Episode Highlights

"The one thing one mustn't do with these days is see the resurrection as just coming down off the cross a few days later. That trivializes the cross."

"Jesus is portrayed as being utterly one with God and utterly one with us. He's mortal. He's flesh. He can weep. He suffers."

"The right question is not so much what happened on the cross, as who happened on the cross."

"We are invited into this extraordinary intensity of the divine glory — but it's a glory that is utterly, utterly realistic about darkness, sin, death, suffering, and evil."

"The whole gospel, I think, is an education of desire."

About David Ford

David F. Ford, OBE, is Regius Professor of Divinity Emeritus at the University of Cambridge, where he held the chair from 1991 to 2014, and a Fellow of Selwyn College. He is the founding director of the Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme and a co-founder of the practice of Scriptural Reasoning. He has served as theological adviser to three Archbishops of Canterbury. His books include The Gospel of John: A Theological Commentary (Christianity Today 2023 Book Award Finalist), Theology: A Very Short Introduction, The Shape of Living, and most recently Meeting God in John. His commentary on John's Gospel took over twenty years to write and has been translated into Korean. He was awarded an OBE for services to theological scholarship and inter-faith relations in 2013. (Sources: University of Cambridge Faculty of Divinity page; Center of Theological Inquiry profile, Feb. 2026.) Ford does not appear to maintain a personal website or public social media.

Helpful Links and Resources

Meeting God in John: Inspiration and Encouragement from the Fourth Gospel, by David F. Ford https://www.amazon.com/Meeting-God-John-Inspiration-Encouragement/dp/1587437066

The Gospel of John: A Theological Commentary, by David F. Ford https://www.amazon.com/Gospel-John-Theological-Commentary/dp/1540964086

For the Life of the World Episode 224: How to Read the Gospel of John / David Ford https://faith.yale.edu/media/how-to-read-the-gospel-of-john

Scriptural Reasoning http://www.scripturalreasoning.org/

Denise Levertov, "On a Theme from Julian's Chapter XX" — discussed at Image Journal https://imagejournal.org/article/denise-levertov-a-memoir-and-appreciation/

Show Notes

• Why John's Gospel is the "matured gospel" — distilled from years of meditation, eyewitness reports, and rewriting
• "From his fullness we've all received grace upon grace" — the theme of superabundance running through John
• John wrote for both beginners and the experienced — simple Greek, inexhaustible depth
• Ford's biggest hope after 20 years writing his commentary: that readers would become "habitual rereaders" of John
• The prologue as the most influential short text in the history of Christianity
• "In the beginning was the Word" — the only framework for understanding Jesus is God and the whole of reality
• "The Word was made flesh" — utterly one with God, utterly one with us
• The farewell discourses of chapters 13–17 as probably the most profound teaching in the New Testament
• Chapter 17 as the most profound chapter in the Bible — Jesus' final prayer before the passion
• The foot washing: "All things having been given into his hands — and then what the hands do is wash the feet of his disciples"
• "Loving utterly, intimately, vulnerably, mutually" — the heading Ford gave to Maundy Thursday; used as the title of the Korean translation of his commentary
• "If you want to be great, wash feet"
• The "as" in John's Gospel — love as Jesus loved, sent as the Father sent — requiring us to go deep and then endlessly improvise
• Jesus washing Judas's feet — the radicality of love extended even to the one who betrays
• John omits the Eucharist from the Last Supper — placing eucharistic theology in chapter 6 to keep the focus on who Jesus is
• "I think nobody is in favor of the real absence of Jesus" — Ford on disputes over the real presence
• The beloved disciple as the model disciple, Peter as "all the rest of us" — the one who tries, fails, and is restored
• "The anonymity allows us all to write our names there" — reading ourselves into the beloved disciple and the mother of Jesus
• The threefold "Who are you looking for?" and the threefold "I am" at the arrest — echoing Exodus 3:14, the very name of God
• Before Pilate, facing the most powerful empire in history, Jesus headlines one thing: truth
• The scene at the cross as the seed of the church — Jesus sending his mother and the beloved disciple to each other
• "Here is your mother, here is your son" — the Greek verb for "received her" is the same as "whoever receives the one I send, receives me"
• "The right question is not so much what happened on the cross, as who happened on the cross"
• Nelson Mandela as a distant analogy: "Apartheid happened to Mandela, but Mandela happened to apartheid" — likewise, sin happened to Jesus, but Jesus happened to sin
• Denise Levertov's poem on Julian of Norwich: "the oneing with the Godhead opened him utterly to the pain"
• "He handed over the spirit" — not "gave up his spirit"; a possible first breathing of the Holy Spirit from the cross
• Scriptural Reasoning: its origins with Jewish textual reasoning scholars working out what it means to be Jewish after the Shoah
• Peter Ochs and the founding of Scriptural Reasoning at Princeton
• Ford on reading John chapter 8 with Peter Ochs: facing the "appalling inheritance" of antisemitic interpretation
• Adele Reinhartz's reading: John isn't anti-Semitic — John is Semitic; the Gospel relativizes ethnic identity
• Dietrich Bonhoeffer on doing justice to incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection — all three, not just one
• Receptive Ecumenism — looking at yourself first, asking how we can be better Christians rather than telling others to be like us
• "The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness does not overcome it. But it doesn't say the darkness disappeared."
• "The whole gospel, I think, is an education of desire"

#GospelOfJohn #HolyWeek #GoodFriday #DavidFord #Lent #PassionNarrative #TheologyOfTheCross #FootWashing #ScripturalReasoning #ForTheLifeOfTheWorld

Production Notes

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

"Can you view your work, your toil, not just as a means to a further end? Can you rather turn to simply enjoy the work itself?"

Together they discuss the distinction between meaning and value, why Qoheleth denies lasting significance while affirming joy, the harm of death and the death of memory, Ecclesiastes and Camus's absurdism, and the book's surprising message about enjoyment as an intrinsic good.

Episode Highlights

"I think what's at the heart of the Book of Ecclesiastes is just to say, maybe not, maybe there isn't a direct line between what you do and what the result will be."

"It's not just that you'll physically die, but meaning that you've accrued in your life, if there was such a thing, that dies with you."

"In this moment of working on what I'm working on, whatever it is, I am fully alive."

"You have a little piece of the pie, and just own it. Absorb yourself into whatever that may be."

"Can you view your work, your toil, not just as a means to a further end? Can you rather turn to simply enjoy the work itself?"

About Jesse Peterson

Jesse Peterson is an Assistant Professor of Biblical Studies in the School of Theology and Honors Program at George Fox University. He previously taught at Purdue University, Fordham University, and St. John's University. He earned a PhD in Hebrew Bible from Durham University (UK), an MDiv from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and a BA in music and Jewish studies from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. His work on Ecclesiastes has appeared in Harvard Theological Review, Vetus Testamentum, and the Journal of Theological Studies. He is the author of Qoheleth and the Philosophy of Value (Cambridge University Press).

Helpful Links and Resources

Qoheleth and the Philosophy of Value, by Jesse Peterson https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/qoheleth-and-the-philosophy-of-value/877B040C17EE8B9DD60174DEC7C306F7

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: https://www.amazon.com/Flow-Psychology-Experience-Perennial-Classics/dp/0061339202

Featured music by the Jesse Peterson Quartet https://jessepetersonquartet.bandcamp.com/album/man-of-the-earth

Show Notes

• The most philosophical book in the Bible
• Bringing Ecclesiastes into dialogue with contemporary philosophy of value
• Jaco Gericke's Hebrew Bible and Philosophy of Religion as catalyst
• Authorship: why scholars date Ecclesiastes to the 3rd century BCE
• The Solomonic persona and the epilogue problem
• Amal (toil) and yitron (gain): does life add up?
• Qoheleth as businessman: commercial language for philosophy
• Three theories of meaning: subjectivism, consequentialism, intersubjectivism
• "Maybe there isn't a direct line between what you do and what the result will be"
• Brueggemann's orientation, disorientation, new orientation
• The absurd: expectation vs. reality, linking Qoheleth to Camus
• "Meaning that you've accrued in your life, if there was such a thing, that dies with you"
• The same fate for all: wise and foolish, human and animal
• Epicurus and the harm of death
• Hebrew anthropology: dust plus life-breath, no afterlife
• The carpe diem passages: "Go eat your bread with joy"
• Joy as robust, not narcotic—enjoying toil as an end in itself
• "In this moment of working on what I'm working on, I am fully alive"
• Csikszentmihalyi's Flow and the autotelic experience
• "Just own it. Absorb yourself into whatever that may be."

#Ecclesiastes #Qoheleth #PhilosophyOfValue #MeaningInLife #BiblicalStudies #HebrewBible #WisdomLiterature #CarpeDiem #Absurdity #ForTheLifeOfTheWorld

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Jesse Peterson
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Noah Senthil
• 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

That creates a dilemma for Christian witness, one that can perhaps only be solved by the courage and fortitude to live in the tension this creates, honoring everyone’s dignity, and not falling into a gross idolatry of the state.

Oxford's Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology Luke Bretherton joins Ryan McAnnally-Linz to name what's happening as Christianity sees a resurgence in democratic public life, and what faithful witness demands. In this episode, Bretherton reflects on Christianity's re-emergence and the theology it requires. Together they discuss the real-time collapse of secular progressivism, democratic agency, Augustine on glory and shame, how media monetizes suspicion, why community organizing outlasts protest, and how the church might tell a truer—and more costly—story about common life.

Episode Highlights

"The plausibility structure of Christianity is kind of back in play in the post-progressive vibe shift."

"We want to have enemies—it's really hard to organize the world around love of enemies, and it's hard to make money off love of enemies."

"How do you express loyalty to your particular political community—loyalty without idolatry?"

"The giving over of responsibility is itself an act of self-dehumanizing."

"The uncle who drives you crazy at Thanksgiving is also the one who turns up with a bake when your child is ill—that's how idolatry works."

About Luke Bretherton

Luke Bretherton is Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford, director of the McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics, and Public Life, and a canon of Christ Church. Previously at Duke University and King's College London, his work spans political theology, democracy, and grassroots politics. He hosts the Listen, Organize, Act! podcast. Books include A Primer in Christian Ethics (Cambridge, 2023), Christ and the Common Life, and Christianity and Contemporary Politics.

Learn more at https://www.theology.ox.ac.uk/people/rev-canon-professor-luke-bretherton and @WestLondonMan https://x.com/WestLondonMan

Helpful Links and Resources

A Primer in Christian Ethics: Christ and the Struggle to Live Well (Cambridge, 2023) https://www.amazon.com/Primer-Christian-Ethics-Christ-Struggle/dp/1009329022

Listen, Organize, Act! podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/listen-organize-act-organizing-democratic-politics/id1553824477

Luke Bretherton at Oxford https://www.theology.ox.ac.uk/people/rev-canon-professor-luke-bretherton

Show Notes

• “Post-progressive vibe shift”; Christianity newly plausible across UK and Europe
• Bible Society "quiet revival" research; young people back in Oxford churches
• "The plausibility structure of Christianity is kind of back in play in the post-progressive vibe shift."
• Meaning, purpose, character; religion in government policy commissions
• Tom Holland; civilizational Christianity; the post-new-atheist turn
• Political theology replacing secular ideology: Ukraine, Gaza, India-Pakistan
• Two dominant scripts: total shame vs. lost glory
• Augustine's third way: grace, ambiguity, open wounds
• "How do you express loyalty to your particular political community—loyalty without idolatry?"
• Local social trust still holds; national trust collapsed
• Social media systems that profit from suspicion: monetized idolatry
• "We want to have enemies—it's really hard to organize the world around love of enemies, and it's hard to make money off love of enemies."
• Think with the body, from place; neighbors before scripts
• "The uncle who drives you crazy at Thanksgiving is also the one who turns up with a bake when your child is ill."
• Mass mailing dissolved federated civil society: unions, denominations, guilds
• Moses's challenge: atomized crowd to covenantal people
• Strongmen and unmediated belonging; technology and concentrated power
• Polanyi's two responses: strong man or democratic organizing
• "The giving over of responsibility is itself an act of self-dehumanizing."
• Mobilizing vs. organizing; the Arab Spring
• The Westfield story: a teenager discovers her democratic agency
• Thick vs. thin trust: the only metric that matters

#PublicTheology #PoliticalTheology #ChristianWitness #Democracy #CommunityOrganizing #FaithAndPolitics #ChristianEthics #PostProgressivism #ChurchAndState #Secularism

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Luke Bretherton
• Interview by Ryan McAnnally-Linz
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Noah Senthil
• 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

"Trauma tends to isolate and alienate us from our siblings, our human siblings. But ironically, this witnessing of one another's pain is the source of healing. So it has the very opposite effect of what is needed for it to be healed."

In this conversation, Lee reflects on the spiritual journey from what one author calls "alarmed aloneness" toward becoming beloved—seen, held, and gazed upon with love. Together they discuss the overlapping layers of collective, personal, racialized, and intergenerational trauma shaping contemporary life; attachment theory and its parallels with spiritual formation; the Ignatian tradition of imaginative, contemplative prayer; the still face experiment and the theology of the loving gaze; and why the church has something singular to offer the trauma crisis of our time.

Episode Highlights

"We are quite sure we're alone in the world and no one really sees us, no one truly cares and no one can be trusted. You're alone, overwhelmed, and helpless."

"Trauma tends to isolate and alienate us from our siblings, our human siblings. But ironically, this witnessing of one another's pain is the source of healing. So it has the very opposite effect of what is needed for it to be healed."

"I need to be held, but it's this illusory figure that holds me, because I have shut myself off to the very things that could help me, because no one is to be trusted."

"I've seen too much hope, and too much beauty, and too much healing walking through the spiritual exercises that I can no longer despair that trauma has the final word."

"Gazing upon the God who gazes upon me with love. That is contemplative prayer."

About Bo Karen Lee

Bo Karen Lee is Associate Professor of Spiritual Theology and Christian Formation at Princeton Theological Seminary, where she teaches contemplative theology, Ignatian spirituality, and the relationship between prayer and social justice. A leading voice in the integration of trauma studies and Christian formation, she brings the Ignatian tradition into conversation with psychology, attachment theory, and the lived experience of racialized communities. Her work draws on the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola to offer resources for healing that are both theologically grounded and pastorally immediate. She directs retreatants in the nineteenth annotation of the Spiritual Exercises and works regularly with spiritual directors trained in the Ignatian tradition.

Helpful Links and Resources

Bessel van der Kolk, Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society https://www.amazon.com/Traumatic-Stress-Overwhelming-Experience-Society/dp/1572300485

Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score https://www.besselvanderkolk.com/resources/the-body-keeps-the-score

Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother's Hands https://www.resmaa.com/resources

Kathy Weingarten, Common Shock: Witnessing Violence Every Day https://www.kathyweingarten.com

David Fleming SJ, Draw Me Into Your Friendship https://www.amazon.com/Draw-Me-Into-Your-Friendship/dp/0912422904

Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises https://www.ignatianspirituality.com/ignatian-prayer/the-spiritual-exercises/

Edward Tronick, Still Face Experiment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apzXGEbZht0

Find a Spiritual Director https://www.ignatianspirituality.com/making-good-decisions/find-a-spiritual-director/

Show Notes

• Trauma defined: "terror triggered by an inescapably stressful event that overwhelms existing coping mechanisms" — Bessel van der Kolk
• Layers of trauma: collective pandemic grief, personal wounding, racialized violence, intergenerational encoding, vicarious/secondary trauma
• Global pandemic as collective trauma — threat of death, forced isolation, planetary-scale overwhelm
• Racialized trauma and AAPI hate incidents — one in five AAPI individuals reported a hate incident in the U.S. in a 15-month window (as of late 2021)
• My Grandmother's Hands by Resmaa Menakem — racialized trauma encoded in bodies and communities https://www.resmaa.com/resources
• Cumulative microaggressions — daily small injuries can produce PTSD-level effects over time; growing body of clinical literature
• Secondary/vicarious trauma — hearing others' suffering reactivates unresolved wounds in caregivers and companions
• "Double jeopardy" — Kathy Weingarten's term for caregivers whose own past traumas are reactivated while supporting others
• Five professions at highest risk: clergy, health workers, teachers, police, journalists — context for the Great Resignation
• "Alarmed aloneness" — the net effect of trauma: certainty that no one sees you, no one cares, no one can be trusted
• "Trauma tends to isolate and alienate us from our siblings, our human siblings. But ironically, this witnessing of one another's pain is the source of healing."
• The orphan image: a girl in a Middle Eastern orphanage draws a chalk mother around her fetal body — illusory comfort as portrait of traumatic isolation
• Intergenerational trauma — encoded in DNA; personal testimony about learning her own mother was nearly killed as an infant, its echo across generations
• Kintsugi as healing metaphor — the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with gold; grief before repair, not a race to be fixed
• Robert Stolorow's concept: finding a "relational home" for traumatic suffering — the necessity of being witnessed
• Ignatius of Loyola — 16th-century Spanish soldier wounded by cannonball; encountered the living Christ through Ludolph of Saxony's Vita Christi during convalescence
• The Spiritual Exercises: a four-week manual for imaginative prayer — beloved and broken, walking with Christ through ministry, suffering, resurrection https://www.ignatianspirituality.com/ignatian-prayer/the-spiritual-exercises/
• Ignatian contemplative prayer defined: "gazing upon the God who gazes upon me with love" — kataphatic, embodied, not requiring stillness or silence
• Still Face Experiment (Edward Tronick) — infant distress when a loving mother goes blank; evidence that the gaze of love is neurologically and psychologically foundational https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apzXGEbZht0
• Attachment theory and spiritual formation — earned secure attachment: what unhealthy early bonding cannot provide, sustained relationship with God can
• "I've seen too much hope, and too much beauty, and too much healing walking through the spiritual exercises that I can no longer despair that trauma has the final word."
• Personal testimony: AAPI hate crimes, night terrors, contemplative prayer with a spiritual director; a vision of Mary, the wailing women, and the crucified Christ
• "Bo, they killed me too" — Christ's words in a contemplative vision; solidarity as the beginning of bearable grief
• Sartre's "hell is other people" reframed — parasitic dependence on others' approval vs. the freedom of knowing how God gazes upon you
• Resources for beginning: David Fleming's Draw Me Into Your Friendship; finding a spiritual director trained in Ignatian spirituality; Jesuit retreat centers

#TraumaHealing #IgnatianSpirituality #ContemplativePrayer #ChristianFormation #SpiritualTheology #MentalHealthAndFaith #RacializedTrauma #AttachmentTheory #ForTheLifeOfTheWorld #YaleDivinity

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Bo Karen Lee
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Annie Trowbridge 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

In this episode with Evan Rosa, Dault reflects on interpretation, responsibility, and how readers shape the meaning and moral impact of the Bible.

