For the Life of the World / Yale Center for Faith & Culture
Miroslav Volf, Matthew Croasmun, Ryan McAnnally-Linz, Drew Collins, Evan Rosa
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What is a life worthy of our humanity? How can we live it? Featuring Yale's Miroslav Volf, Ryan McAnnally-Linz, Matt Croasmun, and Drew Collins for conversations exploring theology and culture. Hosted by Evan Rosa. A production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture.
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6 days ago
Ukrainian Pastor Speaks Out: Resist Evil, Be Present, and Remember How Little You Control / Fyodor Raychynets & Miroslav Volf
Imagine war becoming your new normal. Imagine getting used to things like airstrike sirens. Imagine sleeping through the distant bombs. Imagine passing through the rubble on your way to work, or school, or church.
Over the past year, war _has_ become the new normal for Ukrainian pastor and theologian Fyodor Raychynets. Most of the expectations for how tthis war might go have fallen through. Worst case scenarios have come to pass. And the precarity and fragility of life outside of wartime—well, that continues too.
A year ago, 20 days into the war, Fyodor joined Miroslav Volf to catch up with his former professor for a conversation on the immediate impact of Russia’s invasion on Ukrainian life and culture. At the time, uncertainty filled the globe. Now, after 387 days of war, the shock has numbed into weariness. But a consistent message of presence pervades Fyodor’s mindset. Providing humanitarian aide, friendship, and surrogate family in the wake of so much destruction and loss, his church in the outskirts of Kiev has grown.
In this episode, Ukrainian pastor and theologian Fyodor Raychynets provides an update on life during wartime, in a war zone—which includes not only the pain of war, but the grief of losing his wife prior to the war, and his adult son just months ago. His faith persists in the face of all the cold reminders of how little control any of us exert on world events such as this. He now turns to the minor prophets—Nahum and Habakkuk in particular—to hope for justice, to complain and express his anger toward God, even with God. And he continues to minister to soldiers and civilians, holding their questions with presence and patience, while preaching a message of hope in the good and resistance to evil.
Thanks for listening friends, even on this 387th day of war in Ukraine.About Fyodor Raychynets
Fyodor Raychynets is a theologian and pastor in Kyiv, Ukraine. He is Head of the Department of Theology at Ukrainian Evangelical Theological Seminary, where he teaches courses in Leadership and Biblical Studies, particularly the Gospel of Matthew. He studied with Miroslav Volf at Evangelical Theological Seminary in Osijek, Croatia.
Follow him on Facebook here.Production Notes
* This podcast featured theologians Fyodor Raychynets and Miroslav Volf
* Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
* Hosted by Evan Rosa
* Production Assistance by Macie Bridge & Kaylen Yun
* A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
* Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
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Feb 22, 2023
Esau McCaulley / Lent: Season of Repentance, Renewal... and Rebellion
It’s not a popular idea, but secular America is pretty damn religious. Pretty damn liturgical. Pumpkin spice lattes and apple cider donuts are the eucharistic elements of autumn. The militaristic pageantry of the 4th of July. Our children love asking about the next big event. Color coordinated myths drive the year along, shaping us into …. well, I’m not quite sure what this secular American liturgy is shaping us into. But I bet you and I could have had a great conversation about during a Super Bowl party earlier this month—where the eucharistic elements have changed—it’s Buffalo wings and light beer—but it even comes with a sacred gathering of fanatical religious nuts, worshipping the high priest as he barks his coded sermon, and singing along with the high priestesses at halftime, praying all along to the gods of the gridiron to grant victory. When you put it that way, observing Lent—which starts today, Ash Wednesday—seems pretty tame and sensible.
Joining me today on the show is Esau McCaulley—for a discussion of Lent. Esau is associate professor of New Testament at Wheaton college and a contributing opinion writer for _The New York Times_.
He’s author of _Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope_, which won Christianity Today’s book of the year award in 2020, as well as a new book, Lent: The Season of Repentance and Renewal, which is part of a series entitled “The Fullness of Time”—which features other authors discussing different seasons of the Christian liturgical year and how it contributes to a Christian understanding of flourishing.
During our conversation, Esau McCaulley and I discuss the Christian practice of Lent—he speaks about it as both a collective wisdom, passed down through generations of Jesus followers, as well as a spiritual rebellion against mainstream American culture. He construes Lent as a season of repentance and grace; he points out the justice practices of Lent; he walks through a Christian understanding of death, and the beautiful practice of stripping the altars on Maundy Thursday; and he’s emphatic about how it’s a guided season of finding the grace to find (or perhaps return) to yourself as God has called you to be.
_This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information, visit tyndale.foundation._Show Notes
* Lent: The Season of Repentance and Renewal
* Commodifying our rebellion—the agency on offer is a thin, weakened agency.
* Repentance, grace, and finding (or returning to) yourself
* Examination of conscience
* The Great Litany: “For our blindness to human need and suffering, and our indifference to injustice and cruelty. Except our repentance, Lord.”
* The beauty of Christianity
* “Liturgical spirituality is not safe. God can jump out and get you at any moment in the service.”
* “The great thing about the, the, the season of Blend in the liturgical calendar more broadly is it gives you a thousand different entry points into transformation.”
* Lent is bookended by death. Black death, Coronavirus death, War death.
* Jesus defeated death as our great enemy.
* “Everybody that I know and I care about are gonna die. Everybody.”
* “I, as a Christian, believe that because we're going to die. our lives are of infinite value and the decisions that we make and the kinds of people we become are the only testimony that we have and that I have chosen to, to, in light of my impending death, put my faith in the one who overcame death.”
* Two realities: We’re going to die and Jesus defeated death.
* Stripping of the Altars on Maundy Thursday.
* Silent processional in black; Good Friday celebrates no eucharist.
* “I'm, like, the one Pauline scholar who doesn't like to argue about justification all of the time.”
* Good Friday’s closing prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, son of the living God, we pray you to set your passion cross and death between your judgment and our souls.”
* “You end Lent with: Something has to come between God’s judgement and our souls. And that thing is Jesus.”
* “Lent is God loving you enough to tell you the truth about yourself, but not condemning you for it, but actually saying that you can be better than that.”About Esau McCaulley
Esau McCaulley, PhD is an associate professor of New Testament at Wheaton College in Wheaton, IL and theologian in residence at Progressive Baptist Church, a historically black congregation in Chicago. His first book entitled _Sharing in the Son’s Inheritance_ was published by T & T Clark in 2019. His second book _Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope_ was published by IVP academic in 2020. It won numerous awards including Christianity Today’s book of the year. His most recent work was a children’s book entitled _Josey Johnson’s Hair and the Holy Spirit_ for IVP kids. His latest book is *Lent: The Season of Repentance and Renewal.* He is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. His writings have also appeared in places such as The Atlantic, Washington Post, and Christianity Today. He is married to Mandy, a pediatrician and navy reservist. Together, they have four wonderful children. Check out his website at https://esaumccaulley.com/.Production Notes
* This podcast featured Esau McCaulley
* Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
* Hosted by Evan Rosa
* Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Luke Stringer, and Kaylen Yun.
* A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
* Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
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Feb 3, 2023
Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination and the Expression of True Freedom / Vincent Lloyd
The primal scene of domination and slavery inevitably produces struggle. It must. Because domination is the idolatrous effort of one to exert control over the will of the other, and we are compelled as free beings to realize and always live that freedom. So the struggle produces dignity, and that dignity, declared and acted and performed and practiced and sung and chanted and screamed and whispered—when enacted by all human beings against various and sundry forms of domination, it leads to joy and love.
Vincent Lloyd (Villanova University) joins Evan Rosa to discuss his book Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination. We start with what struggle against domination is, especially how it’s expressed in Black life. We entertain the feeling of struggle psychologically and culturally; the ugly and vicious temptation to idolatry that seeking domination and mastery over others entails; how the humanity of both the master and the slave are lost or found; how struggle produces dignity; and an understanding of the debate between seeing dignity as purely intrinsic as opposed to performative. We close by thinking about how the Black struggle for dignity can inform all of us about what it means to actualize our humanity, embrace the power our freedom entails, culminating in joy and love.
_This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information, visit tyndale.foundation._About Vincent Lloyd
Vincent Lloyd is Associate Professor of Theology and Religious Studies and Director of the Center for Political Theology at Villanova University. He is the author of _Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination_ (Yale University Press, 2022), _Break Every Yoke: Religion, Justice, and the Abolition of Prisons_, with Joshua Dubler (Oxford University Press, 2019), _In Defense of Charisma_ (Columbia University Press, 2018), _Religion of the Field Negro: On Black Secularism and Black Theology_ (Fordham University Press, 2017), _Black Natural Law_ (Oxford University Press, 2016), _The Problem with Grace: Reconfiguring Political Theology_ (Stanford University Press, 2011), and _Law and Transcendence: On the Unfinished Project of Gillian Rose_ (Palgrave, 2009). Visit his personal website here.Show Notes
* What is struggle?
* Augustine’s approach to struggle in Confessions: with oneself, with others, with the world, with the powers that be
* Phenomenology of human struggle: What are the features of struggle that land on the human consciousness?
* Struggling against not flesh and blood but powers and principalities.
* Righteous indignation against idolatry
* Rejecting humanity by presenting oneself in a position of mastery
* Making distinctions between individual persons, the vice of the will to dominate, and the system those vices create
* The struggle of a community
* Ontological struggle: Aimed at defeating domination
* “Is struggle dependent on the existence of some prior will to dominate?”
* Understanding oneself as “master” and setting oneself up as a god.
* Mastery is a particularly vicious form of idolatry.
* The primal scene of master and slave is always behind the amorphous systems we struggle against.
* What is the psychology of the will to dominate?
* Is domination a special vice? Or is it a more ubiquitous vice?
* Black theology, Black philosophy, and the experience of the Middle Passage
* Enslavement continues to fuel anti-Blackness
* The humanity of master and slave are both lost
* Black rage and Audrey Lorde’s 1981 “The Uses of Anger”
* Emotion as a symphony, not a cacophony
* Airing rage next to each other and clarifying our vision of the world
* Rethinking Human Dignity
* Retelling the story of democratizing and Christianizing the aristocratic beginnings of “dignity”
* “When we perform dignity, we’re struggling.”
* Distinguishing dignity from respectability (and turning away from respectability)
* “That's where dignity is truly democratized, right? What we all have in common as human is our capacity to turn away from domination, and turn toward the divine. That's where dignity has a universal quality.”
* Understanding the debate between seeing dignity as intrinsic vs dignity as performative or extrinsic.
* “We’re all dominated.”
* How exactly does struggle produce dignity?
* Emmanuel Levinas and responding to the Jewish Holocaust, giving morality new content by tethering it to encounter—seeing the infinite shine through in the face of the other, allowing new concepts to flow through like love and justice.
* How do we finally move from domination, to struggle, to dignity, to joy and love?Production Notes
* This podcast featured Vincent Lloyd
* Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
* Hosted by Evan Rosa
* A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
* Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
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Dec 24, 2022
The Complicated World of Christmas / Drew Collins, Frederica Mathewes-Green, Jeff Reimer, & Matt Croasmun
A conglomeration of Advent people: Drew Collins on how the Magi were pushed willingly to the edge of their knowledge, open to the giving spirit of God. Frederica Mathewes-Green with an illustration of Mary, living in prayer, which proves just enough to know to say "yes" when met with her call. Jeff Reimer on W.H. Auden's common Joseph, asked only and profoundly to believe. And Matt Croasmun on St. Paul, offering an invitation to Christian joy that, well, differs from Santa's offer just a little.
Show Notes
* EPISODE 44: The Reason We Follow the Star: Learning from the Magi How to Give, How to Receive, and How to Be Human / Drew Collins
* EPISODE 98: Frederica Mathewes-Green / Mary Theotokos: Her Bright Sorrow, Her Suffering Faith, and Her Compassion
* EPISODE 97: Jeff Reimer / W.H. Auden's For the Time Being: Post-Christmas Blues, the Darkness of Modernity, and the Human Response to Incarnation
* EPISODE 43: Matt Croasmun / Santa, God, and the Obligation to Rejoice
Production Notes
* This podcast featured art historian Matthew Milliner
* Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
* Hosted by Evan Rosa
* A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
* Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
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Dec 17, 2022
The Story of a Global Icon: The Virgin of the Passion / Matthew Milliner on the Theological Aesthetics of Suffering Love, Powerless Compassion, and Mournful Silence
Art historian Matthew Milliner (Wheaton College) reflects on one of the most powerful and moving Christian icons: “The Virgin of the Passion,” AKA, “Our Lady of Perpetual Help,” which he develops in his book, _Mother of the Lamb: The Story of a Global Icon_. First painted as a response to failed Christian Empire and the violence of the Crusades, then mass produced and proliferated as a norm of Christian aesthetic worship, the icon offers a unique filter for contemporary understanding of faith and power; the Christian temptation to nationalism, empire, and violence; the meaning and visual expression of suffering love; and the beauty of engaged, solidarity and prophetic witness.
