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

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

About Marilynne Robinson

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

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

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

Show Notes

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

Production Notes

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

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

About Rev. William Barber

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

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

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

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

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

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

About Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

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

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

Show Notes

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

Production Notes

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

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

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

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

Show Notes

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

Production Notes

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

Happy Thanksgiving! We often misunderstand gratitude as either a means to our subjective well-being or as an obligation of debt to a giver. So what is the emotion of gratitude? Sameer Yadav (Westmont College) joins Ryan McAnnally-Linz to reflect on a better way to understand gratitude than owing it, being in debt to another person, seeing gratitude only through the dry indifference of a receiver's economic indebtedness to a giver. Gratitude as indebtedness creates problems especially when thinking about gratitude to God, and the two consider instead on a conception of gratitude based in sacrament and creatureliness, mystical shared witness, the meetness and rightness of thanks and praise, and a joyful recognition of the gifts in our lives. This understanding of gratitude would have truly seismic consequences for how we see the world. Thank you cards would no longer feel obligatory, and gratitude lists wouldn't have to be hacked for my subjective well-being, it would simply follow from the glad, mutual sharing in the gift of life from God, and the presence of being what we are to each other.

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

Show Notes

• "A debt of gratitude": Is it helpful for Christians to think about gratitude?
• What do we owe to one another?
• Obligations tied up with debts
• Gratitude is historically tied up with political economy
• Robert C. Roberts, Spiritual Emotions: A Psychology of Christian Virtues
• Debts of gratitude as deeply problematic because of (1) the dynamics it presents for human relationships and (2) Christian understanding of the emotion
• David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years
• Debt, calculation, equivalence
• Owing money vs owing favors
• Forcibly severing us from our contexts: Abstraction from relationships and dependencies
• "The Labor that Pays My Salary" (Isaac Villegas, The Christian Century)
• Seneca on gratitude—internal attention on gift
• Thomas Aquinas on gratitude
• Immanuel Kant on gratitude: You can never do enough as recipient, since you're only ever a respondent; the giver always acts first
• Aristotle on gratitude: Not a virtue for the magnanimous person, since you'd have to owe someone, and self-sufficiency is better than dependence—better to be a giver than receiver
• The role of social hierarchy and the economic image of gratitude
• Gratia vs Gratitudo
• Modeling "gratitudo" on social superiority/inferiority
• Gratitude as an "unfortunate necessity"
• Apostle Paul: "For who sees anything different in you? What do you have that you did not receive? And if you received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift?" (1 Corinthians 4:7)
• Affirmation of dependence as essential to the human condition; staunch independence as sinful pride
• "Why not just be happy with indebtedness?"
• Inverting the values of debt obligation
• Indebted to God
• Argument by analogy: Aquinas's distinction between gratitudo and gratia: Everyone has equal indebtedness to God. A bad analogy when you do it on economic terms.
• Jeremy David Engels, The Art of Gratitude
• Christianity and the cancellation of debt
• Christian mystical tradition—Howard Thurman and the divine sharing with creation
• God's life extended in creatures
• Rather than benefactor or beneficiary relationships, God is a transcendent, holy other ...
• "We're a witness and channel for God's holy presence."
• Gratitude as joyful recognition offered to God
• Praise and Gratitude
• Howard Thurman: Gratitude as a sacrament
• Abraham Joshua Heschel: Gratitude as a window
• Reflecting light back to its source
• David Graeber: "What could possibly be more presumptuous, more ridiculous than to think it would be possible to negotiate with the grounds of one's existence? Of course it isn't. Insofar as it is indeed possible to come to any sort of relation with the absolute, we are confronting a principle that exists outside of time or human scale entirely, therefore as medieval theologians correctly recognize when dealing with the absolute, there can be no such thing as debt."
• Debt as a category mistake
• Jacob's Ladder: "You give me everything, and I'll give a tenth back to you."
• "God isn't dealing with losses and gains here."
• Transfiguration
• Intrinsic relationality
• Eucharistic prayer: "Let us give thanks to the Lord our God. / It is meet and right so to do."
• Glad, mutual sharing in the gift of one another to one another
• Intrinsically egalitarian dimension to sharing
• Eugene McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity: "without faith in the sacramental nature of the world, we anchor ourselves in the illusionary and inevitably malevolent apparatus of domination."
• Eucharist = "thanks"

Introduction (Evan Rosa)

This is the obligatory gratitude podcast for the week before Thanksgiving. Thank you. You're welcome. But in all seriousness: Here's to hoping that you're listening to this in the peace and rest and warmth of family and loving community.

But I have to be honest about something; I'm not very good at thank you notes. Don't get me wrong, I try my best to communicate verbally my gratitude for the people and gifts in my life, and I'm ever—often painfully aware of my dependence on others, my need for them, my profound linkage to them. But I feel pretty bad that when it comes to writing the note and formalizing the payment of my debt of gratitude, I falter.

Part of the problem, I gauge, besides the grossness of my narcissism, is that I feel so indebted, so obligated to do it, like my gratitude to you just doesn't count if I don't write the note, or that it's less about the giver and more about the card or the transaction. There's something wrong there.

But I'm equally tempted to err in another way: Ever since I learned from positive psychology that I could hack my own thankfulness for happiness, I tend to exploit gratitude just to feel better.

Our episode today will correct me on both counts, both for thinking of gratitude as something to be exploited for my personal well-being and for thinking of gratitude as an obligation.

Today on the show Sameer Yadav, a theologian at Westmont College, joins Ryan McAnnally-Linz to reflect on a better way to understand gratitude than owing it, being in debt to another person, seeing gratitude only through the dry indifference of a receiver's economic indebtedness to a giver. Gratitude as indebtedness creates problems especially when thinking about gratitude to God, and the two consider instead on a conception of gratitude based in sacrament and creatureliness, mystical shared witness, the meetness and rightness of thanks and praise, and a joyful recognition of the gifts in our lives.

This understanding of gratitude would have truly seismic consequences for how we see the world. Thank you cards would no longer feel obligatory, and gratitude lists wouldn't have to be hacked for my subjective well-being, it would simply follow from the glad, mutual sharing in the gift of life from God, and the presence of being what we are to each other.

And I would be remiss if I didn't take the opportunity to thank each of you, our listeners and subscribers, for joining us each weekend for these conversations. It's our joy to produce them for you, and I don't even feel obligated to say that. Not in the least. So I guess remiss was the wrong word there cuz that means faulting a duty. Aye! That's why we need this episode.

So, how about this: Thanks for sharing in the gift of making this podcast. Enjoy.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured theologians Sameer Yadav and Ryan McAnnally-Linz
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Martin Chan, Nathan Jowers, Natalie Lam, and Logan Ledman
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

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?
• Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
• Jon Sobrino, SJ
• "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
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Can Christianity survive in the Middle East? Ancient communities of Christian faithful are currently being decimated not just by religious violence, persecution, and war—but the economic factors that motivate emigration and refuge. Janine Di Giovanni is an award-winning journalist and war correspondent, and is Senior Fellow at Yale University's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. She joins Evan Rosa to discuss her journalistic style and approach to human rights reporting, the alarming decimation of the Christian population in the Middle East, the difference between survival and flourishing, and what it means to adapt to being an outsider. Her latest book is The Vanishing: Faith, Loss, & the Twilight of Christianity in the Land of the Prophets.

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

From the Introduction (Evan Rosa):

There are many ways to be a journalist in our noisy digital commons. And likely, there's a place for them all, but everyone—whether writer or reader—needs to ask: What is a journalist for? Presenting the truth, spreading knowledge, yes. But reporting for mere awareness pushes the question all the more for us news junkies, hooked on headlines replete with bad news.

My guest today sees journalism as an endeavor of human empathy—recording the truth not from embassies or palaces or political centers, but from the leaky tents of refugee camps; telling stories not of the powerful politicians and generals executing a war, but the widows and orphans caught up in the chaos; publishing news and correspondence not to feed the insatiable news gluttony of American media, but to give voice to the voiceless.

Show Notes

• The Vanishing: Faith, Loss, & the Twilight of Christianity in the Land of the Prophets
• How Janine Di Giovanni became a "human rights reporter"
• Palestinian occupation and intifada
• Bosnian War
• War is not about religion or tribe, but power
• Embedded within a community
• Giving voice
• Expressing agency
• The Vanishing: Documenting Christian communities before they disappear
• Di Giovanni's personal faith and commitment to neighbor love
• Coats on the Bowery
• Journalistic style: bringing the reader close
• "If you have the ability to go to these places and bring the story to other people, then you have the obligation."
• Confusion, frustration, fear
• War makes life change in an instant
• Perspective-taking, empathy, and compassion
• "Celebrating the fact that we still exist."
• Christian persecution around the world
• The purpose of The Vanishing: to honor the people who have decided to stay, even amidst persecution
• Pope Francis's trip to Iraq during covid, for solidarity
• "Emigration is our enemy."
• Good refugees vs bad refugees
• Chaldean Christian Iraqis chanting in Aramaic
• Faith rooted in the land
• Adapting to being an outsider vs adapting to being an insider
• Egyptian Coptic Christians
• Courage to be a stranger in a strange land
• What is a life worth living?