Together they discuss the materiality of scripture, translation and betrayal, moral seriousness, scriptural reasoning across traditions, catastrophic love, and the ethical responsibility readers bear for how sacred texts are used.

Episode Highlights

“To assume that we know what a text is telling us is a matter of hubris.”

“The Bible doesn’t tell you to do anything. You as a reader decide what to do.”

“Violence is always an act of interpretation.”

“We never get to a place where everything is clean and everyone benefits.”

“We have to take responsibility for the violence we involve ourselves in.”

About David Dault

David Dault is a theologian, journalist, and media producer whose work explores religion, culture, ethics, and interpretation. He is Executive Producer and host of Things Not Seen: Conversations About Culture and Faith, a nationally distributed public radio program. He teaches in the Institute of Pastoral Studies at Loyola University Chicago. Dault’s scholarship focuses on hermeneutics, religion and media, and the ethical implications of how sacred texts are interpreted and used in public life. His book The Accessorized Bible examines the material forms, cultural framing, and interpretive communities that shape how people encounter scripture. He holds degrees in theology and religious studies and frequently writes and lectures on religion, politics, and culture.

Helpful Links And Resources

The Accessorized Bible, by David Dault https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300153125/the-accessorized-bible/

Things Not Seen: Conversations About Culture and Faith https://thingsnotseenradio.com

David Dault’s personal website https://www.daviddault.com/

Show Notes

• The Accessorized Bible—material culture of scripture, design, marketing niches, and the ways the physical form of the Bible shapes how readers interpret and use it
• Bible as object, medium, and cultural artifact; Marshall McLuhan and media theory—the form of a book shaping how ideas move between minds
• Books as technologies of imagination and identity formation; reading as a kind of “magical” transfer of ideas from one mind into another
• “To assume that we know what a text is telling us is a matter of hubris.” Interpretation requires caution, humility, and the recognition that texts exceed our control
• Making the familiar strange again; recovering the power of scripture by refusing to domesticate it or assume we fully understand it
• Franz Rosenzweig on preserving the alienness of sacred texts; debate with Martin Buber on translation and clarity
• Translation as interpretation—translators inevitably carry values, ideologies, and cultural assumptions into the text
• Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence; interpreters “misread” texts in order to wrestle with their influence and generate new meaning
• Reading scripture in community; trust, vulnerability, and shared responsibility among interpreters
• Scriptural reasoning—Jews, Christians, and Muslims reading shared stories (Noah, Abraham, Moses) together without claiming mastery over the text
• Tikkun olam—Jewish ethical tradition of “repairing the world”; the world is wounded and humans participate in its healing
• Repentance and Repair—Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg on moral accountability, restitution, and the work of restoring relationships
• Violence embedded in interpretation; moral action always involves choices about attention, resources, and responsibility
• The “flashlight” metaphor—moral attention illuminating one suffering person while another need temporarily falls into shadow
• Jairus’s daughter and the woman with the hemorrhage—competing moral urgencies in the Gospels
• “We never get to a place where everything is clean and everyone benefits.” Moral action always involves tragic limitation and competing responsibilities
• Levinas and infinite responsibility; the ethical demand arising from the face of the person before us
• Moral seriousness versus performative irony; resisting discourse driven by trolling, spectacle, and dopamine-driven outrage
• A Bible Is A Book—dismantling the assumption that sacred texts themselves command moral action
• Steve Martin’s The Jerk and the phone book illustration; a sniper randomly selecting a name and deciding someone should die
• “The Bible doesn’t tell you what to do.” Readers decide what moral actions follow from a text
• Reader responsibility; refusing the excuse “the Bible told me to,” recognizing moral agency belongs to interpreters
• Scripture as “accessory to a crime”—sacred texts used as cover for violence, exclusion, or cruelty
• The Bible as platform—modular text shaped by study notes, editorial commentary, illustrations, and devotional framing
• Study Bibles, children’s Bibles, niche-market editions; publishing strategies shaping the interpretive experience
• Platform logic—similar to Facebook or Twitter; users curate meaning from a shared medium
• Proof-texting and selective quotation; constructing entire moral worlds from isolated passages
• Hannah Arendt on responsibility; loving the world enough to accept responsibility for it
• James Baldwin leaving Paris after the Little Rock crisis; refusing comfort while others bear injustice
• “Someone should have been there with her.” Baldwin’s recognition that solidarity requires leaving safety and standing beside the vulnerable
• Catastrophic love—risking institutions, traditions, and comfort for the sake of vulnerable bodies
• Matthew 25 ethics; encountering Christ among the hungry, imprisoned, and marginalized
• Moral seriousness as daily practice; imperfect responsibility, persistent solidarity, doing what one can today and beginning again tomorrow

#Bible

#ChristianBible

#BiblicalInterpretation

#TheologyPodcast

#ChristianEthics

#Hermeneutics

#Scripture

#FaithAndCulture

#DavidDault

Production Notes

• This podcast featured David Dault
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Noah Senthil
• 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

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 pursuing the grace to find (or perhaps return) to yourself as God has called you to be.

In his classic text, Great Lent, Orthodox priest and theologian Alexander Schmemann calls this season one of “bright sadness”—an important paradox that represents both Christian realism and hope.

Lent is not about gloom, self-loathing, performative penitence, or despair. Instead it brings us face to face with our human condition, reminding us that we did not bring ourselves into being and someday we will die, sober about the reality and banality of evil, and sorrowful in a way that leads back to joy.

Esau McCaulley is The Jonathan Blanchard Associate Professor of New Testament and Public Theology at Wheaton College, a contributing writer for the New York Times, and is author of many books, including children’s books. Notables are Reading While Black, a theology of Lent, and his latest: How Far to the Promised Land: One Black Family’s Story of Hope and Survival in the American South.

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

About Esau McCaulley

Esau McCaulley is The Jonathan Blanchard Associate Professor of New Testament and Public Theology at Wheaton College, a contributing writer for the New York Times, and is author of many books, including children’s books. Notables are Reading While Black, a theology of Lent, and his latest: How Far to the Promised Land: One Black Family’s Story of Hope and Survival in the American South. Learn more at https://esaumccaulley.com/.

Show Notes

• Lent: The Season of Repentance and Renewal — https://esaumccaulley.com/books/lent-book/
• 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.”

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

Acknowledgements

• This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of Blueprint 1543. For more information, visit http://blueprint1543.org/.

“I think our faith compels us to hope for and enact flourishing for everyone.”

In this episode with Evan Rosa, Ecklund reflects on vocation, gender, authenticity, and principled pluralism in modern workplaces. Together they discuss workplace identity, gender discrimination, calling across occupations, boundaries around work, religion’s public role, and pluralism in professional life.

Episode Highlights

“I think our faith compels us to hope for and enact flourishing for everyone.”

“People use their religion to bring justice to their workplaces.”

“They don’t want to pretend they’re someone different.”

“There are ways in which our faith traditions can put needed boundaries around our work.”

“I am being fully who I am and I am oriented toward the other.”

About Elaine Ecklund

Elaine Howard Ecklund is a sociologist of religion and professor at Rice University, where she directs the Boniuk Institute for the Study and Advancement of Religious Tolerance. Her research focuses on religion in public life, science and faith, and workplace culture. She is the author or co-author of numerous books, including Religion in a Changing Workplace and Working for Better: A New Approach to Faith at Work (with Denise Daniels). Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation and featured in major media outlets.

Helpful Links And Resources

Working for Better: A New Approach to Faith at Work https://www.ivpress.com/working-for-better

Religion in a Changing Workplace https://academic.oup.com/book/58194

Boniuk Institute for Religious Tolerance https://boniuk.rice.edu/

Elaine Ecklund website https://elaineecklund.com

Show Notes

• Religion and workplace life
• Sociology of belief research background
• Studying scientists and religion
• Expanding research beyond science workplaces
• Collaboration with Denise Daniels
• Academic and practical faith-at-work books
• Defining work as paid labor
• Honoring caregiving and volunteer labor
• “People don’t want to pretend they’re someone different.”
• Bringing whole selves to work
• Calling across occupational sectors
• Workplace autonomy and meaning
• “People use their religion to bring justice to their workplaces.”
• Faith creating boundaries around work
• Gender dynamics in workplaces
• Story of hiding motherhood in academia
• Fragmentation and identity performance
• “There are ways in which our faith traditions can put needed boundaries around our work.”
• Church gender expectations
• Billy Graham rule implications
• Work skills serving congregations
• Living in pluralistic society
• Principled pluralism explained
• “I am being fully who I am and I am oriented toward the other.”
• Embrace, dignity, and learning from difference

#FaithAndWork #ElaineEcklund #PrincipledPluralism #ReligionAndWorkplace #Vocation #GenderAndWork #HumanFlourishing

Production Notes

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

“There is a certain comfort in knowing you have somebody who’s always in your corner.”

In this conversation with Evan Rosa, Kasich reflects on personal faith shaped by tragedy, the search for purpose, and why character matters more than ideology in leadership. Together they discuss religious faith in American life, his experience running in the 2016 Republican presidential primaries, voting on character over beliefs, firm political commitments, open-minded perspective taking, his vision of a life worth living, and before the end of this conversation, you’ll find out his favorite Metallica song.

Episode Highlights

“There is a certain comfort in knowing you have somebody who’s always in your corner.”

“You can be firm while at the same time looking at a point of view of somebody who’s diametrically opposed to you.”

“I look for character. I don’t look for what somebody thinks about the Book of Revelation.”

“Faith informs the way I think about things, but it doesn’t spell out what I’m going to do.”

“If you begin to work together to solve a problem locally, it can actually create friendship.”

About John Kasich

John Kasich is a former U.S. congressman, two-term governor of Ohio, and presidential candidate with more than four decades of experience in public service, media, and civic leadership. First elected to the Ohio State Senate at age 26, he later served 18 years in the U.S. House of Representatives before becoming governor in 2011. Kasich has authored six books exploring politics, faith, leadership, and civic responsibility, including his most recent, Heaven Help Us: How Faith Communities Inspire Hope, Strengthen Neighborhoods, and Build the Future. He is known for emphasizing character, dignity, and community-based solutions over ideological rigidity. Kasich frequently speaks on leadership, faith in public life, and democratic renewal, and continues to engage across political and cultural divides in pursuit of common purpose. Learn more and follow at https://johnkasich.com and https://twitter.com/JohnKasich

Show Notes

• Growing up Catholic, altar service, early religious formation
• Tragedy in 1987, parents killed by drunk driver
• “Where do you stand vis-à-vis your eternal destiny?”
• Faith as ongoing window of questioning, not certainty
• God’s existence, care, and personal relationship
• “Faith itself is a gift. God has to act first.”
• Fear, loss, and the backstop of divine presence
• “You’ve got the most powerful being in all of history kind of got your back.”
• Faith shared as gift, not coercion or argument
• Voting based on character, not doctrinal alignment
• Scripture informing decisions, not dictating policy
• Respect for the poor as moral baseline
• Christian nationalism and the question of objective truth
• Politics and faith distinct, neither hostile nor coercive
• Singles win games, local action over grand crusades
• Faith communities as clubhouses for moral action
• Working locally dissolves partisan hostility
• Life worth living as purpose, gifts, and contribution
• Character, integrity, and not taking advantage of others
• Freedom from fear, boxes, and rigid identities
• Kindness versus niceness as moral distinction
• Open-mindedness as antidote to boredom and fear
• Campaigning as test of endurance, character, and empathy
• “People wanted to know who you were more than your ideas.”
• Pursuing convictions while staying rooted in faith communities

Production Notes

• This podcast featured John Kasich
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Noah Senthil
• 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

#FaithAndPolitics

#CharacterMatters

#PublicFaith

#CivicLife

#CommonGood

#JohnKasich

“I see this as a gift from God, a creator that allows us to find each other again.”

In this conversation with Evan Rosa, Grant reflects on his 2025 book, Murriyang: Song of Time—his philosophical and spiritual exploration of the human place in the world and faith as lived experience rather than abstraction. He looks closely at his father’s life in order to come to terms with his own, the meaning of fatherhood and how to understand and forgive our fathers, masculinity and vulnerability, Aboriginal history and identity, masculinity and vulnerability, forgiveness and sacrifice, prayer and poetry, and the whole human experience of time and eternity.

Episode Highlights

“We inherit our father’s cups.”

“We must forgive our fathers. It is the only way that we can forgive ourselves.”

“We cannot survive without each other.”

“Man is not made for history. History is made for man.”

“ … to confront the beauty of that mortality—my father’s final gift to me is his death.”

About Stan Grant

Stan Grant is an Australian journalist, author, and public intellectual of Wiradjuri, Kamilaroi, and Dharawal heritage. A former international correspondent and broadcaster, he has written widely on Indigenous identity, history, faith, and moral responsibility. Grant is the author of several acclaimed books, including Talking to My Country and Murriyang: Song of Time, which blends prayer, memoir, poetry, and theology. His work consistently resists abstraction in favor of embodied human experience, emphasizing forgiveness, attention, and the dignity of the human person. Grant has received national honors for journalism and cultural leadership and remains a leading voice in conversations about history, masculinity, faith, and what it means to live lives worthy of our shared humanity.

Helpful Links and Resources

Murriyang: Song of Time https://www.harpercollins.com.au/9781460763827/murriyang/

Talking to My Country https://www.harpercollins.com.au/9781460752210/talking-to-my-country/

Stan Grant official website https://www.stangrant.com.au

Show Notes

• Fathers and sons; inherited burden, sacrifice, and responsibility
• “We inherit our father’s cups”
• Christ in Gethsemane as archetype of father-son suffering
• Masculinity as physical burden, scars, toughness
• “We must forgive our fathers. It is the only way that we can forgive ourselves and live in a world of forgiveness with the other.”
• Yindyamarra: respect, gentleness, quietness, forgiveness
• Improvisation and rehearsal; jazz as spiritual and artistic model
• “I have never written a second draft.”
• Second thought as artifice, hiding, dishonesty
• Forgiveness of self before speaking; imperfection and risk
• “If silence is violence, then we have redefined the very nature of violence itself.”
• Giftedness of life; what is given and received
• Gift exchange versus transaction in modern society
• “We offer the gift of ourselves to each other.”
• Murriyang as Psalter, prayer, song, contemplation of time and God
• Reading slowly; opening anywhere; shelter from modern noise
• “We cannot survive without each other.”
• One-person performance; no script, immediacy, intimacy
• Music, poetry, time, mortality woven together
• Father’s body as history; sawmills, injuries, exhaustion
• Childhood memory of bath; “the water is stained black with blood”
• Mother’s touch; tenderness amid survival
• Late-life renaissance; language recovery, teaching, honors
• Murriyang (heaven) and Babiin (father) liturgical, prayerful, dialogical alternation throughout the text
• St. Augustine: “What was God doing before he made time? He was making hell for the over-curious.”
• Is God in time? Or out of time?
• Speaking of eternity or timelessness still imputes the concept of time.
• “ The imaginative space of time itself, it reaches to an horizon. But what is beyond the horizon? For modernity, of course, time is the big story. To be modern is to reinvent time. It's to be new. Modernity and technology is all about taming time.”
• “Man is not made for history. History is made for man.”
• Attention, affliction, abstraction, and the loss of human touch
• “My father’s gift to me is his death.”
• Mortality as meaning; resisting transhumanism
• Time, modernity, instant life, collapsing space
• Fragility, love, forgiveness, and beginning again
• Ending where we began

#StanGrant

#Murriyang

#Fatherhood

#Masculinity

#Forgiveness

#TimeAndFaith

#HumanFlourishing

#Australia

Production Notes

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

“It’s time some person should see these calamities to their end.” (Thomas Clarkson, 1785)

“There are millions of slaves in the world today.” (Kevin Bales, 2025)

In this episode, they consider how conscience, power, and religious belief can either sustain enslavement or become forces for abolition. Together they discuss the psychology of slaveholding, faith’s complicity and resistance, Quaker abolitionism, modern debt bondage, ISIS and Yazidi slavery, and what meaningful action looks like today.

https://freetheslaves.net/

––––––––––––––––––

Episode Highlights

“There are millions of slaves in the world today.”