_This episode was made possible by a grant from the Tyndale House Foundation._
_Support the Yale Center for Faith & Culture's $25,000 End of Year Matching Campaign by giving online today: __https://faith.yale.edu/give_Show Notes
* Click to view: “Virgin of the Passion, late 15th century” Andrea Rico di Candia, Cretan, active 1451–1492, tempera on wood panel (Princeton University Art Museum)
* Click to get a copy of Matthew Milliner’s _Mother of the Lamb: The Story of a Global Icon_About Matthew Milliner
Matthew Milliner is Associate Professor of Art History at Wheaton College. He holds an M.A. & Ph.D. in art history from Princeton University, and an M.Div from Princeton Theological Seminary. He is author is author most recently of _The Everlasting People: G.K. Chesterton and the First Nations_ and _Mother of the Lamb: The Story of a Global Icon__._ His scholarly specialization is Byzantine and medieval art, with a focus on how such images inform contemporary visual culture. He teaches across the range of art history with an eye for the prospects and pitfalls of visual theology. He is a five-time appointee to the Curatorial Advisory Board of the United States Senate, and a winner of Redeemer University’s Emerging Public Intellectual Award. He has written for publications ranging from _The New York Times_ to _First Thing_s. He recently delivered the Wade Center’s Hansen lecture series on Native American Art, and was awarded a Commonwealth fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. to complete his forthcoming book, _Mother of the Lamb_ (Fortress Press). Follow @Millinerd on TwitterProduction Notes
* This podcast featured art historian Matthew Milliner
* Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
* Hosted by Evan Rosa
* Production assistance by Macie Bridge
* A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
* Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
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Dec 3, 2022
William Cross on Winslow Homer / Looking Long, Finding Grace in Crisis, and Painting Truth to Power
[Help us reach our $25,000 end of year goal! Give online to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture today.]
We often think that telling the truth only applies to words. But American painter Winslow Homer (February 24, 1836 – September 29, 1910) told the truth in pencil, water color, and famously, oil paintings. Coming of age in antebellum America, starting his artistic career as the Civil War began, and dramatically painting truth to power during the complicated and failed Reconstruction era—Winslow Homer looked long and hard at America in its moral complications and struggle toward justice. But he also looked long and hard at the natural world—a harsh, sometimes brutal, but nonetheless ordered world. Sometimes red in tooth and claw, sometimes shining rays of grace and glory upon human bodies, Homer's depiction of the human encounter with the world as full of energy and full of spirited struggle, and therefore dignity.
William Cross is author and biographer of _Winslow Homer: American Passage_—a biography of an artist who painted America in conflict and crisis, with a moral urgency and an unflinching depiction of the human spirit's struggle for survival and search for grace. As a consultant to art and history museums, a curator, and an art critic and scholar, when Bill sees the world, he's looking long for beauty and grace, and often finding it in art.
In this conversation, Bill Cross and I discuss the morally urgent art and perspective of Winslow Homer. We talk about the historical context of American life before, during, and after the Civil War. Including the role of Christianity and religious justification of the Confederacy and the institution of slavery. Bill comments on the beautiful and bracing expression of Black life in Winslow Homer's work—truly radical for the time. But Homer's work goes beyond human social and political struggles. We also discuss the role of nature in his work—particularly the human struggle against the power and indifference of the ocean and the wild, untamed animal kingdom.
Throughout, you might consider referencing each of the paintings we discuss, all of which are available in the show notes and can be found online for further viewing and reflection.
Show Notes
* Give toward the Yale Center for Faith & Culture $25,000 matching campaign. Donate online here, or send a
* William R. Cross, _Winslow Homer: American Passage _(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022)
* _Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents_
Paintings
Click below for painting references
* Prisoners from the Front (1866)
* The Brush Harrow (1866)
* Dressing for the Carnival (1877)
* Visit from the Old Mistress (1876)
* The Gulf Stream (1885)
* Fox Hunt (1893)
About William Cross
William R. Cross is an independent scholar and a consultant to art and history museums. He served as the curator of Homer at the Beach: A Marine Painter’s Journey, 1869–1880, a nationally renowned 2019 exhibition at the Cape Ann Museum on the formation of Winslow Homer as a marine painter. He is the chairman of the advisory board of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Cross and his wife, Ellen, the parents of two grown sons, live on Cape Ann, north of Boston, Massachusetts.
About _Winslow Homer: American Passage_
The definitive life of the painter who forged American identity visually, in art and illustration, with an impact comparable to that of Walt Whitman and Mark Twain in poetry and prose—yet whose own story has remained largely untold.
In 1860, at the age of twenty-four, Winslow Homer (1836–1910) sold Harper’s Weekly two dozen wood engravings, carved into boxwood blocks and transferred to metal plates to stamp on paper. One was a scene that Homer saw on a visit to Boston, his hometown. His illustration shows a crowd of abolitionists on the brink of eviction from a church; at their front is Frederick Douglass, declaring “the freedom of all mankind.”
Homer, born into the Panic of 1837 and raised in the years before the Civil War, came of age in a nation in crisis. He created multivalent visual tales, both quintessentially American and quietly replete with narrative for and about people of all races and ages. Whether using pencil, watercolor, or, most famously, oil, Homer addressed the hopes and fears of his fellow Americans and invited his viewers into stories embedded with universal, timeless questions of purpose and meaning.
Like his contemporaries Twain and Whitman, Homer captured the landscape of a rapidly changing country with an artist’s probing insight. His tale is one of America in all its complexity and contradiction, as he evolved and adapted to the restless spirit of invention transforming his world. In Winslow Homer: American Passage, William R. Cross reveals the man behind the art. It is the surprising story of a life led on the front lines of history. In that life, this Everyman made archetypal images of American culture, endowed with a force of moral urgency through which they speak to all people today.
Production Notes
* This podcast featured William R. Cross
* Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
* Hosted by Evan Rosa
* A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
* Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
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Nov 26, 2022
A Message from Miroslav: Help Us Reach Our 2022 Goal
Help Miroslav Volf and the Yale Center for Faith & Culture reach our end-of-year goal $25,000 Matching Challenge for 2022!
How to donate to YCFC and support the For the Life of the World podcast:
* Click here to give online
* Mail a check made out to "Yale Center for Faith and Culture" (409 Prospect St., New Haven, CT 06511).Dear Friend,
Inspired by faith in Christ in whom God became one of us, at the Yale Center for Faith & Culture we help people discern and pursue lives worthy of our shared humanity. Our fragile, finite, fallible—_but nevertheless beautiful and immeasurably precious_—humanity.
This work matters so much to me personally because I believe it matters to God and it matters for the world.
And today, I am excited to tell you about a tremendous new opportunity for us to fund this important work.
Members of our Advisory Board have established a $25,000 challenge gift. If we raise $25,000 by December 31st we will unlock an additional $25,000, doubling the impact of your gift.
To put that in perspective: Meeting our goal would be enough to fund our _For the Life of the World_ podcast and support two student fellows for all of 2023.
Would you consider a donation to our work today? Simply click here to give online, or mail a check made out to "Yale Center for Faith and Culture" (409 Prospect St., New Haven, CT 06511).
Lifting up my heart with gratitude,
Miroslav Volf
Director, Yale Center for Faith & Culture
Henry B. Wright Professor of Systematic Theology, Yale Divinity School
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Oct 22, 2022
Miroslav Volf / Beautiful, Humane, & Hospitable: Dwelling in the Home of God (In Memoriam, Phil Love)
"If the goal of God in creating the world is to make it the home of God and humans together, then it is the intention of God to make this place as beautiful and as humane—as hospitable—to human life as it can possibly be." Miroslav Volf reflects on why he wrote his latest book, _The Home of God: A Brief Story of Everything_. He also celebrates and eulogizes his friend Phil Love, to whom the book is dedicated.
Click here to buy The Home of God for 30% off!
Production Notes
* This podcast featured Miroslav Volf
* Special thanks to Patty & Phil Love
* Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
* Hosted by Evan Rosa
* A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
* Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
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Oct 15, 2022
Fostering the Knowledge and Love of God / Yale Divinity School Bicentennial
The mission of Yale Divinity School is "to foster the knowledge and love of God through scholarly engagement with Christian traditions in a global, multifaith context." A variety of Yale Divinity School faculty and alumni have been featured as guests on For the Life of the World, and this episode highlights some of those contributions, including Krista Tippett, Willie Jennings, Keri Day, Kathryn Tanner, and David Kelsey (not to mention Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz). Current Yale Divinity Student Luke Stringer introduces each highlight segment. Special thanks to Harry Attridge and Tom Krattenmaker.
Show Notes
* Our first segment features Yale Divinity School alum Krista Tippett, the founder and CEO of the On Being Project. She's a nationally syndicated journalist who has become known for curating conversations on the art of being human, civil conversations, and social healing. Miroslav Volf invited Krista onto the show to talk about the importance of engaging otherness on the grounds of our common humanity, her personal faith journey from small town Baptists in Oklahoma, to a secular humanism in a divided Cold-War Berlin, and then back to her spiritual homeland and mother tongue of Christianity.
* For the Life of the World launched in 2020 during an immensely chaotic and troubling year. The painful and confusing early days of the pandemic gave way to the horrifying footage of George Floyd's murder. In the days following this event, we aired a reflection by Yale Divinity School professor Willie Jennings and a conversation with Princeton Theological Seminary theologian and Yale Div school alum Keri Day. First, an excerpt from Willie Jennings' reflection on the murder of George Floyd. And then, theologian Keri Day shares the core motivations of Christians to embrace the other across lines of difference.
* This next segment features theologian, Kathryn Tanner, who spoke to Ryan McAnnally-Linz about the virtue of patience through the lens of economy and capitalism. She's the Frederick Marquand Professor of Systematic Theology at Yale Divinity School and her latest book is _Christianity in the New Spirit of Capitalism_.
* This final highlight segment features theologian David Kelsey, who is the Luther A. Weigel Professor Emeritus of Theology at Yale Divinity School, where he taught for 40 years. Ryan McAnnally-Linz, himself an alum of Yale Divinity School, brings Kelsey onto the show to talk about the wild and inexplicable grip of evil on earthly creatures, and the analogously wild and inexplicable nature of God's grace—and God's immediate, if silent, witness and presence to human anguish.
Production Notes
* This podcast featured Krista Tippett, Willie Jennings, Keri Day, Kathryn Tanner, and David Kelsey (not to mention Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz)
* Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
* Hosted by Evan Rosa and Luke Stringer
* A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
* Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
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Oct 3, 2022
Kelly Corrigan & Miroslav Volf / Experts at Means, Amateurs at Ends: Talking About Success & Flourishing at College
“We’ve become experts at means but amateurs at ends.” Miroslav Volf and Kelly Corrigan discuss the role of education in seeking a flourishing life; the risks and rewards endemic to asking questions of meaning and existential import in the higher educational context; the meaning of success to college students, and how the specter of success drives our cultural narrative; what it takes to live a life based on one's deepest -held values; Miroslav shares his own personal experience of approaching what makes life worth living within a particular Christian vision; what made him decide to be the only openly Christian kid in his high school; and how suffering grief, forgiveness, and living faith informed his early childhood and shaped his family's life.
Show Notes
* Listen to Kelly Corrigan Wonders on Apple Podcasts
About Kelly Corrigan
Kelly Corrigan has written four New York Times bestselling memoirs in the last decade, earning her the title of “The Poet Laureate of the ordinary” from the Huffington Post and the “voice of a generation” from O Magazine. She is curious and funny and eager to go well past the superficial in every conversation. More on KellyCorrigan.com.
Production Notes
* This podcast featured Kelly Corrigan and Miroslav Volf
* Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
* Hosted by Evan Rosa
* Special thanks to Kelly Corrigan and Tammy Stedman
* A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
* Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
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Sep 19, 2022
Adam Eitel / Character As Authority: Theology as a Lived, Embodied Experience
"Somewhere is better than anywhere." (Flannery O'Connor, as quoted by Wendell Berry in _Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community_) Today, Christian ethicist Adam Eitel (Yale Divinity School) sits with Matt Croasmun for a conversation on ethics and theology. Eitel is Assistant Professor of Christian Ethics at Yale Divinity School. Together, he and Matt discuss the demands of teaching and learning theology on personal character—holiness even; the relationship between ethics and theology; the locatedness and situatedness and particularity of Christian ethics; and the rooted, framing question, that animates Adam Eitel's writing and teaching: "What sort of life does the Gospel enjoin?"
About Adam Eitel
Adam Eitel is Assistant Professor of Christian Ethics at Yale Divinity School.
Show Notes
* Teaching theology as a vocation
* "Authority is linked to character"
* Instruction in holiness
* The millennial demand for personal character to matter in academic authority
* Formation
* "I…
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Sep 10, 2022
Graham Tomlin / Words About God: Theology as Worship, Reform, and Witness
"If you don't really understand religion, if you don't understand faith, if you don't understand theology, you can't really understand the modern world."
"Words make worlds," says one of my podcasting heroes, Krista Tippett. Ask any poet, priest, or politician, and they'll agree. Language does have that power, for better or for worse.
But whatever power our words have to make a world that we can then ourselves inhabit—that power is drawn from the archetypal Word—the Word made flesh, by whom all things are made and in whom all things are held together, and for whom all tongues confess.