Production Notes

• This podcast featured journalist and war correspondent Janine Di Giovanni
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Martin Chan, Nathan Jowers, Natalie Lam, and Logan Ledman
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

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
• Will Willimon and Stanley Hauerwas recent article: "The dangers of providing pastoral care"
• 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
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Julian 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.

Show Notes

• Click here to learn more about Julian Reid's "Notes of Rest"
• Introduction: Evan Rosa
• "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
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Over-worked or over-entertained? Our humanity gives us the joint gifts of both activity and passivity. We act and we are acted upon. But how do we balance and mediate these states? How do we cultivate long practices and habits that help us to inhabit the space between activity and passivity, bringing them together in a beautiful agency?

Poet and linguist Alysia Harris joins Matt Croasmun for a discussion of that space between active and passive in human life—bringing the concepts of wonder, awareness/attention, patient receptivity to the natural world and to God, bearing witness to the autonomy and action of the other, and how she cultivates and meditates on these things in her own life.

Show Notes

• Norman Wirzba, This Sacred Life: Humanity's Place in a Wounded World
• Active life vs passive life
• Intermediate category between activity and passivity: attentive awareness
• Active receptivity and bearing witness
• Human beings enacting and reacting
• Witness as perception and response
• Carl Sagan, Robin Kimmerer, Timothy Wilburn
• Wonder as a mediating emotion between active and passive
• "I'm not the entire system."
• Granting autonomy to a natural system
• Making the right impact through granting the sovereignty of the other
• Adam and Eve as gardeners—beauty vs productivity
• Genesis: "Avad and Shamar"—Till and Keep, Serve and Protect
• Restrain, observe, attend, and magnify
• "Me and God"
• Capitalism, scarcity mentality, and "enough"
• Ping-ponging between over-worked and over-entertainment—deficient visions of activity and deficient visions of passivity
• Mark 4: Parable of the Sower. Scattering Seeds
• Dynamic reciprocity and intentional permeability
• The patience an orchid demands
• "Ideas have no use unless they have something to do with our lives."
• Practices and rituals to inhabit the space between active and passive
• Writing habits—"faithful stewardship with less brings faithful stewardship with more"
• Dance as an embodied balance with intellectual work
• Intercessory prayer and producing opportunities
• Working out of hope instead of striving
• Running, walking, granting the natural world autonomy

About Alysia Harris

Follow Alysia Harris @Poppyinthewheat

Alysia Nicole Harris was born in Fremont, California but grew up in Alexandria, VA and considers herself on all accounts a member of the ranks of great Southern women. At age 10 she wrote her first poem, after hearing about sonnets in English class. That class began her life-long love of poetry and the literary arts.

Alysia went to The University of Pennsylvania where she experienced her first success as a writer and a performer. In 2008 she featured on the HBO documentary: Brave New Voices where she wowed audiences with her piece "That Girl". In 2010 Alysia graduated UPENN Summa Cum Laude with honors and was also inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa honor society. 

Alysia received her MFA in poetry from NYU in 2014 and her PhD in linguistics from Yale University in 2019. Her dissertation “The Non-Aspectual Meaning of African-American English ‘Aspect’ Markers” breaks with traditional analyses and explores the discourse-oriented uses of the preverbal particles ‘be’ and ‘done’ in varieties of African-American English.

Although she has experienced scholastic success, poetry has always come first in her heart. Cave Canem fellow, winner of the 2014 and 2015 Stephen Dunn Poetry Prizes, Pushcart Nominee, her poetry has appeared  in Best American Poets, Indiana Review, The Offing, Callaloo, Solstice Literary Magazine, Squaw Valley Review, Letters Journal, and Vinyl Magazine among others. Her first chapbook How Much We Must Have Looked Like Stars to Stars won the 2015 New Women's Voices Chapbook Contest and is available for purchase on site.

Alysia was also a founding member of the internationally known performance poetry collective, The Strivers Row and has garnered over 5 million views on YouTUBE. She has toured nationally for the last 10 years and also performed at the United Nations and the US Embassies in Jordan and Ukraine, as well as in Australia, Canada, Germany, Slovakia, South Africa, the UAE, and the UK.

Alysia now lives in Atlanta, GA where she works as a consultant for the Morehouse Center for Excellence in Education and as arts and soul editor at Scalawag Magazine, a nonprofit POC-led, women run media organization focused on Southern movement, community, and dissent. She is working on a book of poems and a collection of essays about the intersections of faith, violence, and the natural world. 

Production Notes

• This podcast featured poet Alysia Harris and biblical scholar Matt Croasmun
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Martin Chan & Nathan Jowers
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

This 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
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

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
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

The 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
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

What is the shape of a flourishing human life? Once upon a time this question came pre-answered—by culture or tribe, by religion or philosophy, by tradition or way of life—but these days, given our increasingly individualized world and its emphasis on autonomy and self-expression, given the breakdown of social trust and the increasing degree of polarization and suspicion of the other: we each have to ask and answer these questions for ourselves: What is the good life?

What does it mean to live a flourishing life, and how can we actually do it? These are difficult questions on their own. They require intellectual muscles we've long let atrophy; they require reading deeply and at length; they require a willingness to listen across the chasm of disagreement. But one begins to wonder: if each of us must answer these questions for ourselves, how do we even begin to have this conversation together? The fact is, we need one another. Not just to answer them well. But to ask them well.

For the coming two weeks, we'll be airing a conversation between New York Times columnist David Brooks and theologian Miroslav Volf. In this first part of the dialogue, David interviews Miroslav about his 2016 book, Flourishing: Why We Need Religion in a Globalized World. In next week's follow up, Miroslav and David discuss his 2015 book The Road to Character.

Show Notes

• Life going well, life led well, life feeling right
• "Flourishing extends over long periods of time."
• "Does flourishing involve some eternal standard?"
• How can we engage in meaningful debate about religion and flourishing in a globalized world?
• Reading Nietzsche devotionally as a Christian theologian
• The world is becoming, for ill or for good, a more religious place
• What does religion offer the individual person today?
• "I don't see any reason why washing the feet of the destitute... why that wouldn't be an even more noble calling than working for Goldman Sachs."
• Market economy and flourishing 
• "Religious traditions take us out of ourselves, into something transcendent."
• Can you be good without God?
• "You can be good without believing in God, but you can't be without God."
• If you have no connection to the transcendent realm, do you have a chance at being good?
• Secularization
• The state of the world: Globalization and religion are in crisis, tearing human communities and nations and cultures apart.
• Global capitalism letting down our hopeful expectations, because it's not delivering on the creation or distribution of wealth
• Sin and grace in public debate—"Why did the secular sermons go away?"
• Life Worth Living course at Yale College
• The unbearable lightness of being
• Two nihilisms
• Is it possible to combine the pleasure of freedom and belief in God?
• Joy in and joy of the world: taking pleasure in the created order
• The sacraments of relationships and admiring the good of the world
• Pluralism and contending particular universalisms

Production Notes

• This podcast featured journalist and columnist David Brooks and theologian Miroslav Volf
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Martin Chan & Nathan Jowers
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

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

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

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

Show Notes

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

About John Inazu

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

Image Citation

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

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

Colorized by Jordan J. Lloyd.

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

Production Notes

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

As the first plane was crashing into the World Trade Center, Miroslav Volf was giving an address at the UN headquarters along the East River in Manhattan, just blocks away from Ground Zero. As the first plane shook the first tower and smoke rose into the sky, Miroslav was quoting Romanian poet Paul Celan. Specifically, his poem "Death Fugue"—which paints a dark picture of human suffering during the Holocaust and the living death that was the concentration camps. "We shovel a grave in the air."  

Miroslav went on to outline the features of reconciliation as embrace. "Embrace," he said that morning, "is the horizon of the struggle for justice. You will have justice only if you strive for something greater than justice, only if you strive after love."

In this episode, Miroslav talks about his experience on 9/11 with Evan Rosa, including short clips from his UN remarks 20 years ago. They consider the lasting impact of 9/11 on both American and global life, and how the event and its continuing aftermath have shaped the world. 