“Statistics isn’t gonna do it. I need to actually show people things.”

“They have sexual control. They can do what they like.”

“Slavery is flowing into our lives hidden in the things we buy.”

“We have to widen our sphere of concern.”

––––––––––––––––––

About Kevin Bales

Kevin Bales is a leading scholar and activist in the global fight against modern slavery. He is Professor of Contemporary Slavery at the University of Nottingham and co-founder of Free the Slaves, an international NGO dedicated to ending slavery worldwide. Bales has spent more than three decades researching forced labor, debt bondage, and human trafficking, combining academic rigor with on-the-ground investigation. His work has shaped international policy, influenced anti-slavery legislation, and brought global attention to forms of enslavement often dismissed as historical. He is the author of several influential books, including Disposable People and Friends of God, Slaves of Men, which examines the complex relationship between religion and slavery across history and into the present. Learn more and follow at https://www.kevinbales.org and https://www.freetheslaves.net

About Michael Rota

Michael Rota is Professor of Philosophy at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, where he teaches and researches in the philosophy of religion, moral psychology, and the history of slavery and religion. His work spans scholarly articles on the definition of slavery, the moral psychology underlying social change and abolition, and the relevance of theological concepts to ethical life. Rota is co-author with Kevin Bales of Friends of God, Slaves of Men: Religion and Slavery, Past and Present, a comprehensive interdisciplinary study of how religions have both justified and resisted systems of enslaving human beings from antiquity to the present day. He is also the author of Taking Pascal’s Wager: Faith, Evidence, and the Abundant Life, an extended argument for the reasonableness and desirability of Christian commitment. In addition to his academic writing, he co-leads projects in philosophy and education and is co-founder of Personify, a platform exploring AI and student learning. Learn more and follow at his faculty profile and personal website https://mikerota.wordpress.com and on X/Twitter @mikerota.

––––––––––––––––––

Helpful Links And Resources

Disposable People by Kevin Bales

https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520281820/disposable-people

Friends of God, Slaves of Men by Kevin Bales and Michael Rota

https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520383265/friends-of-god-slaves-of-men

Free the Slaves

https://www.freetheslaves.net

Voices for Freedom

https://voicesforfreedom.org

International Justice Mission

https://www.ijm.org

Talitha Kum

https://www.talithakum.info

––––––––––––––––––

Show Notes

– Slavery named as a contemporary moral crisis obscured by twentieth-century abolition narratives

– Kevin Bales’s encounter with anti-slavery leaflet in London, mid-1990s

– “There are millions of slaves in the world today … I thought, look, that can’t be true because I don’t know that. I’m a professor. I should know that.”

– Stories disrupting moral distance more powerfully than statistics

– “There were three little stories inside, about three different types of enslavement … it put a hook in me like a fish and pulled me.”

– United Nations documentation mostly ignored despite vast evidence

– Decades of investigation into contemporary slavery

– Fieldwork across five regions, five forms of enslavement

– Kevin Bales’s book, Disposable People as embodied witness with concrete stories

– “Statistics isn’t gonna do it. I need to actually show people things. There’s gonna be something that breaks hearts the way it did me when I was in the field.”

– Psychological resistance to believing slavery touches ordinary life

– Anti-Slavery International as original human rights organization founded in U.K. in 1839

– Quaker and Anglican foundations of abolitionist movements

– Religion as both justification for slavery and engine of resistance

– Call for renewed faith-based abolition today

– Slavery and religion intertwined from early human cultures

– Colonial expansion intensifying moral ambiguity

– Columbus, Genoa, and enslavement following failed gold extraction

– Spanish royal hesitation over legitimacy of slavery

– Las Casas’s moral conversion after refusal of absolution

– “He eventually realized this is totally wrong. What we are doing, we are destroying these people. And this is not what God wants us to be doing.”

– Sepúlveda’s Aristotelian defense of hierarchy and profit

– Moral debate without effective structural enforcement

– Power described as intoxicating and deforming conscience

– Hereditary debt bondage in Indian villages

– Caste, ethnicity, and generational domination

– Sexual violence as mechanism of absolute control

– “They have sexual control. They can beat up the men, rape the women, steal the children. They can do pretty much what they like.”

– Three-year liberation process rooted in trust, education, and collective refusal

– Former slaves returning as teachers and organizers

– Liberation compared to Plato’s allegory of the cave

– Post-liberation vulnerability and risk of recapture

– Power inverted in Christian teaching

– “The disciples are arguing about who’s the greatest, and Jesus says, the greatest among you will be the slave of all… don’t use power to help yourself. Use it to serve.”

– Psychological explanations for delayed abolition

– The psychological phenomenon of “motivated reasoning” that shapes moral conclusions

– “The conclusions we reach aren’t just shaped by the objective evidence the world provides. They’re shaped also by the internal desires and goals and motivations people have.”

– Economic self-interest and social consensus sustaining injustice

– Quaker abolition through relational, conscience-driven confrontation

– First major religious body to forbid slaveholding

– Boycotts of slave-produced goods and naval blockade of slave trade

– Modern slavery as organized criminal enterprise

– ISIS enslavement of Yazidi women

– Religious reasoning weaponized for genocide

– “They said, for religious reasons, we just need to eradicate this entire outfit.”

– Online slave auctions and cultural eradication

– Internal Islamic arguments for abolition

– Restricting the permissible for the common good

– Informing conscience as first step toward action

– Community sustaining long-term resistance

– Catholic religious sisters as leading global abolitionists

– Hidden slavery embedded in everyday consumer goods

– “There’s so much slavery flowing into our lives which is hidden… in our homes, our watches, our computers, the minerals, all this.”

– Expanding moral imagination beyond immediate needs

– “Your sphere of concern has to be wider… how do I start caring about something that I don’t see?”

– “It’s time some person should see these calamities to their end.” (Thomas Clarkson, 1785)

––––––––––––––––––

#ModernSlavery

#FaithAndJustice

#HumanDignity

#Abolition

#FreeTheSlaves

Production Notes

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

“I don’t believe life feels like beginnings, middles, and ends.”

In this episode, Davis reflects on how lived trauma narrows attention, reshapes language, and unsettles conventional storytelling. Together they discuss poetry as dwelling rather than explanation, childhood and formation amid violence, image versus narrative, moral imagination, and the challenge of staying present to suffering.

Episode Highlights

“Nothing has happened at Hawley School. Please hear me. I have opened every door and seen your children.”

“And that was what it is not to suffer. This is the not-suffering, happy-ending story.”

“I’m always narrowing focus.”

“I think stories lie to us sometimes.”

“I think of the shooting as a nail driven into the tree.”

“I’m capable of anything. I’m afraid I’m capable of anything.”

“I tried to love and out of me came poison.”

About Carol Ann Davis

Carol Ann Davis is a poet, essayist, and professor of English at Fairfield University. She is the author of the poetry collections Psalm and Atlas Hour, and the essay collection The Nail in the Tree: Essays on Art, Violence, and Childhood. A former longtime editor of the literary journal Crazyhorse, she directs Fairfield University’s Low-Residency MFA and founded Poetry in Communities, an initiative bringing poetry to communities affected by violence. An NEA Fellow in Poetry, Davis’s work has appeared in The Atlantic, The American Poetry Review, Image, Agni, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere. Learn more and follow at https://www.carolanndavis.org

Helpful Links and Resources

The Nail in the Tree: Essays on Art, Violence, and Childhood https://www.tupelopress.org/bookstore/p/the-nail-in-the-tree-essays-on-art-violence-and-childhood

Songbird https://www.weslpress.org/9780819502223/songbird/

Psalm https://www.tupelopress.org/bookstore/p/psalm

Atlas Hour https://www.amazon.com/Atlas-Hour-Carol-Ann-Davis/dp/1936797003

Carol Ann Davis official website https://www.carolanndavis.org

Show Notes

• Carol Ann Davis recounts moving to Newtown, Connecticut just months before Sandy Hook, teaching a course at Fairfield University when news of the shooting first breaks
• Her young children attended a local elementary school
• Confusion, delay, and the unbearable seconds of not knowing which school was attacked
• A colleague’s embrace as the reality of the shooting becomes clear
• Parenting under threat and the visceral fear of losing one’s children
• “Nothing has happened at Hawley School. Please hear me. I have opened every door and seen your children.” (Hawley School’s Principal sends this message to parents, including Carol Ann)
• Living inside the tension where nothing happened and everything changed
• Writers allowing mystery, unknowing, and time to remain unresolved
• Naming “directly affected families” and later “families of loss”
• Ethical care for proximity without flattening grief into universality
• The moral value of being useful within an affected community
• Narrowing attention as survival, parenting, and poetic discipline
• Choosing writing, presence, and community over national policy debates
• Childhood formation under the long shadow of gun violence
• “I think of the shooting as a nail driven into the tree. And I’m the tree.” (Carol Ann quotes her older son, then in 4th grade)
• Growth as accommodation rather than healing or resolution
• Integration without erasure as a model for living with trauma
• Refusing happy-ending narratives after mass violence
• “I don’t believe life feels like beginnings, middles, and ends.”
• Poetry as dwelling inside experience rather than extracting meaning
• Resisting stories that turn suffering into takeaways
• Crucifixion imagery, nails, trees, and the violence of embodiment
• “I’m capable of anything. I’m afraid I’m capable of anything.”
• Violence as elemental, human, animal, and morally unsettling
• Distinguishing intellectual mastery from dwelling in lived experience
• A poem’s turn toward fear: loving children and fearing harm
• “I tried to love and out of me came poison.”
• Childhood memory, danger, sweetness, and oceanic smallness
• Being comforted by smallness inside something vast and terrifying
• Ending without closure, choosing remembrance over resolution

#CarolAnnDavis

#PoetryAndViolence

#TraumaAndAttention

#SandyHook

#SandyHookPromise

#FaithAndWriting

#Poetry

#ChildhoodAndMemory

Production Notes

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

The Rt. Rev. Dr. Graham Tomlin (St. Mellitus College, the Centre for Cultural Witness) joins Evan Rosa for a sweeping exploration of Blaise Pascal—the 17th-century mathematician, scientist, philosopher, and theologian whose insights into human nature remain strikingly relevant. Tomlin traces Pascal’s life of brilliance and illness, his tension between scientific acclaim and radical devotion, and his deep engagement with Descartes, Montaigne, and Augustine. The conversation moves through Pascal’s analysis of self-deception, his critique of rationalism and skepticism, the transformative Night of Fire, his compassion for the poor, and the wager’s misunderstood meaning. Tomlin presents Pascal as a thinker who speaks directly to our distracted age, revealing a humanity marked by greatness, misery, and a desperate longing only grace can satisfy.

This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. Visit tyndale.foundation to learn more.

Episode Highlights

1. “Our longings are much more powerful than our logic, and our desires are stronger than our reason.”
2. “The greatness and the refuse of the universe—that’s what we are. We’re the greatest thing and also the worst thing.”
3. “If everybody knew what everybody else said about them, there would not be four friends left in the world.”
4. “Only grace can begin to turn that self-oriented nature around and implant in us a desire for God.”
5. “The reason you cannot believe is not because of your reason; it’s because of your passions.”

Show Notes

• Graham Tomlin introduces the Night of Fire and Pascal’s meditation on “the greatness of the human soul”
• Evan Rosa frames Pascal as a figure of mystery, mechanics, faith, and modern technological influence.
• Tomlin contrasts Pascal with Descartes and Montaigne—rationalism vs. skepticism—locating Pascal between their poles.
• Pascal’s awareness of distraction, competition, and “all men naturally hate each other” surfaces early as a key anthropological insight.
• Evan notes Nietzsche’s striking admiration: “his blood runs through my veins.”
• Tomlin elaborates on Pascal’s lifelong tension between scientific achievement and spiritual devotion.
• The story of the servant discovering the hidden Night of Fire parchment in Pascal’s coat lining is recounted.
• Tomlin reads the core text: “Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy… Let me never be separated from him.”
• Pascal’s distinction: “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers.”
• Discussion of Jansenism, Augustinian anthropology, and the gravity of human fallenness.
• Tomlin sets the philosophical context: Pascal as a counter to both rationalist optimism and skeptical relativism.
• Pascal’s core tension—grandeur and misery—is presented as the interpretive key to human nature.
• Quote emerges: “the greatness and the refuse of the universe—that’s what we are.”
• Tomlin describes Pascal’s political skepticism and the idea that politics offers only “rules for a madhouse.”
• Pascal’s diagnosis of self-deception: “If everybody knew what everybody else said about them, there would not be four friends left in the world.”
• Evan raises questions about social hope; Tomlin answers with Pascal’s belief that only grace can break self-love.
• They explore Pascal’s critique of distraction and the famous line: “the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.”
• Tomlin ties this to contemporary digital distraction—“weapons of mass distraction”.
• The conversation turns to the wager, reframed not as coercion but exposure: unbelief is driven by passions more than reasons.
• Closing reflections highlight the apologetic project of the Pensées, Pascal’s brilliance, and his ongoing relevance.

Helpful Links and References

Special thanks to the Center for Christian Witness and Seen and Unseen https://www.seenandunseen.com/

Blaise Pascal: The Man Who Made the Modern World, by Graham Tomlin https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/graham-tomlin/blaise-pascal/9781399807661/

Pensées, by Blaise Pascal https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18269

Provincial Letters, by Blaise Pascal https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2407

Why Being Yourself Is a Bad Idea, by Graham Tomlin

https://www.amazon.com/Why-Being-Yourself-Bad-Idea/dp/0281087097

Montaigne’s Essays https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3600

Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/23306

Augustine’s Confessions https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3296

About Graham Tomlin

Graham Tomlin is a British theologian, writer, and church leader. He is the former Bishop of Kensington (2015-2022) in the Church of England and now serves as Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and President of St Mellitus College in London. He is widely known for connecting theology with cultural life and public imagination. Tomlin is the author of several books, including Looking Through the Cross, The Widening Circle, and Why Being Yourself Is a Bad Idea: And Other Countercultural Notions. His latest book is an intellectual and spiritual biography, Blaise Pascal: The Man Who Made the Modern World.

Production Notes

• This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation
• This podcast featured Graham Tomlin
• Production Assistance by Emily Brookfield and Alexa Rollow
• 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 by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

This episode is part 6 of a series, SOLO, which explores the theological, moral, and psychological dimensions of loneliness, solitude, and being alone.

In this reflective conclusion to the series, Macie Bridge and Ryan McAnnally-Linz explore loneliness not as a pathology to solve but as a universal, creaturely experience that reveals our longing for relationship. Drawing on insights from conversations throughout the series, they consider how loneliness emerges in the gap between what we desire relationally and what we actually have, and why this gap might be intrinsic to being human. They discuss solitude as a vital space for discernment, self-understanding, and listening for God; how risk is inherent to relationships; why the church holds unique potential for embodied community; and how even small interactions with neighbors and strangers can meet real needs. Together they reflect on grief, social isolation, resentment, vulnerability, and the invitation to turn loneliness into attentiveness—to God, to ourselves, and to our neighbors, human and non-human alike.

Episode Highlights

“Loneliness is just baked into our creaturely lives.”

“There really is no solution to loneliness—and also that’s okay.”

“We invite a certain level of risk because we invite another person closer to our own human limits.”

“There’s no blanket solution. We are all experiencing this thing, but we are all experiencing it differently.”

“I realized I could be a gift to her, and she could be a gift to me, even in that small moment.”

About Macie Bridge

Macie Bridge is Operations Coordinator for the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. Macie is originally from the small town of Groton, Massachusetts, where she was raised in the United Church of Christ. As an undergraduate at Trinity College in Hartford, CT, Macie studied English literature, creative writing, and religious studies. She spent a year in Chapel Hill, North Carolina with the Episcopal Service Corps after receiving her B.A. There, she served as Events & Communications Coordinator for L’Arche North Carolina—an emerging L’Arche community, and therefore an incredible “crash course” into the nonprofit world.

About Ryan McAnnally-Linz

Ryan McAnnally-Linz is Associate Director of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture and a theologian focusing on flourishing, meaning, and the moral life. He is co-author of Public Faith in Action and The Home of God with Miroslav Volf, and Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most with Miroslav Volf and Matt Croasmun.