So this simple definition offered by Bishop Graham Tomlin, that theology is just "words about God" is actually quite expansive. When our words about God are directed first toward God, but then toward the church and the world, theology lives up to its purpose of worship, reform, and witness. Graham Tomlin is President of St. Mellitus College and author of many books of theology and Christian spiritu…
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Sep 3, 2022
Matt Croasmun / Nourishing Mutual Encounter: Food, Meals, and the Hunger for Home in the Gospel of Luke
Food and meals are hidden in plain sight throughout the Bible, providing a background context for Christian spirituality and flourishing. Matt Croasmun joins me on the podcast today to talk about his new book co-authored with Miroslav Volf, _The Hunger for Home: Food and Meals in the Gospel of Luke_. For them, a meal is a site of nourishing mutual encounter. It's this definition of a meal that makes that riddle work I think. It's also incredibly illuminating (and even delightfully surprising, really) to consider how that nourishing mutual encounter—a meal—provide a context that spans thousands of years and the whole of human history from creation to fall to redemption. It can all be understood as a site of nourishing mutual encounter with God, family, neighbor, world—everything. From the fruitful multiplying of living creatures to the forbidden fruit—from the passover seder, manna from heaven, water from the rocks, and feasts in the fields—to the Lord's table prepared before…
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Aug 27, 2022
George Marsden / The Outrageous Idea of Theological Education: How Deep Teaching in Theology Might Work in and for the Church and the World
A pervasive anti-intellectual tradition seems to haunt American Christianity. Paired with nationalism, xenophobia—a fear of the other, and an hypersensitive oscillation between defensiveness and jingoism in the culture war—it's worth asking what in the world happened to this religion which was founded by a peaceful, humble homeless preacher who healed the poor, the lame, and the blind.
But the over-correction to an intellectualizing of theology, to the exclusion of lived experience, swings the pendulum back in another erroneous direction. A merely cognitive theology that stays relevant only at abstract academic levels would be stale and dead—unlivable.
Perhaps what this moment needs is a widened perspective on the global, universal potential of theology, especially as it meets particular contexts and communities and the individual human life, where the transcendent meets the immanent and real human concerns inform the theological task. In other words, theology for the life of t…
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Aug 20, 2022
Katie Grimes / Theology's Human Context: Jesus, Exemplarity, and Theologizing Through the Lens of Flourishing
"You can be, at least according to Christian thought, the only sinless person in human history, and you can still be tortured and crucified in your early thirties."
From the perspective of Christian theology, it's probably not going too far to say that both the moral exemplarity and the suffering life of Jesus should be central to the Christian understanding of flourishing. Here's another way to put it. Jesus was morally perfect and sinless, but encountered immense suffering, poverty, marginalization, and eventual torture and death. Tempted, yet without sin. But also counted among the sinners, according to Isaiah 53's "Suffering Servant" theme. He is acquainted with grief, familiar with sorrow, anguished in his soul.
And so the big question here is: What kind of flourishing do we envision when we follow Christ toward that flourishing?
Today, we're sharing a conversation between Matt Croasmun and Katie Grimes, Assistant Professor of Theological Ethics at Villanova University. Togethe…
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Aug 13, 2022
Casey Strine / Informed Empathy: Approaching Religion through Theology, Understanding, and a Commitment to Diversity
You can't understand our globalized world without understanding religion. But that's easier said than done. For any given person, it's sometimes hard enough to understand your own religious perspectives. They often change throughout life, modified by experience and ideas. Modified by people and events. Modified by an encounter with the world and an encounter with God. Then go ahead and multiply that challenge by about 7.7 billion people and the ways that some of them collide and interact. Then we see a few things: we see that diversity is both a promise and a peril, we see that approaches to religious studies, sociology of religion, and the practice of theology all must be grounded in an "informed empathy," and we see that the only way to make progress is to accept responsibility and limits as an individual, and hope and commit to the necessity of collaboration.
Show Notes
* Diversity and creativity are one of the strengths of theology today.
* Sometimes diversity of thought and…
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Aug 6, 2022
Willie Jennings / Against Despair and Death: Cultivating and Gathering Joy in an Embodied Act of Resistance
Willie Jennings defines joy in a surprising and profoundly physical way—as an act of resistance against despair and death. He explains joy as, "Resisting all the ways in which life can be strangled and presented to us as not worth living." Here, in a 2018 talk for the Theology of Joy and the Good Life Project, Willie Jennings comments on the powerful, embodied act of resistance that joy calls for, examining its scope and cultural context, exploring the musical form of the blues as a space for commonly held joy, and envisioning a pathway of life through the valley of the shadow of death.
About Willie Jennings
Willie Jennings is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology, Africana Studies, and Religious Studies at Yale University; he is an ordained Baptist minister and is author of _The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race,__Acts: A Commentary, The Revolution of the Intimate_, and most recently, _After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging._ You can hear him in podc…
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Jul 30, 2022
Jamie Tworkowski / To Be Known & Loved: Surprise, Hope, Resilience, and Identity
As we're knit in the womb, a primal cry emerges from the very fact of our being, the very fact of our dependence, the fact of our contingency, the fact of our ultimate need: _Do you love me? _Jamie Tworkowski, the founder of To Write Love on Her Arms and bestselling author of _If You Feel Too Much: Thoughts on Things Found and Lost and Hoped For_, joins Evan Rosa for a discussion about the hope and resilience and human identity that emerges from being known and loved; what it means to live a life worth living; his own struggle with mental illness and therapy; the connection between mystery, not knowing, and the sort of surprise that makes life worth another day.
In this episode, we talk in some detail about the beautiful and heartbreaking founding story that led Jamie to start To Write Love on Her Arms, which includes references to self-harm and contains an expletive, which in Jamie's words is "more about identity than profanity". And if you are or anyone you know is struggling with t…
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Jun 29, 2022
Bo Karen Lee / Trauma and Spirituality: From Bystander to Beloved, From Alarmed Aloneness to Gazing Upon the God Who Gazes Upon Me With Love
How do you heal from trauma—whether individual, familial, or collective? Can Christian spirituality help?
The tumultuous time we find ourselves in serves up regular doses of the suffering and pain of others—war wages destruction, migrants are left to die of heat exposure, hate crimes based in bigotry and fear of ethnicity or orientation or identity leave us all feeling numbed to our humanity; and with the aid of our phones, we even risk a dependency relationship with that trauma. It's constantly leveraged for political gain, power, money, or ugly fame. If we see the game of human culture as a zero-sum struggle for power, someone's political gain is always another's loss. Someone's joy another's sorrow.
How are we supposed to find our human siblings? Add to this the unspoken trauma that haunts so many of us—myself, you listeners, that person in your life who seems strong and impervious to harm—we all carry our lifetime's worth of trauma even if we act like it's not there. But…
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Jun 20, 2022
Lisa Sharon Harper / Fortune: How Race Broke My Family & the World—and How to Repair It All
Seldom do we think of the study of history as a journey of self-discovery. And if that claim has any truth, it's because we modern people tend to see ourselves as autonomous, independent, untethered, and unaffected by our biological and cultural genealogies. But there's a story in our DNA that didn't start with us. And Lisa Sharon Harper has been on a decades-long journey of self-discovery, piecing together her family's lineage from their arrival on America's shores—via slave boats, through the twists and turns of slavery and indentured servitude, through America's post-civil war attempt at Reconstruction, down into the shadowy valley of Jim Crow and twentieth-century Civil Rights struggle, all to her life in the present. Her book is _Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World—and How to Repair It All_. Evan Rosa recently spoke with Lisa at length about how race broke her world and how she traced her family line back beyond the founding of America. And in continued celebration…
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Jun 11, 2022
Amy Brown Hughes / Hospitable Theology: Space for Questions, Diversity, and Reflection
Does your approach to theology bring healing and reconciliation? Does it introduce Christianity as a way of life and peace, flourishing, justice, and shalom? Does your theology have space for diverse and difficult questions to occupy the same space? That kind of hospitable theology would indeed make a difference in our world. Today on the show, we're playing a conversation between Matt Croasmun and Amy Brown Hughes, Associate Professor of Theology at Gordon College and author of Christian Women in the Patristic World. Amy and Matt reflect on the promise and hope of a hospitable theology, grounded in a way of life, sensitive to the difference theology makes for the most pressing issues of our lives today.
About Amy Brown Hughes
Amy Brown Hughes is Associate Professor of Theology at Gordon College. She received her Ph.D. in historical theology with an emphasis in early Christianity from Wheaton College and is the author (with Lynn H. Cohick, Wheaton College) of Christian Women in the P…
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Jun 4, 2022
Eric Gregory / Theology as a Way of Life
If we all weren't so cynical, we might expect professional ethicists—or say a professor of ethics or morality at a university—to also be a really morally virtuous and good person. And by extension, you might also expect a theologian to be a person of deeper faith. And that's because intellectual reflection about matters of justice, right and wrong, God and human flourishing all cut to the core of what it means to be human, and the things you discuss in an ethics or theology course, if you took those ideas seriously, just might change the way you live.
Today, in our series on the Future of Theology, Matt Croasmun hosts Eric Gregory, Professor of Religion at Princeton University and author of _Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship. _Eric reflects on what it's like to teach theology in a secular institution—the good, the bad, and the ugly of that exercise; the complications of making professors of humanities, ethics, and religion into moral…
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May 29, 2022
Unimaginable: A Reflection after Uvalde
Ryan McAnnally-Linz reflects on the May 24, 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.
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May 28, 2022
Keri Day / Targeting Normative Theology: Lived Experience, Practice, and Confessional Theology
Miroslav Volf has said that every Christian is a theologian. This is important not so much because it demands of an individual Jesus-follower to exert the best of her cognitive abilities, but because it demands of theologians that theology take seriously the experience, perception, and lived realities of human life. As part of our Future of Theology series, Keri Day (Princeton Theological Seminary) joins Matt Croasmun to discuss the purpose and promise of theology today, honing in on this phenomena and the temptation to see theology as an abstract exercise cut off from the particularities of faith.
Keri Day is Associate Professor of Constructive Theology and African American Religion at Princeton Theological Seminary. She’s author of _Unfinished Business: Black Women, The Black Church, and the Struggle to Thrive in America_ as well as _Religious Resistance to Neoliberalism: Womanist and Black Feminist Perspectives. _
About Keri Day
Keri Day is Associate Professor of Constructive T…
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May 21, 2022
Luke Bretherton / (Un)Common Life: Secularity, Religiosity, and the Tension Between Faith and Culture
Jesus's teaching to be in but not of the world (John 17:14-15) has gone from a mode of prophetic witness that could lead to martyrdom, to bumper sticker ethics that either feeds the trolls or fuels the tribe. We're in a moment where the ways that Christianity's influence on culture—and vice versa—are writ large and undeniable. And yet, how are we to understand it? How are we to live in light of it? How does that relationship change from political moment to political moment? In this conversation, ethicist Luke Bretherton (Duke Divinity School) joins Matt Croasmun to reflect on the purpose of theology as a way of life committed to loving God and neighbor; the essential virtue of listening and its role in public theology; the interrelation between Church and World; the temptation to see the other as an enemy to be defeated rather than a neighbor to be loved; and how best to understand secularism and religiosity today.
Show Notes
* Do you call yourself a theologian?
* “You can'…
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Apr 9, 2022
Tyler Roberts / Taking Theology Seriously: A Perspective from Outside Christian Theology
Over the past two centuries, colleges have slowly replaced theology departments with religious studies departments. But what happens when theology becomes religious studies? It can produce a more neutral, observational approach that might not fully appreciate the _normative claims_ of religious adherents and their values, commitments, and beliefs.
A careful historical and objective study of religious history and the dimensions of religious practice are deeply valuable. But engaging religious texts and voices without a serious appreciation for the _normative elements_—that is, the things about a theological or religious idea that means your life would have to change—that would be a problem. It would evacuate the true substance and meaning of theological claims as they're experienced by religious adherents. But it would also fail to form students of religion and the humanities in a way that poses significant challenges to their own lived experience. For living a life worthy of their…
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Apr 4, 2022
Aristotle Papanikolaou / Russian Christian Nationalism and Eastern Orthodoxy (and How Culture Wars Contributed to the War in Ukraine)
"Real wars always begin with culture wars." Theologian Aristotle Papanikolaou discusses Eastern Orthodox perspectives on war and violence; the impact of Communism on Eastern Orthodox theology; the complicated ecclesial structures of Eastern Orthodoxy, where bishops, patriarchs, and nation-states interact in unpredictable ways; he reflects on Eastern Orthodoxy in Russia and Ukraine, the ways Christianity is enmeshed and caught up in the authoritarian, nationalist regime under Putin, and the idea of "Russkii Mir" (the Russian world), which has come to motivate and justify a great deal of violence and aggression in the name of peace and unity.
About
Aristotle Papanikolaou is Professor of Theology and the Archbishop Demetrios Chair in Orthodox Theology and Culture at Fordham University. He co-directs the Orthodox Christian Studies Center, and is author of _The Mystical as Political: Democracy and Non-Radical Orthodoxy _and has edited several volumes of Eastern Orthodox theological and po…
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Mar 26, 2022
Katherine Sonderegger / God, the Great Hope of Theology
What is the future of theology? We asked that question of several leading theologians 7 years ago, including today's featured guest, Katherine Sonderegger, The William Meade Chair of Systematic Theology at Virginia Theological Seminary, a priest in the Episcopal Church, and has written widely, covering Creation, Christology, Election, the Jewishness of Jesus...