Production Notes

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

You can't 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
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Part 1 Show Notes: Andrew Root

• Doubling down and the temptation to make up for lost time
• Hartmut Rosa and Modernity as Acceleration
• Acceleration across three categories: technology, social change, and pace of life
• "Decay rate” is accelerating—we can sense that things get old and obsolete much faster (e.g., phones, computers)
• Riding the wave of accelerated social change
• "We’ve become enamored with gadgets and time-saving technologies."
• “Getting more actions within units of time"
• Multi-tasking
• Expectations and waiting as an attack on the self
• "Waiting feels like a moral failure."
• Give yourself a break; people are under a huge amount of guilt that they’re not using their time or curating the self they could have.
• "You’re screwing up my flow here, man."
• When I’m feeling the acceleration of time: “Get the bleep out of my way. My humanity is worn down through the acceleration."
• Busyness as an indicator of a good life
• “To say that I’m busy is to indicate that I’m in demand."
• "Stripping time of its sacred weight."
• Mid-life crises and the hollowness of time
• Patience is not just "go slower”
• Eric Fromm's "having mode" vs "being mode" of action
• Waiting doesn’t become the absence of something
• Pixar’s Soul, rushing to find purpose, failing to see the gift of connectedness to others
• Not all resonance is good (e.g., the raging resonance of Capitol rioters)
• How would the church offer truly good opportunities for resonance
• Bonhoeffer and the community of resonant reality
• Luther's theology of the cross—being with and being for—sharing in the moment
• Receiving the act of being with and being for
• Instrumentalization vs resonance
• Bearing with one another in weakness, pain, and suffering
• Encountering each other by putting down accelerated goals to be with and for the other
• Flow or resonance in one’s relationship to time
• Artists, mystics, and a correlation with psychological flow

Part 2 Show Notes: Kathryn Tanner

• 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."

Part 3 Show Notes: Paul Dafydd Jones

• God's patience
• Apostle Peter: “The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you.” (2 Peter 3)
• Tertullian and Cyprian
• "You need to think about who God is, and what God is doing before you think about who human beings are, and what we're called to become."
• Augustine: "God is patient, without any passion."
• Patience: Creation, providence, incarnation, Trinity
• 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?
• Patience as notably absent
• Can we suffer well? Can we wait well?
• David Baily Harned: Has patience gone out of style since the industrial revolution (Patience: How We Wait Upon the World)
• Waiting as a form of suffering
• 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."

"It's just that I know it's real. The Lord is ever present in trouble. And you can know, and be known, and love, and be loved by God. And that's different than thinking about God." Ethicist Adam Eitel on the tasting and seeing of Psalm 34, Thomas Aquinas's interpretation of that psalm, and the foundation of experience for theological reflection.

Bonus episode from our 6-part podcast series on patience.

Show Notes

• "When the Psalmist says "taste and see how sweet," he's urging us toward an experience. He's exhorting us to experience dwelling together with God.
• Psalm 34
• Thomas Aquinas on Psalm 34
• Finding delight in and encouragement from Psalm 34 and the feeling intellect of Thomas Aquinas
• Thomas Aquinas as lumbering saint living between his ears, or tasting and seeing the sweetness of God
• "Living between your ears"
• "It's just that I know it's real. The Lord is ever present in trouble. And you can know, and be known, and love, and be loved by God. And that's different than thinking about God."
• Becoming a theologian can wreck your soul, when faith is merely cerebral.
• Coming soon on For the Life of the World: philosopher Charles Taylor on October 2, 2021.

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 Adam Eitel and Ryan McAnnally-Linz
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Martin Chan & Nathan Jowers
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

"We are creatures in time."

Today, the Reverend Tish Harrison Warren explores patience as spiritual formation. She’s an Anglican priest and author of Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life, which was Christianity Today's 2018 Book of the Year, and Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work, or Watch, or Weep. She recently started a weekly newsletter on faith in private and public life for The New York Times.

She reflects on the human demand for control in both ordinary and extraordinary life events, from the line at the supermarket to the cancer ward; the recognition of human vulnerability and just hating the fact that we can’t control what happens next; the temptation to break out of time; and the difficult balance between the urgent need for justice and the acceptance of our human and societal limits. The entire conversation is illuminated by the beauty of what Hans Urs Von Balthasar calls “the meekness of the Lamb which is led.”

Part 6 of a 6-episode series on Patience, hosted by Ryan McAnnally-Linz.

About Tish Harrison Warren

Tish Harrison Warren is a priest in the Anglican Church in North America. She is the author of Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life, which was Christianity Today's 2018 Book of the Year, and Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work, or Watch, or Weep. She has worked in ministry settings for over a decade as a campus minister with InterVarsity Graduate and Faculty Ministries, as an associate rector, and with addicts and those in poverty through various churches and non-profit organizations. Currently, she is Writer in Residence at Resurrection South Austin. She is a monthly columnist with Christianity Today, and her articles and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Religion News Service, Christianity Today, Comment Magazine, The Point Magazine, and elsewhere. She is a founding member of The Pelican Project and a Senior Fellow with the Trinity Forum. She lives with her husband and three children in the Austin, Texas area.

Show Notes

• "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."

Production Notes

• This podcast featured priest and author the Reverend Tish Harrison Warren and theologian Ryan McAnnally-Linz
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Martin Chan & Nathan Jowers
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

What 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?
• Patience as notably absent
• Can we suffer well? Can we wait well?
• David Baily Harned: Has patience gone out of style since the industrial revolution (Patience: How We Wait Upon the World)
• Waiting as a form of suffering
• 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
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

"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
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

"God's patience empowers us to act. ... 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."

Theologian Paul Dafydd Jones comments on the bearing of God's patience on human experience and action. The patience of Christ-incarnate means that Christ is patience-incarnate. This makes it possible to "live otherwise"—contesting the reign of sin and resisting evil by responding to God's patience. Jones emphasizes the togetherness and solidarity of God with creation. And suggests the importance of appreciating the complexity of Christian faith.

Part 3 of a 6-episode series on Patience, hosted by Ryan McAnnally-Linz.

About Paul Dafydd Jones

Paul Dafydd Jones is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and the Co-Director of The Project on Religion and its Publics at the University of Virginia. He is a theologian specializing in Karl Barth, Christology, political theology, and religion in public life; and is author of the forthcoming research project: Patience: A Theological Exploration. 

Show Notes

• God's patience
• Apostle Peter: “The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you.” (2 Peter 3)
• Patience series recap
• Episode summary
• Tertullian and Cyprian
• "You need to think about who God is, and what God is doing before you think about who human beings are, and what we're called to become."
• Augustine: "God is patient, without any passion."
• Patience: Creation, providence, incarnation, Trinity
• 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."

Production Notes

• This podcast featured theologians Paul Dafydd Jones and Ryan McAnnally-Linz
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Martin Chan & Nathan Jowers
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

What does 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
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Modern life presents a crisis of time, bringing the value of patience into question. Andrew Root joins Ryan McAnnally-Linz to provide some context for our modern patience predicament. As a professor of youth ministry at Luther Seminary, he has years of both experience and careful thinking about what it means for kids, families, churches, and communities to flourish in an impatient world, cultivating the mindset, the virtues, and the community we need to wait well. Part 1 of a 6-episode series on Patience hosted by Ryan McAnnally-Linz.

Show Notes

• Doubling down and the temptation to make up for lost time
• Hartmut Rosa and Modernity as Acceleration
• Acceleration across three categories: technology, social change, and pace of life
• "Decay rate” is accelerating—we can sense that things get old and obsolete much faster (e.g., phones, computers)
• Riding the wave of accelerated social change
• "We’ve become enamored with gadgets and time-saving technologies."
• “Getting more actions within units of time"
• Multi-tasking
• Expectations and waiting as an attack on the self
• "Waiting feels like a moral failure."
• Give yourself a break; people are under a huge amount of guilt that they’re not using their time or curating the self they could have.
• "You’re screwing up my flow here, man."
• When I’m feeling the acceleration of time: “Get the bleep out of my way. My humanity is worn down through the acceleration."
• Busyness as an indicator of a good life
• “To say that I’m busy is to indicate that I’m in demand."
• "Stripping time of its sacred weight."
• Mid-life crises and the hollowness of time
• Patience is not just "go slower”
• Eric Fromm's "having mode" vs "being mode" of action
• Waiting doesn’t become the absence of something
• Pixar’s Soul, rushing to find purpose, failing to see the gift of connectedness to others
• Not all resonance is good (e.g., the raging resonance of Capitol rioters)
• How would the church offer truly good opportunities for resonance
• Bonhoeffer and the community of resonant reality
• Luther's theology of the cross—being with and being for—sharing in the moment
• Receiving the act of being with and being for
• Instrumentalization vs resonance
• Bearing with one another in weakness, pain, and suffering
• Encountering each other by putting down accelerated goals to be with and for the other
• Flow or resonance in one’s relationship to time
• Artists, mystics, and a correlation with psychological flow

About Andrew Root

Andrew Root is the Olson Baalson Associate Professor of Youth and Family Ministry at Luther Seminary. He teaches classes on youth ministry, young adults, family, church, and culture; he has lately been writing about issues surrounding the intersection of faith and science, including a project called Science for Youth Ministry. He is author of several books, including The End of Youth Ministry?, The Congregation in a Secular Age, The Pastor in a Secular Age, and Faith Formation in a Secular Age.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured theologians Andrew Root and Ryan McAnnally-Linz
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Martin Chan & Nathan Jowers
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

"Be with me, Madam Jazz, I urge you now, / Riff in me so I can conjure how / You breathe in us more than we dare allow." (Micheal O'Siadhail, The Five Quintets)

Irish poet Micheal O'Siadhail and theologian David Ford discuss the improvisational jazz that emerges in the interplay of poetry and theology, riffing on life and love, the meaning of covenant, retrieving wisdom from history, and imagining a future by letting go in communion with Madam Jazz. Interview by Drew Collins.