Show Notes

• Loneliness as Creaturely Condition
• Loneliness as “baked into our creaturely lives,” not a sign of brokenness or failure
• The “gap between what we want and what we have” in relationships
• Loneliness as a universal human experience across ages and contexts
• Solitude and Discernment
• Solitude as a place to listen more clearly to God and oneself
• Time alone clarifies intuition, vocation, and identity.
• Solitude shapes self-knowledge outside societal expectations.
• Community, Church, and Embodiment
• Churches can be embodied spaces of connection yet still feel lonely.
• Hospitality requires more than “hi”; it requires digging deeper into personal encounter.
• Embodied church life resists technological comforts that reduce vulnerability.
• Grief, Risk, and Vulnerability
• Distinguishing grief-loneliness from social-isolation loneliness
• Relationships inherently involve risk, limits, and potential hurt.
• Opening oneself to others requires relinquishing entitlement.
• Everyday Encounters and Ecological Attention
• Small moments with neighbors (like taking a stranger’s photo) can be meaningful.
• Loneliness can signal attention toward creaturely neighbors—birds, bugs, landscapes.
• Turning loneliness outward can widen our capacity for care.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Macie Bridge
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Alexa Rollow, Emily Brookfield, and Hope Chun
• 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

“He said, ‘Someone finally saw me. I’ve been in this hospital for 20 years and I didn’t think anyone ever saw me.’”

This episode is part 5 of a series, SOLO, which explores the theological, moral, and psychological dimensions of loneliness, solitude, and being alone.

In this episode, Columbia physician and medical ethicist Lydia Dugdale joins Macie Bridge to reflect on loneliness, solitude, and what it means to die—and live—well. Drawing from her clinical work in New York City and the years of research and experience that went into her book The Lost Art of Dying, Dugdale exposes a crisis of unrepresented patients dying alone, the loss of communal care, and medicine’s discomfort with mortality.

She recalls the medieval Ars Moriendi tradition, where dying was intentionally communal, and explores how virtue and community sustain a good death. Together they discuss solitude as restorative rather than fearful, loneliness as a modern epidemic, and the sacred responsibility of seeing one another deeply. With stories from her patients and her own reflections on family, COVID isolation, and faith, Dugdale illuminates how medicine, mortality, and moral imagination converge on one truth: to die well, we must learn to live well … together.

Helpful Links and Resources

• The Lost Art of Dying: Reviving Forgotten Wisdom by Lydia S. Dugdale
• Pew Research Center Study on Loneliness (2025)
• Harvard Study of Adult Development on Loneliness

Episode Highlights

1. “If you want to die well, you have to live well.”
2. “Community doesn’t appear out of nowhere at the bedside.”
3. “He said, ‘Someone finally saw me. I’ve been in this hospital for 20 years and I didn’t think anyone ever saw me.’”
4. “We are social creatures. Human beings are meant to be in relationship.”
5. “Solitude, just like rest or Sabbath, is something all of us need.”

About Lydia Dugdale

Lydia S. Dugdale, MD, MAR is a physician and medical ethicist at Columbia University, where she serves as Professor of Medicine and Director of the Center for Clinical Medical Ethics. She is the author of The Lost Art of Dying: Reviving Forgotten Wisdom and a leading voice on virtue ethics, mortality, and human flourishing in medicine.

Show Notes

Loneliness, Solitude, and the City

• New York’s “unrepresented” patients—those who have no one to make decisions for them.
• The phenomenon of people “surrounded but unseen” in urban life.
• “I have a loving family … but I never see them.”

Medicine and the Pandemic

• Loneliness intensified during COVID-19: patients dying alone under strict hospital restrictions.
• Dugdale’s reflections on balancing social responsibility with human connection.
• “We are social creatures. Human beings are meant to be in relationship.”

Technology, Fear, and the Online Shadow Community

• Post-pandemic isolation worsened by online echo chambers.
• One in five adults reports loneliness—back to pre-pandemic levels.

The Lost Art of Dying

• Medieval Ars Moriendi: learning to die well by living well.
• Virtue and community as the foundation for a good death.
• “If you don’t want to die an impatient, bitter, despairing old fool, then you need to practice hope and patience and joy.”

Modern Medicine’s Fear of Death

• Physicians unpracticed—and afraid—to talk about mortality.
• “Doctors themselves are afraid to talk about death.”
• How palliative care both helps and distances doctors from mortality.

Community and Mortality

• The man who reconnected with his estranged children after reading The Lost Art of Dying.
• “He said, ‘I want my kids there when I die.’”
• Living well so that dying isn’t lonely.

Programs of Connection and the Body of Christ

• Volunteer models, day programs, and mutual care as small restorations of community.
• “The more we commit to others, the more others commit back to us.”

Solitude and the Human Spirit

• Distinguishing solitude, loneliness, and social isolation.
• Solitude as restorative and necessary: “All of us need solitude. It’s a kind of rest.”
• The contemplative life as vital for engagement with the world.

Death, Autonomy, and Community

• The limits of “my death, my choice.”
• The communal role in death: “We should have folks at our deathbeds.”
• Medieval parish customs of accompanying the dying.

Seeing and Being Seen

• A patient long thought impossible to care for says, “Someone finally saw me.”
• Seeing others deeply as moral and spiritual work.
• “How can we see each other and connect in a meaningful way?”

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Lydia Dugdale
• Interview by Macie Bridge
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Alexa Rollow, Emily Brookfield, and Hope Chun
• 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

“Even those moments of solitude that she’s carving for herself are surprisingly sociable.”

This episode is part 1 of a 5-part series, SOLO, which explores the theological, moral, and psychological dimensions of loneliness, solitude, and being alone.

Medieval Anchoresses and Women Mystics sought a life of solitude with and for God—what about their vocation might illuminate our perspectives on loneliness, isolation, and solitude today?

In this episode, Hetta Howes joins Macie Bridge to explore the extraordinary lives of medieval women mystics, including Julian of Norwich and Marjorie Kempee. Drawing from her book Poet Mystic Widow Wife: The Extraordinary Lives of Medieval Women, Howes illuminates how these women lived in literal and spiritual solitude—sometimes sealed in stone anchorages, sometimes carving sacred space in the midst of family and community. Together they consider the physical and spiritual demands of enclosure, the sociable windows of anchorages, and the simultaneous human longing for both solitude and companionship. Across the centuries, these women invite us to think anew about loneliness, vocation, and the need for community—even in devotion to God.

Helpful Links and Resources

• Poet Mystic Widow Wife: The Extraordinary Lives of Medieval Women – Hetta Howes
• Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (Penguin Classics)
• The Book of Margery Kempe (Oxford World’s Classics)

Episode Highlights

1. “An anchorage is a small cell, usually joined to a church… and the idea was that you would never leave that place alive again.”
2. “Sometimes you do come across these things and you’re like, oh, maybe the cultural consciousness was so different that they had a different language for loneliness.”
3. “Marjorie frames herself as a figure who is constantly looking for connection—sometimes finding it, but often being rejected in really painful ways.”
4. “Even those moments of solitude that she’s carving for herself are surprisingly sociable.”
5. “What I’ve learned from them is the importance of community—that even solitary professions absolutely rely on other people.”

About Hetta Howes

Hetta Howes is a Lecturer in Medieval and Early Modern Literature at City St. George’s, University of London. She specializes in the literature of the Middle Ages, with particular focus on medieval women writers, mysticism, and representations of gender and devotion. Her most recent book is Poet Mystic Widow Wife: The Extraordinary Lives of Medieval Women (2024).

Show Notes

Solitude and Sanctity

• Howes introduces her research on medieval women mystics and writers (Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Christine de Pizan, Marie de France).
• Exploration of the anchoritic life—cells built into church walls where women lived sealed from the world.
• The paradox of solitude: enclosure for God that still required connection for survival.

The Anchorite’s World

• Anchorages included small windows—to the church, the street, and for food—balancing isolation with limited engagement.
• Guidebooks warned women against gossip and temptation, revealing anxiety about sociability and holiness.
• “Why have a window to the world if you’re not ever going to converse with it?”

Loneliness and Boredom

• Loneliness rarely appears in medieval texts; boredom and idleness were greater concerns.
• “Boredom comes up as a concept much more often than loneliness.”
• Modern readers project our loneliness onto them; their silence might reveal difference, not absence.

Julian and Marjorie

• Julian’s quiet solitude contrasts with Marjorie’s noisy, emotional piety.
• Marjorie Kempe’s “roarings” and unconventional piety challenged norms; she lived in the world but sought holiness.
• “I wish you were enclosed in a house of stone”—a critique of her refusal to conform.

Solitude and Community

• Even in seclusion, anchorites served others—praying, advising, maintaining windows to the world.
• Julian’s writings reveal care for all Christians; her solitude was intercessory, not selfish.
• Howes connects medieval community to our modern digital and emotional isolation.

Modern Reflections

• Howes parallels her own experience of digital overload and motherhood with the medieval longing for quiet focus.
• “As amazing as the digital can be, it’s eroding so much.”
• She cautions against idolizing solitude but affirms its value for clarity and grounding.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Hetta Howes
• Interview by Macie Bridge
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Alexa Rollow, Emily Brookfield, and Hope Chun
• 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

“AI technologies aren’t capable of creating conditions in which grace can happen—it’s endemic to personhood.”

This episode is part 3 of a 5-part series, SOLO, which explores the theological, moral, and psychological dimensions of loneliness, solitude, and being alone.

In this episode, sociologist Felicia Wu Song joins Macie Bridge to discuss the sociology of solitude, loneliness, and isolation, framed by today’s most pressing technological challenges.

Drawing from her work on digital culture and AI, Song distinguishes between isolation, loneliness, and generative solitude—what she calls “positive aloneness.” She explores how technology both connects and disconnects us, what’s lost when care becomes automated, and why the human face-to-face encounter remains vital for grace and dignity. Together they consider the allure of AI companionship, the “better-than-nothing” argument, and the church’s local, embodied role in a digitized age. Song invites listeners to rediscover curiosity, self-reflection, and the spiritual discipline of solitude as essential practices for recovering our humanity amid the noise of the crowd.

Helpful Links and Resources

• Felicia Wu Song, Restless Devices: Recovering Personhood, Presence, and Place in the Digital Age — https://www.ivpress.com/restless-devices
• Allison Pugh, The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World — https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691240817/the-last-human-job
• David Whyte, “Solace: The Art of Asking the Beautiful Question” — https://www.amazon.com/Solace-Art-Asking-Beautiful-Question/dp/1932887377
• Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other — https://www.sherryturkle.com/alone-together

Episode Highlights

1. “Even though I study technology, I’m really interested in what it means to be human.”
2. “What happens when we have technologies that always bring the crowd? The crowd is always with us all the time.”
3. “Loneliness is the gap between what I think I should have and what I actually have.”
4. “AI technologies aren’t capable of creating conditions in which grace can happen—it’s endemic to personhood.”
5. “We should cut ourselves a lot of slack. Feeling lonely is very human. It doesn’t mean something’s wrong with me.”

About Felicia Wu Song

Felicia Wu Song is a sociologist, writer, and speaker, and was Professor of Sociology at Westmont College for many years. She is author of Restless Devices: Recovering Personhood, Presence, and Place in the Digital Age. Her research examines digital technology, culture, and Christian formation, exploring how contemporary media ecosystems shape our social and spiritual lives. Learn more about her work at https://feliciawusong.com/

Show Notes

Technology, Humanity, and Solitude

• Song describes her sociological work at the intersection of culture, technology, and spirituality.
• She reflects on how technology reshapes our sense of identity, community, and human meaning.
• “Even though I study technology, I’m really interested in what it means to be human.”
• The question of loneliness emerges from the expectation of constant accessibility and permanent connection.

The Crowd Is Always With Us

• “What happens when we have technologies that always bring the crowd?”
• Song critiques how digital connectivity erases silence and solitude, making stillness feel uncomfortable.
• Explores the challenge of practicing ancient spiritual disciplines like silence in the digital age.

Connection and Disconnection

• Song traces the historical celebration of communication technology’s power to transcend time and space.
• Notes the danger of normalizing constant connectivity: “If you can do it, you should do it.”
• Examines how connection can become a cultural norm that stigmatizes solitude.

Defining Loneliness, Isolation, and Solitude

• “Social isolation is objective; loneliness is subjective; solitude is generative.”
• Distinguishes “positive aloneness” as a space for self-conversation and divine encounter.
• References David Whyte and the Desert Fathers and Mothers as guides to solitude.

Youth, Boredom, and the Portal of Loneliness

• Discusses the value of “episodic loneliness” as a portal to self-discovery and spiritual growth.
• Connects solitude to creativity and reflection through the “boredom literature.”

AI, Care, and the Better-Than-Nothing Argument

• Examines the emergence of AI chatbots and companionship tools.
• Engages Allison Pugh’s critique of “the better-than-nothing argument.”
• “It sounds altruistic, but it actually leads to deeper and deeper inequality.”
• Raises justice and resource questions around replacing human teachers and therapists with chatbots.

The Limits of Machine Grace

• “AI technologies aren’t capable of creating conditions in which grace can happen—it’s endemic to personhood.”
• Explores embodiment, dignity, and the irreplaceable value of human presence.
• Critiques the assumption that “being seen” by a machine equates to being known by a person.

AI, Divinity, and Projection

• Notes human tendency to attribute divine or human qualities to machines.
• References Sherry Turkle’s early studies on human-computer relationships.
• “We are so relational that we’ll even take a clunky computer program and give it human-like qualities.”

Faith, Solitude, and Social Conditions

• Song emphasizes the sociological dimension: environments shape human flourishing.
• “Let’s not make it so hard for people to experience solitude.”
• Advocates for embodied, place-based communities as antidotes to digital disembodiment.

Loneliness, Curiosity, and Grace

• Encourages gentleness toward oneself in moments of loneliness.
• “Feeling lonely is very human. It doesn’t mean something’s wrong with me.”
• Promotes curiosity and acceptance as pathways to spiritual and personal growth.

Production Notes

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

“Loneliness is the symptom that desires its cure.”

In this episode Macie Bridge welcomes writer, translator, and poet Laura Marris to reflect on her essay collection The Age of Loneliness, a meditation on solitude, grief, and the ecology of attention. Marris considers what it means to live through an era defined by environmental loss and human disconnection, yet still filled with wonder. She shares stories of tardigrades that endure extreme conditions, how airports reveal our attitudes toward birds, and the personal loss of her father that awakened her to “noticing absence.” Together, they explore how ecological loneliness might transform into longing for reconnection—not only among humans, but with the creatures and landscapes that share our world. Marris suggests that paying attention, naming, and noticing are acts of restoration. “Loneliness,” she writes, “is the symptom that desires its cure.”

Episode Highlights

• “Loneliness is the symptom that desires its cure.”
• “There are ways, even very simple ones, that individuals can do to make the landscape around them more hospitable.”
• “I don’t believe that humans are hardwired to exploit. There have been many societies with long traditions of mutual benefit and coexistence.”
• “It’s really hard to notice an absence sometimes. There’s something curative about noticing absences that have been around but not acknowledged.”
• “Ecological concerns are not a luxury. It’s actually really important to hold the line on them.”

Helpful Links and Resources

The Age of Loneliness by Laura Marris — https://www.graywolfpress.org/books/age-loneliness
Underland by Robert Macfarlane — https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393242140
E.O. Wilson on “Beware the Age of Loneliness” — https://www.economist.com/news/2013/11/18/beware-the-age-of-loneliness

About Laura Marris

Laura Marris is a writer and translator whose work spans poetry, essays, and literary translation. She is the author of The Age of Loneliness and has translated Albert Camus’s The Plague for Vintage Classics. She teaches creative writing and translation at the University at Buffalo.

Show Notes

• The Ecology of Loneliness and Longing
• Laura Marris discusses The Age of Loneliness—“Eremocene”—a term coined by E.O. Wilson to describe a speculative future of environmental isolation.
• Fascination with poetic form and environmental prose emerging during the pandemic.
• Ecological loneliness arises from biodiversity loss, but also offers the chance to reimagine more hospitable human landscapes.
• Extreme Tolerance and the Human Condition
• Marris describes tardigrades as metaphors for endurance without thriving—organisms that survive extremes by pausing metabolism.
• “How extremely tolerant are humans, and what are our ways of trying to be more tolerant to extreme conditions?”
• Air conditioning becomes an emblem of “extreme tolerance,” mirroring human adaptation to a destabilized environment.
• Birds, Airports, and the Language of Blame
• Marris explores how modern air travel enforces ecological loneliness by eradicating other species from its space.
• She reveals hidden networks of wildlife managers and the Smithsonian’s Feather Identification Lab.
• Reflects on the “Miracle on the Hudson,” where language wrongly cast geese as antagonists—“as if the birds wanted to hit the plane.”
• Loneliness, Solitude, and Longing
• “Loneliness is solitude attached to longing that feels painful.”
• Marris distinguishes solitude’s generativity from loneliness’s ache, suggesting longing can be a moral compass toward reconnection.
• Personal stories of her father’s bird lists intertwine grief and ecological noticing.
• Ground Truthing and Community Science
• Marris introduces “ground truthing”—people verifying ecological data firsthand.
• She celebrates local volunteers counting birds, horseshoe crabs, and plants as acts of hope.
• “Community care applies to human and more-than-human communities alike.”
• Toxic Landscapes and Ecological Aftermath
• Marris recounts Buffalo’s industrial scars and ongoing restoration along the Niagara River.
• “Toxins don’t stop at the edge of the landfill—they keep going.”
• She reflects on beauty, resilience, and the return of eagles to post-industrial lands.
• Attention and Wonder as Advocacy
• “A lot of advocacy stems from paying local attention.”
• Small, attentive acts—like watching sparrows dust bathe—are forms of resistance against despair.
• Cure, Absence, and Continuing the Conversation
• Marris resists the idea of a final “cure” for loneliness.
• “Cure could be something ongoing, a process, a change in your life.”
• Her annual bird counts become a continuing dialogue with her late father.
• Wisdom for the Lonely
• “Take the time to notice what it is you’re lonely for.”
• She calls for transforming loneliness into longing for a more hospitable, interdependent world.

