet
"Kumain ka na ba?”—a greeting and an invitation - have you eaten yet?
“‘Kumain ka na ba?’ Is the lavish invitation of Christ to a banquet that sustains our weary, divided, broken and lonely selves”
“I miss hosting people”
Jesus says, "Don't invite people to your parties who can pay you back. Invite the people who never get invitations. Then you'll have it good"
“The racial justice uprisings of this past year remind us that this country still remains inhospitable to black and brown lives”
The increase in violence towards Asian American and Asian American elders since the beginning of the Pandemic
The legacy of inhospitality towards Asian people in America
“It rears its head in our internalized hatred and the loss of memory and story, the separation of our families, and then the incomprehension of our heart languages”
“The pressure to present yourself in ways that display your competence, your control, the need to check their whole self at the waiting room of your zoom calls, leaving pieces of yourself off the pages of the papers you write”
Justice is not scarce
There’s room for all of our joy at this banquet
“Perhaps Jesus is inviting us to partake in the feast of rest, the feast of vulnerability and community, to entrust our imperfections and limitations to one another”
“The food that tastes like home” – how expansive home can be
“I think there's something about the deep vulnerability of inviting somebody into something that feels very ordinary for you, but it's very comfortable, and then having people enjoy that thing with you”
Sharing the most unglamorous parts of ourselves
Unphotogenic food
How gendered racial violence can be
“It just seemed like yet another moment where we're not woken up until there's loss of life”
“Our shared life together should be our orienting hope and dream, as opposed to just the quite proper anger that we might experience in response to death?”
“It can be really easy to believe that joy and justice, or even our grief – that expressing that comes at the expense of other people”
A radical conviction that God has enough life for us all
Are you going to come to the banquet? Are you going to turn away?
About David de Leon
David de Leon is a graduating Master of divinity candidate at Yale Divinity School, and is an incoming PhD student studying Systematic Theology at Fordham University. He’s a child of Pilipino immigrants and was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, and for the last 12 years has worked in college campus ministry, leading Pilipino American focused ministries, and working to mobilize Asian Americans to pursue racial justice.
Production Notes
This podcast featured David de Leon and Matt Croasmun
Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
Hosted by Evan Rosa & Matt Croasmun
Production Assistance by Martin Chan & Nathan Jowers
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
20 Jun 2020
Law of Love, Order of Peace / Miroslav Volf & Lauren Green
00:38:50
"Religion is most dangerous when it is superficial—when it serves to mark my identity as belonging to a different group than you. And when it's a tool in a politician's hands to legitimize their power. Then they just use religion to mark and to validate what they want to do in any case. And that ends up being really a kind of desacralization of faith. That which is holy has been completely turned to a means of a secular, profane end that bears no relation to the content of that which is holy." Lauren Green, Chief Religion Correspondent at Fox News, interviews Miroslav Volf for her podcast, Lighthouse Faith. They discuss his his book Exclusion & Embrace, his views on sin, racism, identity, religion and power, forgiveness, and the will to embrace.
This episode contains an interview, reproduced in its entirety, between Lauren Green and Miroslav Volf, which originally appeared at here. Used with permission from Fox News Radio.
Creating subhuman terms leads to justified oppression.
Christianity is a law of love.
The spirit of exclusion
Responding as a Christian to violence around us.
Exclusion and Embrace is born out of this attempt to respond Christianly to the world around us.
Ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia.
Two prodigal sons.
Contemporary America through the lens of exclusion.
Sin as transpersonal and personal.
Exclusion as domination.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's Letter from a Birmingham Jail
Religion is most dangerous when it is superficial.
The will to embrace.
Opening oneself up to experience something that might seem scary and unacceptable, but is a journey full of hope.
The importance of forgiveness.
Discover what is beautiful within someone who is different than you.
08 Jan 2022
Marilynne Robinson, Charles Taylor, et al / Making or Breaking Democracy
00:27:41
Democracy in America and abroad is under threat. Authoritarian regimes, nationalisms of many stripes, a loss sense of the value of democratic participation among younger generations, and a growing cynicism and suspicion of our neighbors all threaten freedom and flourishing. In this episode, Miroslav Volf, Marilynne Robinson, Charles Taylor, Kevin Lau, and Andrew Kwok comment on what makes or breaks democracy around the world. NOTE: For the Life of the World is running highlights, readings, lectures, and other best-of features until May 1, 2022, when we'll be back with new conversations.
Show Notes
The concern is with healing our divided country and Church
How former president Trump’s false allegations of electoral fraud led to violence at the Capitol
Naming wrongdoing for what it is
“At the heart of the current effort to deny and overturn the results of the presidential election is the wounded pride of a man”
“Many Americans have taken his lie to be their truth. Sadly, but unsurprisingly, among them are many who call themselves Christians.”
‘Jesus 2020’
The theological dimension of these events
“The salvation (Jesus) offers is not the success of your political candidate or the realization of your national dream”
Each of us must ask, what will we do with our fear and anger?
“We must commit firmly to truth even, and especially when it hurts our pride when we lose”
“Commitment to the truth is never at odds with love of neighbor.”
How suspicion has disconnected us from reality, and each other
There is something ‘spiritually dead’ about our political climate
Do young people care about democracy?
“Some people might say, well, if we need to choose between prosperity and democracy, we are going to choose prosperity”
A democracy based on ‘the wealthiest culture that ever lived on earth’
Democracy’s capacity for great integrity
“There is no other way of trying to tap this potential that exists in human beings other than democracy.” – Marilynne Robinson
What are the cultural conditions of democracy?
Human beings demand our respect
The relationship between human sacrality and democracy
Kevin Lau and Andrew Kwok on their hopes for tomorrow from the perspective of Hong Kong Christians
“For non-western Christians, we always think that democracy is an outcome of Christian spirituality.”
The need for internal peace within Christianity
Healing memory
“You have to hold on tight to your identity as a beloved child of God”
Not letting affliction sway you from your true identity
Only then can you face your memory, and reality
Production Notes
This podcast featured Miroslav Volf, Marilyn Robinson, Charles Taylor, Kevin Lau, and Andrew Kwok
Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
Hosted by Evan Rosa
Editorial and Production Assistance by Logan Ledman
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
11 Jul 2020
Christian Racist Complicity: American History, Monuments, and the Arc of Justice / Jemar Tisby & Ryan McAnnally-Linz
00:53:58
Jemar Tisby, author of the NYT bestseller The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism, joins Ryan McAnnally-Linz for a conversation on how American Christian history has failed us. In this episode, Jemar explains the complicity and compromise of American Christians; the narrative war that confederate monuments wage (and how they were erected much later than you might think); the ugly theological justifications of racism and the shameful history of Christian white supremacy; the fraught project of selectively naming heroes and villains and then memorializing them; and the practical problem of how to go forward rightly from this moment of increased attention to racial injustice.
Disillusioned with Faith: Finding Hope in Our Scars / Aimee Byrd
00:58:56
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).
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.
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
09 Oct 2021
Charles Taylor & Miroslav Volf / Finding a Shared Moral Understanding: Progress, Evil, Freedom, and Solidarity (Part 2)
00:37:26
This is Part 2 of 2—don't miss the previous conversation with Charles Taylor on "What's Going Wrong with Our Democracies?"
This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information, visit tyndale.foundation.
Part 2 of 2: Philosopher Charles Taylor joins Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz for a two-part conversation about what's gone wrong with our democracies and finding common moral understanding. In this episode, Charles Taylor explains his most recent thinking about the growth of common ethical understanding in a world that often fails to live up to those shared moral principles of respect, dignity, and care. The conversation also covers the promise of hope in its political and theological context; the response we need for the epistemological crisis of post-truth politics; how to restore trust in each other; the relation between individual freedom and public common good; the need to recover solidarity and sacred encounter between humans during our time; and finally the promise of democracy for living up to our moral ideals.
Introduction: Ryan McAnnally-Linz
We’re living at the end of a strange moral century. 100 years ago, the world was marked by a global pandemic, the end of a long war, fights over gender inequality and racial injustice, and the precipice of a broken economy. And people in 1921 simply had no idea what kind of violence, bloodshed, and upheaval was coming.
And yet, even over the course of a century filled with all-too-human evil, we can trace a faint golden thread of moral invention. Commitments to human dignity, universal human rights, suffrage and democracy, solidarity with the marginalized and suffering, equality—the spread of these ideas also mark the last 100 years. The disparity is stark. At another moment of conflict and uncertainty, the fate of that golden thread is unclear.
This is part 2 of our conversation with philosopher Charles Taylor. Author of Sources of the Self, The Ethics of Authenticity, A Secular Age, and much more, Taylor exemplifies determined, imaginative, generous intellectual commitment to a fundamental question: What is humanity for? This is one of the foundational questions of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture and this podcast—seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. Following Taylor, we want to help people to better understand themselves, their world, and the significance of their lives.
Show Notes
Introduction: Ryan McAnnally-Linz
A strange moral century
Hope
How have we got as far as we've got?
The progress of ethical understanding through history
Disparity with human propensity for evil
Non-violent resistance
How non-violence shapes Miroslav Volf's approach to democracy
Miroslav's first democratic act of protest in Czechoslovakia
"Fear not" as a command; hope as an obligation
The hope that permeates Charles Taylor's work
How do you cultivate a sense of hopefulness?
The quest for moral certainty and purity
Listener question from Bonnie Kristian: "How to achieve ethical growth/gain moral knowledge in a time of epistemic crisis?"
Listener question from Jennifer Herdt: "You have written in such illuminating ways about the quest for certainty and moral purity, and about how these often end up rationalizing violence in service of the eradication of error and evil. I'm wondering how you would you relate your analysis to our contemporary post-truth historical moment, in which various groups that perceive themselves as under attack seek epistemic closure, sealing themselves off from an enemy regarded as absolutely unworthy of engagement--even at the cost of massive loss of life, as we see in politically-motivated anti-masking and anti-vaccination campaigns. What sources of hope would you name for restoring basic forms of social trust and commitment to pursuit of a common life?"
Tribalism that overtakes the sacred encounter between human beings
How the COVID pandemic has made things harder for tribalism
Democracy, freedom, choice, and the public good
Listener question from David Moe: It might be good to ask him these: "what kind of democracy the religiously pluralistic world needs today? How does religion shape the moral principle of that democracy?
What makes democracy a worthwhile pursuit for the human community?
The polis allows agents together to determine their common life by reason.
Pope Francis's Encyclicals: Solidarity, collaboration, and universal human dignity in Laudato Si, and Fratelli Tutti
"A cross-confessional ecumenical discussion about what the telos of human life is about."
Production Notes
This podcast featured philosopher Charles Taylor, theologian Miroslav Volf, and theologian Ryan McAnnally-Linz
Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
Hosted by Evan Rosa
Production Assistance by Martin Chan & Nathan Jowers
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
12 Dec 2020
Black Joy and Oppressive Humility / Stacey Floyd-Thomas
00:49:16
Social ethicist Stacey Floyd-Thomas offers a womanist perspective on how humility can go terribly wrong, when it's hung over the heads of the humiliated, marginalized, and oppressed. This criticism of the traditional Christian virtue helps clarify the role of joy as the ultimate virtue of Black life, the centrality of black folk wisdom, and the beauty of black sisterhood. Interview by Ryan McAnnally-Linz.
Stacey Floyd-Thomas is the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Chair and Associate Professor of Ethics and Society at Vanderbilt University, and is a nationally recognized scholar and leading voice in social ethics who provides leadership to several national and international organizations that educate, advocate, support and shape the strategic work of individuals, initiatives, and institutions in their organizing efforts of championing and cultivating equity, diversity, and inclusion via organizations such as Black Religious Scholars Group (BRSG), Society for the Study of Race, Ethnicity and Religion (SRER), Strategic Effective Ethical Solutions (SEES), Society of Christian Ethics (SCE) and the American Academy of Religion (AAR). She holds a PhD in Ethics, a MBA in organizational behavior and two Masters in Comparative religion and Theological Studies with certification in women’s studies, cultural studies, and counseling. Not only has she published seven books and numerous articles, she is also as an expert in leadership development, an executive coach and ordained clergy equipped with business management. As a result, Floyd-Thomas has been a lead architect in helping corporations, colleges, universities, religious congregations, and community organizations with their audit, assessment, and action plans in accordance with evolving both the mission and strategic plans. Without question, she is one of the nation’s leading voices in ethical leadership in the United States and is globally recognized for her scholarly specializations in liberation theology and ethics, critical race theory, critical pedagogy, and postcolonial studies. Additionally, leaving podium and pulpit, she hosts her own podcast to popularize and make her profession and vocation intergenerationally and intracommunally accessible through The Womanist Salon Podcast.
07 Nov 2020
Mixed Feelings: Poetry and Faith for Our Time / Christian Wiman & Miroslav Volf
00:42:01
Poet Christian Wiman and theologian Miroslav Volf, both colleagues and friends, discuss poetry's ability to give voice to the mixed feelings of life today, talking about the mash-up of home and exile, joy and sorrow, saint and sinner; and Wiman reads some of his favorite poetry from his upcoming anthology, Home: 100 Poems.
Poet Christian Wiman is Professor of the Practice of Religion and Literature at Yale Divinity School. He’s the author of several books of poetry, including Every Riven Thing, Hammer is the Prayer, and his most recent, Survival Is a Style. His memoirs include the bracing and beautiful My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer, and He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art. He edited an anthology of 100 poems on Joy a few years ago, and is currently putting finishing touches on another 100 poems on Home.
Our guest last week, the novelist Marilynne Robinson, says of Wiman, "His poetry and scholarship have a purifying urgency that is rare in this world. This puts him at the very source of theology, and enables him to say new things in timeless language, so that the reader’s surprise and assent are one and the same.”
Show Notes
On being nowhere, absence, place, and home
Simone Weil: “We must take the feeling of being at home into exile, we must be rooted in the absence of a place."
Christian Wiman’s home
The resonance of objects and persons
Completing a poetry anthology about home during a pandemic
The ubiquity of home in poetry
"The Niagara River” by Kay Ryan
Individual life joining with collective life, the circularity and rhythm of lyric poetry; searching for a remembrance of home
William Wordsworth: “Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come”
“Innocence” by Patrick Kavanagh
"To be a poet is to be in exile." What is it to be a believer?
"Poets are not poets most of the time, the rest of the time they’re poor slobs like everybody else."
Living in and attending to our exile: Abraham “living in tents, awaiting the city, whose architect and builder is God”; Jesus sleeping in the boat in the storm.
Gillian Rose, Love’s Work and Nietzsche’s "tragic joy”; writing when she was dying of cancer and viewing faith as unmaking oneself.
"The Bennett Springs Road” by Julia Randall: “The bird that sang I am."