Her approach to theology is beautifully summed up in the following, “There really is no more beautiful thought in all reality than the thought of God. I believe that theology is ultimately just that: thinking the thought of God and worshipping the Reality who is God.”
In this conversation, Katherine Sonderegger joins Matt Croasmun to discuss the importance of a free and unapologetic, unembarrassed approach to Christian theology; the interplay of Christian theology with other religious texts and pluralistic perspectives; the practice of peace, listening, and being knit together even in difference; the strong unity and cente…
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Mar 19, 2022
Miroslav Volf / War in Ukraine: Theological and Moral Reflections
Miroslav Volf offers his personal reflections about the war on Ukraine. His theological and ethical commentary speaks to various facets of the situation, including: the global cultural clash between authoritarian nationalism and pluralistic democracy; the primacy and priority of God's universal and unconditional love for all humanity, including evildoers; the call to actively resist evil and guard our humanity; the importance of truth in an age of disinformation and suppression of real facts; the need for Christians to remain "unreliable allies" with governments or parties while remaining faithful to the humanity in the friend, neighbor, stranger, and enemy; but ultimately his message is one to soberly—and dare I suggest joyfully, with unabashed hope—lift up our hearts (and the hearts of those suffering through war, dislocation, death, and destruction) to the Lord.
Episode Art Provided by Fyodor Raychynets. "ні війні!" = "NO WAR!"
Show Notes
* Gustavo Gutiérrez, On Job…
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Mar 15, 2022
A Voice from Kyiv: Fyodor Raychynets / Faithful Presence in the War on Ukraine
Today we're sharing a conversation between Miroslav Volf and Fyodor Raychynets, a former student of Miroslav's when he taught at Evangelical Theological Seminary in Osijek, Croatia in the early '90s. Fyodor is a theologian and pastor in Kyiv, and is head of the department of theology at Ukrainian Evangelical Theological Seminary on the northwest outskirts of the city, 20 kilometers outside downtown Kyiv.
We spoke to Fyodor on Sunday, March 13, 2022, just as he came in for the 8pm curfew after a day of feeding the elderly, the sick, weary soldiers, and women and children stuck in the basements without electricity, without clean water, without medication, and increasingly, without a clear idea of how any of this will end for them. That day Fyodor visited his seminary campus to find it had been shelled by three missiles, destroying much of the campus, including his office, leaving his library of books destroyed.
In this conversation, Fyodor shares his experience, now after 20 days of wa…
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Mar 12, 2022
Willie Jennings / The Christian Imagination: Theological Complexity, Communication, Cultivation, and Community
Willie James Jennings (Yale Divinity School) joins Matt Croasmun for a conversation about the future of theology, addressing the Christian inability to hold complexity, public communication, and deep formation together in a way that shows how theology is for our very lives.
Seven years ago the Yale Center for Faith and Culture interviewed a diverse array of theologians about the present woes and future potential of theology. Some five years and a pandemic later, the landscape of theological education seems like it's at a crossroads. The driving purpose of Christian higher education is in question as colleges, universities, and seminaries across denominations and around the world consider how they'll move forward in the wake of stark realities this pandemic laid bare. So it's worth revisiting the conversation to see what has changed, what holds true, and what hopes we're still holding on to. For today’s episode, we're featuring a conversation between Matt Croasmun and Dr. Willie Jame…
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Mar 5, 2022
Fernando Segovia / Global Crisis and the Hope for Global Flourishing
As Christians around the world heard these words spoken on Ash Wednesday this past week, as an ashen oil was smudged to their brows, the world watched on in horror and grief over the brutality and aggression against Ukraine. In a swift movement of solidarity, we're all still are left with difficult and enduring questions. Why this war? What is at stake? How did we get here and what can we do? How can we stop this in a way that might hang on to a hope for peace?
But as finite, limited beings brought forth from dust, we quickly run to the end of our ability to explain. And like so many problems in our world, we're just left with further questions: What does it mean to be a Christian in a world where so many of our systems are dehumanizing? What duties are incumbent upon us as Christians, as humans? How can we learn and share a global flourishing that respects and honors all?
In this week's episode, Matt Croasmun interviews Fernando Segovia, the Oberlin Graduate Professor of New Testame…
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Feb 26, 2022
Julian Reid / How Black History Made Jazz: Suffering, Joy, and Longing for Our True Home
Jazz pianist Julian Reid on music, theology, and improvisation. The keys element of The JuJu Exchange uses the history of blues, gospel, and jazz to discuss how we communicate emotionally and spiritually through music, teaching an important lesson in how to live and long for home while we remain exiles. Features score from The JuJu Exchange's latest release, _The Eternal Boombox_. Interview by Ryan McAnnally-Linz and Evan Rosa.
Julian Reid is a Chicago-based jazz pianist and producer, writer, and performer (not to mention B.A. Yale University, and M.Div. Emory University). The JuJu Exchange is a musical partnership also featuring Nico Segal (trumpet, Chance the Rapper; The Social Experiment) and Everett Reid—exploring creativity, justice, and the human experience through their hip-hop infused jazz. Their new 5-song project is called The Eternal Boombox.
Show Notes
* Music is invisible and tactile
* Music as a matter of faith
* How do we decide what is music and what is just…
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Feb 19, 2022
Lisa Sharon Harper & Miroslav Volf / The Case for Reparations, Historical Restorative Justice, Ancestry, and Christian Power
"I am because they were." Lisa Sharon Harper joins Miroslav Volf to discuss the significance of narrative history for understanding ourselves and our current cultural moment; the sequence of repeated injustices that have haunted America's past and directly impacted Black Americans for hundreds of years; the Christian nationalist temptation to hoard power; the necessary conditions for true repair, the role of reparations in the pursuit of racial justice, and the goodness of belonging.
This month, Lisa Sharon Harper released a new book that traces her family's history. Even with the aid of new mail-order genetic testing and ancestry services, I think it's fair to say that most Americans live their lives disconnected from their ancestors. Call it ancestor worship, call it autonomy, call it selective memory—whatever is going on there, we tend to be disconnected from our past, mostly unaware of those from whom we came beyond our parents and grandparents.
Who were those people who we dep…
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Feb 12, 2022
Jemar Tisby / Holistic and Historical Racial Justice: Awareness, Relationships, Commitment
Jemar Tisby, author of the NYT bestseller _The Color of Compromise_, explains the complicity and compromise of American Christians; the narrative war that confederate monuments wage (and how they were erected much later than you might think); the ugly theological justifications of racism and the shameful history of Christian white supremacy; the fraught project of selectively naming heroes and villains and then memorializing them; and the practical problem of how to go forward rightly from this moment of increased attention to racial injustice.
Get Jemar Tisby's book! _The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism_
Show Notes
* "the North won the Civil War, but the south won the narrative war." - Bryan Stevenson
* The birth of Jim Crow in the Redemption Era – white people taking back the South
* Monuments as reassertion of white supremacy
* The theological significance of the 'Redemption Era'
* Separation of Church and State as a d…
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Feb 5, 2022
Black Joy / Howard Thurman's Civil Rights Theology, Stacey Floyd-Thomas on Vicious Humility and Black Joy, and David Walker's Christian Abolitionism
Sameer Yadav comments on Howard Thurman's Civil Rights Theology, Ryan McAnnally-Linz reflects on the spiritual and moral significance of David Walker's "Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World," and Stacey Floyd-Thomas talks about racial oppression via vicious humility and the life-giving dignity of Black joy. #BlackHistoryMonth
Show Notes
* Three themes that impacted Thurman’s early religious life:
* Divine common ground
* Social injustice
* Humanity of Jesus and black joy
* “ Human life is one, and all humans are members of one another, and this insight is spiritual and it is 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. "An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World" – pamphlet by David Walker
* Freedom as a natural right
* “What in our day do we claim as ours when in fact it belongs to God?” Ryan McAnnally-Linz
* “Where do I find my…
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Jan 22, 2022
N.T. Wright & Miroslav Volf / The Politics of Joy & Suffering in the Now and Not Yet
Can we find joy in our world? It's hard enough to find genuine, death-defying joy in the wake of the failure of the modern utopian project, the expectation that human reason and technology and political revolution might save us all. Overlay the malaise of modernity with this dumb pandemic, and the prospects for joy seem bleak. But for N.T. Wright, joy doesn't depend on the whims of circumstance or the proper function of the world. He speaks of the hardy resilience of joy, even in the midst of tragic, terrible, and untimely death. He speaks of the groanings of the Spirit, laboring and working in us even and especially when we can't find the words to explain the circumstances away. Today we're sharing Miroslav Volf's 2014 interview with the New Testament scholar, theologian, and Anglican bishop N.T. Wright. He's the former Bishop of Durham, he's Emeritus Professor University of St Andrews, and is Senior Research Fellow at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford.
NOTE: For the Life of the World is running…
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Jan 15, 2022
MLK, Willie Jennings, Keri Day / Dangerous Theology
"Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness... " (Martin Luther King, Jr., April 3, 1968)
The day before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King, Jr. preached these words in Memphis, Tennessee. In a powerful and urgent message for sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee that's come to be known "I've Been to the Mountaintop," he considers the parable of the Good Samaritan, going on to speak prophetically and presciently of the dangers he himself faced, not knowing how very true his words were.
"We've got some difficult days ahead, but it really doesn't matter with me now because I've been to the mountain top. like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place, but I'm not concerned about that. I just want to do God's will, and he's allowed me to go up to the mountain and I've looked over and I've seen the promised land. I may not get that. But I want you to know the night that we will get to the promised land tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not…
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Jan 8, 2022
Marilynne Robinson, Charles Taylor, et al / Making or Breaking Democracy
Democracy in America and abroad is under threat. Authoritarian regimes, nationalisms of many stripes, a loss sense of the value of democratic participation among younger generations, and a growing cynicism and suspicion of our neighbors all threaten freedom and flourishing. In this episode, Miroslav Volf, Marilynne Robinson, Charles Taylor, Kevin Lau, and Andrew Kwok comment on what makes or breaks democracy around the world. NOTE: For the Life of the World is running highlights, readings, lectures, and other best-of features until May 1, 2022, when we'll be back with new conversations.
Show Notes
* The concern is with healing our divided country and Church
* How former president Trump’s false allegations of electoral fraud led to violence at the Capitol
* Naming wrongdoing for what it is
* “At the heart of the current effort to deny and overturn the results of the presidential election is the wounded pride of a man”
* “Many Americans have taken his lie to be their…
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Jan 1, 2022
Miroslav Volf / Where the Light Gets In: Primordial Goodness, Excluding the Middle, and Searching for Hope in 2022
Miroslav Volf and Evan Rosa consider audience questions and feedback about hopes and fears going into 2022. A reflective conversation about politics and theology, the aims of theological writing, suffering and the problem of evil, the loss of the middle ground in our polarized era (and Miroslav questions whether "middle" is even a Christian category), the primordial goodness of the world and seeing suffering with one eye squinted; and whether theology is for the religious only, or indeed, for the life of the world. NOTE: For the Life of the World will run highlights, readings, lectures, and other best-of features until May 1, 2022, when we'll be back with new conversations.