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.

About David Ford

David F. Ford OBE is Regius Professor of Divinity Emeritus in the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Selwyn College. He is a renowned theologian and leader in inter-faith relations and is author of Christian Wisdom: Desiring God and Learning in Love and the forthcomingThe Gospel of John: A Theological Commentary.

Show Notes

• Book: The Five Quintets, Micheal O'Siadhail
• Jazz, poetry, improvisation
• Reading: Epigraph to The Five Quintets
• Madam Jazz, Improvisation, syncopated peace, "Let there be"
• Modernity, science, and history
• Secular supersessionism
• Deep conversation from your own tradition, with others
• The formation of historical figures
• Second sight and recovering history and wisdom from the past
• "Some of things we thought we have surpassed, we need to retrieve."
• History in service of the present and the future
• Paul Ricoeur
• 50 years of friendship
• Reading: "Covenant"
• One of the most important words of life: covenant
• Unity across generations: family, friend, and institutional covenants
• "Loving God for nothing"
• Unity, trust, and interdependence, even across difference and pluralism
• Culture of suspicion
• Without trust you have nothing
• Enora O'Neil on trust in the public sphere
• Susan Highland: belief and trust in John's Gospel
• O'Siadhail on "a life worth living"—decency and "bringing talents back"
• Ford on "a life worth living"—delighting in God and each other
• Taking roads not normally taken

Production Notes

• This podcast featured poet Micheal O'Siadhail, theologian David Ford, and theologian Drew Collins
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Martin Chan & Nathan Jowers
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

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

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

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

About Micheal O'Siadhail

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

Show Notes

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

Production Notes

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

"The artist has the ability to direct the attention of the audience. If you agree to engage with their work, then they will show you something. And you agree to pay attention to that thing. And I think the act of attending to things is basically the act of love. And when I look at the life of Christ, he's forever drawing people's attention to things as lessons or just things they wouldn't have seen otherwise: a person they would have passed by, or a lesson from nature, or something that they would have missed. That discipline and virtue of attention flies directly in the face of everything that we experienced today."

What is the role of entertainment in human flourishing? Vox film critic Alissa Wilkinson reflects on how her early life formed her critical and cultural sensibilities, the role of entertainment in a flourishing life, how biblical interpretation lends itself to the attentive task of the critic, the challenge of boredom and seeing entertainment as mere consumption, and how creating art and watching film well cultivates the virtues of attention and hospitality. Not to mention: The saddest song ever to score a film, why film is not a storytelling medium, how Jesus and Terrence Malick direct our attention, and much more. Interview by Drew Collins.

Show Notes

• Attention economy (introduction by Evan Rosa)
• About Alissa Wilkinson
• Art and the shared experience of attention by artist and audience
• Art and propaganda
• How Alissa's upbringing cultivated her cultural sensibilities
• Reading a text, understanding it and being able to reinterpret
• How to watch vs. what to watch
• Remaking our visual vocabulary
• The communal, public nature of entertainment
• The public nature of art
• Catharsis and emotion as a public act
• "Learning to perform my emotions..."
• "The experience we have together"
• Compare religious liturgy to public entertainment
• Entertainment and the life of Jesus
• Telling stories and singing songs
• "Singing is such a useless thing."
• The saddest song in the world: Max Richter's "On the Nature of Daylight"
• The discipline and virtue of attention
• Directing the attention of the audience
• Terrence Malick helping viewers "see"
• Film is not a storytelling medium; it's primarily visual. You can have no sound, no characters, but you can't have no video.
• "Good artists are hospitable"
• Young Adult Movie Ministry and the ministry of attention
• Christian engagement with film
• A.O. Scott and Hail, Caeser!
• "A bad movie can instruct you as much as a good one. ... Every movie critic knows it's more fun to write about a bad movie"
• Apocalyptic pop culture
• The Daniel Option: The prophet Daniel as an exemplar of public engagement
• Responsibility and authorship
• Hand it over to the audience to making meaning together
• The share-ability of art
• We're all getting hit differently by the movies we see
• Jean Luc Marion's Idols and Icons
• Boredom and entertainment in a life worth living
• Michael Chabon's reclaiming entertainment in "The Pleasure Principle" (LA Times)
• C.S. Lewis's An Experiment in Criticism
• Boredom
• "A lot of what passes for criticism is just cultural amnesia."
• The role of entertainment in a life worth living

About Alissa Wilkinson

Alissa Wilkinson is Vox's film critic; she also writes about culture more generally. She's been writing about film and culture since 2006, and her work has appeared at Rolling Stone, The Washington Post, Vulture, RogerEbert.com, The Atlantic, Books & Culture, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Paste, Pacific Standard, and others. Alissa is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics, and was a 2017-18 Art of Nonfiction writing fellow with the Sundance Institute. Before joining Vox, she was the chief film critic at Christianity Today.

Alissa is also an associate professor of English and humanities at The King's College in New York City, where she's taught criticism, cinema studies, and cultural theory since 2009. Her book Salty: Lessons on Eating, Drinking, and Living from Revolutionary Women is forthcoming from Broadleaf Books. She is also the co-author, with Robert Joustra, of How to Survive the Apocalypse: Zombies, Cylons, Faith, and Politics at the End of the World. Alissa regularly gives lectures around the world on film, pop culture, postmodernity, religion, and criticism. She holds an MA in humanities and social thought from New York University and an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from Seattle Pacific University.

Read Alissa's articles on Vox.com

Listen to Alissa's podcast Young Adult Movie Ministry
Production Notes

• This podcast featured critic and journalist Alissa Wilkinson and theologian Drew Collins
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Martin Chan & Nathan Jowers
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Is it possible for anyone to change their mind anymore? 

Matt Croasmun welcomes theologian and ethicist Nichole Flores (University of Virginia) onto the show for a discussion of changing our minds in political and religious contexts. They discuss the meaning of intellectual, political, and religious conversion; how aesthetic and emotional experience of beauty is often the key ingredient in changing one's mind and behavior; the value of open-mindedness and intellectual humility as well as the value of a firm sturdiness and courageous conviction; and the role of changing one's mind in a life worth living.

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.

Show Notes

• Recovery mode from 2020 general election
• 538 Podcast and Nate Silver as original demographic determinist
• Is it possible for us to change our minds?
• "I'm a Christian and I believe that conversion is possible."
• "I live in the world as if it were possible to change one's mind."
• Political conversion and mind-changing
• Changing one's mind can be the result of a conversion
• Political conversion focuses as much on a profound experience
• Anecdote: A Catholic student who voted for Donald Trump because of abortion
• Registering for a political party is a little like getting married...
• "Catholics like to think of ourselves as politically homeless... maybe political misfits is the better category."
• A political party should not be a place of comfort.
• Charles Taylor, hypergoods, and the impossibility of reasoning oneself into a "firmer grip"
• Changing your mind about American Football: "Young men shortening their lives for my entertainment."
• "I remember when I quit football ... I knew the shift happened when I turned on a game and I felt sick ... This shift was on the affective level."
• Treating students like "brains on a stick" or "free floating rationalities"
• How does the importance of affective emotional role in conversion shape an approach to teaching?
• "Learning is a version of changing your mind."
• Community of the beautiful: gathering around a shared aesthetic experience
• Social-political commitments that can change theological commitments
• Mutual encounter with the world and the other
• "The church is the light of the world. The church is bringing joy and hope to our society. But also the church is being chastened by what we encounter in society. And we are seeing where we can more fully image the body of Christ."
• The open-mindedness of an annoyingly sturdy Christian. "I want to get that knowing eye-roll."
• The value of intellectual humility
• What is the role of changing one's mind in seeking a life worthy of our humanity.
• Compromise: Negative or Positive
• "The unassailable value of human life created in the image of God: That's a value worth fighting for, worth holding onto."

Production Notes

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

In celebration of Juneteenth, Jamal-Dominique Hopkins and Angela Gorrell offer appreciation Old Testament scholar Charles B. Copher and Christian Educator Anne Streaty Wimberly. 

About Charles B. Copher

Charles Buchanan Copher (1913-2003), a United Methodist minister and Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Scholar, held an illustrative academic career at his alma mater, Gammon Theological Seminary, which later became part of the Interdenominational Theological Center (ITC) consortium. A respected educator and beloved by his students, he was Professor for Biblical Studies and Languages from 1958-1978.  Following his death in 2003, ITC honored his life work by creating the Charles B. Copher Annual Faculty Lectures. He was author of Black Biblical Studies: Biblical and Theological Issues on the Black Presence in the Bible.