What is the right relationship of security to precarity?
“In a Time of Peace” by Ilya Kaminsky
How do we live lives of joy while there’s suffering all around us?
“Shema” by Primo Levi
Alexander Schmemann’s “bright sorrow"
Marilynne Robinson’s model of creating characters with credible lives of faith‚ credible for the very fact that they are attentive to the suffering around them.
W.H. Auden: “A good poem is the clear expression of mixed feelings."
"Taking life by the throat"
Both/And Life
“Filling Station” by Elizabeth Bishop—“Somebody loves us all."
04 Apr 2024
A World Out of Joint: Pilgrimage and the Possibilities of Homemaking / Ryan McAnnally-Linz
00:48:06
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.
28 Feb 2021
Joy and the Act of Resistance Against Despair / Willie Jennings and Miroslav Volf
00:24:58
"I look at joy as an act of resistance against despair and its forces. ... Joy in that regard is a work, that can become a state, that can become a way of life." Willie Jennings joins Miroslav Volf to discuss the definition of joy as an act of resistance against despair, the counterintuitive nature of cultivating joy in the midst of suffering, the commercialization of joy in Western culture, joy segregated by racism and slavery, how Jesus expands and corrects our understanding of joy.
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"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"
Beyond Invisible | American 한 (Han): An Artistic Response to Anti-Asian Violence / Sarah Shin & Shin Maeng
00:07:15
"The tears were always there. / You just didn’t recognize my face." Author, artist, and theologian Sarah Shin reads her poem "Beyond Invisible"—a response to the March 2021 Atlanta shootings that left six Asian women dead—a crescendo of increasing anti-Asian violence.
Sarah's poem and her husband Shin Maeng's accompanying illustration ask the pointed question, "Can you see me now?"—dealing with the recognition not just of grief over recent events, but the generational tears that have flowed unseen, unacknowledged, and unaddressed.
The tears were always there. You just didn’t recognize my face. Nor did you see behind the hunched back of the one doing your nails The steel frame of a mother feeding her family with 14 hour work days.
Instead of seeing in our bodies and our face The altar of the broken faithful awaiting resurrection You make them instead into a graveyard for your sins. But some habits just die hard, huh?
Inconvenient convenience it would be To behold in a flattened story The freedom-fighters who battled war, demagogues, oceans, and despair And tore themselves from everything they knew to be home The heartache of sacrificing family past to give family future a chance.
Anchors they have served to be as we strive to make this home But cut into them and you’ve cut loose Everything that told us to bear it Everything that said hope was worth it To swallow tears and keep our heads down.
No more now.
Our dams are broke and now they flood All around you, all around me.
Do you see beyond just my face now? Do you see beyond what you didn’t see in my eyes now? Do you see me Can you see me Can you see me now?
Sarah Shin is author of Beyond Colorblind: Redeeming Our Ethnic Journey. She is currently studying at the Logos Institute for Analytic and Exegetical Theology at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Prior to that she served as Associate National Director of Evangelism for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. She regularly trains leaders and speaks at the intersection of evangelism, ethnic reconciliation, justice, beauty, and technology.
About Shin Maeng
Shin Maeng is an artist and illustrator. Make sure to check the show notes to examine his illustration, "American 한 (Han)" which was a direct response to Sarah's poem, "Beyond Invisible." Follow him @ShinHappens on Instagram.
06 Jun 2024
Theologian of Hope: Remembering Jürgen Moltmann (1926 – 2024) / Miroslav Volf
00:42:54
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."
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
20 Mar 2024
Chinese Political Theology: Protests in Blood Letters, Freedom, and Religion in China Today / Peng Yin
00:37:39
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"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
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
06 Mar 2024
The Heart of Theology: Emotions, Christian Experience, & the Holy Spirit / Simeon Zahl
00:57:01
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“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.
“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
-3:30 What responding to the pandemic looks like for those professions that directly engage with tangible issues.
-4:20 What responding to the pandemic looks like for theologians and non-working Christians.
-6:00 “The question for all of us is how do we live with this disruption? How do we live with this menacing cloud that is over us? And the Christian faith—and I think theology as well—has something very important to say to that very question...The central question of the Christian faith is what kind of life is worthy of our humanity?
-7:30 “The Christmas story, as you will recall, describes the coming of Christ into the world as ‘light shining into darkness’ [John 1:5]—darkness of imperial oppression, darkness of widespread destitution, darkness of incurable diseases, darkness of hunger, darkness of vulnerability, darkness of precarity of our fragile lives. And what better underscores the fragility of our lives than the pandemic that we are experiencing right now!”
-8:23 “The question about the true, flourishing life for Christians is always a question of how to live that kind of a life as we are surrounded by the forces that push us to make our lives and the living of our lives false, to stifle the flourishing of our lives, to the make us languish—or to express it with the Psalmist, who was writing during the Israelite exile in Babylon; "how can we sing the Lord’s song in the strange land?" [Psalm 137:4] The current pandemic is just such strange land. We are now in many ways in exile; We’re now in the strange land; we’re now in the strange land in our very homes. Can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”
-10:00 Is it possible that isolation can mean more than empty time—Netflix and snacking?
-11:00 fundamental questions going forward: “How can we live so as not to betray our own humanity, the humanity of our loved ones, and the humanity of our neighbors? How can we do so as we live under oppressive conditions of the pandemic? The key question for us is to consider in this series of conversations we are about to introduce is What does it mean to say at this time that the God of Jesus Christ, the healer of the sick, the critic of powers, and the crucified and resurrected Savior... what does it mean to say that this God is our God?”
-12:20 Closing.
14 Oct 2023
How to Lead with Peace, Humility, Compassion, and Faith / Christian Faith & Democratic Leadership / Evan Mawarire
00:46:15
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.
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.
23 Jan 2021
God’s Love Made Delicious: Food, Hospitality, and the Gift of Eating Together / Norman Wirzba & Matt Croasmun
00:49:51
"Cooking is a declaration of love ... food is God’s love made delicious." Theologian Norman Wirzba reflects on the threats of our faulty logic of food and our disordered and disconnected relationship to eating and nourishment, and imagines a theology of food grounded in membership, gift, and hospitality. Interview with Matt Croasmun.
Norman Wirzba is the Gilbert T. Rowe Distinguished Professor of Theology at Duke University. His teaching, research, and writing happens at the intersections of theology and philosophy, and agrarian and environmental studies. He is the author of several books, including Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating (2nd Edition), From Nature to Creation, and The Paradise of God: Renewing Religion in an Ecological Age, and his most recent book, This Sacred Life: The Place of Humanity in a Wounded World, will be published in 2021. In his spare time he likes to bake, play guitar, and make things with wood. For more information visit his website at normanwirzba.com.
Show Notes
Introduction
Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating—a picture of what eating can be, connecting us to the world, to each other, to God.
When it comes to eating in America these days, how are we doing?
Anonymity and ignorance. We are disconnected from food, we’re not encouraged to know where food comes from or how it came to be.
"Eat food, not too much, mostly vegetables."
Good eating is not solely a matter of personal virtue or vice. It’s part of a complicated system, agricultural strategy, and political process we’re involved in.
Food is central to human flourishing, but if it’s only a market commodity, we end up with a faulty logic that drives a sinister food industry.
You can only sell so much: therefore, preservatives
If food is primarily to be digested, we have foods that are, in principle, indigestible. It tastes good, and never makes you full. It’s the perfect food commodity. The food system is developed to take advantage of you as a unit of consumption.
What is eating for?
Membership as a eucharistic mode for changing the way we conceive of food and the good.
Eating is a daily reminder of our need.
Fruits of the spirit that ought to animate our relation to membership.
Mutual belonging (Willie Jennings, The Christian Imagination)
How disconnection from the land leads to alienation and loneliness.
Attention to geography and sources of life; how do we cultivate awareness and proper attention?
Robin Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass—the White American presence has always been “this is not home.” Therefore, “The land we live on and are blessed by does not love us.” Think about what kind of compensation must follow to this kind of alienation.
Racial components of agriculture and food. "You cannot tell the story of agriculture apart from the story of slavery.” Agricultural labor and the objection to embodiment.
Embodiment and food.
Essential work, abstraction from bodies, and disembodied labor.
"We don’t want to know, because to have to know these things implicates us in how we shop for food."
God creates a world in which creatures eat.
What’s communicated through a meal prepared for you? You matter.
God invites us into hospitality, and food and eating can teach us that nurturing welcoming presence.
Food as gift. Submitting oneself to "the grace of the world.”
"Food is God’s love made delicious."
"Life has always proceeded by hospitality."
“Eating and cooking … cause us to stop and say, ‘It’s not all vicious. Maybe our living together can also be a celebration.’"
"All eating involves death.” How do you square the gift of food with the death it entails?
The first virtue of humility—because I don’t know, and because I understand vulnerability, I must live in a more humble, patient way.
What does policy look like when it comes through the lens of humility, dependence, gift, and vulnerability?
The story of a meal—its cultivating, growing, cooking, gathering, eating, enjoying, and nourishing.
You can’t homogenize people’s experience of food.
Sabbath, time, place: Slowing down to notice the goodness of the world God has given us. Thoughtfulness, intention, attention, presence, honoring each other
Who is invited to the table? Communal living, kinship, and community in a welcoming world. Abraham Heschel’s “an opening for eternity in time."
How can we honor the life that feeds us? Start simple. Soup and bread to celebrate the goodness of the world.
17 Jan 2021
Patience with Yourself: Resisting the Temptation to Curate Yourself and Finding the Courage to Embrace Imperfection
This is that time of year when the little demon of self-criticism and self-denigration wakes up and starts nagging you for letting your new year’s resolutions slip a little. Or maybe you’re not there yet. You’re powering through, waking up early, working out hard, eating right, reading more, living your best life. Hey. Good on you. Go get it.
But regardless, whether you find yourself nailing it or failing it, do you have the patience and the necessary courage to accept yourself at every moment you try to improve?
This week, Ryan McAnnally-Linz and Miroslav Volf discuss an obscure but incredibly timely passage from an old lecture given by the great Karl Rahner, the German Jesuit priest and one of the most notable Catholic theologians of the 20th century—he was instrumental, for instance, in the theological developments of the Second Vatican Council.
Miroslav once heard Rahner give a talk about patience, and has passed along the wisdom of that lecture, and now we’re passing it on to you. Miroslav even translated a passage from the German text, and reads it here (you can also find it in our show notes).
In this episode, Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz reflect on Karl Rahner's admonition to be patient with oneself. The discussion begins by recognizing the gap between who you are now and who you aspire to be, and proceeds with the need to keep the tension alive, working and bearing with your limitations, and exploring the freedom of a serene patience with oneself. Serenity is not acquiescence to vice or bad habits. But it represents a courageous long-term peace with your imperfections—an effort to recognize oneself as rooted in divine love and grace and acceptance, even as you pursue a vision of a better self.
Show Notes
New Year’s Resolutions and the need to be patient
Karl Rahner’s “Intellectual Patience with Oneself” (translated from German to English by Miroslav Volf)
Minding the gap between who you are and who you aspire to be
Narcissism, complacency, and resignation
Miroslav’s friend’s motto for graduate school: “Courage to Imperfection!"
Patience is not merely a private interior thing—there is a public effect of bearing with oneself that leads to bearing with others.
The courage to public imperfection
Cultivating a secure sense of self grounded in God’s love
We can live with imperfection knowing that we are accepted as we are
Release yourself from the grip of the performed, curated self
How patience with oneself applies to the struggle to improve through New Year’s Resolutions
Reflect on which self you want to nurture and don’t give up on the tension between who you are and who you aspire to be.
Constant pressure to improve quickly, as opposed to acceptance of limitations and imperfections
Keep the tension alive, work with your limitations, and explore the freedom of a serene patience with oneself.
You cannot do whatever you want, and the lie that you can leaves you exposed to the deep pain of failure and limitation.
“You are not at stake.” Limits are there. They are to be worked with rather than hated or abhorred.
"I’m not divine. I’m human."
Karl Rahner, “On Intellectual Patience with Oneself”
in Schriften zur Theologie, 15, 303ff.
(Abridged version of the first few paragraphs that deal with patience with oneself in general, of which intellectual patience with oneself is one dimension)
Translated by Miroslav Volf
That we need … patience with ourselves, seems to me a self-evident thing, in fact one of those self-evident things which in reality turn out to be difficult to achieve. Perhaps there are people who don’t think they need patience with themselves because they are in full agreement with who they are and with what they do. But I hope that we will not envy the “good fortune” of such simple-minded people. If we are honest with ourselves, we are [all] the kind of people who, rightly, are not fully finished with ourselves, and also the kind of people who cannot establish the state of their full agreement with ourselves on command or through some psychological trick. Because a full agreement with ourselves is neither given nor within our power to achieve, we need to have patience with ourselves. The person in us, who we actually are, greets with pain, the person in us who we want to become… We are now on the way, we live between a past and a future, and both, each in its own way, are out of our full control. We never have all things together which we need to live; we are always historically conditioned, socially manipulated, biologically threatened—and we are aware of this. We can try to suppress the knowledge of this state of existence; we can try to let things that we cannot change just be there as surd elements of our lives; or we can misuse joyous experiences of life as analgesics against the uncanny tensions between who we are and who we should be; or we can interpret these dissatisfactions as depression which we either have simply to suffer or which we can medicalize ourselves against.
But when we muster the courage to face these tensions [between who we are and who we aspire to become], when we acknowledge them and accept them … then we have come to have patience with ourselves, to accept that we are not in pure agreement with ourselves… Many believe that they have patience with themselves and that this patience is the most ordinary of things. But if we were to look at such people more carefully, we would see that they do not take on patiently the pain of their tensions, that they don’t face them without ether embellishing or hating them, but that they flee from them into the banality of everyday life … that what has triumphed in them [over these tensions] is an unrecognized despair or despairing resignation, that they, in the end, believe that life has no meaning. We would also see that they do not actually have patience as they behold the questionableness of their existence, but are seeking ways to look away and find surrogates for patience, which, they believe, make it possible for them to live.
Those who are truly patient endure in reality their existential tensions, take them on, accept the pain they cause… Those who are patient are patient with their impatience; serenely, they let go of the final “agreement” between who they are and what they aspire to become. They do not know where this serenity, in which they let themselves be, comes from… Those who are patient are serene and therefore free.
We will not further explore the question about what it is that we ultimately fall upon when practicing such serene patience. Some people will think that the stance rests on “Nothing”; resting on “Nothing,” they can be victorious over tense conflicts of finite realities in their own lives. Others are persuaded, that “Nothing,” when one gives it its proper sense, is of no use, that it can have no power to give peace. Instead, they believe that when we serenely accept our tensions [between who we are and what we aspire to become], then, whether we are aware or not, we have come to rest on what in everyday use of the word we call God.And when we really understand that word [God], the we see that the letting oneself “fall” into the silent incomprehensibility which is God “succeeds” because God receives in grace those who let themselves fall into serene patience with themselves.