* Finding light in darkness: “how do we find and recognize the moments of of light?” - Miroslav Volf
* Primordial goodness, positivity more powerful than negativity
* “Where the light gets in” Leonard Cohen
* WWII and joy in times of darkness
* "The beauty before God of the singer who doesn’t kn…
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Dec 25, 2021
Matthew Milliner / A Womb More Spacious Than Stars: How Mary's Beauty and Presence Upends the Patriarchy and Stabilizes Christian Spirituality
"Don't dare think that somehow your conversation with Mary and your interest in her is in competition with your relationship with Christ. ... You are flirting with heresy if you do not have a doctrine of Mary as mother of God." —Matthew Milliner
What is the role of the Virgin Mary in Christian spiritual formation? Art historian Matthew Milliner (Wheaton College) joins Evan Rosa for a conversation about beauty of Mary in Christian spirituality—particularly for Protestants, for whom the abuses of the past have alienated them from a core component of creedal Christianity, Mary as "Theotokos," the Mother of God. They discuss the history of iconoclasm against Mary, the struggle of contemporary Christianity with art and aesthetics, unpacking the "Woman Clothed with the Sun" from Revelation 12, the feminist objection to Mary, and how the Virgin Mary upends an ancient pagan goddess culture invented to _maintain_ patriarchy. They close with an appreciation of Mother Maria Skobtsova, who's…
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Dec 18, 2021
Frederica Mathewes-Green / Mary Theotokos: Her Bright Sorrow, Her Suffering Faith, and Her Compassion
_"Her hands steadied the first steps of him who steadied the earth to walk upon; her lips helped the Word of God to form his first human words." (St. John of Damascus)_
Who is Mary? Why is she called "Theotokos"? Frederica Mathewes-Green, an Eastern Orthodox writer and educator, joins Evan Rosa for a discussion about Mary, the Mother of God. During the first half of the episode, they discuss the Eastern Orthodox reverence for Mary and the scriptural account of her life—from the Annunciation and Nativity, to her parenting of Jesus, through to the Wedding at Cana and witnessing the unimaginable as her son was crucified, died, buried, and risen. In the second half of our conversation, Frederica sheds light on two ancient texts: The Forgotten Gospel of Mary, also known as the Protoevangelium of James, as well as one of the oldest known manuscripts that refer to Mary as Theotokos: a very short prayer scribbled on papyrus, and known as "Sub tuum praesidium" or "Under your compassion." But…
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Dec 11, 2021
Jeff Reimer / W.H. Auden's For the Time Being: Post-Christmas Blues, the Darkness of Modernity, and the Human Response to Incarnation
In the midst of war, the loss of his mother, and the heartbreak of unrequited love, poet W.H. Auden was rediscovering his faith. And the fitting response to the darkness and despair and apathy around him, he thought, was the Christmas event. So he set to work on a Christmas Oratorio called _For the Time Being_. Originally meant to be performed and sung, what emerged is a much more sobering and stark retelling of the Christmas narrative than you're used to. Auden's modernist poetry becomes a way for a modern humanity—whose resources are spent, whose plans have gone awry, whose hopes have been misplaced, whose sense of time has been unwound—to find redemption amidst the quotidian, the mundane, and the everyday. But also always in an eternally full "moment of decision"—a response to the bare fact of the Incarnation of God in infant Jesus. Evan Rosa is joined by writer Jeff Reimer (Associate Editor, Comment Magazine), who suggests that this modernist retelling of Christmas helps us t…
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Dec 5, 2021
David Dark / Non-Violent Resistance, Robot Soft Exorcism, and the Blurry Binaries Between Christianity and Culture
"I wrestle not against flesh and blood." (David Dark's Ephesians 6:12 mantra) / According to David Dark (Belmont University), each of us occupy a variety of robots—roles, titles, occupations, institutions, conglomerates, ways of being, social norms, etc.—and these robots exert a cultural force, sometimes benign, but then again, sometimes violently destructive and degrading of human life. And in order to appreciate and honor our shared humanity, those of us in violent, impersonal robot systems need to be softly, humanely, respectfully, lovingly exorcised from those violent systems. David Dark joins Evan Rosa to talk about his idea of "Robot Soft Exorcism"—a metaphor-slash-parable-slash-theory-slash-way-of-life—that he uses to explain and expound non-violent resistance and prophetic witness. Along the way, they discuss the righteous skepticism he was raised on, the blurry secular-sacred divide, how he met Henri Nouwen, the technological ethics of Jacques Ellul, the real meaning o…
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Nov 27, 2021
Christian Wiman / Finding Home Through Exiles' Eyes
"To be a poet is to be an exile," says poet Christian Wiman. He echoes the most influential writer on his early life and work, Simone Weil, who wrote in her _Gravity & Grace_: "We must take the feeling of being at home into exile. We must be rooted in the absence of a place." Wiman spent most of the 2020 leg of the pandemic curating a story about home using 100 poems, seamed with prose from some of the wisest denizens of our species to narrate the tale. He joins Evan Rosa to read some of the poetry from the collection, talk about the connection between poetry and faith, and continue to examine the meaning of home through exiles' eyes.
_This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information, visit tyndale.foundation._
Show Notes
* _Home: 100 Poems_
* Joseph Brodsky, exile from Russa
* Defining "Home"
* Mahmoud Darwish, "I Belong There"
* "I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them, a s…
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Nov 20, 2021
Sameer Yadav / Gratitude Is Not a Debt: Giving, Receiving, and Sharing Thanks
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 fro…
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Nov 13, 2021
Francisco Lozada / Theology of Immigration: Crossing Porous Borders, Welcoming Strangers, and the Faith of the Migrant
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…
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Nov 6, 2021
Janine Di Giovanni / The Vanishing: War Correspondence, Humanitarian Journalism, and the Twilight of Christianity in the Middle East
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 digi…
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Oct 30, 2021
Will Willimon / Gospel Oddity: The Purpose of Pastors and the Problem with Self-Care
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…
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Oct 23, 2021
Julian Reid / Musical Spiritual Hotel: Rest, Hospitality, and Sacred Music
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…
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Oct 16, 2021
Alysia Harris / Attention, Wonder, Permeability, & the Space Between Activity & Passivity
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 perce…
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Oct 9, 2021
Charles Taylor & Miroslav Volf / Finding a Shared Moral Understanding: Progress, Evil, Freedom, and Solidarity (Part 2)
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…
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Oct 2, 2021
Charles Taylor & Miroslav Volf / What's Wrong with Our Democracies?: Fear of Replacement, Post-Truth, and Entrenched Tribal Factions (Part 1)
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, e…
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Sep 25, 2021
David Brooks & Miroslav Volf / The Road to Character
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…
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Sep 18, 2021
David Brooks & Miroslav Volf / What Is Human Flourishing?
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.
Fo…
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Sep 11, 2021
Miroslav Volf on 9/11 / A Grave in the Air: The Lasting Impact of 9/11 on Faith & Culture
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 conti…
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Sep 4, 2021
Ryan McAnnally-Linz and Evan Rosa / Courage, Control, Kairos Time, and Roasting S'mores as an Exercise in Patience / Patience Coda
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 Divinit…
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Sep 2, 2021
Adam Eitel / Taste and See / Patience Bonus
"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…
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Aug 28, 2021
Tish Harrison Warren / Control, Creatureliness, and the Practice of Patience / Patience Part 6
"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-episod…
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Aug 21, 2021
Sarah Schnitker / The Psychology of Patience / Patience Part 5
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 su…
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Aug 14, 2021
Adam Eitel / Constraining Sorrow, Contemplating Joy / Patience Part 4
_"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 tem…
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Aug 7, 2021
Paul Dafydd Jones / God's Patience, Human Action, and Complex Faith / Patience Part 3
"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 s…
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Jul 31, 2021
Kathryn Tanner / Money, Markets, and the Economy of Grace / Patience Part 2
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 anxiet…
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Jul 24, 2021
Andrew Root / Time, Acceleration, and Waiting / Patience Part 1
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."
* “G…
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Jul 17, 2021
Life Riffs: Improvisation in Poetry, Theology, and Flourishing / Micheal O'Siadhail & David Ford
"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. H…
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Jul 10, 2021
Are You Not Entertained?: Art, Attention, and Watching Culture / Alissa Wilkinson & Drew Collins
"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…
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Jul 3, 2021
Think Again: Changing Your Mind, Political-Religious Conversion, and the Emotional Life / Nichole Flores & Matt Croasmun
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…
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Jun 19, 2021
Juneteenth: Looking Back to Step Forward / Charles B. Copher and Anne Streaty Wimberly
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 Ame…
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Jun 7, 2021
Collapse and Rebuild: How Spirituality Informs Social Action in Hong Kong / Kevin Lau & Andrew Kwok
"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 o…
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May 30, 2021
Gilded Wounds, Co-Mingled Tears: The Gratuity of God in Art and Faith / Makoto Fujimura & Miroslav Volf
"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 everyt…
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May 22, 2021
How to Respond to Other Peoples' Pain: Silent Presence in the Wild Inexplicability of Evil and Grace / David Kelsey
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”
*…
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May 15, 2021
Everything Wrong Can Be Made Right: Racial History, Reparations, and Belonging / Lisa Sharon Harper & Miroslav Volf
"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…
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May 8, 2021
The Freedom of Forgiveness: Ancient Christian Wisdom on The Happiness Lab / Laurie Santos & Miroslav Volf
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 sol…
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May 6, 2021
Beyond Invisible | American 한 (Han): An Artistic Response to Anti-Asian Violence / Sarah Shin & Shin Maeng
"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 int…
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May 1, 2021
Active Mystic: How Wonder Unifies Justice and Spirituality / Sameer Yadav
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 sho…
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Apr 24, 2021
Have You Eaten Yet?: Hospitality, Solidarity, and the Great Banquet of Justice / David de Leon & Matt Croasmun
"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 banqu…
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Apr 10, 2021
Passionate God, Crucified God, Joyful God / Jürgen Moltmann & Miroslav Volf
"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 theologic…
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Apr 3, 2021
Dead Quiet: The Death Penalty in Theological, Moral, and Political Context / Elizabeth Bruenig & Ryan McAnnally-Linz
_"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 Oppenhei…
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Mar 29, 2021
You Do You: Ethics of Authenticity in Disney's Frozen and Moana / Matt Croasmun and Ryan McAnnally-Linz
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…
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Mar 20, 2021
When Hospitals Become Battlefields: The Impact of Spiritual Abuse on Faith & Flourishing / Dan Koch
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…
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Mar 13, 2021
The Gravity of Joy / Angela Gorrell
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 someon…
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Mar 6, 2021
Befriending Reality: Engaging Otherness with Hospitality, Artfulness, and Particularity at Depth / Krista Tippett & Miroslav Volf
“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 centur…
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Feb 28, 2021
Joy and the Act of Resistance Against Despair / Willie Jennings and Miroslav Volf
"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 a…
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Feb 24, 2021
Willie Jennings's After Whiteness: Belonging, Intimacy, and Resisting White Masculinity / Matt Croasmun
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…
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Feb 20, 2021
The Dignity of Work: Poverty, Property, and Fraternity in Pope Francis's Fratelli Tutti (Brothers & Sisters All) / Martin Schlag
"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 th…
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Feb 19, 2021
Howard Thurman's Mystical Activism: Connection, Alienation, and Black Vitality / Sameer Yadav
"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."…
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Feb 15, 2021
David Walker's Dangerous Appeal: Black Abolitionism and Belonging to God / Ryan McAnnally-Linz
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._
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Feb 13, 2021
This Economy Kills: Healing the Human Environment in Pope Francis's Fratelli Tutti (Brothers & Sisters All) / Sister Helen Alford
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 inequali…
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Feb 6, 2021
Dreaming of a Different World: Friendship, Dignity, and Solidarity in Pope Francis's Fratelli Tutti (Brothers & Sisters All) / Nichole Flores
_“Here we have a splendid secret that shows us how to dream and to turn our life into a wonderful adventure. No one can face life in isolation… We need a community that supports and helps us, in which we can help one another to keep looking ahead. How important it is to dream together… By ourselves, we risk seeing mirages, things that are not there. Dreams, on the other hand, are built together. Let us dream, then, as a single human family, as fellow travelers sharing the same flesh, as children of the same earth which is our common home, each of us bringing the richness of his or her beliefs and convictions, each of us with his or her own voice, brothers and sisters all." _(Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti)
Last year, in the midst of a global nightmare, Pope Francis invited the world to dream together of something different. He released _Fratelli Tutti _in October 2020—a message of friendship, dignity, and solidarity not just to Catholics, but "to all people of good will"—for t…
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Jan 31, 2021
Radical Humility: Forgetting Oneself as a Path to Flourishing
Philosopher Kent Dunnington exposes the radical roots of Christian humility, exploring the centrality of humility to Christian ethics, the goal of humility in eliminating one’s own self-concern, why humility remains so appealing and so appalling, and how to respond to the abuse and weaponizing of humility to oppress. Interview with Evan Rosa.
Join us in taking hold of life that is truly life.
Will you partner with us in helping people envision and pursue lives worthy of our shared humanity?
Give to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: faith.yale.edu/give
About Kent Dunnington
Kent Dunnington is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Biola University in La Mirada, CA. He teaches and writes in the areas of virtue ethics and theological ethics. Other research interests include addiction and criminal justice, inspired by his experiences teaching in prison. He is author _Addiction and Virtue: Beyond the Models of Disease and Choice _and _Humility, Pride, and Christian Virtue Theory_. H…
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Jan 23, 2021
God’s Love Made Delicious: Food, Hospitality, and the Gift of Eating Together / Norman Wirzba & Matt Croasmun
"Cooking is a declaration of love ... food is God’s love made delicious." Theologian Norman Wirzba reflects on the threats of our faulty logic of food and our disordered and disconnected relationship to eating and nourishment, and imagines a theology of food grounded in membership, gift, and hospitality. Interview with Matt Croasmun.
Support _For the Life of the World: _Give to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture
About Norman Wirzba
Norman Wirzba is the Gilbert T. Rowe Distinguished Professor of Theology at Duke University. His teaching, research, and writing happens at the intersections of theology and philosophy, and agrarian and environmental studies. He is the author of several books, including _Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating _(2nd Edition), _From Nature to Creation_, and _The Paradise of God: Renewing Religion in an Ecological Age,_ and his most recent book, _This Sacred Life: The Place of Humanity in a Wounded World,_ will be published in 2021. In his spare time he lik…
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Jan 16, 2021
Patience with Yourself: Resisting the Temptation to Curate Yourself and Finding the Courage to Embrace Imperfection
Thanks for listening to For the Life of the World. To support the show, you can make a tax-deductible gift to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture by clicking here.
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This is that time of year when the little demon of self-criticism and self-denigration wakes up and starts nagging you for letting your new year’s resolutions slip a little. Or maybe you’re not there yet. You’re powering through, waking up early, working out hard, eating right, reading more, living your best life. Hey. Good on you. Go get it.