About Anne Streaty Wimberly

Anne E. Streaty Wimberly, Professor Emerita of Christian Education at the Interdenominational Theological Center (ITC), is a renowned African American researcher, scholar, professor, advocate, and champion of black youth. A leading Christian educator rooted in the United Methodist Church, she has inspired students, colleagues, pastors, church leaders, and countless admirers to pursue education with a “zest to know.” For Wimberly, education centers on the big questions of life’s meaning and purpose, and she has enthusiastically pursued these questions throughout her spiritual and educational journey in light of her embrace of the generating theme of hope. While her teaching and scholarship encompass a wide range of ministerial and educational themes, she is most passionate about youth and family ministry in the black church. She currently serves as the Executive Director of the Youth Hope-Builders Academy at ITC and founder and coordinator of the Annual Youth and Family Convocation. Her passion for learning has undergirded her educational ministry and life-long vocation.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured biblical scholar Jamal-Dominique Hopkins and theologian Angela Gorrell
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Martin Chan & Nathan Jowers
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

"It's not just internal peace. It's internal healing. Healing of your memory."  (Kevin Lau)

After suffering a brutal knife attack that nearly killed him, journalist Kevin Lau, then editor-in-chief of Ming Pao, chose to forgive his two attackers. Since then, he has continued to support social participation through deep Christian spirituality. In this episode, he is joined by theologian Andrew Kwok of Hong Kong Baptist University. Together they reflect on the spirituality of social participation in a society that is experiencing censorship, political disagreement and disenfranchisement that leads to violence, increasing polarization, and tribalized media consumption curated only to confirm the views you already hold.

Interview by Evan Rosa.

Show Notes

• Learn more about the 2014 attack on Kevin Lau: South China Morning Post /  BBC / NYT
• Read more from Kevin Lau in his address at the 2015 Human Rights Press Awards

About Kevin Lau

Kevin Lau Chun-to is the former editor-in-chief of Ming Pao, a moderate Chinese-language news outlet based in Hong Kong and known for its commitment to journalistic freedom and reporting integrity. In 2014 he was viciously attacked in a premeditated slashing for his work. The attack was an international news event that sparked protests and demonstration for freedom of the press. Since then, he has spoken widely about his forgiveness for his attackers and remains an advocate for freedom of the press and Christian spirituality of social participation in Hong Kong and beyond.

About Andrew Kwok

Wai Luen (Andrew) Kwok is Associate Professor in the Department of Religion & Philosophy in Hong Kong Baptist University. His research includes Chinese Christianity, public theology, and Christian doctrine and hermeneutics. He has written and taught about religious discourse, social participation, and identity construction of Hong Kong Protestant Christians from 1970 to 1997; as well as the concept of social justice in the periodicals of foreign religions in China 1911 to 1949. He is currently working on a reconciliation project between Christians occupying different ends of the political spectrum in Hong Kong.

Production Notes

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

"Jesus is the great kintsugi master." 

"Something that's broken is already more valuable than when it's whole." 

"The imagination creates, through the fractures, a river of gold, a mountain of gold." 

Makoto Fujimura joins Miroslav Volf to discuss Art & Faith: A Theology of Making. Fujimura is a painter who practices the Japanese art of nihonga, or slow art. His abstract expressionist pieces are composed of fine minerals he grinds himself and paints onto several dozens of layers, which take time and close attention both to make and to appreciate.

Mako and Miroslav discuss the theology and spirituality that inspires Mako's work, the creative act of God mirrored in the practice of art, the unique ways of seeing and being that artists offer the world, which is, in Mako's words "dangerously close to life and death." They reflect on the meaning of Christ's humanity and his wounds, the gratuity of God in both creation from nothing and the artistic response in the celebration of everything.

Show Notes

• Makoto Fujimura's Art & Faith: A Theology of Making
• Illuminated Bible by Makoto Fujimura
• Mary, Martha, & Lazarus
• Genesis Creation Narrative
• Art follows in the footsteps of the creator
• The reasons for God's creation
• Why would an all-sufficient God create anything?
• God as "a grand artist with no ego and no need to create."
• Communicating about art and theology outside the boundaries of the institutional church
• Reconciliation between art and faith
• God's gratuitous creation doesn't need a utilitarian purpose
• Creating vs making
• In artistic creation, something new does seem to emerge
• "God is the only artist"
• The scandal of God's incarnation: In becoming incarnate, God's utter independence is flipped to utter dependence.
• Psalmist's cry to God
• How art breaks the ordinary
• The artist's way of seeing and being
• Seeing as survival
• Seeing with the eyes of your heart
• "Artists stay dangerously close to death and life"
• Getting beyond the rational way of seeing
• Letting the senses become part of our prayer
• William James on conversion: everything becomes new for the converted
• Seeing with a new frame of beauty
• Faith and the authenticity of seeing with the eyes of an artist
• Emily Dickenson on the "tender pioneer" of Jesus
• Hartmut Rosa on resonance—in modernity, the world becomes dead for us, and fails to speak with us, but we need a sense of resonance
• Kandinsky and Rothko—artists' intuitive sense of resonance that has escaped the church in the wake of mid-century destruction
• Mary's wedding nard oil and the gratuitous cost of art
• The non-utilitarian nature of art
• Using precious materials in art
• Tear jars
• Miroslav's mother regularly weeping and crying: "I wonder why God gave us tears? Only humans are the animals who cry."
• Helmut Plessner's Laughing and Crying: Weeping as relinquishing self-possession and merging the self with the flesh (as opposed to reason/ratio or technique/techne)
• N.T. Wright—the greatest miracle is that Jesus chose to stay human.
• Jesus's remaining wounds
• Co-mingling our tears with Christ's tears
• Kintsugi and Japanese Slow Art
• Accentuating the fracture
• "The imagination creates, through the fractures, a river of gold, a mountain of gold."
• This is the best example of new creation.
• "What would happen to our scars? That's a question with no answer."
• Through his wounds, our wounds would look different
• Jesus is the great kintsugi master, leading a path of gold along the fractures of life
• The permanence of scars
• Is it possible to be in the good and be truly joyous?
• "God is not the source of beauty. God is beauty."
• Fundamental "new newness": So new that it evades understanding
• Goodness, truth, and beauty
• God loved the world so much, it wasn't enough to merely admire it—he had to join it.
• What is a life worthy of our humanity?
• Fujimura's practice of art as an attempt to answer that question.
• "Our lives as the artwork of God, especially as a collaborative community in the Body of Christ."

About Makoto Fujimura

Makoto Fujimura is a leading contemporary artist whose process driven, refractive “slow art” has been described by David Brooks of New York Times as “a small rebellion against the quickening of time”. Robert Kushner, in the mid 90’s, written on Fujimura’s art in Art in America this way: “The idea of forging a new kind of art, about hope, healing, redemption, refuge, while maintaining visual sophistication and intellectual integrity is a growing movement, one which finds Makoto Fujimura’s work at the vanguard.”

Fujimura’s art has been featured widely in galleries and museums around the world, and is collected by notable collections including The Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, The Huntington Library as well as Tikotin Museum in Israel. His art is represented by Artrue International in Asia and has been exhibited at various venues including Dillon Gallery, Waterfall Mansion, Morpeth Contemporary,  Sato Museum in Tokyo, Tokyo University of Fine Arts Museum, Bentley Gallery in Phoenix, Gallery Exit and Oxford House at Taikoo Place in Hong Kong, Vienna’s Belvedere Museum, Shusaku Endo Museum in Nagasaki and Jundt Museum at Gonzaga University. He is one of the first artists to paint live on stage at New York City’s legendary Carnegie Hall as part of an ongoing collaboration with composer and percussionist, Susie Ibarra.  Their collaborative album "Walking on Water" is released by Innova Records. 

As well as being a leading contemporary painter, Fujimura is also an arts advocate, writer, and speaker who is recognized worldwide as a cultural influencer. A Presidential appointee to the National Council on the Arts from 2003-2009, Fujimura served as an international advocate for the arts, speaking with decision makers and advising governmental policies on the arts. His book “Refractions” (NavPress) and “Culture Care” (IVPress) reflects many of his thesis on arts advocacy written during that time. His books have won numerous awards including the Aldersgate Prize for “Silence and Beauty” (IVPress). In 2014, the American Academy of Religion named Fujimura as its 2014 “Religion and the Arts” award recipient. This award is presented annually to professional artists who have made significant contributions to the relationship of art and religion, both for the academy and a broader public. Previous recipients of the award include Meredith Monk, Holland Cotter, Gary Snyder, Betye & Alison Saar and Bill Viola. Fujimura's highly anticipated book "Art+Faith: A Theology of Making" (Yale Press, with foreword by N.T. Wright, 2021) has been described by poet Christian Wiman as "a real tonic for our atomized time".

Fujimura founded the International Arts Movement in 1992, now IAMCultureCare, which over sees Fujimura Institute. In 2011 the Fujimura Institute was established and launched the Four Qu4rtets, a collaboration between Fujimura, painter Bruce Herman, Duke theologian/pianist Jeremy Begbie, and Yale composer Christopher Theofanidis, based on T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. The exhibition has travelled to Baylor, Duke, and Yale Universities, Cambridge University, Hiroshima City University and other institutions around the globe.

Bucknell University honored him with the Outstanding Alumni Award in 2012.

Fujimura is a recipient of four Doctor of Arts Honorary Degrees; from Belhaven University in 2011, Biola University in 2012, Cairn University in 2014 and Roanoke College, in February 2015. His Commencement addresses has received notable attention, being selected by NPR as one of the “Best Commencement Addresses Ever”. His recent 2019 Commencement Address at Judson University, was called “Kintsugi Generation”, laying out his cultural vision for the next generation.