06 Sep 2020
Supporting Sacrificial Love: Learning How to Fight a Pandemic from the Army's Chief of Chaplains / Major General Thomas Solhjem
00:31:14
Matt Croasmun interviews the U.S. Army Chief of Chaplains: Major General Thomas Solhjem about whatever transferable wisdom we might apply from armed conflict to our war with Covid-19. They discuss how to cultivate courage, human fragility and loss of control, stories of bravery and love when life is on the line, and how to support the spiritual lives of the men and women of the armed forces.
Chaplain (Major General) Thomas L. Solhjem is the Army’s 25th Chief of Chaplains. He leads the Chaplain Corps in providing religious support to the Army’s Soldiers, their Families, and Civilians.
The views that Major General Thomas Solhjem discusses in this interview are his own and do not represent the United States Department of Defense or the United States Army, which have permitted his appearance on this podcast episode.
13 Nov 2021
Francisco Lozada / Theology of Immigration: Crossing Porous Borders, Welcoming Strangers, and the Faith of the Migrant
00:53:37
What can the faith of the migrant teach us about a living theology? The resilience and communal outlook of immigrants offers a way of seeing human relationships—political, social, religious—as porous and permeable, meant to encounter God in the other, welcoming each other in love and hospitality. Francisco Lozada (Brite Divinity School) joins Evan Rosa to reflect on his experiences at U.S.-Mexico borderlands, leading travel seminars and teaching about immigration and justice from a theological framework—they discuss the influence of liberation theology's guiding principle of the preferential option for the poor, the centrality of history in understanding immigration, the problem of American xenophobia, and the racialization of U.S. immigration policy.
This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information, visit tyndale.foundation.
"Building bridges, not walls."
"God doesn't see borders. In my theological thinking, I don't imagine a God or theologize a God asking, "show me your papers." God's asking different questions: Did you feed me, did you give me something to drink, did you clothe me?
During this trip to Nogales, we came across a group of students and they were celebrating mass. We were walking right by them. We were on the U.S. side, they were on the Mexican side, and they asked, do we want to celebrate mass there? And what I see that moment is, that mass, that prayer was a form or expression of resistance, of pushing back there. There are no borders between us.
Prayer doesn't see borders. Faith doesn't see borders. That's the power religion. I think the power of theology, the power of prayer, is that it works—not always, but in its true sense—it works to build bridges, not walls." (Francisco Lozada, from the interview)
Introduction (Evan Rosa)
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
"The New Colossus" Emma Lazarus, 1883
The generous spirit, the welcome for the wandering, taking in the homeless stranger, the refugee—these words that inscribe the Statue of Liberty offer a hopeful image of an America with open arms, a beacon of hospitality and safety in a dangerous world. How do we square this symbol of welcoming freedom with the reality of immigration policy today? Detention centers crowded with young children separated from their families, exploitation of undocumented migrants for agricultural labor, billions of dollars spent on "the wall," the false nativism of fair-skinned European-American immigrants.
Alongside the ideals of The New Colossus embracing the "tired, poor, huddled masses," a history of racial purity, exclusion, xenophobia, and fear can be seen in immigration policy, from the Chinese Exclusion Act just four years before the dedication of Lady Liberty, to the discriminatory immigration quotas of the Johnson-Reed Act in 1924, all the way up to the Muslim Travel Ban of 2017.
In the spring of 2018, approximately 5,500 children were separated from their families by Trump's zero tolerance policy. 1,700 children still live in detention centers, 3 years later.
But how does this balance with the rights of a nation to enforce and manage its political borders? How should those borders be enforced justly? How should we prioritize national security and cultural integrity with the call to welcome the tempest-tost stranger through our "golden doors"?
Well, beyond the dizzying political and moral questions that we have with us always, Francisco Lozada is thinking theologically about immigration and the migrant experience. He is the Charles Fischer Catholic Professor of New Testament and Latinx Studies at Brite Divinity School in Fort Worth, Texas.
Lozada draws on his experiences at U.S.-Mexico borderlands, leading travel seminars and teaching about immigration and justice from a theological framework. In this episode we discuss the influence of liberation theology's guiding principle of the preferential option for the poor, the centrality of history in understanding immigration, the problem of American xenophobia, the racialization of U.S. immigration policy, and the ways Jesus, himself a migrant and refugee, crosses borders and boundaries throughout the Gospel narrative.
Thanks for listening.
About
Francisco Lozada, Jr. is the Charles Fischer Catholic Professor of New Testament and Latinx Studies at Brite Divinity School in Fort Worth, Texas. He holds a doctorate in New Testament and Early Christianity from Vanderbilt University. He is a past co-chair of the Johannine Literature Section (SBL), past chair of the Program Committee of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL), and a past member of SBL Council. He is a past president of the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States, a past steering committee member of the Bible, Indigenous Group of the American Academy of Religion (AAR), and past co-chair of the Latino/a and Latin American Biblical Interpretation Consultation (SBL). He also serves on the board of directors for the Hispanic Summer Program, and mentored several doctoral students with the Hispanic Theological Initiative (HTI). Dr. Lozada’s most recent publications concern cultural and ideological interpretation while exploring how the Bible is employed and deployed in ethnic/racial communities. As a teacher, he co-led immersion travel seminars to Guatemala to explore colonial/postcolonial issues and, most recently, to El Paso, TX, and Nogales, AZ, to study life and society in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Click here to check out his personal website.
Show Notes
Introduction (Evan Rosa)
"The New Colossus," Emma Lazarus, 1883 (see above)
Relationality, borderlands, and solidarity
Life shared together
What does solidarity mean in the context of immigration?
"How do you bring us churches in solidarity with the plight of the poor in Latin America?"
The guiding principles of liberation theology and their influence on immigration theology
Preferential option for the poor
Jesus as someone with us
Resilience and the migrant's journey
Reframing the narrative of why migration occurs.
Common misconceptions (narratives) about why people migrate
"How you understand migration will influence how you respond to immigration."
Nationalism, nativism, and scarce resources
Responsibility comes from our relatedness and living off the benefits of oppressive history
"Immigration is historical. You can't construct an immigration response that's ahistorical."
Oscar Martinez, Troublesome Border
"The border is not fixed."
Jesus crossing borders in the Gospel of John
Relationships that break through borders
Samaritan woman
Centurion
Are borders meant to be crossed?
Why migrants cross, how migrants cross, and how borders are maintained.
The narrative is the encounter itself.
Xenophobia
A reckoning with our complicity with the construction of whiteness
Nationality Act of 1790
Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882
Johnson-Reed Act of 1924
Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965
Whiteness and the history of U.S. Immigration Policy
"The New Colossus" (Inscription on the Statue of Liberty): "Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, / I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
How do we interpret human mobility?
How do we understand our past?
"It can't begin out of an abstract reality, it has to begin with a lived reality. That's liberation."
The faith of the migrant
Resilience
Production Notes
This podcast featured biblical scholar Francisco Lozada
Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
Hosted by Evan Rosa
Production Assistance by Martin Chan, Nathan Jowers, Natalie Lam, and Logan Ledman
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
21 Jun 2022
Lisa Sharon Harper / Fortune: How Race Broke My Family & the World—and How to Repair It All
00:48:47
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:
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.”
“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
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
13 Mar 2025
The Fear to Hope: Ukrainian Pastor on Democracy, Fear, and Abundant Life in the Midst of War / Fyodor Raychynets
00:54:20
"Do not be afraid of your fears, but cope with them—learn how to deal with them—because unless you do, you cannot live your life abundantly and fully." (Fyodor Raychynets)
Evoking courage, resilience, and faith in the face of overwhelming uncertainty, Ukrainian pastor and theologian Fyodor Raychynets returns to For the Life of the World three years after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In conversation with Evan Rosa, Fyodor shares his reflections on fear, freedom, and the emotional and spiritual challenges of living fully in a time of war. He discusses his response to recent global political developments, the struggle of holding onto hope, and the importance of confronting fear rather than suppressing it. Drawing from the Gospel of Mark’s iteration of Jesus walking on water, his own personal grief and therapy, and the lived experience of war, Fyodor sees fear not as something to be avoided or gotten rid of, but as something to understand and face with courage.
"We are in a situation where we are scared to hope."
"Do not be afraid of your fears, but cope with them—learn how to deal with them—because unless you do, you cannot live your life abundantly and fully."
"If I want to say to someone, ‘I love you,’ I say it. If I want to forgive, I forgive. If I want to do something meaningful, I do it now—because tomorrow is never guaranteed."
"The enemy wants us to live in fear, to be paralyzed by it. But to live fully is to resist."
"When Jesus scared his disciples on the water, he was bringing their fears to the surface—so that they could face them and find true freedom."
Show Notes
Image: “Walking on Water”, by Ivan Aivazovsky, Russia, 1888
Episode Summary
Ukrainian pastor and theologian Fyodor Raychynets reflects on faith, fear, and hope after three years of war.
The role of fear in spiritual and personal transformation.
A biblical perspective on confronting fear, drawn from the Gospel of Mark.
Political and emotional reactions to recent global events impacting Ukraine.
Living fully in the present as an act of resistance against fear and oppression.
Faith, Fear, and Freedom
Fyodor Raychynets returns to discuss Ukraine’s ongoing struggle and his evolving faith.
"Fear to hope"—the challenge of holding onto hope when the world is falling apart.
Why fear should be faced rather than suppressed.
The spiritual wisdom of encountering fear: “When Jesus scared his disciples, it was for their good.”
The difference between being reckless, cowardly, or courageous—all of which share the common state of fear.
The Ukrainian Perspective on Global Politics
How Ukraine perceives the shifting stance of U.S. foreign policy.
The impact of Zelenskyy’s visit to the Oval Office and international reactions.
The challenge of fighting for democracy when global powers redefine the terms of war.
The fear that democratic values are no longer upheld by those who once championed them.
Biblical and Psychological Perspectives on Fear
Mark’s Gospel and the fear of encountering God in unexpected ways.
Fyodor quotes Carl Jung: "Where our fears lie, that is where change is most needed."
Facing fear as a practice of faith and emotional resilience.
The importance of naming fears, localizing them, and even “inviting them in for tea.”
How unprocessed fear can lead to paralysis or aggression.
Living in the Present: The Antidote to Fear
Why Fyodor refuses to postpone life until after the war.
"We don’t know what tomorrow brings. So I live today, fully."
A powerful response to fear: doing good, loving openly, and forgiving freely.
The lesson of war: never get used to abnormal things.
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.
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
20 Aug 2022
Katie Grimes / Theology's Human Context: Jesus, Exemplarity, and Theologizing Through the Lens of Flourishing
00:19:25
"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
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
12 Mar 2022
Willie Jennings / The Christian Imagination: Theological Complexity, Communication, Cultivation, and Community
00:28:39
Willie James Jennings (Yale Divinity School) joins Matt Croasmun for a conversation about the future of theology, addressing the Christian inability to hold complexity, public communication, and deep formation together in a way that shows how theology is for our very lives.
Seven years ago the Yale Center for Faith and Culture interviewed a diverse array of theologians about the present woes and future potential of theology. Some five years and a pandemic later, the landscape of theological education seems like it's at a crossroads. The driving purpose of Christian higher education is in question as colleges, universities, and seminaries across denominations and around the world consider how they'll move forward in the wake of stark realities this pandemic laid bare. So it's worth revisiting the conversation to see what has changed, what holds true, and what hopes we're still holding on to. For today’s episode, we're featuring a conversation between Matt Croasmun and Dr. Willie James Jennings, Associate Professor of Systematic Theology and Africana Studies at Yale Divinity School, an ordained Baptist minister, and author of The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, and more recently After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging. Willie reminds us to be looking for the opportunities in the middle of crises of theological education; he worries about the inability to hold complexity, public communication, and deep formation together in a way that shows how theology is for our very lives; he speaks to the recent aversion to pastoral ministry, which is theology for the sake of the people; he touches on the role of Christian theology in a pluralistic world, asking how theologians might learn from comedians; and he encourages all Christians to take up the theological call to courage, the call to see, listen, and and alleviate suffering, and the call to a theology of life.
Show notes
How to make theology attractive
Who do we want to teach?
Secular religious studies versus confessional environments
“Never let a good crisis go to waste”
educational ecology: learning environments
Doctoral students, do you want to be a teacher?
The pastor versus the professor: the call to teach
Theology and plurality
Theology and violence: naming the pressure points of suffering
The Christian frame versus the real matter at hand
“We want to be asking human questions, they’re not just Christian questions”
The alleviation of pain and suffering comes before questions of the good life
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
07 Apr 2023
Micheal O'Siadhail / Testament: Through You I Gaze at All I Love
00:56:09
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
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.
24 Jan 2024
Listeners Dare: Courage and the Act of Sermon-Listening / Will Willimon
00:48:14
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.
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
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
31 Jul 2021
Kathryn Tanner / Money, Markets, and the Economy of Grace / Patience Part 2
00:29:09
What does patience have to do with money? It's much more than timing the market just right. The economic factors of our market economy hold great sway over our relationship to the past, present, and future. Theologian Kathryn Tanner reflects on the ways finance-dominated capitalism controls our experience of time, and offers insights for a Christian approach to living in the present, informed by an economy of abundant grace. Part 2 of a 6-episode series on Patience hosted by Ryan McAnnally-Linz.
Show Notes
Listen to Patience Part 1 on Time, Acceleration, and Waiting, with Andrew Root (July 24, 2021)
What does patience have to do with money?
Is time money?
What is finance dominated capitalism?
Viewing economy and our relationship to time through past, present, and future
"Chained to the past”—debt is no longer designed to be paid off, and you can’t escape it
“Urgent focus on the present”—emergencies, preoccupation, short-term outlook, and anxiety
Workplace studies
Poverty, Emergency, and a Lack of Resources (Time or Money)
Lack of time and resources makes you fixated on the present
A Christian sense of the urgency of the present
Sufficient supply of God's grace
The right way to focus on the present
"Consideration of the present for all intents and purposes collapses into concern about the future."
The future is already embedded and encased in the present value of things.
Stock market and collapsing the present into future expectations
Pulling the future into the present
Gamestop and making the future present, and the present future
Patience and "elongating the present"
Fulsomeness, amplitude, expansiveness of God’s grace
Race, savings, and dire circumstances
Patience as a means to elongating the present
Stability, volatility, and waiting
“There’s no profit in waiting."