But regardless, whether you find yourself nailing it or failing it, do you have the patience and the necessary courage to accept yourself at every moment you try to improve?
This week, Ryan McAnnally-Linz and Miroslav Volf discuss an obscure but incredibly timely passage from an old lecture given by the great Karl Rahner, the German Jesuit priest and one of the most notable Catholic theologians of the 20th century—he was instrumental, for instance, in the theological dev…
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Jan 9, 2021
Violence, Shame, Fear, Anger, and Lost Civic Friendship / Willie Jennings, David French, Marilynne Robinson, Robert George, and more
What is the state of Christianity and Democracy in America? We mined the past 6 months of episodes for the most timely, relevant, and even strangely prescient reflections on faith and politics in America. Past guests Willie Jennings, David French, Marilynne Robinson, Robert George, and Samuel Perry and Andrew Whitehead, and Arlie Hochschild each offer perspectives we need to understand the political moment through the eyes of faith and culture.
Here’s the breakdown of our episode today—it’s really a “best of" for faith and politics in America today.
Episode Contents / Show Notes
* 3:33 - Theologian Willie Jennings on crowds, mobs, fear, and anger
* 14:17 - Sociologists Samuel Perry and Andrew Whitehead on Christian Nationalism, identity, and violence
* 20:01 - Novelist Marilynne Robinson on Christianity and democracy
* 23:17 - Political commentator David French on political exhaustion, culture war, and the role of faith in political division
* 34:22 - Legal scholar…
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Jan 7, 2021
Sedition in the Capitol: Wounded Pride, Lies that Incite Violence, Losing Connection to Reality, and Longing for Peace / Miroslav Volf & Colleagues
Miroslav Volf and the staff of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture respond to the lies, provocation, and violence at the Capitol building on January 6, 2021.
Show Notes
* "The most responsible thing to say about the President’s and the attackers’ actions is that they were without qualification wrong. To praise, to condone, to excuse, or to ignore them is to 'call evil good… put darkness for light… put bitter for sweet' (Isaiah 5:20)."
* At the heart of the current effort to deny and overturn the results of the presidential election is the wounded pride of a man who cannot handle the truth of his own imperfection and the fact that he lost a fair democratic contest.
* There is a sorrowful, pathetic smallness to this petty woundedness even as it produces momentous—and tragic—consequences. Faced with painful realities that conflict with his self-image but that he cannot control, President Trump has given himself over to wishful thinking, conspiracy theories, and falseho…
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Jan 2, 2021
Christian Witness in Turbulent Places / Miroslav Volf with Mike Cosper
Mike Cosper, host of Cultivated, a podcast about faith and work, interviews Miroslav Volf about his vocation as theologian. They discuss Miroslav's youth in Croatia and his family's influence on his spirituality and theology, as well as the urgent need for faithful witness in our turbulent times. Original air date: November 2, 2020.
Show Notes
* “I had parents who were extraordinary spiritual human beings, not in a sense that they were total exemplars of holiness, but there was kind of an honesty about the spiritual life”
* His father “experienced God’s love in the midst of Hell” on a socialist death march
* “A vivid representation of what faith can do, what God can do”
* Volf’s early experience of the Church via his father’s ministry
* “Oh, what an incredible thing. To devote one’s life to helping people who are so much on the margins”
* Volf traveled as a translator: “I realized there that one could be cool and the believer as well”
* “To…
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Dec 26, 2020
The Reason We Follow the Star: Learning from the Magi How to Give, How to Receive, and How to Be Human / Drew Collins
How can the Magi of Matthew 2—the Three Wise Men "bearing gifts" and "traversing afar"—help us understand faith and reason, giving and receiving, the nature of God, and how to be human? Drew Collins offers some new perspective on a familiar Christmas story.
Introduction and Notes
Merry Christmas friends—for this week, we’re dropping a double dose of Christmas reflections from the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. We’ll be hearing from Matt Croasmun and Drew Collins, both of whom are Associate Research Scholars and lead our Life Worth Living and Christ & Flourishing initiatives, respectively.
In this episode, I interview Drew Collins about the Magi of Matthew Chapter 2—these wise men from the east come to pay Jesus homage, but in so doing, they offer for us an outside perspective on the wonder and the weirdness of Christmas. hey’ve been lauded through centuries of Christian theology for both their reason and their faith, but W.H. Auden’s treatment of their intentions i…
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Dec 26, 2020
Santa, God, and the Obligation to Rejoice / Matt Croasmun
Santa doesn't just want you to be happy. Santa needs you to be happy. Matt Croasmun explains how the contemporary Christmas myth—the Gospel of Christmas according to St. Nick—sets emotional norms that are vastly different from the Gospel of Christmas according to St. Paul.
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Dec 19, 2020
Ignore These Walls: Faith that Leads to Freedom in Zimbabwe / Evan Mawarire & Miroslav Volf
Evan Mawarire is a Pentecostal minister and democratic activist in Zimbabwe. He is founder of #ThisFlag Citizen's Movement and has been instrumental in standing up to corruption, injustice, and poverty in Zimbabwe. Miroslav Volf interviews Pastor Evan about his story of faith that leads to activism; the transformation he experience while being unjustly arrested, detained, and tortured in maximum security prison; and what it means to live a life worthy of our humanity.
Show Notes
* Introduction and clip from #ThisFlag viral video
* How Evan Mawarire became a Pentecostal minister
* #ThisFlag movement - united around the symbolism of the Zimbabwe flag
* Compassion, mercy, and other biblical values that can be practiced across all levels
* “If we don’t stand up, our children will hold us to account one day, and say ‘Why did you do nothing?’"
* "I was asking people to shut down the government in 48 hrs."
* The other side of fear is possibility
* The atrocities of R…
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Dec 12, 2020
Black Joy and Oppressive Humility / Stacey Floyd-Thomas
Social ethicist Stacey Floyd-Thomas offers a womanist perspective on how humility can go terribly wrong, when it's hung over the heads of the humiliated, marginalized, and oppressed. This criticism of the traditional Christian virtue helps clarify the role of joy as the ultimate virtue of Black life, the centrality of black folk wisdom, and the beauty of black sisterhood. Interview by Ryan McAnnally-Linz.
Links
* The Womanist Salon Podcast, featuring Stacey Floyd-Thomas
* The Joy of Humility: The Beginning & End of the Virtues (edited by Drew Collins, Ryan McAnnally-Linz, and Evan Rosa)
About Stacey Floyd-Thomas
Stacey Floyd-Thomas is the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Chair and Associate Professor of Ethics and Society at Vanderbilt University, and is a nationally recognized scholar and leading voice in social ethics who provides leadership to several national and international organizations that educate, advocate, support and shape the strategic work of individuals, initiat…
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Dec 5, 2020
Strangers in Our Own Land: Empathy Walls, Deep Stories, and Shelters from Shame / Arlie Hochschild
Arlie Hochschild discusses her book, _Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right_, reflecting on how 2020 has made our mutual political alienation worse, and how we can implement deep listening, emotion management, hospitality, and create shelters from shame. Interview by Evan Rosa.
How to Give to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: faith.yale.edu/give
We’re passionate about making this work consistently accessible to a people who are genuinely concerned with he viability of faith in a world wracked with division, contested views about what it means to be human and what it means to live life well. If you’re in a position to support our show financially, and are looking for some year end opportunities, please consider partnering with us. We rely on the generosity of individuals like you to make our work possible. And if you’re not, please continue listening and engaging the content and let us know what you’re interested in. But if you can give, if y…
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Nov 28, 2020
Joyful Recognition, All Is Gift: Four Perspectives on Gratitude in 2020 / Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Sarah Schnitker, Jessica Hooten Wilson, Miroslav Volf
Defining gratitude as joyful recognition, the courage to be grateful, comparing gratitude for self-help vs gratitude in prayer, resilience, seeing all as gift and everything as grace. Featuring: Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Sarah Schnitker, Jessica Hooten Wilson, and Miroslav Volf.
Show Notes
* 1:07 - Miroslav Volf
* Our gratitude for you listeners!
* Sometimes complaint comes easier than gratitude, requiring the courage to be grateful.
* Misconceptions about gratitude: repayment of debt, obligation to the giver, a strategy for happiness or subjective well-being.
* Miroslav’s view of gratitude: Joyful recognition
* Gratitude is "joy over the giver, joy over the gift, joy over having received the gift and having been set into relation to the giver marked by freedom.”
* 6:45 - Stacey Floyd-Thomas
* Slow down and focus on what matters most
* Despite what may seem grim in this moment, redeem now as a holy time.
* Gratitude as not merely a disposition but an essential duty…
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Nov 21, 2020
Civic Friendship, Courageous Humility, and Seeking Truth Together / Robert P. George
Legal scholar Robert P. George comments on the meaning of friendship across disagreement, the need for public virtues of courage and humility, and how to address political polarization and hateful divisions through seeking the truth, thinking critically and openly, and respecting the dignity and freedom of the other. Interview by Evan Rosa.
Episode Introduction (Evan Rosa)
How do we heal from 2020? Yes, how do we heal from this pandemic, but how do we heal from the political rifts deeper than we can remember? How do we heal from physical distance that has isolated and alienated us from embodied presence and genuine connection with others? How do millions of public school children heal from remote learning and the psychological impact of disconnection?
How do we heal in a moment like this?
We’ve been trying to tackle this question in a variety of ways on the podcast, and we'll continue in upcoming episodes.
This week, we’re sharing a conversation I had with Robert P. George, th…
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Nov 14, 2020
Rabbi Sacks on Etching Everyday Existence with the Charisma of Holiness / Jonathan Sacks & Miroslav Volf
Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks was a British Jewish Rabbi, philosopher, politician, and author of more than 30 books. In this conversation, Miroslav Volf interviews Rabbi Sacks about Jewish perspectives on human flourishing, joy, sabbath and work, and the deeply communal and particular nature of Jewish faith as a witness to the common good. Rabbi Sacks died on November 7, 2020. May his memory be a blessing.
_This episode starts with a 12-minute reflection and memorial from Miroslav Volf, followed by a 40-minute conversation with Rabbi Sacks._
For a video of the full conversation, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWpQ-23OBtU&t
Show Notes
* The Jewish vision of a life worth living: life going well, life led well, life feeling as it should.
* Following the Mosaic Law, as a means to etching everyday life with the charisma of holiness.
* “How would you take an ordinary life, and imbue it with a sense for the transcendence?"
* The Hebrew Bible’s focus on “life down he…
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Nov 7, 2020
Mixed Feelings: Poetry and Faith for Our Time / Christian Wiman & Miroslav Volf
Poet Christian Wiman and theologian Miroslav Volf, both colleagues and friends, discuss poetry's ability to give voice to the mixed feelings of life today, talking about the mash-up of home and exile, joy and sorrow, saint and sinner; and Wiman reads some of his favorite poetry from his upcoming anthology, Home: 100 Poems.
Poet Christian Wiman is Professor of the Practice of Religion and Literature at Yale Divinity School. He’s the author of several books of poetry, including _Every Riven Thing_, _Hammer is the Prayer_, and his most recent, _Survival Is a Style_. His memoirs include the bracing and beautiful _My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer_, and _He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art_. He edited an anthology of 100 poems on Joy a few years ago, and is currently putting finishing touches on another 100 poems on Home.
Our guest last week, the novelist Marilynne Robinson, says of Wiman, "His poetry and scholarship have a purifying urgency that is…
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Oct 31, 2020
Marilynne Robinson on This Political Moment / Interview with Miroslav Volf
This is a political moment characterized by stridency, suspicion, resentment, anger, and despair—where shared commitments to truth, debate, free speech, and simple good faith in one another (these core elements of democratic society)—these are under threat of outright rejection by those in power. But the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson sees an opportunity for putting aside the resentment, suspicion of the other, and despair, and instead renewing a love of democracy, grounded in the sacredness of the person, and she sees more hope in a patriotism closer to familial love than America-first Christian nationalism.
To watch the video of this conversation, visit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUMN011pamw
Show Notes
* Pursuing theology instead of literature
* America as a family
* The incredible singularity of the human being
* “When we don’t treat someone with respect, we impoverish them."
* How does the sacredness of humanity apply to o…
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Oct 24, 2020
Understanding Black Politics: Faith, Representation, and Black Political Voices
Political scientist Andra Gillespie (Emory University) discusses the significance of black politics in 2020, including the need to fix disproportional representation, ideological sorting in party politics, the experience and salience of racial identity as a grounding factor for black political engagement, pursuing justice through the political process, and bringing political science to bear on lives of faith.
Show Notes
* Disproportional representation of African-Americans in Congress
* Ideological Sorting, Partisanship, and Race
* “Welcome to America’s Freedom Church”: How Rev. Raphael Warnock, the pastor of MLK’s Ebenezer Baptist Church is leading the Georgia U.S. Senate race
* Pursuing Justice in the Political Process: Voting Rights, Disenfranchisement, and Representation
* Political rules and doing the right thing
* Vocation and Christian public engagement
* The role of faith in ideological sorting, and faith in black politics
Follow Andra Gillespie on Twit…
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Oct 17, 2020
Faith 2020: Seeing Christianity in Political Context / Michael Wear & Miroslav Volf
Obama's 2012 director of faith-outreach, Michael Wear, joins theologian Miroslav Volf for a conversation on faith and politics in 2020 and beyond. They discuss the connection between the personal and the political in their own lives; why Christians should care about politics; the public responsibility that comes with democratic citizenship; compromise and personal integrity; the challenge of religious and political identity that converges around the common good; ambivalence and political homelessness; and the important challenge and prospect of finding joy in what is, while hoping for what seems impossible.