Production Notes

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

How should we respond to the pain of others? We are too often quick to justify God's permitting horrendous evils, answering why, and talking too much. In this episode, theologian David Kelsey reflects on Human Anguish and God's Power, noticing the anomaly of evil and its wild and inexplicable grip on creatures, the constant temptation of such creatures to talk and explain evil in the face of others' pain, and finally the analogously wild and inexplicable nature of God's grace in his immediate, if silent, presence among human anguish. Interview by Ryan McAnnally-Linz.

Show Notes

• “When you're consoling somebody who’s in deep anguish, let them raise the why questions”
• “As people of faith, we don't know the answer. What we do affirm is that God is present in the situation of the people who are anguishing and the people who are suffering”
• “God is affirming the value of that life, even as it suffers”
• “And God is as offended at the suffering as you are”
• “You don't have to talk. Better to acknowledge what's there, witness to the presence of God's grace in the midst of it and be silent”
• David was one of Ryan’s professors at Yale Divinity School 
• What to do about the pain of others? 
• Observing human suffering when it is not our own
• People who have lost loved ones in the Pandemic, what do you say to them? What do you do? 
• How to live in that sacred yet difficult place? 
• Isaiah 6, “I’m a man of unclean lips”
• David Kelsey: “The main problem is that we seek explanations where there are in fact two mysteries”
• the positive mystery that is God cannot be grasped
• the negative mystery, which is evil
• And the two make no sense together
• "Look, when you look for an explanation there, you're going to get God wrong and you're going to hurt people. There's a better way and it starts and ends with silence”
• David Kelsey, Imagining Redemption
• David Kelsey, Eccentric Existence: A Theological Anthropology
• David Kelsey, Human Anguish and God's Power
• Human Anguish and God's Power – what made you interested in this? 
• Clergy are appalled about the rhetoric that people would say to those in anguish in the hospital. “This was sent for a purpose,’ ‘there is a plan here.’ It makes grief more complicated. 
• So why do people say those things? 
• The Abrahamic traditions asserted that God created the Earth out of nothing, which implies that God can do anything He wants. That leads to people think God wants people to suffer
• Initially the title was Human Anguish and Divine Power, but he realized that was wrong 
• God so exceeds our capacity to get our minds around what it is to be God that everything we say about God should be "God is kind of like someone who loves," "God is kind of like someone who is focused on justice" 
• We don’t really know what justice, in God’s case, really means
• “When people talk very fluently about God, I get very uneasy. It's too slick”
• Reading scripture in light of the text 
• The drive to want an explanation
• Lutheran theologian, Deanna Thompson, has written about this in experience as a cancer victim
• “Christians have trouble with this: God did not create evil, and yet evil is there. It’s absurd, and it’s real.”
• “How it came to be that way, we don’t know. Presumably God knows, but I’ m not God”
• “Not short-circuiting the mysteriousness of evil and yet affirming somehow the priority of what you call ‘the positive mystery that is God’”
• Christians often think evil and grace are reconcilable if you think hard enough 
• The wildness of God's grace: "why in the world would God love us this way?”
• Don’t try to talk, be a witness to the mystery 
• “The wildness of evil is parasitic because it’s a deep distortion of God’s created good”
• Evil as distortion
• “Disease is a distortion of the dynamics of a healthy organism, but not some other sort of dynamic. It's just that gone awry”
• “And so it's that asymmetry where the mystery of evil is parasitic on the mystery of what grace produces”
• Where does silence land in a person’s life? 
• “Worship: it's praying; it's singing; it's asking for help; it's confessing our sins; it's helping our neighbors”
• Praise of God’s glory as foundation of worship
• First silence, then praise

About David Kelsey

David Kelsey is Luther A. Weigle Professor Emeritus of Theology at Yale Divinity School. He is author of several works of theology, including Imagining Redemption, Eccentric Existence: A Theological Anthropology, and most recently Human Anguish and God's Power.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured David Kelsey & Ryan McAnnally-Linz
• Edited by Evan Rosa
• Co-produced by Evan Rosa & Ryan McAnnally-Linz
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Martin Chan & Nathan Jowers
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

"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.

About Lisa Sharon Harper

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

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

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

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

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

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
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

A conversation on the ancient wisdom of Christian forgiveness, between Yale psychologist Laurie Santos (host, The Happiness Lab) and Miroslav Volf. Recently appearing on The Happiness Lab, Miroslav and Laurie discuss his older brother's tragic death as a child and his family's response to forgive. Miroslav reflects on the formative impact of these events. He contrasts forgiveness as an obligation with forgiveness as a gift that frees one from captivity to the past and opens up possibilities for the future. Forgiveness, for him, is more than an event but a practice cultivated throughout life, offering a way of recognizing the sacred and holy in the other.

Reposted with permission from The Happiness Lab. Listen and subscribe at www.happinesslab.fm.

Show Notes

• Introduction: Evan Rosa
• "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us."
• Subscribe to The Happiness Lab: https://www.happinesslab.fm/
• The story of Miroslav Volf's family forgiving the soldier responsible for the death of his brother as a child
• Forgiveness as transcending the rage and deep sorrow
• "Forgive one another as you have been forgiven in Christ." (Ephesians 4:32)
• The love of enemy as a fundamental Christian stance
• How many times should I forgive: 70 x 7
• A definition of forgiveness—dealing with resentment, or freeing one's life from the burden of injury.
• Gift
• "Unstick the deed from the doer. This is what forgiveness does."
• Nietzsche against forgiveness, treating all injury as minor and ineffectual.
• "Time does not run backwards."
• In the gift of forgiveness, I relate to you as if you had not done that particular wrong.
• Forgiveness as an arduous process; a release into new possibilities for the future.
• "We are often held captive by the past."
• Forgiveness reconfigures the relationship with have the other. We give the possibility (not the actuality) for a different future. Imagine and live into a joint future.
• Forgiveness must be a voluntary act.
• We shouldn't think of forgiveness as a burden, but as a gift.
• Life becomes better when we can transcend the self.
• Turning from injury and loss to a new life. "Forgiveness made it possible for her to invest herself into the good around her."
• Release into the future
• The Volf family's forgiveness of the soldier who was responsible for their son's death.
• Practical steps to move toward forgiveness
• Invoking the command to forgive
• "Forgiveness isn't a one-time event. ... It's a messy process. It's in this messiness—in this gradual character of forgiveness—that we actually grow into forgiveness. And forgiveness ends up being not so much an act as it ends up being a a practice."
• Prodigal Son governs the logic of Christianity
• "People have a hard time forgiving themselves."
• "To forgive myself, I somehow have to distinguish between who the core of myself is, and what I have done. I cannot have an account of the self that is simply the sum of what I have suffered and what I have committed. If I have that kind of account of the self, there's no way to delete that from the self, because that wrongdoing is integral to the self. ... In the Christian tradition—other traditions as well, to a significant degree—there's always been a sense that there is a core of the self that is loved by God, and that we ought to love in each other that is untouched by anything that person might or might not have done, or what that person has suffered."
• "Would you love me if I turned into a donkey?"
• Seeing the sacred in the other

About Laurie Santos

Dr. Laurie Santos is Professor of Psychology and Head of Silliman College at Yale University. Dr. Santos is an expert on human cognition and the cognitive biases that impede better choices. Her course, “Psychology and the Good Life,” teaches students what the science of psychology says about how to make wiser choices and live a life that’s happier and more fulfilling. The class is Yale’s most popular course in over 300 years and has been adapted into a free Coursera program that has been taken by over 3.3 million people to date. Dr. Santos has been featured in numerous news outlets including the New York Times, NBC Nightly News, The Today Show, CBS This Morning, NPR, GQ Magazine, Slate, CNN and O, The Oprah Magazine. Dr. Santos is a winner of numerous awards both for her science and teaching from institutions such as Yale and the American Psychological Association. She has been featured as one of Popular Science’s “Brilliant 10” young minds and was named TIME's “Leading Campus Celebrity.” Her podcast, The Happiness Lab, launched in 2019 has over 35 million downloads.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Miroslav Volf and Laurie Santos
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Special thanks to Laurie Santos, Ryan Dilley, and Pushkin Media
• Production Assistance by Martin Chan & Nathan Jowers
• Listen and subscribe to The Happiness Lab at www.happinesslab.fm
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

"The 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.

American 한 (Han)

Click here to view "American 한 (Han)," illustrated by Shin Maeng.

Beyond Invisible

by Sarah Shin

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?

To read more of Sarah's thoughts on the Atlanta shootings, read her piece, "Honoring the Lives of Women Who Refuse to Be Scrubbed Away" (MissioAlliance.org).

About Sarah Shin

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.