God's steadfast love and commitment
Kierkegaard's Works of Love
Augustine’s unstable volatile world and the implication of investing only in God's love and stability
"Something has to hold firm in order for you to take risks."
About Kathryn Tanner
Theologian Kathryn Tanner is the Frederick Marquand Professor of Systematic Theology at Yale Divinity School. Her research relates the history of Christian thought to contemporary issues of theological concern using social, cultural, and feminist theory. She is the author of God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment? ; The Politics of God: Christian Theologies and Social Justice ; Theories of Culture: A New Agenda for Theology ; Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology ; Economy of Grace ; Christ the Key; and most recently Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism.
Production Notes
This podcast featured theologians Kathryn Tanner and Ryan McAnnally-Linz
Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
Hosted by Evan Rosa
Production Assistance by Martin Chan & Nathan Jowers
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
23 Oct 2024
History Speaks the Spirit of Justice / Jemar Tisby
00:46:20
History reveals a lot of things about human nature: our innate drive towards progress, discovery, relationship, community. Often motivated by a drive to feel safe and flourish. But despite this instinct, history also shows that we’re prone to inflicting and being complicit to grave and violent injustices. We fail, regularly, at living well with our neighbors.
In his new book, The Spirit of Justice, Jemar Tisby opens the centuries long history of resistance to racism in the United States through the mode of story, and with the lens of the Spirit moving for justice. He asks, what manner of people are those who courageously confront racism? Presenting the lives and witness of over 50 individuals, Tisby examines the way faith threads the life work of these advocates together: not only inspiring their resistance in the first place, but continuing to move through the weariness that so often arises in this work.
In this episode, Jemar Tisby joins Macie Bridge on the podcast to discuss the manifestations of the Spirit of Justice in figures such as H. Ford Douglas, Sister Thea Bowman, David Walker, Myrlie Evers-Williams, and many more; the problem of historical appropriation with figures such as Martin Luther King Jr.; the women whose stories too often fall into the shadow of their husbands’ legacies, like Anna Murray Douglas or Coretta Scott King; and the ever-present question of why we might look to history as we determine our own ways forward.
Jemar Tisby is the New York Times bestselling author of The Color of Compromise and How to Fight Racism. He is a public historian, speaker, and advocate, and is Professor of History at Simmons College, an HBCU in Kentucky.
Photo Credits: Fannie Lou Hamer, Phyllis Wheatley, Charles Morgan Jr., Anna Murray Douglass, David Walker, Sister Thea Bowman, Myrlie & Darrell Evers.
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
11 Oct 2024
Baseball as a Road to God / John Sexton
01:17:20
To true fans, baseball is so much more than a sport. Some call it the perfect game. Some see it as a field of dreams. A portal to another dimension. Some see it as a road to God. Others—”heathen” we might call them—find the game unutterably boring. Too confusing, too long, too nit-picky about rules.
In this episode, Yankee fan John Sexton (President Emeritus of New York University and Benjamin F. Butler Professor of Law) joins Red Sox fan Evan Rosa to discuss the philosophical and spiritual aspects of baseball. John is the author of the 2013 bestselling book Baseball as a Road to God, which is based on a course he has taught at NYU for over twenty years.
Image Credit: “The American National Game of Base Ball: Grand Match for the Championship at the Elysian Fields, Hoboken, N. J.” Published by Currier & Ives, 1866
About John Sexton
John Sexton hasn’t always been a Yankee fan. He once was a proud acolyte of Jackie Robinson and the Brooklyn Dodgers. A legal scholar by training, he served as president of New York University from 2001 through 2015. He is now NYU’s Benjamin F. Butler Professor of Law and dean emeritus of the Law School, having served as dean from 1988 through 2002.
A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a recipient of 24 honorary degrees, President Emeritus Sexton is past chair of the American Council on Education, the Independent Colleges of NY, the New York Academy of Science, and the Federal Reserve Board of NY.
In 2016, Commonweal Magazine honored Sexton as the Catholic in the Public Square. The previous year, the Arab-American League awarded him its Khalil Gibran Spirit of Humanity Award; and the Open University of Israel gave him it’s Alon Prize for “inspired leadership in the field of education.” In 2013, Citizens Union designated him as “an outstanding leader who enhances the value of New York City.”
He received a BA in history and a PhD in the history of American religion from Fordham University, and a JD magna cum laude from Harvard Law School. Before coming to NYU in 1981, he clerked for Judges Harold Leventhal and David Bazelon of the DC Circuit and Chief Justice Warren Burger.
He married Lisa Goldberg in 1976. Their two children are Jed and Katie Sexton. And their grandchildren are Julia, Ava, and Natalie.
Production Notes
This podcast featured John Sexton
Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
Hosted by Evan Rosa
Production Assistance by Alexa Rollow, Emily Brookfield, Kacie Barrett, and Zoë Halaban
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
23 Dec 2023
How the Light Gets In: Restlessness, Christ, & Belonging / Graham Ward
00:51:00
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.
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
03 Feb 2023
Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination and the Expression of True Freedom / Vincent Lloyd
00:44:24
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?
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
08 May 2023
Angry at God: The Psychology of Spiritual Struggle, Coping with Challenges to Faith, Handling Conflicts with God / Julie Exline
00:43:04
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.
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
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.
26 Dec 2024
How to Read Simone Weil, Part 3: The Existentialist / Deborah Casewell
01:05:43
“All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception.” … “It is necessary to uproot oneself. To cut down the tree and make of it a cross, and then to carry it every day.” … “I have to imitate God who infinitely loves finite things in that they are finite things.” … “To know that what is most precious is not rooted in existence—that is beautiful. Why? It projects the soul beyond time.”
(Simone Weil, Gravity & Grace)
“That's how the figure of Christ comes into this idea of the madness of love. It's that kind of mad, self emptying act completely. And it's the one thing, she says, it's the only thing that means that you are able to love properly. Because to love properly, and therefore to be just properly, you have to love like Christ does. Which is love to the extent that you, that you empty yourself and, you know, die on a cross.” (Deborah Casewell, from this episode)
This is the third installment of a short series on How to Read Simone Weil—as the Mystic, the Activist, and the Existentialist.
This week, Evan Rosa invites Deborah Casewell, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chester, author of Monotheism & Existentialism, and Co-Director of the Simone Weil Research Network in the U.K.—to explore how to read Simone Weil the Existentialist.
Together they discuss how her life of extreme self-sacrifice importantly comes before her philosophy; how to understand her central, but often confusing concept of decreation; her approach to beauty as the essential human response for finding meaning in a world of force and necessity; the madness of Jesus Christ as the only way to engage in struggle for justice and how she connects that to the Greek tragedy of Antigone, which is the continuation of the Oedipus story; and, the connection between love, justice, and living a life of madness.
About Simone Weil
Simone Weil (1909–1943) was a French philosopher, mystic, and political activist. She’s the author of Gravity and Grace, The Need for Roots, and Waiting for God—among many other essays, letters, and notes.
About Deborah Casewell
Deborah Casewell is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chester, author of Monotheism & Existentialism, and is Co-Director of the Simone Weil Research Network in the U.K.
Simone de Beauvoir’s anecdote in Memories of a Beautiful Daughter: “Shouldn’t we also get people’s minds, not just their bodies? Weil: “You’ve never been hungry have you?”
Leon Trotsky yells violently at Weil
The odd idolizing of Weil without paying attention to her writing
”You get a kind of, as you say, a kind of odd idolization of her, or a sense in which you can't then interact so critically or systematically with her philosophy, because her figure stands in the way so much, and the kind of the respect that people have.”
Anti-Semitism despite Jewishness
Simone Weil’s relationship to food: an unhealthy role model
“She’d reject anything that wasn’t perfect.”
Extreme germophobe
Expression of solidarity with the unfortunate
Her life comes before her philosophy. Being, you might say, comes before thinking.
Weil’s life of extreme self-sacrifice as “mad”—alienating, insane, strange to the outside world.
“ I think an essential part of, to an essential part of understanding her is to understand that world is kind of structured and set up in such a way that it runs without God, without the supernatural, God's kind of abdicated through the act of creation. And as a result, the universe operates through necessity and through force. So left to its own devices, the universe, I think, tends towards crushing people.”
Abandonment vs abdication
People possess power and ability and action—a tension between activity and passivity
Weil’s Marxism and theory of labor and work
Activity becomes sustained passivity
Consent, power, and the social dynamics of force and necessity
I think she sees the best human existence is to be in a state of obedience instead. And so what you have to do is relinquish power over people.
The complexity of human relationships
“She was a very individual person … a singular, individual life.”
The Need for Roots
“And this is what I do like about Simone Weil—is that she's always happy to let contradictions exist. And so when she describes human nature and the needs of the soul, they're contradictory. They all contradict each other. It's freedom and obedience.”
Creating dualisms
She is a dualist
Simone Weil on Beauty and Decreation
”Decreation is essentially your way to exist in the world ruled by force and necessity without succumbing to force and necessity, because in a way there's less of you to succumb to force and necessity.”
Platonic idea of Metaxu
Weil on the human experience of beauty—” people need beautiful things and they need experiences of beauty in order to exist in the world, fundamentally… if this world is ruled by force and necessity.”
The unity of the transcendentals of beauty and truth and goodness—anchored in God
Weil’s Platonism
Weil as religious existentialist, as opposed to French atheistic existentialist
“ For her, God is the ultimate reality, but also God is love. And so the goal of human existence, I think, is to return to God and consent to God. That's the goal of human life.”
“What are you paying attention to?”
The madness of Christ
The struggle for justice
“Only a few people have this desire for justice, this madness to love.”
Existentialism and Humanism: “Sartre says that man is nothing but what he makes of himself.”
Making oneself an example
“The real supernatural law, which is mad and unreasonable, and it doesn't try to make accommodations and get on with the world and deal with tricky situations. It's just mad.”
Simone Weil on Antigone and the continuation of the Oedipus story
Summary of the Greek tragedy, Antigone
“And so Antigone says, the justice that I owe is not to the city. It's not so that the city can, you know, continue its life and move on. The justice that I owe is to the supernatural law, to these more important primordial laws that actually govern the life and death situations and the situation of your soul as well. And that's why she does what she does. She's obedient to the unwritten law rather than the written law.”
“The love of God and the justice of God is always going to be mad in the eyes of the world.”
”The spirit of justice is nothing other than the supreme and perfect flower of the madness of love.”
The mad, self-emptying love of Christ
“That's how the figure of Christ comes into this idea of the madness of love. It's that kind of mad, self emptying act completely. And it's the one thing, she says, it's the only thing that means that you are able to love properly. Because to love properly, and therefore to be just properly, you have to love like Christ does. Which is love to the extent that you, that you empty yourself and, you know, die on a cross.”
Does Weil suggest an unhealthy desire to suffer?
“ It hurls one into risks one cannot run. If one has given one's heart to anything at all that belongs to this world. Um, and the outcome to which the madness of love led Christ is, after all, no recommendation for it.”
“But if the order of the universe is a wise order, there must sometimes be moments when, from the point of view of earthly reason, only the madness of love is reasonable. Such moments can only be those when, as today, mankind has become mad from want of love. Is it certain today that the madness of love may not be capable of providing the unhappy masses, hungry in body and soul, with a food far easier for them to digest than our inspirations to a less lofty source? So then, being what we are, is it certain that we are at our post in the camp of justice?”
“ From a loftier view, only the madness of love is reasonable.”
“Only the madness of love can be the kind of love that actually helps people in the world. Fundamentally, that people, even though they know it's mad, and they find it mad, and they would sometimes rather not see it, they need that kind of love, and they need people who love in that kind of way. Even if it's not the majority, people still need that. And so in some way, the way in which she is, and the way in which she sees Christ being, is indispensable. Even though the path that you have to go down has nothing to recommend, as she says, in the eyes of the reasonable world, nothing to recommend it. It's the only just thing to do. It's the only just and loving thing to do in the end.”
Production Notes
This podcast featured Deborah Casewell
Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
Hosted by Evan Rosa
Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, Emily Brookfield, and Zoë Halaban
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
13 Jun 2020
Justice Somewhere: Local Lament and Joyful Protest in New Haven, CT / Josh Williams & Matthew Croasmun
00:44:54
Matthew Croasmun interviews Pastor Josh Williams (Elm City Vineyard, New Haven, CT) about being a black pastor of a multi-ethnic church in New Haven. In this conversation, Williams provides a window into the incarnational theology that truly makes a difference in the world; he reflects on how increased attention to police involved violence against black life has impacted his life and vocation; he focuses on lament as the first step toward action and justice, but talks about joy and spiritual discipline in the act of protest, and finally, reflects on the fundamentally challenging question everyone is wrestling with right now: What does it mean to love our whole city?
Show Notes
Josh Williams, Elm City Vineyard Church
A pastor’s perspective on increased national attention to police-involved shootings since 2014.
Leading community through following Jesus in the face of racial violence
The difficulties of multi-ethnic community in these times.
The assumption that police are good and trying to do right.
An expectation that the nation is just.
A practice of lament
The “Night of Joy”
Joy is critical because his existence as a black person in American is a protest.
Bittersweet joy versus vibrant joy
Joy helps us remember the truth of the fight.
Living for the sake of the Black and Brown community in New Haven.
Christian responsibility to the ethics of justice.
Hopes for the work of understanding from the police.
Hopes and demands.
04 Dec 2024
Open the Gates: Immigration & the Book of Revelation / Yii-Jan Lin
00:43:08
Why do we have countries? Why do we mark this land and these people as distinct from that land and those people? What are countries for? Yii-Jan Lin (Associate Professor of New Testament, Yale Divinity School) joins Matt Croasmun to discuss her new book, Immigration and Apocalypse, which traces the development of distinctly American ideas about the meaning of a country, its borders, and crossing those borders through immigration—exploring how the biblical book of Revelation has influenced our modern geopolitical map.
Together they discuss the eschatological vision of Christopher Columbus; the Puritanical founding of New Haven, Connecticut to be the New Jerusalem; Ronald Reagan’s America as “City on a Hill”; the politics of COVID; the experience of Asian American immigrants in the 19th century; and how scripture shapes the American imagination in surprising and sometimes troubling ways.
About Yii-Jan Lin
Yii-Jan Lin is Associate Professor of New Testament at Yale Divinity School. She specializes in immigration, textual criticism, the Revelation of John, critical race theory, and gender and sexuality. Her book *Immigration and Apocalypse: How the Book of Revelation Shaped American Immigration* (Yale University Press 2024), focuses on the use of Revelation in political discourse surrounding American immigration—in conceptions of America as the New Jerusalem and of unwanted immigrants as the filthy, idolatrous horde outside the city walls.