Click here to listen to Michael Wear and the Faith 2020 podcast
Click here to subscribe to Michael Wear's Reclaiming Hope email newsletter
About Michael Wear
Michael Wear is a leading strategist, speaker and practitioner at the intersection of faith, politics and public life. He has advised a president, as well as some of the nation’s leading foundations, non-profits and publi…
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Oct 11, 2020
Always, Always On: Technology, Digital Life, and New Media / Angela Gorrell
How do visions of flourishing life converge in the new media landscape? Theologian Angela Gorrell (Baylor University) reflects on the challenges and opportunities of technology and digital life, especially those that reveal to us who we are, who we are becoming, and to whom we belong.
Show Notes
* The purpose of _Always on: Practicing Faith in a New Media Landscape_
* New media: not just social media, but entertainment, productivity, tools, and more
* How to develop interested conversations about the impact of new media on moral, relational, political, and spiritual life.
* How do visions of flourishing life converge in the new media landscape?
* Understanding (and exploiting) human psychology in new media business
* Seeking joy through affirmation and recognition
* Becoming curious and open to conversations about new media.
* The idolatry of technology
* The chief task of adolescence growing into healthy adulthood: Identity and belonging—Who am I? Whose am I?…
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Oct 3, 2020
How to Destroy a Debate: Winning, Democracy, and the Very Possibility of Public Discourse / Matt Croasmun, Ryan McAnnally-Linz, Miroslav Volf
In this episode, Matt Croasmun, Ryan McAnnally-Linz, and Miroslav Volf discuss the Trump-Biden presidential debate from September 29, 2020, and its implications for public discourse and the very possibility of democratic deliberation.
And yes, we know that that is not the headline anymore. The truth is stranger than fiction—again. The fact is lots of people are still sick. This pandemic is real.
But we’re not trying to keep up with the latest headlines. The purpose of every single episode of this podcast is to help you envision and pursue a life that is worthy of your humanity.
And we think there’s something to important to say about what we saw (or maybe more appropriate—what we can’t unsee) in the presidential debate. Something deeply significant for what it means to share common life together and jointly pursue the fullest vision of flourishing we can imagine.
Earlier this week, we saw the symptoms of a truly unhealthy public discourse. But we are not referring to the…
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Sep 26, 2020
How Political Division Impacts Christian Unity / Miroslav Volf #AskMiroslav
Miroslav Volf and Evan Rosa take listener questions about how to live faithfully in this political moment, focusing especially on questions of how political division impacts Christian and civil unity.
Featuring:
* Miroslav’s social media bio gloss of the Prayer of St. Francis: "Before I tweet, I pray: Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.”
* Dr. Bethany Keeley-Jonker: "I'm struggling to balance unity in the body with my firm conviction that the Trump presidency is hostile to my most deeply held Christian values.”
* Ramiro Medrano: "How can we foster unity in the body of Christ in the midst of division? How does one challenge the “brethren” to consider a different perspective? How can we correct bad theology and doctrine, when both sides use (or should I say abuse) Scripture to justify their position? I’m aware that much of this is based upon poor discipleship and interpretation. However, the polarization is further encouraged from the pulpit."
* Disagreement…
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Sep 20, 2020
What is really worth wanting? / Matt Croasmun
Is what _you want_ really worth wanting? We often settle for procedural and productivity thinking—life hacks, listicles, and tips and tricks that offer the life of your dreams. We max out our search in the shallow water of seeking answers to the questions “what do I want and how can I get it?” But Matt Croasmun (Director of the Life Worth Living Program at Yale College) suggests that if we—a society in crisis—want to live lives worthy of our humanity, we need to ask the deepest question possible and let it inform our thinking: _What is truly worth wanting?_
Show Notes
* How can I live the life that I want?
* Matt’s former dream of being a musician
* “I was more interested in being famous than in being good”
* Self-formation versus self-obsession
* “Giving up my dream to be a composer is either the most courageous or the most cowardly thing I’ve ever done”
* “The fundamental question is, do I have the right dreams?”
* The worthiness of our dream…
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Sep 12, 2020
The Home and Homelessness of God / Miroslav Volf and Drew Collins
In this episode, Miroslav Volf and Drew Collins discuss home as a source of joy and humanity; the way we organize and order our homes for hospitality; and the homelessness of God and what that means for humanity.
For many, the first thought of home is the threat of its negation: homelessness. Still others think of the stress and anxiety—sometimes even at life-threatening levels—of being at home. For some home is grounding, a place of safety and growth, it is embrace. For others, home is hostile, unsafe and risky, it is exclusionary. This episode features discussions of:
* The theological and moral significance of home
* The meaning of Jesus's homelessness
* Marie Kondo's philosophy of joy and home organization
* Dorothy Day's voluntary poverty and "personal maximalism"
* Home as a place for embrace, joy, and care
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Sep 5, 2020
Supporting Sacrificial Love: Learning How to Fight a Pandemic from the Army's Chief of Chaplains / Major General Thomas Solhjem
Matt Croasmun interviews the U.S. Army Chief of Chaplains: Major General Thomas Solhjem about whatever transferable wisdom we might apply from armed conflict to our war with Covid-19. They discuss how to cultivate courage, human fragility and loss of control, stories of bravery and love when life is on the line, and how to support the spiritual lives of the men and women of the armed forces.
Chaplain (Major General) Thomas L. Solhjem is the Army’s 25th Chief of Chaplains. He leads the Chaplain Corps in providing religious support to the Army’s Soldiers, their Families, and Civilians.
_The views that Major General Thomas Solhjem discusses in this interview are his own and do not represent the United States Department of Defense or the United States Army, which have permitted his appearance on this podcast episode._
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Aug 30, 2020
How Jazz Teaches Faith & Justice / Julian Reid & The JuJu Exchange
Jazz pianist Julian Reid on music, theology, and improvisation. The keys element of The JuJu Exchange uses the history of blues, gospel, and jazz to discuss how we communicate emotionally and spiritually through music, teaching an important lesson in how to live and long for home while we remain exiles. Features score from The JuJu Exchange's latest release, _The Eternal Boombox_. Interview by Ryan McAnnally-Linz and Evan Rosa.
Julian Reid is a Chicago-based jazz pianist and producer, writer, and performer (not to mention B.A. Yale University, and M.Div. Emory University). The JuJu Exchange is a musical partnership also featuring Nico Segal (trumpet, Chance the Rapper; The Social Experiment) and Everett Reid—exploring creativity, justice, and the human experience through their hip-hop infused jazz. Their new 5-song project is called The Eternal Boombox.
More from The JuJu Exchange:
* Listen to The Eternal Boombox EP: https://ditto.fm/theeternalboombox
* If you like what you he…
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Aug 22, 2020
Capitalism, Christianity, and Morality / David French and Miroslav Volf
Miroslav Volf and David French discuss economy, morality, and human flourishing—looking in particular at the questions of whether capitalism and conservative moral values can coexist, and how the demands of Jesus’s ethics implicate free market economy.
David French is a conservative political commentator for The Dispatch, known for his opposition to Donald Trump, his commitment to religious liberty, his advocacy for civility in public discourse, and his willingness to take a clear stand on political and cultural issues informed by his Christian faith commitments.
The nature of the tug-o-war about reopening the American economy in the wake of COVID-19’s onset, and of course now in the wake of its second surge, was primarily a debate about the incommensurable values of economic wealth and personal health—or maybe better, economy and person. But more than that, it pit the concept of what it means for human beings to flourish against the political and economic aspirations of both…
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Aug 15, 2020
We Are Home for Each Other / Natalia Marandiuc
Theologian Natalia Marandiuc explores the meaning of home and the authenticity of self in a world of both beautiful and toxic difference. She is Assistant Professor of Christian Theology at Southern Methodist University's Perkins School of Theology, and author of _The Goodness of Home: Human and Divine Love and the Making of the Self._
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Aug 8, 2020
Violence, Fascism, and Christian Nationalism / Miroslav Volf, Andrew Whitehead, and Samuel Perry
The current presidential administration has linked federal violence against largely peaceful protests in the name of law, order, and defending God. E.g., deploying tear gas for a Bible-holding photo opp. Does the melding of Christianity with the Nation produce violence and war? What's the relation between Christian Nationalism and fascism? Miroslav Volf asks sociologists Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry.
Click here to listen to the full episode on Christian Nationalism in the United States.
Books mentioned in this interview:
* Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry, _Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States_
* David Martin, _Does Christianity Cause War?_
* Jason Stanley, _How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them_
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Aug 1, 2020
Elizabeth Bruenig: Chronicler of the Human Condition / Interview with Ryan McAnnally-Linz
Elizabeth Bruenig (New York Times) joins the podcast to discuss the ethical and theological commitments that underlie her political and cultural commentary; work, labor, and employment; and how to be opinionated and very online at a time when most Americans are afraid of what other people think of their beliefs.
Show Notes
* “If you’re someone who sits between two well-defined ideological modes, it's going to be hard to find your place in the order of things”
* “What lets me sleep at night; what do I really believe is good and true?”
* What is a Catholic socialist?
* What does a Catholic socialist think about work? How we can be suspicious about the importance of work?
* Speaking ones mind comes with fear in today’s world
* The difference between a ‘take’ and reporting
* "I'm a chronicler of the human condition. This is also my explanation for why I retweet really bizarre stuff that I find”
* How understanding the character of God relates to an under…
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Jul 25, 2020
Public Faith Across the Divide / David French and Miroslav Volf
In this conversation, Miroslav Volf and David French discuss the politically and culturally polarized America; the resurgence of cultural struggle, if not outright culture war; seeing fundamentalist political religion on both the right and the left; forgiveness versus cancellation and how our view of human persons affects that public conversation; personal morality and social justice; and finally how political theology can make a difference now, the rest of this year (and it’s been a _year_), and the future of American life.
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Jul 18, 2020
N.T. Wright on Weeping, Waiting, and Working with God in the Pandemic / Miroslav Volf and N.T. Wright
Miroslav Volf interviews N.T. Wright about his latest book, _God and the Pandemic: A Christian Reflection on the Coronavirus and Its Aftermath_. They discuss: Jesus, the God who weeps; the problem with focusing on rational responses to the problem of evil rather than empathic presence and action; the proper translation of Romans 8:28 (hint, it’s not “All things work together for good to those who love God"); waiting for God through the crises of human life; the patience of unknowing; lament as a way of hoping in the dark; Friedrich Nietzsche on our tendency to misinterpret the pain and secret sorrows of others; and finally, the resurrection of Jesus as the center for conquering suffering even in the midst of suffering. _This episode also includes a brief remembrance of Congressman John Lewis (1940-2020)._
* N.T. Wright, _God and the Pandemic: A Christian Reflection on the Coronavirus and Its Aftermath_
* John Lewis speaking at the March on Washington, D.C. (1965): Video
* Ya…
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Jul 11, 2020
Christian Racist Complicity: American History, Monuments, and the Arc of Justice / Jemar Tisby & Ryan McAnnally-Linz
Jemar Tisby, author of the NYT bestseller _The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism_, joins Ryan McAnnally-Linz for a conversation on how American Christian history has failed us. In this episode, Jemar explains the complicity and compromise of American Christians; the narrative war that confederate monuments wage (and how they were erected much later than you might think); the ugly theological justifications of racism and the shameful history of Christian white supremacy; the fraught project of selectively naming heroes and villains and then memorializing them; and the practical problem of how to go forward rightly from this moment of increased attention to racial injustice.
Show Notes
* Jemar Tisby, _The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism_
* Pre-Order Jemar Tisby's next book: _How to Fight Racism: Courageous Christianity and the Journey Toward Racial Justice_
* Min Jin Lee's comment ab…
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Jul 4, 2020
Taking America Back for God / Miroslav Volf w/ Andrew Whitehead & Samuel Perry
For our Fourth of July episode, Miroslav Volf interviews Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry, sociologists and authors of _Taking America Back For God: Christian Nationalism in the United States_. What is Christian Nationalism? Why does it matter? How powerful is it in American life? Who counts as a Christian Nationalist? They discuss the tendency of Christian Nationalism to use Christianity as a tribal identity marker or tool for power, rather than an authentic sign of faith or commitment to a the way of Jesus or the practice of his teaching. They discuss Christian Nationalism in racial perspective, comparing African-American and white conservative approaches to Christianity and the Nation. And the conversation draws out important implications for the meaning of the separation of church and state, and the viability of a robust public faith in American life.