Production Notes

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

This episode is part 1 of a 5-part series, SOLO, which explores the theological, moral, and psychological dimensions of loneliness, solitude, and being alone.

“Solitude brings one back in touch with who one is—it’s how we stabilize ourselves so we know how to be ourselves with others.”

Macie Bridge welcomes Miroslav for a conversation on solitude and being oneself—probing the difference between loneliness and aloneness, and the essential role of solitude in a flourishing Christian life. Reflecting on Genesis, the Incarnation, and the sensory life of faith, Volf considers how we can both embrace solitude and attend to the loneliness of others.

He shares personal reflections on his mother’s daily prayer practice and how solitude grounded her in divine presence. Volf describes how solitude restores the self before God and others: “Nobody can be me instead of me.” It is possible, he suggests, that we can we rediscover the presence of God in every relationship—solitary or shared.

Helpful Links and Resources

• The Cost of Ambition: How Striving to Be Better Than Others Makes Us Worse
• Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
• Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours (Buch der Stunden)
• Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall

Episode Highlights

1. “Nobody can be me instead of me. And since I must be me, to be me well, I need times with myself.”
2. “It’s not good, in almost a metaphysical sense, for us to be alone. We aren’t ourselves when we are simply alone.”
3. “Solitude brings one back in touch with who one is—it’s how we stabilize ourselves so we know how to be ourselves with others.”
4. “Our relationship to God is mediated by our relationships to others. To honor another is to honor God.”
5. “When we attend to the loneliness of others, in some ways we tend to our own loneliness.”

Solitude, Loneliness, and Flourishing

• The difference between solitude (constructive aloneness) and loneliness (diminishment of self).
• COVID-19 as an amplifier of solitude and loneliness.
• Volf’s experience of being alone at Yale—productive solitude without loneliness.
• Loneliness as “the absence of an affirming glance.”
• Aloneness as essential for self-reflection and renewal before others.

Humanity, Creation, and Relationship

• Adam’s solitude in Genesis as an incomplete creation—“It is not good for man to be alone.”
• Human beings as fundamentally social and political.
• A newborn cannot flourish without touch and gaze—relational presence is constitutive of personhood.
• Solitude and communion exist in dynamic tension; both must be rightly measured.

Jesus’s Solitude and Human Responsibility

• Jesus withdrawing to pray as a model of sacred solitude.
• Solitude allows one to “return to oneself,” guarding against being lost in the crowd.
• The danger of losing selfhood in relationships, “becoming echoes of the crowd.”

God, Limits, and Others

• Every other person as a God-given limit—“To honor another is to honor God.”
• Violating others as transgressing divine boundaries.
• True spirituality as respecting the space, limit, and presence of the other.

Touch, Senses, and the Church

• The sensory dimension of faith—seeing, touching, being seen.
• Mary’s anointing of Jesus as embodied gospel.
• Rilke’s “ripe seeing”: vision as invitation and affirmation.
• The church as a site of embodied presence—touch, seeing, listening as acts of communion.

The Fear of Violation and the Gift of Respect

• Loneliness often born from fear of being violated rather than from lack of company.
• Loving another includes honoring their limit and respecting their freedom.

Practical Reflections on Loneliness

• Questions Volf asks himself: “Do I dare to be alone? How do I draw strength when I feel lonely?”
• The paradox of social connection in a digital age—teenagers side by side, “completely disconnected.”
• Love as sheer presence—“By sheer being, having a loving attitude, I relieve another’s loneliness.”

The Spiritual Discipline of Solitude

• Volf’s mother’s daily hour of morning prayer—learning to hear God’s voice like Samuel.
• Solitude as the ground for transformation: narrating oneself before God.
• “Nobody can die in my place… nobody can live my life in my place.”
• Solitude as preparation for love and life in community.

About Miroslav Volf

Miroslav Volf is the Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School and Founding Director of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. He is the author of Exclusion and Embrace, Flourishing: Why We Need Religion in a Globalized World, and numerous works on theology, culture, and human flourishing—most recently The Cost of Ambition: How Striving to Be Better Than Others Makes Us Worse.

Production Notes

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

“Jesus defied expectations—he welcomed the stranger, he fed the hungry, he loved his enemies.”

Together they discuss the role of faith in public life amid deep division. Reflecting on Jesus’s call to love our enemies and the Apostle Paul’s exhortation to “rejoice always,” she describes how Scripture, prayer, and gratitude sustain her work in the U.S. Senate.

From bipartisan collaboration to the challenges of resisting an authoritarian executive branch, Gillibrand speaks candidly about the challenges of embodying gentleness and compassion in politics, consistently seeking spiritual solidarity with colleagues across the aisle. Drawing on Philippians 4, she testifies to the peace of God that transcends understanding, revealing a vision of political life animated by faith, courage, and joy—all in the spirit of hope, humility, and the enduring call to love in public service.

Episode Highlights

• “Faith is the greatest gift you could have. It grounds me; it reminds me why I’m here and what my life is supposed to be about.”
• “We can disagree about public policy, but we don’t have to be in disagreement as people.”
• “Jesus defied expectations—he welcomed the stranger, he fed the hungry, he loved his enemies.”
• “Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again, rejoice… let your gentleness be evident to all.”
• “I pray for wisdom every day. Scripture tells us if you ask for it, you will receive it—and boy do I need it.”

About Kirsten Gillibrand

Kirsten Gillibrand is the U.S. Senator from New York, serving since 2009. A graduate of Dartmouth College and UCLA Law School, she has focused her legislative career on ethics reform, national security, and family policy. Grounded in her Christian faith, she seeks to model bipartisan leadership and compassionate public service. For more information, visit gillibrand.senate.gov.

Helpful Links and Resources

• Philippians 4:4–9 (Bible Gateway)
• Redeemer Presbyterian Church (Tim Keller)
• Gospel in Life Podcast (Tim Keller)
• Chaplain Barry C. Black – U.S. Senate Chaplain
• Kirsten Gillibrand, Official Senate Page

Faith and Division

• Gillibrand describes America’s current political and social moment as deeply divided, weakened by retreat into ideological corners.
• “We’re stronger when we work together—when people love their neighbors and care as if they were their own family.”
• Faith offers grounding amid chaos; social media and tribalism breed extremism and hate.

Following Jesus in Public Life

• Faith clarifies her purpose and sustains her in political life.
• “It makes everything make sense to me.”
• Living “out of step with what’s cool, trendy, or powerful” defines Christian vocation in public office.

Bipartisanship and Common Ground

• Works with Senators Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) on crypto regulation, Ted Cruz (R-TX) on first responder support, and Josh Hawley (R-MO) on stock trading bans.
• “If I can restore some healthcare or Meals on Wheels, I’ll go that extra mile to do that good thing.”
• Collaboration as moral practice—faith expressed through policy partnership.

Loving Enemies and Welcoming Strangers

• Draws parallels between Jesus’s ministry and bipartisan cooperation.
• “He would sooner convert a Roman soldier than go to war with him.”
• “If I went to a Democratic rally and said, ‘love your enemy,’ I don’t know how that would go over.”

Testifying to Faith

• Weekly Bible study with Senate Chaplain Barry C. Black.
• “He told us: Testify to your blessings. Share what God is doing in your life.”
• Posts daily blessings on social media, mixing joy and public witness.

The Faith of Democrats

• Counters perception that Democrats lack faith: “There are more ordained ministers and theology degrees on our side than people realize.”
• Mentions Senators Tim Kaine, Chris Coons, Raphael Warnock, Amy Klobuchar, and Lisa Blunt Rochester, all of whom regularly meet and discuss their faith and its impact on public office.

Faith and Policy Differences

• On reproductive rights and LGBTQ equality: “It’s not the government’s job to discriminate.”
• Frames Matthew 25 as central to Democratic faith—feeding, caring, welcoming.
• Compares differing theological interpretations of government’s role in justice.

Joy and Gratitude

• Philippians 4 as daily anchor: “Rejoice in the Lord always… let your gentleness be evident to all.”
• Keeps a five-year daily gratitude journal: “You rewire your brain to look for what is praiseworthy.”
• Rejoicing doesn’t deny suffering; it transforms it into solidarity.

Prayer and Wisdom

• Prays constantly for family, colleagues, nation, and reconciliation.
• “Wisdom’s usually the one thing I ask for myself.”
• Prayer as discernment: deciding “where to put my voice, effort, and relationships.”

Production Notes

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

Together they explore religious and ethnic heritage, cultural identity, community, covenant, interfaith dialogue, and the ongoing implications for Christian theology and practice.

They also reflect on how the Holocaust forced Christians to confront theological assumptions, how Vatican II and subsequent church statements reshaped doctrine, and why the gifts and calling of God remain irrevocable. Soulen challenges traditional readings of Scripture that erase Israel, insisting instead on a post-supersessionist framework where Jews and Gentiles bear distinct but inseparable witness to God’s faithfulness.

Image Credit: Marc Chagall, ”Moses with the Burning Bush”, 1966

This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. Visit tyndale.foundation to learn more.

Episode Highlights

1. “The gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.”
2. “Supersessionism is the Christian belief that the Jews are no longer God’s people.”
3. “The Lord is God—those words preserve God’s identity and resist erasure.”
4. “Israel sinned. They are still Israel. That identity is irrevocable.”
5. “The gospel doesn’t erase the distinction between Jews and Gentiles; it reconfigures it.”

About R. Kendall Soulen

R. Kendall Soulen is Professor of Systematic Theology at Candler School of Theology, Emory University. A leading voice in post-supersessionist Christian theology, he has written extensively on the relationship between Christianity and Judaism, including The God of Israel and Christian Theology and Irrevocable: The Name of God and the Christian Bible.

Helpful Links and Resources

• R. Kendall Soulen, Irrevocable: The Name of God and the Christian Bible
• R. Kendall Soulen, The God of Israel and Christian Theology
• Vatican II, Nostra Aetate — Vatican.va
• Michael Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith: God in the People Israel
• Drew Collins, The Unique and Universal Christ

Show Notes

• R. Kendall Soulen’s formative encounters with Judaism at Yale and influence of Hans Frei and Michael Wyschogrod
• Romans 9–11 as central to understanding Christianity’s relationship with Judaism
• Supersessionism defined as denying Israel’s ongoing covenant with God
• Impact of the Holocaust and World War II on Christian theology
• Vatican II’s Nostra Aetate affirming God’s covenant with Israel remains intact
• Over a billion Christians now belong to churches rejecting supersessionism
• Soulen’s early work The God of Israel and Christian Theology diagnosing supersessionism in canonical narrative
• Discovery of the divine name’s centrality in Scripture and its neglect in Christian interpretation
• Jesus’s reverence for God’s name shaping Christian prayer and theology
• Proper names as resistance to instrumentalization and fungibility
• Jewish and Gentile identities as distinct yet united in Christ
• Dialogue with Judaism as essential for Christian self-understanding
• Post-supersessionist theology reshaping interfaith relations and Christian identity
• Implications for law observance, Christian Seders, and Jewish-Gentile church life
• Abrahamic faiths and typology: getting Christianity and Judaism right as foundation for interreligious dialogue

Production Notes

• This episode was made possible by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation
• This podcast featured R. Kendall Soulen
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Alexa Rollow and Emily Brookfield
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

“For me, it’s knowing that the Lord has made me as much to work as much to be and to be still and know that he is God.”

On this episode, clinical psychologist Alexis Abernethy (Fuller Seminary) joins Macie Bridge to discuss burnout, Sabbath, worship, mental health, and resilience in the life of the church. Defining burnout through its dimensions of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced sense of accomplishment, Abernethy reflects on how church life can intensify these dynamics even as it seeks to heal them. Drawing from scripture, theology, psychology, and her own experience in the Black church and academic worlds, she reorients us to Sabbath as more than self-care: a sacred practice of being still before God. Sabbath, she argues, is not a quick fix but a preventive rhythm that sustains resilience in leaders and congregations alike. Along the way, she points to the necessity of modeling rest, the impact of daily and weekly spiritual rhythms, and the communal posture that makes Sabbath transformative.

This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. Visit tyndale.foundation to learn more.

Episode Highlights

1. “For me, it’s knowing that the Lord has made me as much to work as much to be and to be still and know that he is God.”
2. “Often people have overextended themselves in face of crises, other circumstances over a period of time, and it’s just not really sustainable, frankly, for anyone.”
3. “We act as if working hard and excessively is dutiful and really what the Lord wants—but that’s not what He wants.”
4. “When you are still with the Lord, you look different when you’re active.”
5. “Sabbath rest allows you to literally catch your own breath, but also then be able to see what the congregation needs.”

Helpful Links and Resources

• That Their Work Will Be a Joy, Kurt Frederickson & Cameron Lee
• Howard Thurman, Meditations of the Heart
• Emily Dickinson, “Some Keep the Sabbath” (Poetry Foundation)

About Alexis Abernethy

Alexis Abernethy is a clinical psychologist and professor in the School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy at Fuller Seminary. Her research explores the intersection of spirituality and health, with particular focus on Christian spirituality, church leadership, and group therapy models.

Topics and Themes

• Burnout in Church Leadership and Congregational Life
• Defining Burnout: Emotional Exhaustion, Depersonalization, and Reduced Accomplishment
• Spiritual Misconceptions of Work and Duty
• Sabbath as Sacred Rest, Not Just Self-Care
• Silence, Stillness, and the Presence of God
• Scriptural Foundations for Sabbath: Psalm 23, Psalm 46, John 15
• The Role of Pastors in Modeling Rest
• Pandemic Lessons for Church Rhythms and Participation
• Emily Dickinson and Creative Visions of Sabbath
• Resilience Through Sabbath: Lessons from New Orleans Pastors
• Practical Practices for Sabbath in Everyday Life

Show Notes

• Exodus 20:8-11: 8 Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. 9 Six days you shall labor and do all your work. 10 But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. 11 For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and consecrated it.
• Opening framing on burnout, Sabbath, and confusion about self-care
• Introduction of Alexis Abernethy, her background as psychologist and professor
• Childhood in a lineage of Methodist pastors and formative worship experiences
• Early academic path: Howard University, UC Berkeley, affirmation from her father
• Defining burnout: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, reduced accomplishment
• “I’m just stuck. I used to enjoy my job.”
• The church as both source of fulfillment and site of burnout
• Misconceptions of spirituality equating overwork with duty
• Reference: That Their Work Will Be a Joy (Frederickson & Lee)
• Scriptural reflections: Psalm 23, Psalm 46, John 15
• Stillness, quiet, and Howard Thurman on solitude
• “When you are still with the Lord, you look different when you’re active.”
• Sabbath as sacred rest, not a quick fix or pill
• Pastors modeling Sabbath for congregations, including personal family time
• COVID reshaping church rhythms and recalculating commitment costs
• Emily Dickinson’s poem “Some Keep the Sabbath”
• Lessons from New Orleans pastors after Hurricane Katrina
• Sabbath as resilience for leaders and congregations
• Practical steps: scripture meditation, playlists, Lectio Divina, cultivating quiet
• Closing invitation: Sabbath as both individual discipline and community posture

Production Notes

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

What makes John’s Gospel so distinct from the Synoptics? Why does it continue to draw readers into inexhaustible depths of meaning? In this conversation, theologian David Ford reflects on his two-decade journey writing a commentary on John. Together with Drew Collins, he explores John’s unique blend of theology, history, and literary artistry, describing it as a “gospel of superabundance” that continually invites readers to trust, to reread, and to enter into deeper life with Christ. Together they explore themes of individuality and community; friendship and love; truth, reconciliation, and unity; the tandem vision of Jesus as both cosmic and intimate; Jesus’s climactic prayer for unity in chapter 17. And ultimately the astonishing superabundance available in the person of Christ. Along the way, Ford reflects on his interfaith reading practices, his theological friendships, and the vital role of truth and love for Christian witness today.

“There’s always more in John’s gospel … these big images of light and life in all its abundance.”

This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. Visit tyndale.foundation to learn more.

Episode Highlights

1. “It is a gospel for beginners. But also it’s endlessly rich, endlessly deep.”
2. “There’s always more in John’s gospel and he has these big images of light and, life in all its abundance.”
3. “It all culminates in love. Father, I desire that those also you, whom you have given me, may be with me.”
4. “On the cross, evil, suffering, sin, death happened to Jesus. But Jesus happens to evil, suffering, sin, death.”
5. “We have to go deeper into God and Jesus, deeper into community, and deeper into the world.”