Her book The Erotic Life of Manuscripts (Oxford 2016), examines how metaphors of race, family, evolution, and genetic inheritance have shaped the goals and assumptions of New Testament textual criticism from the eighteenth century to the present.
Professor Lin has been published in journals such as the Journal of Biblical Literature, Early Christianity, and TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism. She is co-chair of the Minoritized Criticism and Biblical Interpretation section of the Society of Biblical Literature, on the steering committee for the Ethnic Chinese Biblical Colloquium, and on the steering committees for the New Testament Textual Criticism and the Bible in America sections of SBL. She also serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Biblical Literature. Professor Lin is a member of the Society of Asian Biblical Studies, the European Association of Biblical Studies, and an elected member of Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas.
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
23 Oct 2021
Julian Reid / Musical Spiritual Hotel: Rest, Hospitality, and Sacred Music
00:46:02
Julian Reid explores the way music and scripture can come together to create a sacred space. Extending metaphors of music as architecture and dwelling and spiritual experience as a river, the jazz pianist, producer, writer, and performer explains a recent project of his, "Notes of Rest," combining African-American spirituals with classical hymns for an experience of spiritual hospitality, gratitude, and proclamation of the Gospel into the full spectrum of human experience, in all its pain, frustration, frenzy, stillness, and joy. Throughout the conversation you'll hear Julian play along to accompany his points; he also graciously provided beautiful meditative interludes, much like the kind you'd experience in one of his "Notes of Rest" sessions. Interview by Matt Croasmun.
This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information, visit tyndale.foundation.
"God has given us music so that above all it can lead us upwards. Music unites all qualities: it can exalt us, divert us, cheer us up, or break the hardest of hearts with the softest of its melancholy tones. But its principal task is to lead our thoughts to higher things, to elevate, even to make us tremble… The musical art often speaks in sounds more penetrating than the words of poetry, and takes hold of the most hidden crevices of the heart… Song elevates our being and leads us to the good and the true. If, however, music serves only as a diversion or as a kind of vain ostentation it is sinful and harmful." (Friedrich Nietzsche at 14 years old; see Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography by Julian Young; h/t Brain Pickings)
Bringing together music and scripture
Engendering wonder and trust as a seedbed for a life of faith
Creating space, the architecture that music creates
Weekly liturgical practices
The ends and uses of music in sacred spaces
Living in a tent, motel—a musical spiritual hotel
Scripture is like a cathedral or museum.
Performance: "Thank You, Lord"
Gratitude—the way we enter into hospitality, "what it means to be hosted by God"
Hotel art—the artwork invites and calms rather than jarring and provoking
Curiosity vs calmness
Invoking a different kind of response
Sanitizing the Psalms
Performance: "Give Me Jesus"
Speaking to different registers
Aimed at an encounter with the living God
Grace
Proclamation: music and preaching
Taking risks over the pulpit
Karl Barth: "God tempts the church through God's absence."
Kerygma: "proclamation"
Performance: "Lord, Hear My Prayer" (Taize)
Word and Water
The metaphor of water utilized in "Notes of Rest"
Black musical idioms
Finding the use of Contemporary Christian Music (CCM)
Balm in Gilead
The Hymns of Isaac Watts, colonizing, historical context
Combining musical genealogies
Braxton Shelly's Healing for the Soul
Imaginative fuel from the mystics
Cistercian monastics: worshipping in silence and solitude; "a long-standing faith"
Performance: "Lord, Hear My Prayer / Give Me Jesus" (Medley)
Introduction (Evan Rosa)
One of the most gripping and influential philosophers of the last 200 years once wrote:
"God has given us music so that above all it can lead us upwards. Music unites all qualities: it can exalt us, divert us, cheer us up, or break the hardest of hearts with the softest of its melancholy tones. But its principal task is to lead our thoughts to higher things, to elevate, even to make us tremble… The musical art often speaks in sounds more penetrating than the words of poetry, and takes hold of the most hidden crevices of the heart… Song elevates our being and leads us to the good and the true. If, however, music serves only as a diversion or as a kind of vain ostentation it is sinful and harmful."
That Friedrich Nietzsche, written when he was 14 years old.
There is plenty of "vain ostentation" in popular music today, and certainly not excluding the music played in church.
But the unitive depth and invitation into transcendence that music offers us of course pairs beautifully with scripture. And whatever else might have changed in Nietzsche's thinking, even at the end of his life in Twilight of the Idols, he suggested that "Without music life would be a mistake. The German imagines even God as a songster." And I say: Well, not just the German, but the human.
In today's episode, Matt Croasmun welcomes Julian Reid, jazz pianist and producer, writer, and performer (not to mention Yale and Emory educated). You can hear his hip-hop infused jazz project The JuJu Exchange on episode 26 of For the Life of the World, when Julian joined us to talk about How Jazz Teaches us Faith and Justice. Today, Matt and Julian explore the way music and scripture can come together to create a sacred space. Extending metaphors of music as architecture and dwelling and spiritual experience as a river, Julian explains a recent project of his, "Notes of Rest," combining African-American spirituals with classical hymns for an experience of spiritual hospitality, gratitude, and proclamation of the Gospel into the full spectrum of human experience, in all its pain, frustration, frenzy, stillness, and joy.
Throughout the conversation you'll hear Julian play along to accompany his points; he also graciously provided beautiful meditative interludes, much like the kind you'd experience in one of his "Notes of Rest" sessions.
Thanks for listening.
About Julian Reid
Julian Reid is a Chicago-based jazz pianist and producer, writer, and performer (B.A. Yale University / M.Div. Emory University). The JuJu Exchange is a musical partnership also featuring Nico Segal (trumpet, Chance the Rapper; The Social Experiment) and Everett Reid—exploring creativity, justice, and the human experience through their hip-hop infused jazz. Their new 5-song project is called The Eternal Boombox. Julian's latest project is "Notes of Rest"—a spiritual mini-retreat that places meditations from the Bible on a bed of music, cultivating rest, contemplation, and creativity in all who will hear Jesus’ call.
Production Notes
This podcast featured musician Julian Reid and biblical scholar Matt Croasmun
Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
Hosted by Evan Rosa
Production Assistance by Martin Chan, Nathan Jowers, Natalie Lam, and Logan Ledman
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
25 Jul 2020
Public Faith Across the Divide / David French and Miroslav Volf
00:47:40
In this conversation, Miroslav Volf and David French discuss the politically and culturally polarized America; the resurgence of cultural struggle, if not outright culture war; seeing fundamentalist political religion on both the right and the left; forgiveness versus cancellation and how our view of human persons affects that public conversation; personal morality and social justice; and finally how political theology can make a difference now, the rest of this year (and it’s been a year), and the future of American life.
A gap in Christian instruction in how to interact with politics
Internal virtues have significant political implications
Christian faith and nationalism depend on each other
Post-religious activism
Confession of error as a sign of person growth
The fear and anger cycle which alienates the church
What kind of life does God have in minds for us?
When allegiance is first to Jesus, our care for justice, mercy, and humility fall into alignment.
12 Dec 2024
How to Read Simone Weil, Part 1: The Mystic / Eric O. Springsted
00:59:24
This episode is the first of a short series exploring How to Read Simone Weil. The author of Gravity and Grace, The Need for Roots, and Waiting for God—among many other essays, letters, and notes, Weil has been an inspiration to philosophers, poets, priests, and politicians for the last century—almost all of it after her untimely death.
She understood, perhaps more than many other armchair philosophers from the same period, the risk of philosophy—the demands it made on a human life.
In this series, we’ll feature three guests who look at this magnificent and mysterious thinker in interesting and refreshing, and theologically and morally challenging ways.
We’ll look at Simone Weil the Mystic, Simone Weil the Activist, Simone Weil the Existentialist.
First we’ll be hearing from Eric Springsted, a co-founder of the American Weil Society and its long-time president—who wrote Simone Weil: Late Philosophical Writings and Simone Weil for the Twenty-First Century.
In this conversation, Eric O. Springsted and Evan Rosa discuss Simone Weil’s personal biography, intellectual life, and the nature of her spiritual and religious and moral ideas; pursuing philosophy as a way of life; her encounter with Christ, affliction, and mystery; her views on attention and prayer; her concept of the void, and the call to self-emptying; and much more.
About Simone Weil
Simone Weil (1909–1943) was a French philosopher, mystic, and political activist. She’s the author of Gravity and Grace, The Need for Roots, and Waiting for God—among many other essays, letters, and notes.
About Eric O. Springsted
Eric O. Springsted is the co-founder of the American Weil Society and served as its president for thirty-three years. After a career as a teacher, scholar, and pastor, he is retired and lives in Santa Fe, NM. He is the author and editor of a dozen previous books, including Simone Weil: Late Philosophical Writings and Simone Weil for the Twenty-First Century.
Weil’s critique of Marxism: “Reflections on the Cause of Liberty and Social Oppression”: ”an attempt to try and figure out how there can be freedom and dignity in human labor and action”
“Unfortunately she found affliction.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein: “Philosophy is a matter of working on yourself.”
Philosophy “isn’t simply objective. It’s a matter of personal morality as well.”
”Not only is the unexamined life not worth living, but virtue and intellect go hand in hand. Yeah. You don't have one without the other.”
An experiment in how work and labor is done
The demeaning and inherently degrading nature of factory work
Christianity as “the religion of slaves.”
Christianity can’t take away suffering; but it can take away the meaninglessness.
George Herbert: “Love bade me welcome / But my soul drew back guilty of dust and sin”
Weil’s vision/visit of Christ during Holy Week in Solemn, France: “It was like the smile on a beloved face.”
The role of mystery
Weil’s definition of mystery: ”What she felt mystery was, and she gets a definition of it, it's when two necessary lines of thought cross and are irreconcilable, yet if you suppress one of them, somehow light is lost.”
Her point is that whatever good comes out of this personal contact with Christ, does not erase the evil of the suffering.
What is “involvement in contradiction”
“She thought contradiction was an inescapable mark of truth.”
Contradictions that shed light on life.
Why mysticism is important for Weil: “The universe cannot be put into a box with techniques or tricks or our own scientific methods or philosophical methods. … Mystery instills humility and it takes the question of the knowing ego out of the picture. … And it challenges modern society to resist the idea that faith could be reduced to a dogmatic system.”
“Faith is not a matter of the intellect.”
“Intellect is not the highest faculty. Love is.”
“The Right Use of School Studies”
“Muscular effort of attention”
She wanted to convert her Dominican priest friend into the universality of grace—that Plato was a pre-Chrisitan.” (e.g., her essay, “ Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks”)
“Grace is universal.”
How school studies contribute to the love of God
Prayer as attention
Weil on Attention: “Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object. It means holding in our minds within the reach of this thought, but on the lower level and not in contact with it. The diverse knowledge we have acquired. Which we are forced to make use of. Above all our thought should be empty waiting, not seeking anything but ready to receive in its naked truth. The object that is to penetrate it.”
Not “detached,” but “available and ready for use”
Making space for the afflicted other by “attending” to them
Love that isn’t compensatory
“The void as a space where love can go”
What is prayer for Simone Weil?
Prayer as listening all night long
“Voiding oneself of secondary desires and letting oneself be spoken to.”
Is Simone Weil “ a self-abnegating, melancholy revolutionary” (Leon Trotsky)
Humility in Simone Weil
“The Terrible Prayer”
Was Simone Weil anorexic?
Refusing comfort on the grounds of solidarity
Self-emptying and grace
Accepting the entire creation as God’s will
Simone Weil on patience and waiting
“With time, attention blooms into waiting.”
“She’s resistant to the Church, but drawing from Christ’s self-emptying.”
God’s withdrawal from the world (which is not deism)
“A sacramental view of the world”
“ The very creation of the world is by this withdrawal and simultaneous crucifixion of the sun in time and space.”
(Obsessive) pursuit of purity in morals and thought
Iris Murdoch’s The Nice and the Good
“Nothing productive needs to come from this effort.”
“ She put her finger on what's really the heart of Christian spirituality. … We live by the Word … by our being open to listening to the Word and having that transformed into God’s word.”
Production Notes
This podcast featured Eric O. Springsted
Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
Hosted by Evan Rosa
Production Assistance by Emily Brookfield, Alexa Rollow, Zoë Halaban, & Kacie Barrett
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
22 Aug 2020
Capitalism, Christianity, and Morality / David French and Miroslav Volf
00:30:07
Miroslav Volf and David French discuss economy, morality, and human flourishing—looking in particular at the questions of whether capitalism and conservative moral values can coexist, and how the demands of Jesus’s ethics implicate free market economy.
David French is a conservative political commentator for The Dispatch, known for his opposition to Donald Trump, his commitment to religious liberty, his advocacy for civility in public discourse, and his willingness to take a clear stand on political and cultural issues informed by his Christian faith commitments.
The nature of the tug-o-war about reopening the American economy in the wake of COVID-19’s onset, and of course now in the wake of its second surge, was primarily a debate about the incommensurable values of economic wealth and personal health—or maybe better, economy and person. But more than that, it pit the concept of what it means for human beings to flourish against the political and economic aspirations of both political parties.
It sure is easy to lose sight of the human in all of this.
But Christian values and commitments require that our economic theorizing and policy making mean that the economy serves the person, honoring the dignity of human life, creating opportunity for justice and health, peace and flourishing, for the good of God’s kingdom.
To set up the conversation, we asked David about a 2019 back and forth he had with Sohrab Amari on the future of conservative thought, asking specifically about the way conservative moral values (things like family, integrity, honesty, generosity, forgiveness, purity) have been fused with free market capitalism. As he says, "in the absence of cultural virtue … a virtue in citizenry, a dog-eat-dog capitalism can be a miserable place.”
"There are no effective replacements for capitalism. The question is, what is the Christian responsibility for the proper functioning of it, and to what extent can we steer the whole of capitalist production to serve genuinely human ends as they are articulated by the Christian faith?" (Miroslav Volf, from the episode)
"In the absence of cultural virtue … a virtue in citizenry, a dog-eat-dog capitalism can be a miserable place.” (David French, from the episode)
21 Feb 2025
Kendrick Lamar's Political Theology / Femi Olutade
01:04:33
Super Bowl LIX was amazing, but not because of the football, or the commercials. It was the 13-minute half-time tour de force of political theology and protest art, brought to you by Kendrick Lamar. Acting like a parable to offer more to those who already get it, and to take away from those who don’t get it at all, the performance was so much more than a petty way to settle a rap beef.
But what exactly was going on? Today’s episode is an introduction to the political theology of Kendrick Lamar. Evan Rosa welcomes Femi Olutade, arguably the living expert on the theology of Kendrick Lamar. A lifelong fan of hip hop and student of theology, he’s deeply familiar not just with music Kendrick made, but the influences that made Kendrick, as well as Christian scripture and moral theology. Femi has written incredibly nuanced theological musicological reflections about Kendrick Lamar’s 2017 album DAMN., which won the Pulitzer Prize for Music.