* Guests: Andrew Whitehead (Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis) and Samuel Perry (University of Oklahoma)
* _…
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Jun 27, 2020
People or Economy? / Miroslav Volf & John Hare
Miroslav Volf presents a previously unreleased clip of his conversation with Yale philosopher John Hare, focusing on the treatment of essential workers, the meaning of dignity and respect, and the incommensurable value of human life. Miroslav offers extended commentary on capitalism, Christianity, and economic values in the midst of pandemic.
Reference: David Brooks, "America Is Facing 5 Epic Crises All at Once" _New York Times_, June 25, 2020.
Reference: What Is a Human Life Worth? / John Hare & Miroslav Volf
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Jun 20, 2020
Law of Love, Order of Peace / Miroslav Volf & Lauren Green
"Religion is most dangerous when it is superficial—when it serves to mark my identity as belonging to a different group than you. And when it's a tool in a politician's hands to legitimize their power. Then they just use religion to mark and to validate what they want to do in any case. And that ends up being really a kind of desacralization of faith. That which is holy has been completely turned to a means of a secular, profane end that bears no relation to the content of that which is holy." Lauren Green, Chief Religion Correspondent at Fox News, interviews Miroslav Volf for her podcast, _Lighthouse Faith. _They discuss his his book _Exclusion & Embrace_, his views on sin, racism, identity, religion and power, forgiveness, and the will to embrace.
This episode contains an interview, reproduced in its entirety, between Lauren Green and Miroslav Volf, which originally appeared at here. Used with permission from Fox News Radio.
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Jun 13, 2020
Justice Somewhere: Local Lament and Joyful Protest in New Haven, CT / Josh Williams & Matthew Croasmun
Matthew Croasmun interviews Pastor Josh Williams (Elm City Vineyard, New Haven, CT) about being a black pastor of a multi-ethnic church in New Haven. In this conversation, Williams provides a window into the incarnational theology that truly makes a difference in the world; he reflects on how increased attention to police involved violence against black life has impacted his life and vocation; he focuses on lament as the first step toward action and justice, but talks about joy and spiritual discipline in the act of protest, and finally, reflects on the fundamentally challenging question everyone is wrestling with right now: What does it mean to love our whole city?
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Jun 6, 2020
Redeeming Dangerous Memories: Black Women and Racial Injustice / Keri Day and Miroslav Volf
Theologian Keri Day shares her experience as a black woman and a theologian, not only of the past week, but the long history of racism in America, stemming from the racially inflected roots of America’s founding and emerging even from history that has been erased. She and Miroslav Volf discuss her whole vision of individual and social justice through the lens of Christian faith and practice. Keri also provides a gripping example of redeeming dangerous memories in the form of the 1921 Tulsa Black Wall Street Massacre.
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Jun 2, 2020
My Anger, God's Righteous Indignation / Willie Jennings (Response to the Death of George Floyd)
Guest contributor Willie Jennings (Yale) offers a response to the death of George Floyd and the black experience of racism and police brutality. In order to practice the discipline of hope, he suggests that we must take hold of a shared anger, hate what God hates, reshape communities with attention to the violence of segregation, and rethink the formation of police officers and our understanding of criminality.
faith.yale.edu
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Jun 1, 2020
The Need to Listen / Miroslav Volf
"Before speaking about victims and to victims I need to listen. We all who are not victims need to listen." In a follow-up to his May 30 response to the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd, Miroslav Volf speaks frankly about the necessity of listening to black perspectives about racism, police brutality, and the history and continuous experience of black suffering.
faith.yale.edu
Show Notes
* Police brutality and the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd
* Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity
* Exclusion’s specific expression in racism in this country
* The book is from the perspective of the victims
* Embarking on the difficult journey of embrace
* Even when every fiber of their bodies and all the steerings of their souls want to counter violence with violence and exclusion with exclusion”
* Miroslav’s home town in Croatia was under siege:
* “I wrote the entire book primarily for myself. It's many pages are one…
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May 30, 2020
Racism, Exclusion, & Embrace / Miroslav Volf
Miroslav Volf responds to the recent killing of unarmed black men, Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd. Exclusion takes many forms, but is marked by both a pursuit of false purity and a failure to see the other as fully human.
Visit faith.yale.edu for more information.
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May 23, 2020
Hope Pt. 2, Hope Against Hope / Miroslav Volf
Miroslav Volf investigates the darker side of hope, explaining what it means to “hope against hope” (Romans 4:18) and “hope in what we do not see” (Romans 8:25). He concludes with hope’s connection to patient endurance. This is the second of a two-part series on hope.
For comments, questions, suggested topics, or just to say hello, email faith@yale.edu.
Visit faith.yale.edu for more information.
Show Notes
* “Genuine hope remains alive when there is no good reason to expect something positive in the future."
* “We hope in what we do not see.” (Romans 8:25)
* Martin Luther on “hope not seen"
* "For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mi…
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May 16, 2020
What Is a Human Life Worth? / John Hare & Miroslav Volf
Theologian Miroslav Volf and philosopher John Hare (Noah Porter Professor of Philosophical Theology at Yale Divinity School) discuss Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s fundamental question behind reopening the economy from COVID-19 lockdown, “How much is a human life worth?” Why we should go to such great lengths, sacrificing so much, to save a single human life? What about humans gives us dignity? How should we approach the dilemmas posed by incommensurable values, where there’s no agreed upon standard for comparison? How can we better frame the question of the value of human life by observing the life of Jesus?
“My conviction is that human life doesn't have a price. And I take this from the philosophy of Immanual Kant, who distinguishes between the dignity human life has, and price. And dignity is, he says, incommensurable worth."
"Jesus came to be with us: Emmanuel. And that's what we have lost. We can't be with each other. … I think what we've learned through this is: A good human l…
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May 9, 2020
Hope Pt. 1, The Thing With Feathers / Miroslav Volf
Show Notes
* “Perhaps, we just need to say it. This is not exactly a hopeful time”
* “But hope is for the no exit scenario. Hope is for the life teetering on the edge”
* Fear is more characteristic of our time than hope is
* Optimism in the late 60s gave way to increasing pessimism in 21st century
* Theologies of hopelessness are on the rise
* How Covid has shaped our fear
* Even before the pandemic, we feared more than we hoped
* Dystopian movies and literature: we fear the loss of our culture
* “Fear and hope seem like exclusive experiences, and that’s not entirely wrong, but it isn’t right either”
* Seneca writes: “Cease to hope and you will cease to fear…. Each alike belongs to a mind that is in suspense, a mind that is fretted by looking forward to the future”
* To give up on hope is to give up on any form of meaningful life
* How our humanity is tied to our hope
* “In fearing, we are still hoping”
* “The challenge is not to…
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May 2, 2020
The Crowd Needs Faith: Control, Care, Economy, and Race / Willie Jennings and Miroslav Volf
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_ and _Acts: A Commentary, The Revolution of the Intimate__._
Show Notes
* Willie Jennings wrote in _Acts: A Theological Commentary on the Bible: "The crowd is always susceptible to the fear that ... clothes the creature. The crowd is the creature exposed in its vulnerability. So nationalistic slogan, religious incantation, or enthusiastic cheering are used to conceal this vulnerability. The volume of a crowd is never an indication of the strength of their faith, but always their vulnerability and oftentimes their fear. The crowd needs faith. A crowd that gains faith shrinks in size and becomes a congregation.” (Page 189)_
* Miroslav asks Willie to explain and elaborate on this passage on crowds and fear.
* "Crowds show us, not so much strength,…
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Apr 25, 2020
The Art of Living and Dying During COVID-19 / Lydia Dugdale, MD
For the Life of the World is produced by the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. For more info, visit faith.yale.edu
Dr. Lydia Dugdale, MD is a New York City internal medicine primary care doctor and medical ethicist. She is Associate Professor of Medicine and Director of the Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at Columbia University. Prior to her 2019 move to Columbia, she was the Associate Director of the Program for Biomedical Ethics and founding Co-Director of the Program for Medicine, Spirituality, and Religion at Yale School of Medicine. She edited _Dying in the Twenty-First Century_, a volume that articulates a bioethical framework for a contemporary art of dying, and is author of _The Lost Art of Dying: Reviving Forgotten Wisdom__ _(forthcoming from HarperCollins Summer 2020), a book about a mostly forgotten ethical tradition and text that emerged in response to the Black Plague in the late middle ages: _Ars Moriendi_, “the art of dying.”
-1:10 Drew Collins: introduction to t…
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Apr 18, 2020
The Promise and Peril of Home / Miroslav Volf & Ryan McAnnally-Linz
Warning:
Hello friends, during a part of this episode on the complicated nature of home during a pandemic, the topic of domestic violence comes up. This is a serious and sensitive matter. If you or someone you know is suffering from abuse, call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233, or if you’re unable to speak safely, you can log onto thehotline.org or text LOVEIS to 22522.
For more information about the Yale Center for Faith & Culture, visit faith.yale.edu.
Follow Miroslav Volf on Twitter: @MiroslavVolf
Follow Ryan McAnnally-Linz on Twitter @RJMLinz
-0:00 Introduction and teaser.
-1:17 Introductory summary of the podcast.
-2:14 Ryan McAnnally-Linz begins.
-3:10 Ryan: “The world outside ourselves and our most immediate environs has been fundamentally altered by quarantine, by staying at home, by social distancing. It makes everything seem distant and mediated. But the really surprising thing to me is that even home feels less real; it’s less home-like.…
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Apr 11, 2020
How to Be Afraid: Easter in the Time of COVID-19 / Miroslav Volf
For the Life of the World is produced by the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. For more info, visit faith.yale.edu
Follow Miroslav Volf on Twitter: @MiroslavVolf
-1:37 Introductory summary of the Podcast
-3:35 A diagnosis of the role of fear in our culture today and how we should respond to it--pulling from an earlier podcast.
-5:50 Miroslav reflects on how Christians should respond to fear.
-6:15 Jesus’ injunction “fear not!” and how we are to properly contextualize that phrase: “It is not a call to disregard or minimize potential danger… to _fear not_ means to see danger clearly and yet not to be overwhelmed by it’s prospect.”
-7:05 Paul on courage in the midst of fear: “We are afflicted but not crushed, perplexed but not driven to despair.” 2 Corinthians 4:8.
-7:26 Aristotle’s definition of fear: “Fear is a pain or disturbance due to a mental picture of some destructive or painful evil in the future.” _Rhetoric_.
-8:05 Miroslav reflects on his experien…
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Apr 9, 2020
The Wrong Kind of Social Distance / Ryan McAnnally-Linz
Show Notes
For more information about the Yale Center for Faith & Culture, visit faith.yale.edu.
Follow Ryan McAnnally-Linz on Twitter @RJMLinz
-0:35 Introduction to the podcast topic and speaker.
-1:40 Beginning of Ryan’s reflection on human vulnerability, the response of Stoicism, and the call to Christian love.
-1:45 In his book, _Homo Deus_, Yuval Noah Harari suggests that, once basic human survival is secured by overcoming famine, war, and pandemics, the natural progression of the human species will be to seek a god-like existence of immortal happiness.
-3:55 Stoicism’s vision of the good life: virtue and rejection of attachments to the world.
-5:45 “Following the Stoics, we might find ourselves responding to COVID-19 by training ourselves not to be internally affected by the turmoil around us. This training could look like denying the severity of the crisis or teaching ourselves to see it as overblown political theater. It could look like withdrawing our emotional in…
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Apr 4, 2020
The Culture of Fear / Miroslav Volf, Matt Croasmun, Drew Collins
For the Life of the World is produced by the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. For more info, visit faith.yale.edu
Follow Miroslav Volf on Twitter: @MiroslavVolf
Show Notes
-0:12 Introductory Teaser
-0:57 Summary and introduction to the topic of this podcast—fear.
-3:35 Miroslav begins.
-3:40 Thoughts from Kierkegaard’s _The Concept of Anxiety_
-4:15 “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” Proverbs 9:10
-4:50 The two questions we should have toward fear: 1. What do we fear for? 2. What are we afraid of?
-6:21 Miroslav Volf: “... we are not just afraid of the virus, we are afraid potentially of everyone and almost everything. A carrier of the virus and, therefore source of danger, is everyone and everything. Between us and much of what we see and touch there is something like an invisible aura of danger and therefore also an invisible source of fear.”
-7:15 Kierkegaard, _The Concept of Anxiety_
-7:28 “Fugitives and wanderers” Paraphrase, Genesis 4:14…
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Mar 28, 2020
Trailer / A Message from Miroslav Volf: Faith in a Time of Pandemic
For the Life of the World is produced by the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. For more info, visit faith.yale.edu
Follow Miroslav Volf on Twitter: @MiroslavVolf
-0:45 Introduction to the podcast (Evan Rosa)
-2:22 Beginning of Miroslav’s thoughts.
-3:30 What responding to the pandemic looks like for those professions that directly engage with tangible issues.
-4:20 What responding to the pandemic looks like for theologians and non-working Christians.
-6:00 “The question for all of us is how do we live with this disruption? How do we live with this menacing cloud that is over us? And the Christian faith—and I think theology as well—has something very important to say to that very question...The central question of the Christian faith is what kind of life is worthy of our humanity?
-7:30 “The Christmas story, as you will recall, describes the coming of Christ into the world as ‘light shining into darkness’ [John 1:5]—darkness of imperial oppression, darkness of wide…
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