Show Notes

• David Ford on writing a commentary on John over two decades
• John’s Gospel compared to the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke)
• John as theological history writing (Rudolf Schnackenburg)
• John’s purpose statement in chapter 20: written so that you may trust
• “A gospel for beginners” with simple language and cosmic depth
• John as a gospel of superabundance: light, life, Spirit without measure
• John’s focus on individuals: Nicodemus, Samaritan woman, man born blind, Martha, Mary, Lazarus
• The Beloved Disciple and John’s communal authorship
• Friendship, love, and unity in the Farewell Discourses (John 13–17)
• John 17 as the most profound chapter in Scripture
• The crisis of rewriting: scrapping 15 years of writing to begin anew
• Scriptural reasoning with Jews, Muslims, and Christians on John’s Gospel
• Wrestling with John 8 and the polemics against “the Jews”
• Reconciliation across divisions
• John’s vision of discipleship: learning, loving, praying, and living truth

Helpful Links and Resources

• David Ford, The Gospel of John: A Theological Commentary
• Rudolf Schnackenburg, The Gospel According to St. John

About David Ford

David F. Ford is Regius Professor of Divinity Emeritus at the University of Cambridge. He has written extensively on Christian theology, interfaith engagement, and scriptural reasoning. His most recent work is The Gospel of John: A Theological Commentary (Baker Academic, 2021). Ford is co-founder of the Cambridge Interfaith Programme and the Rose Castle Foundation.

Production Notes

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

“’And if you received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift?’ If you received everything you have as a gift and if your existence as the recipient is also a gift, all ground for boasting is gone. Correspondingly, striving for superiority over others, seeking to make oneself better than others and glorying in that achievement, is possible only as an existential lie. It is not just a lie that all strivers and boasters tell themselves. More troublingly, that lie is part of the ideology that is the wisdom of a certain twisted and world-negating form of the world.”

In Lecture 5, the final of his Gifford Lectures, Miroslav Volf offers a theological and moral vision that critiques the dominant culture of ambition, superiority, and status. Tracing the destructive consequences of Epithumic desire and the relentless “race of honors,” Volf contrasts them with agapic love—God’s self-giving, unconditional love. Drawing from Paul’s Christ hymn in Philippians 2 and philosophical insights from Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Max Scheler, Volf reveals the radical claim that striving for superiority is not merely harmful but fundamentally false. Through Christ’s self-emptying, even to the point of death, we glimpse a redefinition of glory that subverts all worldly hierarchies. The love that saves is the love that descends. In a world ravaged by competition, inequality, and devastation, Volf calls for fierce, humble, and world-affirming love—a love that mends what can be mended, and makes the world home again.

Episode Highlights

1. “Striving for superiority over others… is possible only as an existential lie.”
2. “Jesus Christ was no less God and no less glorious at his lowest point.”
3. “To the extent that I’m striving for superiority, I cannot love myself unless I am the GOAT.”
4. “God cancels the standards of the kind of aspiration whose goal is superiority.”
5. “This is neither self-denial nor denial of the world. This is love for the world at work.”

Show Notes

• Agapic love vs. Epithemic desire and self-centered striving
• “Striving for superiority… is possible only as an existential lie.”
• Paul’s hymn in Philippians 2 and the “race of shame”
• Rousseau: striving for superiority gives us “a multitude of bad things”
• Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity and pursuit of power
• Max Scheler: downward love, not upward striving
• “Jesus Christ was no less God and no less glorious at his lowest point.”
• Self-love as agapic: “I am entirely a gift to myself.”
• Raphael’s Transfiguration and the chaos below
• Demon possession as symbolic of systemic and spiritual powerlessness
• “To the extent that I’m striving for superiority, I cannot love myself unless I am the GOAT.”
• “The world is the home of God and humans together.”
• God’s love affirms the dignity of even the most unlovable creature
• Love as spontaneous overflow, not moral condescension
• “Mending what can be mended… mourning with those who mourn and dancing with those who rejoice.”

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Miroslav Volf
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Taylor Craig and Macie Bridge
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
• Special thanks to Dr. Paul Nimmo, Paula Duncan, and the media team at the University of Aberdeen. Thanks also to the Templeton Religion Trust for their support of the University of Aberdeen’s 2025 Gifford Lectures and to the McDonald Agape Foundation for supporting Miroslav’s research towards the lectureship.

“When a wanted child is born, the immense joy of many parents often renders them mute, but their radiant faces speak of surprised delight: ‘Just look at you! It is so very good that you are here!’ This delight precedes any judgment about the beauty, functionality, or moral rectitude of the child. The child’s sheer existence, the mere fact of it, is ‘very good.’ That’s what I propose God, too, exclaimed, looking at the new-born world. And that unconditional love grounds creation’s existence.”

In this fourth Gifford Lecture, Miroslav Volf contrasts the selective and self-centered love of Ivan Karamazov with the radically inclusive, unconditional love of Father Zosima. Drawing deeply from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Genesis’s creation and flood narratives, and Hannah Arendt’s concept of amor mundi, Volf explores a theology of agapic love: unearned, universal, and enduring. This is the love by which God sees creation as “very good”—not because it is perfect, but because it exists. It’s the love that grieves corruption without destroying it, that sees responsibility as mutual, and that offers the only hope for life in a deeply flawed world. With references to Luther, Nietzsche, and modern visions of power and desire, Volf challenges us to ask what kind of love makes a world, sustains it, and might one day save it. “Love the world,” he insists, “or lose your soul.”

Episode Highlights

1. “The world will either be loved with unconditional love, or it'll not be loved at all.”
2. “Unconditional love abides. If the object of love is in a state that can be celebrated, love rejoices. If it is not, love mourns and takes time to help bring it back to itself.”
3. “Each is responsible for all. Each is guilty for all. Each needs forgiveness from all. Each must forgive all.”
4. “Creation is not primarily sacramental or iconic. It is an object of delight both for humans and for God.”
5. “Agapic love demands nothing from the beloved, though it cares and hopes much for them and for the shared world with them.”

Show Notes

• Schopenhauer and Nietzsche’s visions of happiness: pleasure and power as substitutes for love
• “Love as hunger”: the devouring nature of epithemic desire
• Ivan Karamazov’s tragic love for life—selective, gut-level, and self-focused
• “There is still… this wild and perhaps indecent thirst for life in me”
• Father Zosima’s universal love for “every leaf and every ray of God’s light”
• “Love man also in his sin… Love all God’s creation”
• Sonya and Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment: love as restoration
• “She loved him and stayed with him—not although he murdered, but because he murdered”
• God’s declaration in Genesis: “And look—it was very good”
• Hannah Arendt’s amor mundi—“I want you to be” as pure affirmation
• Creation as gift: “Each is itself by being more than itself”
• Martin Luther on marriage, sex, and delight as godly pleasures
• The flood as hypothetical: divine grief replaces divine destruction
• “It grieved God to his heart”—grief as a form of agapic love
• “Each is responsible for all. Each is guilty for all.”
• Agape over erotic love: not reward and punishment, but faithful presence and care
• “Agapic love demands nothing… It is free, sovereign to love, humble.”
• Closing invitation: to live the life of love, under whatever circumstances

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Miroslav Volf
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Taylor Craig and Macie Bridge
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
• Special thanks to Dr. Paul Nimmo, Paula Duncan, and the media team at the University of Aberdeen. Thanks also to the Templeton Religion Trust for their support of the University of Aberdeen’s 2025 Gifford Lectures and to the McDonald Agape Foundation for supporting Miroslav’s research towards the lectureship.

The idea that competitive and goalless striving to increase one's power is the final Good, does very important work in Nietzsche’s philosophy. For Nietzsche, striving is good. Happiness does not rest in feeling that one's power is growing. In the modern world, individuals are, as Nietzsche puts it, ‘crossed everywhere with infinity.’ …

And therefore condemn to ceaseless striving … The will to power aims at surpassing the level reached at any given time. And that goal can never be reached. You're always equally behind.

Striving for superiority so as to enhance power does not just elevate some, the stronger ones. If the difference in power between parties increases, the weak become weaker in socially significant sense, even if their power has objectively increased. Successful striving for superiority inferiorizes.”

In this third installment of his Gifford Lectures, Miroslav Volf offers a trenchant critique of Friedrich Nietzsche’s moral philosophy—especially his exaltation of the will to power, his affirmation of eternal suffering, and his agonistic conception of love. Nietzsche, Volf argues, fails to cultivate a love that can endure possession, withstand unworthiness, or affirm the sheer existence of the other. Instead, Nietzsche’s love quickly dissolves into contempt. Drawing from Christian theology, and particularly Jesus’s teaching that God causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good alike, Volf explores a different kind of love—agapic, unconditional, and presuppositionless. He offers a vision of divine love that is not driven by need or achievement but that affirms existence itself, regardless of success, strength, or status. In the face of suffering, Nietzsche's amor fati falters—but Jesus’s embrace endures.

Episode Highlights

1. "The sun, in fact, has no need to bestow its gift of light and warmth. It gains nothing from imparting its gifts."
2. "Love that is neither motivated by need nor based on worthiness—that is the kind of love Nietzsche thought prevented Jesus from loving humanity and earth."
3. "Nietzsche aspires to transfiguration of all things through value-bestowing life, but he cannot overcome nausea over humans."
4. "God’s love for creatures is unconditional. It is agapic love for the states in which they find themselves."
5. "Love can only flicker. It moves from place to place because it can live only between places. If it took an abode, it would die."

Show Notes

• Miroslav Volf’s engagement with Nietzsche’s work
• Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity as life-denying and his vision of the will to power
• Schopenhauer’s hedonism vs. Nietzsche’s anti-hedonism: “What is good? Everything that heightens the feeling of power.”
• The will to power as Nietzsche’s supreme value and “hyper-good”
• “The will to power is not a philosophy of life—it’s a philosophy of vitality.”
• Nietzsche’s agonism: the noble contest for superiority among equally powerful opponents
• “Every GOAT is a GOAT only for a time.”
• Amor fati: Nietzsche’s love of fate and affirmation of all existence
• Nietzsche’s ideal of desire without satisfaction: “desiring to desire”
• Dangers of epithumic (need-based, consuming) love
• “Love cannot abide. Its shelf life is shorter than a two-year-old’s toy... If it took an abode, it would die.”
• Nietzsche’s nausea at the weakness and smallness of humanity: “Nausea, nausea... alas, man recurs eternally.”
• Zarathustra’s conditional love: based on worthiness, wisdom, and power
• “Joy in tearing down has fully supplanted love’s delight in what is.”
• Nietzsche’s failure to love the unworthy: “His love fails to encompass the great majority of actually living human beings.”
• Volf’s theological critique of striving, superiority, and contempt
• “Nietzsche affirms vitality at the expense of concrete human beings.”
• The biblical God’s love: “He makes his sun rise on the evil and the good.”
• “Even the poorest fisherman rows with golden oars.”
• Jesus’s unconditional love versus Nietzsche’s agonistic, conditional love
• Kierkegaard and Luther on the distinction between person and work
• Hannah Arendt’s political anthropology and enduring love in the face of unworthiness
• Volf’s proposal for a theology of loving the present world in its broken form
• “We can actually long also for what we have.”
• “Love that cannot take an abode will die.”
• A vision of divine, presuppositionless love that neither requires need nor merit

“Unquenchable thirst makes for ceaseless pain. This befits our nature as objectification of the ceaseless and aimless will at the heart of reality. ... For Schopenhauer, the pleasure of satisfaction are the lights of fireflies in the night of life’s suffering. These four claims taken together make pain the primordial, universal, and unalterable state of human lives.”

In the second installment of his 2025 Gifford Lectures, Miroslav Volf examines the 19th-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s radical rejection of the world. Through Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of blind will and insatiable desire, Volf draws out the philosopher’s haunting pessimism and hatred for existence itself. But Schopenhauer’s rejection of the world—rooted in disappointed love—is not just a historical curiosity; Volf shows how our modern consumerist cravings mirror Schopenhauer’s vision of unquenchable thirst and fleeting satisfaction. In response, Volf offers a theological and philosophical critique grounded in three kinds of love—epithumic (appetitive), erotic (appreciative), and agapic (self-giving)—arguing that agape love must be central in our relationship to the world. “Everything is a means, but nothing satisfies,” Volf warns, unless we reorder our loves. This second lecture challenges listeners to reconsider what it means to live in and love a world full of suffering—without abandoning its goodness.

Episode Highlights

1. “Unquenchable thirst makes for ceaseless pain. This befits our nature as objectification of the ceaseless and aimless will at the heart of reality.”
2. “Whether we love ice cream or sex or God, we are often merely seeking to slake our thirst.”
3. “If we long for what we have, what we have never ceases to satisfy.”
4. “A better version is available—for whatever reason, it is not good enough. And we discard it. This is micro-rejection of the world.”
5. “Those who love agape refuse to act as if they were the midpoint of their world.”

Helpful Links and Resources

• The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer
• Paradiso by Dante Alighieri
• Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables
• A Brief for the Defense by Jack Gilbert

Show Notes

• Schopenhauer’s pessimism as rooted in disappointed love of the world
• God’s declaration in Genesis—“very good”—contrasted with Schopenhauer’s “nothing is good”
• Job’s suffering as a theological counterpoint to Schopenhauer’s metaphysical despair
• Human desire framed as unquenchable thirst: pain, boredom, and fleeting satisfaction
• Schopenhauer’s diagnosis: we swing endlessly between pain and boredom
• Three kinds of love introduced: epithumic (appetite), erotic (appreciation), agapic (affirmation)
• Schopenhauer’s exclusive emphasis on appetite—no place for appreciation or unconditional love
• Modern consumer culture mirrors Schopenhauer’s account: desiring to desire, never satisfied
• Fast fashion, disposability, and market-induced obsolescence as symptoms of world-negation
• “We long for what we have” vs. “we discard the world”
• Luther’s critique: “suck God’s blood”—epithumic relation to God
• Agape love: affirming the other, even when undeserving or diminished
• Erotic love: savoring the intrinsic worth of things, not just their utility
• The fleetingness of joy and comparison’s corrosion of value
• Modern desire as invasive, subliminally shaped by market competition
• Denigration of what is in favor of what could be—a pathology of dissatisfaction
• Consumerism as massive “micro-rejection” of the world
• Volf’s call to reorder our loves toward appreciation and unconditional affirmation
• Theology and metaphysics reframe suffering not as a reason to curse the world, but to love it better
• Preview of next lecture: Nietzsche, joy, and the affirmation of all existence

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Miroslav Volf
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Taylor Craig and Macie Bridge
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
• Special thanks to Dr. Paul Nimmo, Paula Duncan, and the media team at the University of Aberdeen. Thanks also to the Templeton Religion Trust for their support of the University of Aberdeen’s 2025 Gifford Lectures and to the McDonald Agape Foundation for supporting Miroslav’s research towards the lectureship.

“The world, our planetary home, certainly needs to be changed, improved. But what it needs even more is to be rightly loved.”

Miroslav Volf begins his 2025 Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen with a provocative theological inquiry: What difference does belief in God make for our relationship to the world? Drawing deeply from Nietzsche’s “death of God,” Schopenhauer’s despair, and Hannah Arendt’s vision of amor mundi, Volf explores the ambivalence of modern life—its beauty and horror, its resonance and alienation. Can we truly love the world, even amidst its chaos and collapse? Can a belief in the God of Jesus Christ provide motivation to love—not as appetite or utility, but as radical, unconditional affirmation? Volf suggests that faith offers not a retreat from reality, but an anchor amid its disorder—a trust that enables us to hope, even when the world’s goodness seems impossible. This first lecture challenges us to consider the character of our relationship to the world, between atheism and theism, critique and love.

Episode Highlights

1. “The world, our planetary home, certainly needs to be changed, improved. But what it needs even more is to be rightly loved.”
2. “Resonance seems both indispensable and insufficient. But what should supplement it? What should underpin it?”
3. “Our love for that lived world is what these lectures are about.”
4. “We can reject and hate one form of the world because we love the world as such.”
5. “Though God is fully alive… we often find the same God asleep when our boats are about to capsize.”

Helpful Links and References

• Resonance by Hartmut Rosa
• The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt
• This Life by Martin Hägglund
• The Home of God by Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz
• The City of God by Augustine
• Divine Comedy by Dante

Show Notes

• Paul Nimmo introduces the Gifford Lectures and Miroslav Volf’s theme
• Volf begins with gratitude and scope: belief in God and our world
• Introduces Nietzsche's “death of God” as cultural metaphor
• Frames plausibility vs. desirability of God's existence
• Introduces Hartmut Rosa’s theory of resonance
• Problem: resonance is not enough; what underpins motivation to care?
• Introduces amor mundi as thematic direction of the lectures
• Contrasts Marx’s atheism and human liberation with Nietzsche’s nihilism
• Analyzes Dante and Beatrice in Hägglund’s This Life
• Distinguishes between “world” and “form of the world”
• Uses cruise ship metaphor to critique modern life’s ambivalence
• Discusses Augustine, Hannah Arendt, and The Home of God
• Reflections on divine providence and theodicy
• Biblical images: flood, exile, and the sleeping God
• Ends with preview of next lectures on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche
• Let me know if you'd like episode-specific artwork prompts, promotional copy for social media, or a transcript excerpt formatted for publication.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Miroslav Volf
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Taylor Craig and Macie Bridge
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
• Special thanks to Dr. Paul Nimmo, Paula Duncan, and the media team at the University of Aberdeen. Thanks also to the Templeton Religion Trust for their support of the University of Aberdeen’s 2025 Gifford Lectures and to the McDonald Agape Foundation for supporting Miroslav’s research towards the lectureship.