Femi joined Dissect Podcast host Cole Cushna as lead writer for a 20-episode analysis of DAMN., offering incredible insight into the theological, moral, and political richness of Kendrick Lamar.
About Femi Olutade
Femi Olutade is the lead writer for Season 5 of Dissect, an analysis of Kendrick Lamar’s Pulitzer Prize-winning album DAMN. He’s arguably the living expert on the theology of Kendrick Lamar. A lifelong fan of hip hop and student of theology, he’s deeply familiar not just with music Kendrick made, but the influences that made Kendrick, as well as Christian scripture and moral theology. Femi has written incredibly nuanced theological musicological reflections about Kendrick Lamar’s 2017 album DAMN., which won the Pulitzer Prize for Music.
Femi joined host Cole Cushna as lead writer for a 20-episode analysis of DAMN., offering incredible insight into the theological, moral, and political richness of Kendrick Lamar.
Kendrick Lamar’s Political Theology as a Diss Track to America
Super Bowl LIX was amazing, but not because of the football, or the commercials. It was the 13 minute half-time tour de force that Kendrick Lamar offered the world.
Uncle Sam introduces the show, the quote “Great American Game.” A playstation controller appears. Is the game football? Video game? Or some other game? Kendrick appears crouched on a car—dozens of red, white, and blue dancers emerge, evoking both the American flag which they eventually form, as well as the gang wars between bloods and crips—or as Kendrick says in Hood Politics, “Demo-crips” and “Re-blood-icans”
And what ensues is an intricately choreographed set of layered meanings, allusions, hidden references and Easter eggs—not all of which have been noticed, not to mention explained or understood.
You can find links to the performance and the lyrics in the show notes.
Femi Olutade on the Theology of Kendrick Lamar
Today’s episode is an introduction to the political theology of Kendrick Lamar. And joining me is Femi Olutade, arguably the living expert on the theology of Kendrick Lamar. As a lifelong fan of hip hop, he’s deeply familiar not just with music Kendrick made, but the influences that made Kendrick. Femi has written incredibly nuanced theological musicological reflections about Kendrick Lamar’s 2017 album DAMN., which won the Pulitzer Prize for Music.
And I became familiar with Femi’s work in 2021, while listening to a podcast called Dissect—which analyzes albums line by line, note by note. They cover mostly hip hop, but the season on Radiohead’s In Rainbows is also incredible. Femi joined host Cole Cushna to co-write a 20-episode analysis of DAMN., offering incredible insight into the theological, moral, and political richness of Kendrick Lamar, which repays so many replays. Forward, AND backward. Yes, you can play the album backwards and forwards like a mirror and they tell two different stories, one about wickedness and pride, and the other about weakness, love, and humility.
If you want to jump to my conversation with Femi about Kendrick Lamar’s Political Theology, please do, just jump ahead a few minutes.
Not Just a Diss Track to Drake, but a Diss Track to America
But I wanted to offer a few preliminaries of my own to help with this most recent context of the Super Bowl halftime performance.
Because almost immediately, it was interpreted as nothing more than one of the pettiest, egotistical, and overkill ways to settle a rap beef between Kendrick and another hip hop artist, Drake. Some fans celebrated this. Others found it at best irrelevant and confusing, and at worst an offensive waste of an opportunity to make a larger statement before an audience of 133 million viewers.
In my humble opinion, both get it wrong. Kendrick Lamar simply does not work this way.
If it was the biggest diss track of all time, it wasn’t aimed merely at Drake, but America. And if it was offensive, it was because of its moral clarity and force, striking a prophetic chord operating similar to a parable.
Jesus and Kendrick on Prophecy and Parables
Parables, according to Jesus, are meant to give more to those who already have, and take away from those who already have nothing (Matthew 13:13). Because, as the prophet Isaiah says, “seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand” (Isaiah 6:9).
At this point, it’s possible that you’re entirely confused, and if so, I’d invite you to hang with me and lean in. Watch it again, listen more closely. Because rap, according to Jay Z, is a lean-in genre. You can’t understand it without close examination, without contextual, bottom-up, historical appreciation, or without a willingness to be educated about what it’s like to be Black in America.
But I guarantee you that in Kendrick Lamar’s outstanding choreographed prophetic theatre, there’s much more going on—”there’s levels to it”—to quote Lamar.
You Picked the Right Time, but the Wrong Guy
And if you want it clearly spelled out for you—a cleaner, smoother, tighter, more palatable, less subtle social commentary that can be abstracted from history, circumstance, and the genre of rap itself so that it can be rationally evaluated—well, you’re occupying the exact position Kendrick is critiquing, which he prophetically predicts in the very performance itself. As he warns us:
The revolution 'bout to be televised You picked the right time, but the wrong guy
Still, what was that?? First, it’s public performance art, so just let it land. Watch it again. Notice something new. Submit yourself to it. Let it change you.
The Black American Experience in Hip Hop and Kendrick Lamar
And if you really want to understand it, you need to be open to the possibility that some social commentary can only be understood in light of certain lived experiences. In this case, at least the Black American experience. And then, rather than demanding that Kendrick explain it to you in your own vernacular, listen to what he’s already said. Lean in an listen to his whole body of work, learn his story, expertly rendered in jaw-dropping lyrical performance. Drive with him through his childhood streets of Compton on Good Kid M.A.A.D. City. Journey with him from caterpillar to butterfly on To Pimp a Butterfly, look in the mirror presented before you in the Pulitzer-prize winning DAMN., hear out his messy psyche laid bare in Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers, take a ride with him in GNX…
In the days following Kendrick’s super bowl performance, J Kameron Carter, Professor of African American Studies, Comparative Literature, and Religion at the University of California at Irvine, called for a more in-depth study of the 13-minute performance, noting that:
“[B]lack performance carries within it an interrogation of the question of country as the problem and question of US political theology and the legacy of Christian empire.”
This episode isn’t meant to close any books or offer a full explanation of Kendrick’s performance, let alone his music, but just to lean in, and to quote Kendrick, “salute truth and the prophecy.”
Production Notes
This podcast featured Femi Olutade
Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
Hosted by Evan Rosa
Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, Zoë Halaban, Kacie Barrett & Emily Brookfield
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
19 Feb 2022
Lisa Sharon Harper & Miroslav Volf / The Case for Reparations, Historical Restorative Justice, Ancestry, and Christian Power
00:54:42
"I am because they were." Lisa Sharon Harper joins Miroslav Volf to discuss the significance of narrative history for understanding ourselves and our current cultural moment; the sequence of repeated injustices that have haunted America's past and directly impacted Black Americans for hundreds of years; the Christian nationalist temptation to hoard power; the necessary conditions for true repair, the role of reparations in the pursuit of racial justice, and the goodness of belonging.
This month, Lisa Sharon Harper released a new book that traces her family's history. Even with the aid of new mail-order genetic testing and ancestry services, I think it's fair to say that most Americans live their lives disconnected from their ancestors. Call it ancestor worship, call it autonomy, call it selective memory—whatever is going on there, we tend to be disconnected from our past, mostly unaware of those from whom we came beyond our parents and grandparents.
Who were those people who we depend on for our very existence? Lisa Sharon Harper's new book is called Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World--and How to Repair It All. And when new episodes of For the Life of the world come back on May 7 this spring, we'll be talking with Lisa at length about how race broke her world and how she traced her family line back beyond the founding of America. For more information about the book, check the show notes and visit lisasharonharper.com/BlackFortuneMonth for more resources on reconnecting to our history and seeking restorative racial justice.
But for now, we're replaying Miroslav Volf's 2021 conversation with Lisa Sharon Harper; the two friends discuss the significance of narrative history for understanding ourselves and our current cultural moment; the sequence of repeated injustices that have haunted America's past and directly impacted Black Americans for hundreds of years; the Christian nationalist temptation to hoard power; the necessary conditions for true repair, the role of reparations in the pursuit of racial justice, and the goodness of belonging. Thanks for listening. And here's the episode in its entirety. Enjoy.
Show Notes
The importance of family story - ‘I am because they were’
“the hereditary sin of the philosopher is a lack of historical sense” - Frederick Nietzsche
Lisa Sharon Harper traces her family lineage through the Carribean where they suffered ‘grueling oppression’
“They found ways to, to cope and they found their pool of spirit to help them in the project of resilience.” Lisa Sharon Harper
“I'm just very aware of who I have been and also aware that their DNA literally lives in me.”
1619 law
The origin story of police today and the ‘black tax’
The idea that people always had a choice - the first settlers chose to enslave
George Floyd’s impact
We have a choice as a society right now
How faith is involved with choice
Christian nationalism today
Jesus in a suburban Starbucks versus the historical Jesus
“The white Christian nationalist project is to do one thing, is to preserve and protect the power, the assumed rule of white Christian men on this land.”
Miroslav's idea that Jesus has become a moral stranger to us: “Things that were really important to him don't matter to us and things that are really important to us didn't seem to be important to him.” Miroslav Volf
The logic of empire embedded in Christianity
The ‘big lie’ – that everyone in the Bible was white
“You cannot understand this book if you are reading it from the halls of empire” – 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.
Production Notes
This podcast featured Lisa Sharon Harper and Miroslav Volf
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 Martin Chan & Nathan Jowers
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
15 Feb 2021
David Walker's Dangerous Appeal: Black Abolitionism and Belonging to God / Ryan McAnnally-Linz
00:07:30
David Walker was an early 19th-century black abolitionist and activist, who wrote An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World. Ryan McAnnally-Linz celebrates his ideas in this influential pamphlet that gave dignity, hope, and courage to slaves and freed black people alike, urging them to continue fighting for their freedom while the United States struggled toward the end of slavery.
This episode is part of our celebration of Black History Month; we offer these short reflections in appreciation and gratitude for the black voices who’ve shaped how we experience the world, how we think about it, and how we live in it.
Strangers in Our Own Land: Empathy Walls, Deep Stories, and Shelters from Shame / Arlie Hochschild
00:53:51
Arlie Hochschild discusses her book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, reflecting on how 2020 has made our mutual political alienation worse, and how we can implement deep listening, emotion management, hospitality, and create shelters from shame. Interview by Evan Rosa.
We’re passionate about making this work consistently accessible to a people who are genuinely concerned with he viability of faith in a world wracked with division, contested views about what it means to be human and what it means to live life well. If you’re in a position to support our show financially, and are looking for some year end opportunities, please consider partnering with us. We rely on the generosity of individuals like you to make our work possible. And if you’re not, please continue listening and engaging the content and let us know what you’re interested in. But if you can give, if you’re truly passionate about supporting podcasting that’s all about pursuing—really living—lives that are worthy of our humanity, then consider a gift to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. Visit faith.yale.edu/give (or find the link in the show notes) to make a year end contribution. It’s our joy to bring these shows to you; and we’d invite you into that same joy of supporting this work. As always, thanks for listening, and we’ll be back with more, next week.
Episode Introduction
How do we understand each other’s political lives? It’s all too easy to depend on the consistent narratives of bafflement at the political stranger. How could you possibly have voted for [fill in the blank]. I have no idea how you could support [you know who]. Maybe to stay baffled is a defense mechanism. It keeps the stranger strange. If you rely consistently on your inability to fathom another’s behavior or reasons or motivations—or the fears that underlie them all—maybe that helps you cope a little better.
Our guest on the show today turned off all her alarms, set aside the narrative of confusion, and set out to learn about the political other, when around 10 years ago, she began regular visits to Lake Charles, Louisiana, a working class Tea Party stronghold that followed suit with Trump support in 2016—suspicious of the government, struggling for their economic flourishing, feeling the whole time that they were being cut in line, that they were unseen, unrecognized, dishonored, alienated in a hidden social class war.
Sociologist Arlie Hochschild is Professor Emerita in Sociology at the University of California Berkeley and author of Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. In this episode, I ask Arlie about her experience of intentionally identifying her own ideological bubble, forging out to scale a wall of division, bafflement and hostility to find empathy, turning off her political and moral alarms and attuning her mind to hear the desires that inform the deep story of her friends in Louisiana. We discuss political division, resentment, and alienation; how the Trump presidency and subsequent 2020 loss to Biden has continued to make strangers in their own land; she explains the emotional roots of political beliefs and tribalism—especially those held by her conservative friends, the blind spots of progressive views of conservatives, and finally curiosity, humility, emotion management, and putting oneself in perspective. Thanks for listening. —Evan Rosa, from the introduction
Show Notes
How Arlie Hochschild decided to reach out to Tea Party Republicans from within her media bubble, befriend them, and then write a book about understanding how emotion informs political anger, resentment, and Trump support
The paradox of biting the hand that feeds you
Moving beyond political appearances and surface tensions
How to create a shelter from shame in order to connect and disagree in fruitful ways
What it was like to cross the empathy bridge, to meet people who live in a different bubble, who live with a different sense of what is true
Meeting Republican women in Lake Charles, Louisiana
The appeal of Rush Limbaugh: fighting against “feminazis,” “environmental wackos,” and “socialists.” And the deepest reason: protecting southern Republicans from the shame of coastal elites
Turning off one’s alarm system for the sake of genuine encounter across division, deep listening
When to turn the alarm system back on
“Things have grown worse”: One’s own government as a foreign occupying force
The deep story: we can’t do politics without understanding the deep mythology that informs it.
The right wing deep story: Waiting and being cut in line, Obama’s role, Trump’s role, and liberation from shame
Shaming the shamers: Trump’s appeal to those who have been "cut in line"
Belong before you believe: How tribalism drives the political drama of America
The religious overtones of Trumpism: Trump has connected with Hochschild's friends in Louisiana not only as their liberator, but their righteous sufferer, their shelter from shame.
A giant, hostile shame machine: counter-shaming has a backfire effect: “Our shelter from shame is being attacked by the shamers."
What is the greatest felt need for political combatants? What will discuss the vicious cycle?
Recognition of the other across disagreement; finding an opportunity for common ground that we so dearly need right now; encountering the better angels of the political other
Blind spots: Social class, particular economic value, and the wonder inspired by the skill of the working class
The Virtues of Climbing the Empathy Wall and Encountering Others’ Deep Stories: Curiosity, Humility, Emotion Management as a Service to Society, Putting Oneself in Perspective
Recalling the feeling of being a stranger in order to practice an emotional hospitality that makes space for the deep stories of the other
18 Sep 2023
How to Eat, Drink, and Be Human (Lessons from Revolutionary Women) / Alissa Wilkinson
“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.
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; CBCEyeopener, 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.