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? 
• Wonder as a moral emotion 
• Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: the Intelligence of Emotions
• Jeremy Bendik-Keymer, "our ecological responsibility is unlikely to be met purely out of a sense of duty"
• To wonder at the natural order actually makes us responsible to it
• Wonder creates sacredness, and that gives rise to a need for preservation and care
• “Wonder and be drawn to it, before rushing into judgment” 
• Wonder and danger
• Alex Nava, Wonder and Exile in the New World
• Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750
• 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
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

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

So, how should we read Flannery O’Connor?

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

Show Notes

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

About Jessica Hooten Wilson

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

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

Production Notes

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

"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
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

"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."
• "Joy, in the end, wins."

Watch a video of this interview here.

Production Notes

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

"Once a person has done evil, they have destroyed a significant part of themselves. They have made that turn towards non-being, non-existence, chaos, disorder, and loss. And so when you execute a person who has already done that kind of moral damage to themselves, not to mention all the damage they've done to other people, but at that point, the only thing remaining in them is the good, which is that this is a human being, alive and made in the image of the living God. And so at that point, that's all they have. And you're destroying it."

Ryan McAnnally-Linz is joined by Elizabeth Bruenig (New York Times) to discuss the theological, moral, and political implications of the death penalty, best summed in her bracing piece released days after the execution of Alfred Bourgeois, which she witnessed in person. 

Show Notes

• Evan Rosa, Holy Saturday Reflection
• Elizabeth Bruenig, "The Man I Saw Them Kill”—Liz Bruenig witnesses the execution of Alfred Bourgeois
• Mark Oppenheimer, "A Death Row Inmate Finds Common Ground With Theologians”—Jurgen Moltmann’s relationship with death row inmate Kelly Gissendaner
• Elizabeth Bruenig, "The Government Has Not Explained How These 13 People Were Selected to Die”—Liz Bruenig: "The federal death penalty cannot be fixed. It’s time to end it."
• Elizabeth Bruenig, "Witness to an Execution: A Chilling Account”—Readers react to Elizabeth Bruenig’s essay about the recent federal execution of Alfred Bourgeois.
• "Execution as theater” 
• What does the death penalty do to us?
• Hoping for the destruction of another person
• “I think anytime you’re sitting around hoping someone is destroyed, that’s a morally compromising position to be in. It’s certainly the case that people can commit crimes that make me feel like they should be themselves wiped off the face of the earth and eliminated from the cosmos, but I know that those impulses are not the best in me.”
• The impulse to destroy
• Rationality, irrationality, and the extremity of the death penalty
• Moral loss and moral injury
• The question of accidentally executing innocent people versus the impulse to destroy
• Deserted island
• Intense revulsion at evil
• The VVitch (The Witch, 2015)
• St. Augustine on the death penalty. Hate the sin, love the nature.
• "Nothing was restored, nothing was gained. There isn’t any justice in it, nor satisfaction, nor reason: There was nothing, nothing there.” 
• Agnes Callard
• The permanence of harm
• “Harm can’t be undone… What can we do about the fact that harm is so permanent. … It may seem symmetrical in a literary sense but it doesn’t actually do anything to undo the harm."
• “What can we preserve? What can we prevent from being destroyed any further?"
• Wounds of the martyrs
• Miroslav Volf’s view that the sins, harms, and wounds of life will not come to mind in heaven; social reconciliation that goes along with the settling of accounts in judgment
• The Prodigal Son and the moral damage done to oneself
• “You were always with me. Why are you complaining? Everything I have is yours. Why are you upset about that?"
• Hen Meme: “Sorry my mom said no”
• “Hiding in God’s wing and feeling like, whatever else anyone does, however angry anyone else makes me, I am here with the Lord. He has me. I’ll be okay. I have it in me to forgive because I have everything my Father has, which is everything there is."
• Public policy and the death penalty abolition movement; states will slowly trail off in the use of the death penalty
• Federal death penalty, Trump and Barr’s abuse of federal executions
• The role of the Supreme
• What to expect and the range of possibilities for the future of federal capital punishment
• Jürgen Moltmann and death row inmate Kelly Gissendaner
• The political calculation of commuting sentences or abolishing the death penalty.
• “They don’t want to spend political capital on criminals, people who’ve done terrible things."
• Capital punishment and public policy

About Elizabeth Bruenig

Elizabeth Bruenig is an American journalist and opinion writer for the New York Times.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured journalist Elizabeth Bruenig and theologian Ryan McAnnally-Linz
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Martin Chan
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

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? 
• Matt Croasmun’s course at Grace Farms: http://gracefarms.org/life-worth-living
• How would your life change if the idea you were reading about were true? 
• “Aim to become indigenous to a place” Robin Kimmerer
• What way of being human is particular to you?
• Disney and the quest for the self 
• Charles Taylor: “Our most essential responsibility is our responsibility to ourselves to become our most authentic self “
• If we strive for uniqueness, what happens to universal values?
• Moral relativity in Charles Taylor 
• What if we hurt each other on the way to becoming ourselves?
• ‘Let It Go,’ the anthem that’s everywhere
• Reading the song to mean ‘you do you’ is a shallow reading
• Our values run deep in our culture, entertainment, and mythology 
• Elsa’s hidden, dangerous powers: ‘conceal don’t feel’ 
• The disciplined, buffered self 
• “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”

Thinking of the Christian church as a field hospital is a wonderful thought, but what happens when the very place you go to for healing becomes the locus of trauma? What happens to faith and flourishing when the hospital becomes a battlefield? For all the media attention given to cases of spiritual abuse, there is very little by way of psychological research. Dan Koch, host of the podcast You Have Permission and a doctoral student in counseling psychology at Northwest University, explores the tragic and damaging phenomenon of spiritual abuse; its impact on the emotional, intellectual, and spiritual life; and identifies some of the most important factors in understanding its underlying causes and developing approaches to healing for victims. Interview with Evan Rosa.

Show Notes

• "Religion is like nuclear fission. When done well, nuclear fission can give us free electricity indefinitely with a little bit of care and a little bit of grooming. It's this tremendously powerful source of energy and flourishing. But it also, when done poorly, can melt a reactor, kill tens of thousands of people, and irradiate land for a million years."
• "What we do when we spiritually abused someone, not only do we harm them, we cut them off from what may have been their primary healing source. In the same move, we make it harder for them to use their faith, use their spirituality to heal from the harm we just did to them."
• “The church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints.”
• For our purposes, "spiritual abuse" means any form of physical, mental, sexual, or spiritual harm or trauma that occurs in a religious context.
• About You Have Permission
• Theology and psychology—TheoPsych and Blueprint1543
• How Dan Koch  got interested in spiritual and religious abuse
• End-times terror as a form of spiritual abuse
• Spiritual and religious abuse has scant literature, but covers a variety of species of abuse and harm.
• A Venn diagram with other kinds of abuse and harm, in religious contexts
• Controlling and narcissistic pastors
• Conditionality
• Violence, horror, and terror
• Developing a God image
• Restricting negative emotions and unhappiness
• The prevalence of spiritual abuse—Liz Oakley's study of the U.K.
• Jean Vanier and Ravi Zacharias—celebrity, fame, and power dynamics that lead to spiritual and sexual abuse
• The power of religious leaders in American life
• Conflating the religious leader with God
• The impact of spiritual abuse on the plausibility of faith: rationality, emotion, and the holistic response of a person to abuse
• Responding to spiritual abuse
• Standing in solidarity with victims

About Dan Koch

Dan Koch is host of the podcast You Have Permission and a doctoral student in counseling psychology at Northwest University. Follow him on Twitter @DanKoch.

Theologian Angela Gorrell discusses her book The Gravity of Joy, a theological memoir that lays bare the experience of finding the bright sorrow of joy alongside devastating grief, suffering, and pain. The book recounts her experience of joining the Yale Center for Faith & Culture in 2016 as an Associate Research Scholar for our Theology of Joy and the Good Life Project and to teach our Yale undergraduate course, Life Worth Living. That winter, the reality, the extent, and the dangerous potential of joy would become devastatingly clear. The highly abstract question of what it means to live a life worth living would become painfully acute. Interview with Ryan McAnnally-Linz.

Support For the Life of the World by supporting the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: faith.yale.edu/give 

This episode contains some sensitive material about suicide. Use some discretion as you consider listening, and if you are feeling suicidal, thinking about hurting yourself, or are concerned that someone you know may be in danger of hurting themselves, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK.

Show Notes

• Read the book: The Gravity of Joy: A Story of Being Lost and Found 
• A devastating winter of loss
• Suicide and opioid deaths as “deaths of despair"
• “Despair is the feeling I think that people can feel when they feel like no one can reach them. No one can get to them. And for me, joy is a counteragent to despair because joy is the feeling that we get after recognizing truth, meaning beauty, goodness, our relationship to other people."
• Joy as a work of resistance against despair (e.g., Willie James Jennings)
• "Joy as an illumination that there is something more.”
• Grief vs Despair—what prevented your grief from becoming despair? Who reached you?
• “Even though I was a year and five months in grief… angry… constantly afraid of getting another call."
• Suicide watch in a women’s correctional facility—“These women are going to minister to me."
• "Is our study of joy too shallow?"
• Different kinds of joy
• Joy and sorrow—from the book: "Joy doesn’t obliterate grief. . . . Instead, joy has a mysterious capacity to be felt alongside sorrow and even—sometimes most especially—in the midst of suffering."
• The ocean as a spiritual sanctuary, the rain as an indicator that change is coming
• "I suddenly found myself rejoicing over what ought to be, what was to come. I suddenly believed that joy might make its way to me again. And just the mirror. Like what if of joy like found me on that beach, running in the pouring rain?"
• Women’s prison bible study—feeling welcome to a community without shame 
• Humanizing one another in a dehumanizing institution: “The Gravity of Joy is my effort to humanize people who are incarcerated."
• God’s activity in suffering, pain, and joy: “God was always seeking after you."
• Romans 8:28 "All things work together for good"
• I hope people feel seen.