Miroslav Volf unpacks the core themes of his 2025 book, The Cost of Ambition: How Striving to Be Better Than Others Makes Us Worse. In this book, Volf offers a penetrating critique of comparison culture, diagnosing the hidden moral and spiritual wounds caused by competition and superiority.

Drawing on Scripture, theology, philosophy, literature, and our culture’s obsession with competition and superiority, Volf challenges our assumptions about ambition and identity—and presents a deeply humanizing vision of life rooted not in being “the best,” but in receiving ourselves as creatures made and loved by God.

From Milton’s depiction of Satan to Jesus’ descent in Philippians 2, from the architectural rivalry of ancient Byzantium to modern Olympic anxieties, Volf invites us to imagine a new foundation for personal and social flourishing: a life free from striving, rooted in love and grace.

Highlights

1. “The key here is for us to come to appreciate, affirm, and—importantly—love ourselves. Love ourselves unconditionally.”
2. “Striving for superiority devalues everything we have, if it doesn’t contribute to us being better than someone else.”
3. “The inverse of striving for superiority is internal plague by inferiority.”
4. “In Jesus, we see that God’s glory is not to dominate but to lift up what is low.”
5. “We constantly compare to feel good about ourselves, and end up unsure of who we are.”
6. “We have been given to ourselves by God—our very existence is a gift, not a merit.”

Helpful Links and Resources

• Visit faith.yale.edu/ambition to get a 40-page PDF Discussion Guide and Full Access to 7 videos
• The Cost of Ambition by Miroslav Volf (Baker Academic, May 2025)
• Philippians 2:5–11 (NIV) – Christ’s Humility and Exaltation – BibleGateway
• Romans 12:10 – “Outdo one another in showing honor” – BibleHub
• Paradise Lost by John Milton – Project Gutenberg
• Paradise Regained by John Milton – Project Gutenberg

Show Notes

Opening Reflections on Competition

• The conversation begins with Volf recalling a talk he gave at the Global Congress on Christianity & Sports.
• He uses athletic competition—highlighting Lionel Messi—as a lens for questioning the moral value of striving to be better than others.
• “Sure, competition pulls people up—but it also familiarizes us with inferiority.”
• “We compare ourselves to feel good… but end up feeling worse.”
• Introduces the story of Justinian and Hagia Sophia: “Oh Solomon, I have outdone you.”

Rivalry, Power, and Insecurity

• Shares the backstory of Juliana’s competing church and the gold-ceiling arms race with Justinian.
• “Religious architecture became a battlefield of status.”
• Draws insight from these historic rivalries as examples of how ambition pervades religious life—not just secular.

Modern Parallels: Yale Students’s & the Rat Race

• Volf notes how even Yale undergrads—once top of their class—feel insecure in comparison to peers.
• “They arrive and suddenly their worth plummets. That’s insane.”
• The performance-driven culture makes stable identity nearly impossible.

Biblical Illustration: Kierkegaard’s Lily

• Volf recounts Kierkegaard’s retelling of Jesus’s lily parable.
• A bird whispers to the little lily that it’s not beautiful enough, prompting the lily to uproot itself—and wither.
• “The lesson: we are destined to lose ourselves when our value depends on comparison.”

Intrinsic Value and the Image of God

• “We need to discover the intrinsic value of who we are as creatures made in the image of God.”
• Kierkegaard and Jesus both show us the beauty of ‘mere humanity.’
• “You are more glorious in your humanity than Solomon in his robes.”

Theological Anthropology and Grace

• “We have been given to ourselves by God—our lives are a gift.”
• “We owe so much to luck, to others, to God. So how can we boast?”
• Paul’s challenge in 1 Corinthians: “What do you have that you have not received?”

Milton and Satan’s Ambition

• Shifts to Paradise Lost: Satan rebels because he can’t bear not being top.
• “Even what is beautiful becomes devalued if it doesn’t prove superiority.”
• In Paradise Regained, Satan tempts Jesus to be the greatest—but Jesus refuses.

Christ’s Humility and Downward Glory

• Highlights Philippians 2: Jesus “emptied himself… took the form of a servant.”
• “God’s glory is not domination—it’s lifting up the lowly.”
• “Salvation comes not through seizing status, but through relinquishing it.”

Paul’s Vision of Communal Honor

• Romans 12:10: “Outdo one another in showing honor.”
• “True honor comes not from climbing over others, but from lifting them up.”
• Connects this ethic to Paul’s vision of church as an egalitarian body.

God’s Care for Creation and Humanity

• Luther’s observation: God calls Earth good but not Heaven—“God cares more for our home than his own.”
• “We are called to emulate God’s loving attention to the least.”

Striving vs. Acceptance

• Volf contrasts ambition with love: “The inverse of striving for superiority is the plague of inferiority.”
• Encourages unconditional self-love as a reflection of God’s love.
• Uses image of a parent greeting a newborn: “You’ve arrived.”

A Vision for Healed Culture

• “We wreck others in our pursuit of superiority—and we leave them wounded in our wake.”
• The gospel reveals a better way: not performance, but grace.
• “Our salvation and our culture’s healing lie in the humility of Jesus.”
• “We must rediscover the beauty of our mere humanity.”

About Miroslav Volf

Miroslav Volf is the founding director of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture and the Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School. One of the leading public theologians of our time, he is the author of numerous books including Exclusion and Embrace, Flourishing, A Public Faith, Life Worth Living, and most recently, The Cost of Ambition. His work explores themes of identity, reconciliation, human dignity, and the role of faith in a pluralistic society. He is a frequent speaker around the world and has advised both religious and civic leaders on matters of peace and justice.

Production Notes

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

This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. Visit tyndale.foundation to learn more.

Episode Highlights

“The physicality of ballet is cruciform. The dancer stands in a turned-out position... the body becomes the intersection of the vertical and the horizontal plane.”

“Sin makes the soul curve in on itself, whereas holiness or wholeness in God opens us up.”

“We are Christian humanists. We don't need to be intimidated by beauty.”

“There's knowledge and insight in all the different parts of our bodies, not just in our brain.”

“The mystery of the incarnation is that when the creator of all things wanted to make himself known to his creation, he didn't come as a vapor or as a mountain or as a bird. But he came as a man.”

Resources for Understanding and Experiencing Ballet

• Local community ballet companies/schools
• “B is for Ballet” (ABT children’s book)
• “My Daddy Can Fly” (ABT)
• Celestial Bodies, by Laura Jacobs
• Apollo’s Angels, by Jennifer Homans
• Silas Farley’s Podcast: Hear the Dance (NYC Ballet)
• The Nutcracker (NYC Ballet/Balanchine)
• Jewels (1967, Balanchine)
• Agon (Balanchine/Stravinsky)

About Silas Farley

Silas Farley is a professional ballet dancer and choreographer. Dean of the Trudl Zipper Dance Institute at the Colburn School in Los Angeles, Silas is a former New York City Ballet dancer, choreographer, and educator. He also currently serves as Armstrong Artist in Residence in Ballet in the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University.

His work includes choreography for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Houston Ballet, and the New York City Ballet. He hosts the Hear the Dance podcast and creates works that integrate classical ballet with spiritual themes.

Silas also serves on the board of The George Balanchine Foundation.

Show Notes

Silas Farley’s Early Dance Background & Formation

• Silas Farley: Originally from Charlotte, North Carolina; youngest of 7 children (4 brothers, 2 sisters); multiracial family (white father, Black mother)
• First exposure through charismatic Lutheran church’s liturgical dance ministry
• Saw formal ballet at age 6 when Christian ballet company Ballet Magnifica performed
• Dance initially experienced as form of worship before performance

Liturgical vs Classical Ballet

• Liturgical dance:
  • Amplifies worship
  • Functions as embodied prayer
  • Not primarily performative
  • Historical examples: David with Ark of Covenant, Miriam after Red Sea crossing
• Classical ballet:
  • Performed on proscenium stage
  • Requires specific training
  • Focuses on virtuosic movements
  • Explicitly performative
• Both forms serve as offerings/vessels for transmitting energy to audience

Technical Elements of Ballet: Turnout, Spiritual Turnout, and Opening Up

• Foundational concept of “turnout”—rotation of feet/hips outward
• “That idea of turnout makes the body more expressive in a way. Because if our toes are straightforward, like the way we're designed, you only see a certain amount of the leg. Whereas if the body stands turned out, you see the whole inside of the musculature of the leg. It's a more complete revelation of the body.”
• Creates more complete revelation of body’s musculature
• Physicality conveys “spiritual turnout” - openness/receptiveness
• “Spiritual turnout: that you are open   and receptive and generous. And that's embodied in the physicality of ballet.”
• “So much of what developed as ballet as we know, it happened at the court of Louis the XIV in the  1660-1670s.”
• “It's not artificial, it's actually supernatural.”

Physical & Spiritual Connections in Ballet

• “Our walk  with God is that he's  defining us so that we are becoming open. We're open to him. We're open to receive his love. We're open to be vessels of his love. We're open to receiving and exchanging love with  other people.”
• Freedom within the constraints movements and positions
• Swan Lake: “They're so free. They're almost like birds. But that's come through a lifestyle of discipline.”
• “You get a hyper awareness of your own body.”
• Develops hyper-awareness of body
• Links to incarnational theology—Christ as God-man
• Freedom through discipline and submission
• Movement vocabulary builds from simple elements (plié, tendu)
• Plie: Mama and Dada
• “As a dancer grows up in ballet, the dancer then develops  this enormous vocabulary of movement  that are all reducible back to the microcosm of the plié and the tendu.”
• Creates infinite lines suggesting eternity
• Combines circular power with eternal lines
• Theological Dimensions of Ballet
• Silas’s choreographed interpretation of C.S. Lewis’s The Four Loves, as a ballet

Ballet and the Art of Choreography

• “The music and choreography were like brothers.”
• “Songs from the Spirit”
• “The music becomes my map.”
• Choreographing in silence

The Role of the Audience and Their Experience

• Ideas to dialogue with
• A set of ideas to gather together and embody
• Arvo Part, The Genealogy of Jesus in Luke 3
• Uniting my heart with Jesus
• I’m never didactic about it.
• An embodied musical experience
• “If I  say ‘family, friendship, romance, divine love,’ you all instantly have associations, beauty, pain, trauma, consolation that are associated with those four loves.”
• “ I'm not writing a sermon about any of these ideas. I'm choreographing a ballet. I'm assembling these classical steps with this music to create a visceral, embodied musical experience.”
• The audience: “They come to it with their experiences, their own eyes and ears and their own bodies. And that's enough.”
• Arvo Part: “Music is white light, and the prism is the soul of the listener.”
• “The musical ideas are refracted through the hearer.”
• “The audience is always in my heart and mind.”
• “I always think of the artwork as an act of hospitality.  … I’m just setting the table.”

What’s Unique about Ballet as a Physical Artform

• Beautiful interconnectedness
• Asking the body to reach to its limits
• “The Infinite Line” in Ballet
• Radiating out into multiple eternal lines at the same time
• Constant reaching in many directions at once
• Cruciform positioning: intersection of vertical and horizontal planes
• “The body becomes radiant”
• Use of “épaulement”—spiraling of body around spine’s axis
• Reveals pulse points (neck, wrists) creating vulnerable energy exchange with audience
• Opening up the life force of the dancer
• No separation between dancer and instrument (“I am the work of art”)
• Cruciform physicality

Contemporary Cultural Context

• Modern culture increasingly disembodied due to screens/digital media
• “We live in an increasingly disembodied culture, we are absorbed with screens two dimensional, uh, highly edited and curated,  mediated self presentation   as opposed to like visceral nitty gritty blood, sweat, tears, good, bad, and ugly of life itself. So we get insulated from the step that makes life what it is.”
• Education often treats people as “brains on sticks”
• “The Christian life is a lifestyle of in embodied discipleship to the God man, Jesus  Christ. And he's not a brain on a stick. He's the God man. He has a jawbone and he went through puberty and he has wounds like the beautiful hymn. It says, rich wounds, yet visible and beauty glorified. The mystery of the incarnation is that when the creator of all things wanted to make  himself known to his creation, he didn't come as a  vapor or as a mountain or as a bird, but he came as a man. And so he sublimates and affirms the glory of his creation, the materiality of his creation and the body as the crown of his creation by coming as a man.”
• Church needs more embodied practices
• Ballet offers counterpoint to disembodied tendencies
• Importance of physical discipline in spiritual formation
• Romans 12:1 and making our bodies as living sacrifices

How to Experience Ballet

“There's nothing you need to know before going to experience ballet.  You have a body, you have eyes, you have ears. That's all you need. Just let it wash over you.

Let it work on you in its own kind of visceral way, and let that be an entry point  to not be intimidated by the, the music,  or the wordlessness or the tutu's or the point shoes or whatever.

There's so many different stylistic manifestations of ballet. But just go experience it.

And if you can, I would really encourage people almost as much or more than  watching it go see if like your local YMCA or  something has an adult ballet class, or if you're a kid, maybe ask your parents to sign you up to go try a class and just feel what that turned-out physicality feels like in your own body.

It's so beautiful. It's very empowering.”

Production Notes

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

“Here we have a splendid secret that shows us how to dream and to turn our life into a wonderful adventure. No one can face life in isolation… We need a community that supports and helps us, in which we can help one another to keep looking ahead. How important it is to dream together… By ourselves, we risk seeing mirages, things that are not there. Dreams, on the other hand, are built together. Let us dream, then, as a single human family, as fellow travelers sharing the same flesh, as children of the same earth which is our common home, each of us bringing the richness of his or her beliefs and convictions, each of us with his or her own voice, brothers and sisters all." (Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti)

Last year, in the midst of a global nightmare, Pope Francis invited the world to dream together of something different. He released Fratelli Tutti in October 2020—a message of friendship, dignity, and solidarity not just to Catholics, but "to all people of good will"—for the whole human community. In this episode, social ethicist Nichole Flores (University of Virginia) explains papal encyclicals and works through the moral vision of Fratelli Tutti, highlighting especially Pope Francis’s views on faith as seeing with the eyes of Christ, the implications of human dignity for discourse, justice and solidarity, and finally the language of dreaming together of a different world.

Support For the Life of the World: Give to  the Yale Center for Faith & Culture

Show Notes

• Read the entire text of Fratelli Tutti online here
• What is a papal encyclical? For “All people of good will”—not just Catholics
• Examining the signs of the times, e.g., Fratelli Tutti will always be connected to its global context during a pandemic.
• What is Fratelli Tutti? What does its title mean?
• Brothers and Sisters All: Using Italian, a particular language, as a pathway to the universal, rather than traditional Latin title
• Pope Francis’ roots in Latin America: How his particularity as Latin American gives him a universal message; local and communal belonging; neighborhoods contributing to the common good
• Seeing/Gazing: Faith as seeing with the eyes of Christ (Lumen Fidei)
• Undermining human dignity in social media discourse; the failure of grandstanding rather than encounter
• Solidarity as a dirty word: conflicts within Catholicism about how to understand and apply justice and solidarity in real life
• Solidarity requires encounter with the other
• Social friendship and fraternity
• Human dignity in the tradition of Catholic social ethics
• Dreaming together: fighting against the temptation to dream alone, inviting us to imagine; cultivating a conversation that forms collective imagination and aesthetic reality.

About Nichole Flores

Nichole Flores is a social ethicist who is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. She studies the constructive contributions of Catholic and Latinx theologies to notions of justice and aesthetics to the life of democracy. Her research in practical ethics addresses issues of democracy, migration, family, gender, economics (labor and consumption), race and ethnicity, and ecology. Visit NicholeMFlores.com for more information.

Artist and theologian Bruce Herman reflects on the sacred vocation of making, resisting consumerism, and the divine invitation to become co-creators. From Mark Rothko to Rainer Maria Rilke, to Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” and T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, he comments on the holy risk of artmaking and the sacred fire of creative origination.

Together with Evan Rosa, Bruce Herman explores the divine vocation of art making as resistance to consumer culture and passive living. In this deeply poetic and wide-ranging conversation—and drawing from his book *Makers by Nature—*he invites us into a vision of art not as individual genius or commodity, but as service, dialogue, and co-creation rooted in love, not fear. They touch on ancient questions of human identity and desire, the creative implications of being made in the image of God, Buber’s I and Thou, the scandal of the cross, Eliot’s divine fire, Rothko’s melancholy ecstasy, and how even making a loaf of bread can be a form of holy protest. A profound reflection on what it means to be human, and how we might change our lives—through beauty, vulnerability, and relational making.

Episode Highlights

“We are made by a Maker to be makers.”

“ I think hope is being stolen from us Surreptitiously moment by moment hour by hour day by day.”

“There is no them. There is only us.”

“The work itself has a life of its own.”

“Art that serves a community.”