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
23 Jan 2025
Divine Hiddenness / Deborah Casewell
00:36:16
Are you there God? It’s me…
Why is God hidden? Why is God silent? And why does that matter in light of faith, hope, and love?
In this episode, philosopher Deborah Casewell joins Evan Rosa for a discussion of divine hiddenness. Together, they reflect on:
Simone Weil’s distinction between abdication and abandonment
Martin Luther’s theology of the cross
The differences between the epistemic, moral, and existential problems with the hiddenness of God
The terror, horror, and fear that emerges from the human experience of divine hiddenness
The realities of seeing through a glass darkly and pursuing faith, hope, and love
And finally, what it means to live bravely in the tension or contracdition between the hiddenness of God and the faith in God’s presence.
About Deborah Casewell
Deborah Casewell is Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Chester. She works in the areas of philosophy and culture, philosophy of religion, and theology & religion, in particular on existentialism and religion, questions of ethics and self-formation in relation to asceticism and the German cultural ideal of Bildung. She has given a number of public talks and published on these topics in a range of settings.
Her first book. Eberhard Jüngel and Existence, Being Before the Cross, was published in 2021: it explores the theologian Eberhard Jüngel’s philosophical inheritance and how his thought provides a useful paradigm for the relation between philosophy and theology. Her second book, Monotheism and Existentialism, was published in 2022 by Cambridge University Press as a Cambridge Element.
She is Co-Director of the AHRC-funded Simone Weil Research Network UK, and previously held a Humboldt Research Fellowship at the University of Bonn. Prior to her appointment in Bonn, she was Lecturer in Philosophy at Liverpool Hope University and a Teaching Fellow at King’s College, London. She received her PhD from the University of Edinburgh, my MSt from the University of Oxford, and spent time researching and studying at the University of Tübingen and the Institut Catholique de Paris.
Show Notes
Mother Teresa on God’s hiddenness
Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, edited by the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk
What does it mean for God to be hidden?
Perceived absence
Simone Weil on God’s abdication of the world for the sake of the world
The presence of God. This should be understood in two ways. As Creator, God is present in everything which exists as soon as it exists. The presence for which God needs the co-operation of the creature is the presence of God, not as Creator but as Spirit. The first presence is the presence of creation. The second is the presence of decreation. (He who created us without our help will not save us without our consent. Saint Augustine.) God could create only by hiding himself. Otherwise there would be nothing but himself. — Simone Weil, in Gravity and Grace, “Decreation”
Abdication vs. Abandonment
A longing for God, who is hidden, unknown, unperceived, and mysterious
Martin Luther’s theology of the cross
“Hidden in the suffering and ignominy of the cross.”
“God is powerful but chooses not to be in relation to us.”
Human experiences of divine hiddenness
Three ways to talk about hiddenness of God
epistemic hiddenness: ”if we were to grasp God with our minds, then we'd be denying the power of God.”
Making ourselves an idol
The Cloud of Unknowing and “apophatic” or “negative” theology (only saying what God is not)
Moral hiddenness of God: “this is what people find very troubling. … a moral terror to it.”
Existential hiddenness of God: “where the hiddenness of God makes you feel terrified”
Revelation and the story of human encounter or engagement with God
“Luther is the authority on the hiddenness of God in the existential and moral sense.”
The power of God revealed in terror.
“God never becomes comfortable or accommodated into our measure.”
”We never make God into an object of our reason and comfort.”
Terror, horror, and fear: reverence of God
Marilyn McCord Adams, *Christ & Horrors—*meaning-destroying events
“That which is hidden terrifies us.”
Martin Luther: “God is terrifying, because God does save some of us, and God does damn some of us.”
The “alien work of God”
“Is Luther right in saying that God has to remain hidden, and the way in which God has to remain hidden has to be terrifying? So there has to be this kind of background of the terrifying God in all of our relations with the God of love that is the God of grace that, that saves us.”
Preserving the mystery of God
We’re unable to commodify or trivialize God.
Francis Schaeffer’s He Is There and He Is Not Silent
“Luther construes it as a good thing.”
Suffering, anxiety, despair, meaninglessness
Humanity’s encounter with nothingness—the void
“Interest in the demonic, or terror, as a preliminary step into a full religious or a proper religious experience of God.”
Longing for God in the Bible
Noah, Moses, David
“The other side of divine hiddenness is human loneliness.”
Loneliness and despair as “what your life is going to be like without God.” (Barton Newell)
Tension in the experience of faith
1 Corinthians 13:12: ”Now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know even as I also am known.”
Faith, hope, and love abides in the face of epistemic, moral, and existential hiddenness of God.
The meaning of struggling with the hiddenness of God for the human pursuit of faith, hope, and love
“Let tensions be.”
”But you've always got to keep the reality of faith, hope, and love, keep hold of the fact that that is a reality, and that can and will be a reality. It's, it's, not to try and justify it, not to try and harmonize it, but just to hold it, I suppose. And hold it even in its contradiction.”
Production Notes
This podcast featured Deborah Casewell
Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
Hosted by Evan Rosa
Production Assistance by Emily Brookfield, Alexa Rollow, & Zoë Halaban
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
07 Aug 2024
How to Read Dallas Willard / Steve Porter
01:08:56
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.
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 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
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.”
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
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
24 Dec 2022
The Complicated World of Christmas / Drew Collins, Frederica Mathewes-Green, Jeff Reimer, & Matt Croasmun
00:32:43
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
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
27 Nov 2021
Christian Wiman / Finding Home Through Exiles' Eyes
00:43:51
"To be a poet is to be an exile," says poet Christian Wiman. He echoes the most influential writer on his early life and work, Simone Weil, who wrote in her Gravity & Grace: "We must take the feeling of being at home into exile. We must be rooted in the absence of a place." Wiman spent most of the 2020 leg of the pandemic curating a story about home using 100 poems, seamed with prose from some of the wisest denizens of our species to narrate the tale. He joins Evan Rosa to read some of the poetry from the collection, talk about the connection between poetry and faith, and continue to examine the meaning of home through exiles' eyes.
This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information, visit tyndale.foundation.
"I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them, a single word: home."
Josef Pieper on tautology
Poetry as a way of inhabiting rather than defining
The epigraph from He Held Radical Light: "The world does not need to come from a god. For better or worse, the world is here. But it does need to go to one (where is he?). And that is why the poet exists." (Juan Ramon Jimenez)
Why does the poet exist?
"Existence is not existence until it's more than existence."
Jack Gilbert, "Singing in My Difficult Mountains"
"My fine house that love is."
"To be a poet is to be an exile."
Simone Weil: "We must be rooted in the absence of a place." (Gravity & Grace)
A traveling place
Modern humanity in exile, a secular notion
Weil, The Need for Roots
"I think all poets though, experience the feeling of displacement that comes with perception."
W.B. Yeats on Maude Young, "I might have thrown poor words away and attempted to live."
"Life is the thing. Words are always a kind of displacement."
Wendell Berry's Sabbath: "There is a day when the road neither comes nor goes, and the way is not a way, but a place."
Frantically nomadic
Restlessness and the pull toward security
Rooted in relationships
"In my 20s, Simone Weil was the most important writer in my life. ... But now in my fifties, I feel a little differently. I still love Simone Weil, but I appreciate very much the work that someone like Wendell Berry has done to secure an existence against all the odds, secure a kind of existence in one place, and make it out of language as well."
Vincent Van Gogh and Gaston Bachelard
Stabilizing and Destabilizing
Van Gogh: Life is round
Bachelard: Dwelling in images and words
Some real element of the past, brought into the present with metaphysical power: "I think there's some real element of the past of memory, that is made alive and volatile and even salvific, and it's not an image of youth. It is the actual thing being brought into the present."
He Held Radical Light: seeking, through poetry, "those moments of mysterious intrusion, that feeling of collusion with eternity, of life and language riled to the one wild charge.”
Poetry: the main way faith sustains Wiman
"All poets are Jews." (Maria Sativa)
"All poets are believers." (Christian Wiman)
Something in poetry itself to further existence
"If you do not believe in poetry, you cannot write it." (Wallace Stevens)
Glory to God for dappled things
The role of mystery in poetry and faith
Following the music of poetry in a physical, physiological, improvisational way
Wendell Berry on the Kingdom of God: "We contain that which contains us."
Home in painful division in Wendell Berry
Carson McCullers: Improvisation
Braithwaite, "Bass"
How is poetry in conversation with perplexity?
James Baldwin, "Sonny's Blues" (Christian Wiman's "favorite short story in the world")
"Dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing an order on it."
Deep consolation in poetry
Responding to the music of poetry
Read poetry out loud
Can you write good poetry without suffering much?
George MacKay Brown, "Old Fisherman with Guitar"
What is a life worth living? Creating and loving
The pursuit of God is wrapped up with creating art and being freed to love.
The impact of Christian Wiman's "Prayer"
About Christian Wiman
Poet Christian Wiman is Professor of the Practice of Religion and Literature at Yale Divinity School. He’s the author of several books of poetry, including Every Riven Thing, Hammer is the Prayer, and his most recent, Survival Is a Style. His memoirs include the bracing and beautiful My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer and He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art. He edited an anthology of 100 poems on Joy a few years ago, and just released Home: 100 Poems this month.
Introduction (Evan Rosa)
"To be a poet is to be an exile," says Christian Wiman, a poet and Professor of the Practice of Religion and Literature at Yale Divinity School. Wiman knows this personally. When he was younger than now, he moved 40 times over a 15 year period. He would come early to work as Editor of Poetry Magazine to write his own, spilling line after line onto page from the driver seat of his car (he wrote my favorite poem of his that way he tells me). And the writer that defined him then was Simone Weil, who wrote in her Gravity and Grace, "We must take the feeling of being at home into exile. We must be rooted in the absence of a place."
And I wonder, if all poets are exiles, does that make us all poets? The generalized unease and anxiety that comes with being human often leaves us longing for a home. And each of us imagine a particular place, a perspective, a people, when we think of home. But it's always longing, isn't it. Especially in light of the fact that "we are home to each other"—that home is ultimately a relational reality built and maintained and indwelled with people—if that's true then no wonder we long for home all the more, because we long to be accepted, received, and loved all the more.
A recent theme of the podcast has been exile and migration. War correspondent Janine Di Giovanni offered perspective on the vanishing Christian population in the middle east; biblical scholar Francisco Lozada helped us view faith through the eyes of the immigrants hopeful sojourn. Today, that continues, even as we consider the very meaning of home by way of poetry.
Christian Wiman spent most of the 2020 leg of the pandemic curating a story about home using 100 poems, using with prose from some of the wisest denizens of our species to narrate the tale. The book came out this month, and you can listen to Miroslav Volf and Christian Wiman discuss the project on episode 36 of the podcast.
I asked Chris to come back on the show to read more of the poems he selected, talk about the connection between poetry and faith, and continue to examine the meaning of home through exiles' eyes. You might think that's exactly the wrong way to wonder about home. But Odysseus would tell you different as he fights his way back to Ithaca. Moses would tell you different as he leads the Jews through the wilderness. Jesus would tell you different as he goes to prepare a place for you.
And what other option do we have as wandering wonderers anyway—always longing for home, always praying for, in Christian Wiman's words, "those moments of mysterious intrusion, that feeling of collusion with eternity, of life and language riled to the one wild charge.”
Thanks for listening, and enjoy.
Production Notes
This podcast featured poet Christian Wiman
Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
Hosted by Evan Rosa
Production Assistance by Martin Chan, Nathan Jowers, Natalie Lam, and Logan Ledman
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
30 Oct 2021
Will Willimon / Gospel Oddity: The Purpose of Pastors and the Problem with Self-Care
00:44:44
As the political world casts a leery eye on Christians—especially as the meaning of "Evangelical" changes—the focus on the meaning and purpose of the pastor is especially relevant. Amidst our consumeristic, narcissistic culture, what does it mean to pursue self-care? How does caring for oneself square with caring about what Jesus cares about? (Even and especially when Jesus cares about you?) Upholding the call of the pastor to take on the cares of Christ, Will Willimon (Professor of the Practice of Christian Ministry at Duke Divinity School) suggests we've developed a disordered approach to self-care, proving the triumph of the therapeutic and mimicking our consumeristic world rather than embodying the oddity of the Christian Gospel. Interview by Evan Rosa.
This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information, visit tyndale.foundation.
Introduction (Evan Rosa)
What is the purpose of a pastor? To teach you how to think (or vote)? To reassure you that you're safe? To heal your wounds? The goal of pastoral ministry is surely in question right now. Everything from the toxic masculinity of the bully pulpit, to the pastor as political pollster, to the staggering need to be cool of hipster celebrity pastor—there's lots of ways to go wrong in pastoral ministry, and a razors edge of getting it right. It's a demanding job. Perhaps its so demanding because the primary call of the pastor is to take up the cares of Christ, speaking the truth when the truth hurts, listening from both sides of the conversation between God and the Church, comforting the grieving when there's plenty in your own life to grieve, standing with the marginalized and oppressed when its the unpopular, difficult thing.
That is to say: it's a dangerous world, the world of pastoral ministry. But as my guest on the show today suggests, this danger ought to be faced with courage and eyes wide to the cares of Christ.
Will Willimon is Professor of the Practice of Christian Ministry at Duke Divinity School and author of over 100 books, including Worship as Pastoral Care, Accidental Preacher, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (with Stanley Hauerwas), and his most recent, God Turned Toward Us: The ABCs of the Christian Faith. He's been a pastor in the United Methodist Church for a long time, including an 8 year stint as a Bishop.
Will Willimon is concerned about the direction the church is headed and is asking uncomfortable but necessary questions. Amidst our culture of consumerism, narcissism, where the vision of flourishing reaches no higher than getting whatever it is you want most, how does caring for oneself square with caring about what Jesus cares about? (Even and especially when Jesus cares about you?) Upholding the call of the pastor to take on the cares of Christ, Will Willimon suggests we've developed a disordered approach to self-care, proving the triumph of the therapeutic and mimicking our consumeristic world rather than embodying the oddity of the Christian Gospel.
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.
Show Notes
How Will Willimon became a pastor and educator in pastoral ministry
What is the purpose of pastoral ministry?
Equipping
Mutuality of care in Christian community
The sermon as conversation between the preacher, the congregation, and God
Preaching as "double listening"
Helping and caring, overemphasizing the role of help and care in pastoral ministry
The triumph of the therapeutic in pastoral ministry
"... how tough it is in a kind of therapeutic culture to do pastoral care, because our care keeps getting captured by certain secular, therapeutic mindsets."
"Jesus healed, but had an odd, ambiguous relationship to his healing."
"Our care is offered in tension."
Wading into people's pain is dangerous territory.