About Angela Gorrell

Dr. Angela Williams Gorrell is Assistant Professor of Practical Theology at Baylor University's George W. Truett Theological Seminary and author of The Gravity of Joy: A Story of Being Lost and Found and Always on: Practicing Faith in a New Media Landscape. Prior to joining the faculty at Baylor University, she was an Associate Research Scholar at the Yale Center for Faith & Culture, working on the Theology of Joy and the Good Life Project, and a lecturer in Divinity and Humanities at Yale University. She is an ordained pastor with 15 years of ministry experience. Dr. Gorrell’s expertise is in the areas of theology and contemporary culture, education and formation, new media, and youth and emerging adults.

“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

Show Notes

• Julian of Norwich today: "All shall be well." Read the Revelations of Divine Love
• Krista Tippett and On Being
• 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.

"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.

Support For the Life of the World by making a gift to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: faith.yale.edu/give

Show Notes

• Click here to watch the full interview in video
• Click here to learn more about the Theology of Joy and the Good Life project
• Defining joy—an act of resistance against despair
• "Resisting all the ways in which life can be strangled and presented to us as not worth living"
• Singing a song in a strange land
• Making productive use of pain, suffering, and the absurd—taking them serious
• How does one cultivate joy? You have to have people who can show you how to sing a song in a strand land, laugh where all you want to do is cry, and how to ride the winds of chaos.
• "In contexts where your energies have to be focused on survival, it doesn’t leave a lot of energy for overt forms of complaint—you’re spending a lot of energy just trying to hold it together."
• The commercialization of joy in the empire of advertising—contrasting that with the peoples serious work of joy
• The work and skill of making something beautiful out of what has been thrown away
• Segregated joy—joy in African diaspora communities
• Joy is always embedded in community logics
• The Christological center of joy
• Pentecost joy—joy together
• Geographies of joy: Christians tend not to think spatially, but we should
• Public rituals bound to real space
• Hoping for joyous infection, where the space has claimed you as its own
• Where can joy be found? The church, the hospital room, the barber shop and beauty shops—“things are going to be better"

About Willie Jennings

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

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.

Show Notes

• Willie Jennings, After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging
• Arvo Pärt’s Te Deum
• “Be ware the hidden curriculum."
• 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."

About Willie Jennings

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

"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 

Show Notes

• Read Fratelli Tutti in its entirety online here
• 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.

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.

"A strange necessity has been laid upon me to devote my life to the central concern that transcends the walls that divide and would achieve in literal fact what is experienced as literal truth: Human life is one and all humans are members of one another" (Howard Thurman, The Luminous Darkness). Sameer Yadav honors Howard Thurman, minister, theologian, philosopher, civil rights activist. Thurman was the author of the influential book, Jesus & the Disinherited, which Martin Luther King, Jr. was known to carry around with him. 

Links

• Who was Howard Thurman?
• About Jesus & the Disinherited

Show Notes

• Belonging and connectedness
• The trauma of alienation in the Jim Crow segregation
• Vitality of Christian faith and Black Christian resistance to slaveholder Christianity
• "The humanity we share with Jesus is one that cannot be reduced or dominated, but holds a value in union with God that goes beyond any attempt we can make to manipulate it for our own purposes."
• Thurman’s ministry and theology represents the bringing together of these three themes: (1) divine common ground with all living things, (2) the devastating effects of social injustice on human personhood, and (3) sharing in the humanity of Jesus uniquely revealed in the history of Black suffering and the resilience of Black joy.
• Christian mystical tradition
• Influenced by Ghandi’s approach to non-violence (soul force)
• Jesus and the Disinherited—finding the inward strength to stand up to oppression
• Mysticism and activism belong in vital connection with each other
• Thurman’s impact on Martin Luther King, Jr. at Boston University
• MLK was known to carry a copy of Jesus & the Disinherited with him wherever we went.
• From Preface of Luminous Darkness (1960): "The fact that 25 years of my life were spent in Florida and in Georgia has left deep scars in my spirit and has rendered me terribly sensitive to the churning abyss separating white from black. Living outside of the region, I am aware of the national span of racial prejudice and the virus of segregation that undermines the vitality of American life. Nevertheless, a strange necessity has been laid upon me to devote my life to the central concern that transcends the walls that divide and would achieve in literal fact what is experienced as literal truth: Human life is one and all humans are members of one another. And this insight is spiritual and it its the hard core of religious experience. My roots are deep in the throbbing reality of Negro idiom and from it I draw a full measure of inspiration and vitality. The slaves made a worthless life—the life of chattel property, a mere thing, a body—worth living. They yielded with abiding enthusiasm to a view of life which included all the events of their experience without exhausting themselves in those experiences. To them this quality of life was insistent fact because of that which deeply was within them. They discovered God, who was not or could not be exhausted by any single experience or series of experiences. To know God was to live a life worthy of the loftiest meaning of life. People of all ages and times, slave or free, trained or untutored, who have sensed the same values, are their fellow pilgrims, who journey together with them in increasing self-realization, in quest for the city that has foundations whose builder and maker is God.” 

About Sameer Yadav

Sameer Yadav (Th.D. Duke Divinity School) is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, CA. His research areas are in the philosophy and theology of religious experience, race and religion, and the theological interpretation of Scripture. He is the author of The Problem of Perception and the Experience of God: Toward a Theological Empiricism (Fortress Press, 2015), a number of articles published in various journals such as The Journal of Analytic Theology, Faith and Philosophy, and The Journal of Religion among others, as well as a number of chapters in edited volumes.

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.

Show Notes

• Read about David Walker here.
• Read the entire Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World.

Support For the Life of the World, give to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture:  faith.yale.edu/give

Shortly after Jorge Mario Bergoglio became Pope Francis in March 2013, he released an exhortation, very similar to an encyclical, but addressed to a Christian audience. "Evangelii Guadium” or the "Joy of the Gospel,” begins by articulating the most pressing challenges for the contemporary Church. First on his list is the economy of exclusion. What does he mean by that? He writes:

Just as the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say “thou shalt not” to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills. How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points? This is a case of exclusion. Can we continue to stand by when food is thrown away while people are starving? This is a case of inequality. Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape.  (Evangelii Gaudium)

Sister Helen Alford reflects on the economic implications of Pope Francis's Fratelli Tutti, including concerns about unrestrained free markets, the importance of allowing human life and dignity to frame our economic policy, what behavioral economics tells us about human relationality, and how we can understand the big picture of politics, economics, faith, and flourishing operating in Catholic social thought. Interview by Ryan McAnnally-Linz.

Show Notes

• What is the goal of Fratelli Tutti? (And understanding it in light of 2015’s Laudato Si: Care of Our Common Home.)
• Integral ecology: how we relate to each other in our nature environment (ecology) and human environment (economy)
• Ecology and economy share a common root: oikos (home)
• An economy that puts life and human dignity at the center, which also means respect for the environment
• The economic donut principle: the inner ring is social minimum to take care of all people, the outer ring is the environmental ceiling for impact. We need to live within the donut!
• "Fratelli tutti wants to see the economy as situated within a bigger vision of human development"
• Economy is like the foundation of a house, it’s not built for its own sake, but to support the whole house and the people in it. The economy must serve the common good—for all of us, in an integrated way.
• The primacy of politics: "We need a political order that’s going to give proper direction to the economy."
• "We see how difficult it is to make a political system function today."
• The economy is a good tool but a bad master. It must serve, not rule.
• The problem with unrestrained free markets
• Understanding the vision of human flourishing implied in the free market economy
• "The Ultimatum Game": An experiment in behavioral economics
• Relational beings in the economy; relationships really count in economic interactions
• Beings in relation; understanding the humanity at the core of economics
• How theology, biology, and economics all suggest cooperation and relationally is built into human beings.
• Long term ideas that impact our concept of work and the human person
• Rarum novarum and solidarity between workers and owners, and solidarity between workers together
• Solidarity as a strategy for affirming dignity among all humanity
• "The shape of human flourishing and how to reach it"—Charles Taylor on Fratelli Tutti
• "Let us dream as a single human family.” Pope Francis
• What is Pope Francis’s vision for a full and flourishing life? 
• Human rights, human development and resources, moral and spiritual goods
• Increasing diversity, having dialogue with each other and living together in real encounter, loving each other within diversity