Christ as "wounded healer"
Flourishing as opposed to curing or healing
"Jesus loves to take sick, hurting people in pain and give them a job to do—that is be a Christian disciple."
Is ministry a therapy for me?
Triumph of the therapeutic
Consumerism, possession, and life without limits
Willie Jennings's After Whiteness
T.S. Eliot: "Why should people love the church?"
Christian humility
The oddness of the Christian Gospel
Jesus on marriage
"Jesus has a different idea of what it means to be a human being."
The modern myth of the role-less self
The role of the community in supporting the individual
"I wonder what God is doing with your pain right now."
"Is the corporate practice of Christianity optional?"
Hauerwas: "How do you minister to people in a pandemic who think that death is optional or think that death is an injustice God has worked on them?"
Muddling through
Embedded in community
To whom are we responsible?
How to become a community worthy of the name of "community in Christ"?
"Maybe in God's hands, the present moment is not a call for lament and despair, but a call for: 'Wow. Let roll with Christ.'"
Production Notes
This podcast featured pastor and educator Will Willimon
Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
Hosted by Evan Rosa
Production Assistance by Martin Chan, Nathan Jowers, Natalie Lam, and Logan Ledman
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
08 Jan 2024
Power & American Evangelicalism: Sword or Cross? / Tim Alberta
00:54:23
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
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.
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
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
14 Aug 2024
How to Read Julian of Norwich / Ryan McAnnally-Linz
00:54:24
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
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
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
21 Aug 2021
Sarah Schnitker / The Psychology of Patience / Patience Part 5
00:47:16
What is the place of patience in a life worth living? Evidence from psychology suggests that it plays an important role in managing life's stresses, contributing to a greater sense of well-being, and is even negatively correlated with depression and suicide risk. Psychologist Sarah Schnitker (Baylor University) explains her research on patience, how psychological methodology integrates with theology and philosophy to define and measure the virtue, and offers an evidence-based intervention for becoming more patient. She also discusses the connection between patience and gratitude, the role of patience in a meaningful life, and how acedia, a forgotten vice to modern people, lurks in the shadows when we are deficient in patience.
Part 5 of a 6-episode series on Patience, hosted by Ryan McAnnally-Linz.
Show Notes
This episode was made possible in part by a grant from Blueprint 1543.
Why study patience from a psychological perspective?
Daily hassles patience, interpersonal patience, and life hardships patience
Measuring patience is easier than measuring love, joy, or gratitude, because it isn’t as socially valued in contemporary life
How virtue channels toward different goals
Patience can help you achieve your goals by helping you regulate emotion, allowing you to stay calm, making decisions, persist through difficulties
Patience and the pursuit of justice
Patience and assertiveness
“If you’re a doormat, it’s not because you are patient, it’s because you lack assertiveness."
Aristotelian "Golden Mean” thinking: neither recklessly pushing through or giving up and disengaging. Patience allows you to pursue the goal in an emotionally stable way
Unity of the virtues: “We need a constellation of virtues for a person to really flourish in this world."
Golden Mean, excess, deficiency, too much and too little
Acedia and Me, Kathleen Norris on a forgotten vice
Acedia in relationship: “Even in the pandemic… monotony…"
The overlapping symptoms of acedia and depression
Patience is negatively correlated with depression symptoms; people with more life-hardships patience is a strength that helps people cope with some types of depression
Patience and gratitude buffer against ultimate struggles with existential meaning and suicide risk
How do you become more patient?
“It requires patience to become more patient."
Three Step Process for becoming more patient: Identify, Imagine, and Sync
Step 1: Identify your emotional state. Patience is not suppression; it begins with attention and noticing—identifying what’s going on.
Step 2: Cognitive reappraisal: one of the most effective ways to regulate our emotions. Think about your own emotions from another person’s perspective, or in light of the bigger picture. Take each particular situation and reappraise it.
Find benefits. Turn a curse into a blessing. Find opportunities.
Step 3: Sync with your purpose. Create a narrative that supports the meaning of suffering. For many this is religious faith
Reappraising cognitive reappraisal: How convinced do you have to be? You’d have to find something with “epistemic teeth”—is this something you can rationally endorse and know, and can you feel it?
Combining patience and gratitude practices, allowing for multiple emotions at once, and reimagining and reappraising one's life within your understanding of purpose and meaning.
Provide psychological distance to attenuate emotional response.
The existential relevance of faith for patience; theological background of patience
Patience and a life worth living
Love, the unity of the virtues, and "the longsuffering of our Lord is salvation" (2 Peter 3)
About Sarah Schnitker
Sarah Schnitker is Associate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Baylor University. She holds a PhD and an MA in Personality and Social Psychology from the University of California, Davis, and a BA in Psychology from Grove City College. Schnitker studies virtue and character development in adolescents and emerging adults, with a focus on the role of spirituality and religion in virtue formation. She specializes in the study of patience, self-control, gratitude, generosity, and thrift. Schnitker has procured more than $3.5 million in funding as a principle investigator on multiple research grants, and she has published in a variety of scientific journals and edited volumes. Schnitker is a Member-at-Large for APA Division 36 – Society for the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, is a Consulting Editor for the organization’s flagship journal, Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, and is the recipient of the Virginia Sexton American Psychological Association’s Division 36 Mentoring Award. Follow her on Twitter @DrSchnitker.
Production Notes
This podcast featured psychologist Sarah Schnitker and theologian Ryan McAnnally-Linz
Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
Hosted by Evan Rosa
Production Assistance by Martin Chan & Nathan Jowers
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
15 Mar 2022
A Voice from Kyiv: Fyodor Raychynets / Faithful Presence in the War on Ukraine
00:43:14
Today we're sharing a conversation between Miroslav Volf and Fyodor Raychynets, a former student of Miroslav's when he taught at Evangelical Theological Seminary in Osijek, Croatia in the early '90s. Fyodor is a theologian and pastor in Kyiv, and is head of the department of theology at Ukrainian Evangelical Theological Seminary on the northwest outskirts of the city, 20 kilometers outside downtown Kyiv.
We spoke to Fyodor on Sunday, March 13, 2022, just as he came in for the 8pm curfew after a day of feeding the elderly, the sick, weary soldiers, and women and children stuck in the basements without electricity, without clean water, without medication, and increasingly, without a clear idea of how any of this will end for them. That day Fyodor visited his seminary campus to find it had been shelled by three missiles, destroying much of the campus, including his office, leaving his library of books destroyed.
In this conversation, Fyodor shares his experience, now after 20 days of war, 20 days of being under siege, and 20 days of prayer and feeding the hungry.
Fyodor posts daily updates and reflections on his Facebook page, you can find a link in the show notes. Each daily post begins with developments in the war and how it's impacting him, his team of fellow ministers, and the city around him. He then reflects on the nature of war itself, and its impact on human life. He closes each post with a prayer for Ukraine, for freedom, for humanity. I'll quote just a few of his moving passages.
Day 7, "War is when the safest place to sleep in your apartment is the bathroom, although that's obviously for other purposes.."
Day 11, "War is when the most vulnerable suffer. That's when ordinary things, for example, going to the store and buying fresh, warm and fragrant Ukrainian bread (I've visited about 70 countries, but I've never eaten such delicious bread) become impossible. It's when you meet people every day who haven't eaten bread for 4 or 5 days, not to mention anything else...."
Day 15, "War is when evil reaches unseen dimensions and lowest forms, and when good manifests itself in its highest manifestations against the backdrop of total uncontrollable madness."
Day 19, "War is when you wake up in the morning, if you managed to fall asleep at all, not from the alarm clock or birds singing, but to the sounds of sirens, or bomb explosions that make you tremble. War is when your emotional state shifts from optimistic to pessimistic more often than in peaceful time, and the emotional range itself is much wider."
Day 20, written just a few hours ago. "War is when your understanding changes when not in theory but in practice you especially appreciate the moment "here and now" and live it more consciously..."
Show Notes
"War is when the safest place to sleep in your apartment is the bathroom”
Fyodor’s connection with Miroslav Volf, and his experience with war in Croatia and Bosnia
“I was joking when I was coming back to Ukraine... that ‘I am returning to the most peaceful country in the world.’ And here we are.”
“When the US government and UK government warned us about the impending full-scale invasion of Russian troops, we thought that they were exaggerating.”
Three missiles hit his campus the day before this interview
Fyodor’s volunteer group feeds the elderly trapped in basements
Why Fyodor decided to stay and help, rather than leave
“Thanks to God, I was able to evacuate my children.”
The risks involved in visiting those trapped in basements
"Is it worth that degree of risk?"
Fyodor’s seminary was hit by a missile: “Let me put it in one word: it's an apocalyptic scene, you know?”
Giving communion in a destroyed landscape, “What does Christ's body, given for the life of the world, mean in that moment?”
“I started to believe in what we called an open Lord's Supper: when everyone is welcomed”
Giving communion to people from different religious backgrounds
‘What the people ask for’
Grappling with the Russian support for Putin’s war: “It’s a wider problem”
“When the intellectuals support that kind of aggression, we have a serious problem.”
“Ukrainians were always a pain in the back to the Russians because of our free will. We love freedom.”
Is the Russian Orthodox Church involved in a Russian imperial project?
Public versus private support of the war, and neutrality, by the Russian Church
“Martin Luther King used to say there is a special place in hell for these kinds of people who pull or choose neutrality in the times of moral crisis.”
“As we say in Ukraine, the war did not start 18 days ago, it started eight years ago.”
How can our humanity be preserved in the midst of evil?
“I have to remind myself on a daily basis that we are humans and we are-- not just remain --but it is so crucial, in the midst of hell, not to lose our humanity. But to preserve it, and to show it, and to demonstrate it.”
How to keep anger from taking control
Is faith a consolation?
“It is challenging to sustain a faith in the situation where there is a sense that you cannot control anything that is happening.”
Faith and responsibility
“Your faith is challenged by this simple statement of a soldier who says, ‘You go there on your own responsibility.’”
Faith tested by family as much as the war
1 John: “Love conquers all fear”
Emotional extremes in wartime, and the simple comforts of a croissant from the local church
“I don't know what's wrong with the policy in this world that we cannot square one crazy dictator.”
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.
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
26 Feb 2025
The Scandal of Giving and Forgiving / Miroslav Volf
00:32:04
It’s easy to forget how utterly scandalous the concepts of grace and forgiveness are. Grace is an absolutely unmerited, undeserved benevolence. Forgiveness is an intentional miscarriage of retributive justice, ignoring of the wrong by a wrongdoer.
In Miroslav Volf’s understanding, forgiveness “decouples the deed from the doer.”
Today’s episode features some highlights from Miroslav’s personal reflections about each chapter of his book Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace, including his thoughts about one of the most painful moments in his family’s history, the death of his 5-year-old brother Daniel when Miroslav was just a small boy.
Free of Charge was published in 2006, and we just released a 10-video curriculum series through faith.yale.edu/free-of-charge. It also includes a 48-page discussion guide with new material to help facilitate not just deeper reflection about giving and forgiving, but a viable, livable path toward these core Christian practices.
This series is free for Yale Center for Faith & Culture email subscribers. So head over to faith.yale.edu/free-of-charge to sign up today.
Production Notes
This podcast featured Miroslav Volf
Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
Hosted by Evan Rosa
Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, Zoë Halaban, Kacie Barrett, and Emily Brookfield
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
26 Dec 2020
The Reason We Follow the Star: Learning from the Magi How to Give, How to Receive, and How to Be Human / Drew Collins
00:23:56
How can the Magi of Matthew 2—the Three Wise Men "bearing gifts" and "traversing afar"—help us understand faith and reason, giving and receiving, the nature of God, and how to be human? Drew Collins offers some new perspective on a familiar Christmas story.
Introduction and Notes
Merry Christmas friends—for this week, we’re dropping a double dose of Christmas reflections from the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. We’ll be hearing from Matt Croasmun and Drew Collins, both of whom are Associate Research Scholars and lead our Life Worth Living and Christ & Flourishing initiatives, respectively.
In this episode, I interview Drew Collins about the Magi of Matthew Chapter 2—these wise men from the east come to pay Jesus homage, but in so doing, they offer for us an outside perspective on the wonder and the weirdness of Christmas. hey’ve been lauded through centuries of Christian theology for both their reason and their faith, but W.H. Auden’s treatment of their intentions in his beautiful Christmas Oratorio, For the Time Being, brings into clearest brightest view why they followed the star, and offers us something to aspire to. Auden gives them the lines:
To discover how to be truthful now...
To discover how to be living now….
To discover how to be loving now...
To discover how to be human now …. Is the reason we follow this star.
And well, in that sense, we’re all magi. Trying to learn how to be human now.
"Matthew 2:1-12 asks us, in other words, to confront the possibility that those outside of our particular Christian communities might offer us new ways of understanding of who Jesus is, while at the same time revealing new insights into the identities of our non-Christian neighbors.”
"The Christian faith affirms that God is a gift giver. We can say more. For God’s giving is so radical, so total, that even in God’s receiving the gifts we bring, however paltry and imperfect, God is also giving. In receiving the gifts of the Magi, or in affirming our receiving of them on God’s behalf, God is giving us hope that our own lives, scruffy and flawed though they might be, might be received by others as giving, like the Magi, greater insight into who Jesus is and might be received and redeemed by God in the coming of God’s Kingdom.”
20 Dec 2020
Ignore These Walls: Faith that Leads to Freedom in Zimbabwe / Evan Mawarire & Miroslav Volf
00:48:27
Evan Mawarire is a Pentecostal minister and democratic activist in Zimbabwe. He is founder of #ThisFlag Citizen's Movement and has been instrumental in standing up to corruption, injustice, and poverty in Zimbabwe. Miroslav Volf interviews Pastor Evan about his story of faith that leads to activism; the transformation he experience while being unjustly arrested, detained, and tortured in maximum security prison; and what it means to live a life worthy of our humanity.
#ThisFlag movement - united around the symbolism of the Zimbabwe flag
Compassion, mercy, and other biblical values that can be practiced across all levels
“If we don’t stand up, our children will hold us to account one day, and say ‘Why did you do nothing?’"
"I was asking people to shut down the government in 48 hrs."
The other side of fear is possibility
The atrocities of Robert Mugabe: abduction, silencing, torture, murder, citizen fear-based self-policing
#ThisFlag Campaign Slogan: “If we cannot cause the politician to change, then we must inspire the citizen to be bold."
Pentecostalism and Political Activism: Apostolic Faith Movement, Reinhard Bonnke
Pastor Evan’s detention and torture in maximum security prison
How encounters with prison inmates transformed Pastor Evan
“Look at the walls that are holding you back, and understand that there is a bigger prison that holds you back: the prison of your mind… Ignore these walls, behave as if they do not exist."
What is a life worth living?
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.
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