“You must change your life.” —Rilke, recited by Bruce Herman in reflection on the transformative power of art.

“When we're not making something, we're not whole. We're not healthy.”

“Making art is a form of prayer. It's a form of entering into relationship.”

“Art is not for the artist—any more than it's for anyone else. The work stands apart. It has its own voice.”

“We're not merely consumers—we're made by a Maker to be makers.”

“The ultimate act of art is hospitality.”

Topics and Themes

• Human beings are born to create and make meaning
• Art as theological dialogue and spiritual resistance
• Creative practice as a form of love and worship
• Christian art and culture in dialogue with contemporary issues
• Passive consumption vs. active creation
• How to engage with provocative art faithfully
• The role of beauty, mystery, and risk in the creative process
• Art that changes you spiritually, emotionally, and intellectually
• The sacred vocation of the artist in a consumerist world
• How poetry and painting open up divine encounter, particularly in Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo”
• Four Quartets and spiritual longing in modern poetry
• Hospitality, submission, and service as aesthetic postures
• Modern culture's sickness and art as medicine
• Encountering the cross through contemporary artistic imagination

“Archaic Torso of Apollo”

Rainer Maria Rilke 1875 –1926

We cannot know his legendary head with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside, like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low, gleams in all its power. Otherwise the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could a smile run through the placid hips and thighs to that dark center where procreation flared. Otherwise this stone would seem defaced beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur: would not, from all the borders of itself, burst like a star: for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.

About Bruce Herman

Bruce Herman is a painter, writer, educator, and speaker. His art has been shown in more than 150 exhibitions—nationally in many US cities, including New York, Boston, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Houston—and internationally in England, Japan, Hong Kong, Italy, Canada, and Israel. His artwork is featured in many public and private art collections including the Vatican Museum of Modern Religious Art in Rome; The Cincinnati Museum of Fine Arts print collection; The Grunewald Print Collection of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; DeCordova Museum in Boston; the Cape Ann Museum; and in many colleges and universities throughout the United States and Canada.

Herman taught at Gordon College for nearly four decades, and is the founding chair of the Art Department there. He held the Lothlórien Distinguished Chair in Fine Arts for more than fifteen years, and continues to curate exhibitions and manage the College art collection there. Herman completed both BFA and MFA degrees at Boston University College of Fine Arts under American artists Philip Guston, James Weeks, David Aronson, Reed Kay, and Arthur Polonsky. He was named Boston University College of Fine Arts Distinguished Alumnus of the Year 2006.

Herman’s art may be found in dozens of journals, popular magazines, newspapers, and online art features. He and co-author Walter Hansen wrote the book Through Your Eyes, 2013, Grand Rapids, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, a thirty-year retrospective of Herman’s art as seen through the eyes of his most dedicated collector.

To learn more, explore A Video Portrait of the Artist and My Process – An Essay by Bruce Herman.

Books by Bruce Herman

*Makers by Nature: Letters from a Master Painter on Faith, Hope, and Art* (2025) *Ordinary Saints (*2018) *Through Your Eyes: The Art of Bruce Herman (2013) *QU4RTETS with Makoto Fujimura, Bruce Herman, Christopher Theofanidis, Jeremy Begbie (2012) A Broken Beauty (2006)

Show Notes

• Bruce Herman on Human Identity as Makers
  • We are created in the image of God—the ultimate “I Am”—and thus made to create.
  • “We are made by a Maker to be makers.”
  • To deny our creative impulse is to risk a deep form of spiritual unhealth.
  • Making is not just for the “artist”—everyone is born with the capacity to make.
• Theological Themes and Philosophical Frameworks
  • Influences include Martin Buber’s “I and Thou,” René Girard’s scapegoating theory, and the image of God in Genesis.
  • “We don't really exist for ourselves. We exist in the space between us.”
  • The divine invitation is relational, not autonomous.
  • Desire, imitation, and submission form the core of our relational anthropology.
• Art as Resistance to Consumerism
  • “We begin to enter into illness when we become mere consumers.”
  • Art Versus Propaganda
  • Culture is sickened by passive consumption, entertainment addiction, and aesthetic commodification.
  • Making a loaf of bread, carving wood, or crafting a cocktail are acts of cultural resistance.
  • Desire
  • “Anything is resistance… Anything is a protest against passive consumption.”
• Art as Dialogue and Submission
  • “Making art is a form of prayer. It’s a form of entering into relationship.”
  • Submission—though culturally maligned—is a necessary posture in love and art.
  • Engaging with art requires openness to transformation.
  • “If you want to really receive what a poem is communicating, you have to submit to it.”
• The Transformative Power of Encountering Art
  • Quoting Rilke’s Archaic Torso of Apollo: “You must change your life.”
  • True art sees the viewer and invites them to become something more.
  • Herman’s own transformative moment came unexpectedly in front of a Rothko painting.
  • “The best part of my work is outside of my control.”
• Scandal, Offense, and the Cross in Art
  • Analyzing Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ as a sincere meditation on the commercialization of the cross.
  • “Does the crucifixion still carry sacred weight—or has it been reduced to jewelry?”
  • Art should provoke—but out of love, not self-aggrandizement or malice.
  • “The cross is an offense. Paul says so. But it’s the power of God for those being saved.”
• Beauty, Suffering, and Holy Risk
  • Encounter with art can arise from personal or collective suffering.
  • Bruce references Christian Wiman and Walker Percy as artists opened by pain.
  • “Sometimes it takes catastrophe to open us up again.”
  • Great art offers not escape, but transformation through vulnerability.
• The Fire and the Rose: T. S. Eliot’s Influence
  • Four Quartets shaped Herman’s artistic and theological imagination.
  • Eliot’s poetry is contemplative, musical, liturgical, and steeped in paradox.
  • “To be redeemed from fire by fire… when the fire and the rose are one.”
  • The collaborative Quartets project with Makoto Fujimura and Chris Theofanidis honors Eliot’s poetic vision.
• Living and Creating from Love, Not Fear
  • “Make from love, not fear.”
  • Fear-driven art (or politics) leads to manipulation and despair.
  • Acts of love include cooking, serving, sharing, and creating for others.
  • “The ultimate act of art is hospitality.”

Media & Intellectual References

• Makers by Nature by Bruce Herman
• Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot
• The Archaic Torso of Apollo by Rainer Maria Rilke
• Wassily Kandinsky, “On the Spiritual in Art”
• Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
• Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World by René Girard
• The Art of the Commonplace by Wendell Berry
• Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ
• Makoto Fujimura’s Art and Collaboration

Evoking courage, resilience, and faith in the face of overwhelming uncertainty, Ukrainian pastor and theologian Fyodor Raychynets returns to For the Life of the World three years after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In conversation with Evan Rosa, Fyodor shares his reflections on fear, freedom, and the emotional and spiritual challenges of living fully in a time of war. He discusses his response to recent global political developments, the struggle of holding onto hope, and the importance of confronting fear rather than suppressing it. Drawing from the Gospel of Mark’s iteration of Jesus walking on water, his own personal grief and therapy, and the lived experience of war, Fyodor sees fear not as something to be avoided or gotten rid of, but as something to understand and face with courage.

This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale Foundation. Visit tyndale.foundation to learn more.

Episode Highlights

"We are in a situation where we are scared to hope."

"Do not be afraid of your fears, but cope with them—learn how to deal with them—because unless you do, you cannot live your life abundantly and fully."

"If I want to say to someone, ‘I love you,’ I say it. If I want to forgive, I forgive. If I want to do something meaningful, I do it now—because tomorrow is never guaranteed."

"The enemy wants us to live in fear, to be paralyzed by it. But to live fully is to resist."

"When Jesus scared his disciples on the water, he was bringing their fears to the surface—so that they could face them and find true freedom."

Show Notes

Image: “Walking on Water”, by Ivan Aivazovsky, Russia, 1888

Episode Summary

• Ukrainian pastor and theologian Fyodor Raychynets reflects on faith, fear, and hope after three years of war.
• The role of fear in spiritual and personal transformation.
• A biblical perspective on confronting fear, drawn from the Gospel of Mark.
• Political and emotional reactions to recent global events impacting Ukraine.
• Living fully in the present as an act of resistance against fear and oppression.

Faith, Fear, and Freedom

• Fyodor Raychynets returns to discuss Ukraine’s ongoing struggle and his evolving faith.
• "Fear to hope"—the challenge of holding onto hope when the world is falling apart.
• Why fear should be faced rather than suppressed.
• The spiritual wisdom of encountering fear: “When Jesus scared his disciples, it was for their good.”
• The difference between being reckless, cowardly, or courageous—all of which share the common state of fear.

The Ukrainian Perspective on Global Politics

• How Ukraine perceives the shifting stance of U.S. foreign policy.
• The impact of Zelenskyy’s visit to the Oval Office and international reactions.
• The challenge of fighting for democracy when global powers redefine the terms of war.
• The fear that democratic values are no longer upheld by those who once championed them.

Biblical and Psychological Perspectives on Fear

• Mark’s Gospel and the fear of encountering God in unexpected ways.
• Fyodor quotes Carl Jung: "Where our fears lie, that is where change is most needed."
• Facing fear as a practice of faith and emotional resilience.
• The importance of naming fears, localizing them, and even “inviting them in for tea.”
• How unprocessed fear can lead to paralysis or aggression.

Living in the Present: The Antidote to Fear

• Why Fyodor refuses to postpone life until after the war.
• "We don’t know what tomorrow brings. So I live today, fully."
• A powerful response to fear: doing good, loving openly, and forgiving freely.
• The lesson of war: never get used to abnormal things.
• Holding onto humanity in the face of devastation.

Linked Media References

• Mark 6L: 45-52 Jesus Walks on Water
• Episode 110 of For the Life of the World A Voice from Kyiv
• Episode 138 of For the Life of the World / Ukrainian Pastor Speaks Out: Resist Evil, Be Present, and Remember How Little You Control
• Ukraine War Updates - BBC News

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

But what would you think if you met a seer of visions in the present day? Maybe you have.

What about a prophet whose visions came like a movie screen unfurled before him, the images grotesque and vivid, all in the unsuspecting backwoods setting of Lookout Mountain, deep in the south of Tennessee.

Would you believe it? Would you believe him? The beauty of fiction allows the reader to join the author in asking: What if?

That’s exactly what Jamie Quatro has allowed us to do in her newest work of literary fiction, Two-Step Devil.

What if an earnest and wildly misunderstood Christian is left alone on Lookout Mountain? What if the receiver of visions makes art that reaches a girl who’s stuck in the darkest grip of a fraught world? What if the Devil really did sit in the corner of the kitchen, wearing a cowboy hat, and what if he got to tell his own side of the Biblical story?

On today’s episode novelist Jamie Quatro joins Macie Bridge to share about her relationship to the theological exploration within her latest novel, Two-Step Devil; her experience of being a Christian and a writer, but not a “Christian Writer”; and how the trinity of main characters in the novel speak to and open up her own deepest concerns about the state of our country and the world we inhabit.

Jamie Quatro is the New York Times Notable author of I Want to Show You More, and Fire Sermon. *Two-Step Devil* is her latest work and is the winner of the 2024 Willie Morris Award for Southern Writing, and it’s also been named a New York Times Editor's Choice, among other accolades. Jamie teaches in the Sewanee School of Letters MFA program.

SPOILER ALERT! This episode contains substantial spoilers to the novel’s plot, so if you’d like to read it for yourself, first grab a copy from your local bookstore, then two-step on back over here to listen to this conversation!

About Jamie Quatro

Jamie Quatro is the New York Times Notable author of I Want to Show You More, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, and Fire Sermon, a Book of the Year for the Economist, San Francisco Chronicle, LitHub, Bloomberg, and the Times Literary Supplement. Her most recent novel, Two-Step Devil, is the winner of the 2024 Willie Morris Award for Southern Writing. It has also been named a New York Times Editor's Choice, a 2025 ALA Notable Book, and a Best Book of 2024 by the Paris Review and the Atlanta Journal Constitution. A new story collection is forthcoming from Grove Press.

Quatro’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Bread Loaf, and La Maison Dora Maar in Ménerbes, France, where she will be in residence in 2025. Quatro holds an MA in English from the College of William and Mary and an MFA in fiction from the Bennington College Writing Seminars. She teaches in the Sewanee School of Letters MFA program, and lives with her family in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Show Notes

• Get your copy of Two-Step Devil by Jamie Quatro
• Click here to view the art that inspired Jamie Quatro’s Two-Step Devil

Production Notes

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

In Miroslav Volf’s understanding, forgiveness “decouples the deed from the doer.”

Today’s episode features some highlights from Miroslav’s personal reflections about each chapter of his book Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace, including his thoughts about one of the most painful moments in his family’s history, the death of his 5-year-old brother Daniel when Miroslav was just a small boy.

Free of Charge was published in 2006, and we just released a 10-video curriculum series through faith.yale.edu/free-of-charge. It also includes a 48-page discussion guide with new material to help facilitate not just deeper reflection about giving and forgiving, but a viable, livable path toward these core Christian practices.

This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale Foundation. Visit tyndale.foundation to learn more.

This series is free for Yale Center for Faith & Culture email subscribers. So head over to faith.yale.edu/free-of-charge to sign up today.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Miroslav Volf
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, Zoë Halaban, Kacie Barrett, and Emily Brookfield
• 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

But what exactly was going on? Today’s episode is an introduction to the political theology of Kendrick Lamar. Evan Rosa welcomes Femi Olutade, arguably the living expert on the theology of Kendrick Lamar. A lifelong fan of hip hop and student of theology, he’s deeply familiar not just with music Kendrick made, but the influences that made Kendrick, as well as Christian scripture and moral theology. Femi has written incredibly nuanced theological musicological reflections about Kendrick Lamar’s 2017 album DAMN., which won the Pulitzer Prize for Music.

Femi joined Dissect Podcast host Cole Cushna as lead writer for a 20-episode analysis of DAMN., offering incredible insight into the theological, moral, and political richness of Kendrick Lamar.

About Femi Olutade

Femi Olutade is the lead writer for Season 5 of Dissect, an analysis of Kendrick Lamar’s Pulitzer Prize-winning album DAMN. He’s arguably the living expert on the theology of Kendrick Lamar. A lifelong fan of hip hop and student of theology, he’s deeply familiar not just with music Kendrick made, but the influences that made Kendrick, as well as Christian scripture and moral theology. Femi has written incredibly nuanced theological musicological reflections about Kendrick Lamar’s 2017 album DAMN., which won the Pulitzer Prize for Music.

Femi joined host Cole Cushna as lead writer for a 20-episode analysis of DAMN., offering incredible insight into the theological, moral, and political richness of Kendrick Lamar.

Show Notes

• Femi Olutade’s Theology of Kendrick Lamar
• Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl LIX Half-Time Show (Video)
• Kendrick Lamar’s Half-time Show Lyrics (Full)
• Season 5 of Dissect: Kendrick Lamar's DAMN.

Kendrick Lamar’s Political Theology as a Diss Track to America

Super Bowl LIX was amazing, but not because of the football, or the commercials. It was the 13 minute half-time tour de force that Kendrick Lamar offered the world.

Uncle Sam introduces the show, the quote “Great American Game.” A playstation controller appears. Is the game football? Video game? Or some other game? Kendrick appears crouched on a car—dozens of red, white, and blue dancers emerge, evoking both the American flag which they eventually form, as well as the gang wars between bloods and crips—or as Kendrick says in Hood Politics, “Demo-crips” and “Re-blood-icans”

And what ensues is an intricately choreographed set of layered meanings, allusions, hidden references and Easter eggs—not all of which have been noticed, not to mention explained or understood.

You can find links to the performance and the lyrics in the show notes.

Femi Olutade on the Theology of Kendrick Lamar

Today’s episode is an introduction to the political theology of Kendrick Lamar. And joining me is Femi Olutade, arguably the living expert on the theology of Kendrick Lamar. As a lifelong fan of hip hop, he’s deeply familiar not just with music Kendrick made, but the influences that made Kendrick. Femi has written incredibly nuanced theological musicological reflections about Kendrick Lamar’s 2017 album DAMN., which won the Pulitzer Prize for Music.

And I became familiar with Femi’s work in 2021, while listening to a podcast called Dissect—which analyzes albums line by line, note by note. They cover mostly hip hop, but the season on Radiohead’s In Rainbows is also incredible. Femi joined host Cole Cushna to co-write a 20-episode analysis of DAMN., offering incredible insight into the theological, moral, and political richness of Kendrick Lamar, which repays so many replays. Forward, AND backward. Yes, you can play the album backwards and forwards like a mirror and they tell two different stories, one about wickedness and pride, and the other about weakness, love, and humility.

If you want to jump to my conversation with Femi about Kendrick Lamar’s Political Theology, please do, just jump ahead a few minutes.

Not Just a Diss Track to Drake, but a Diss Track to America

But I wanted to offer a few preliminaries of my own to help with this most recent context of the Super Bowl halftime performance.

Because almost immediately, it was interpreted as nothing more than one of the pettiest, egotistical, and overkill ways to settle a rap beef between Kendrick and another hip hop artist, Drake. Some fans celebrated this. Others found it at best irrelevant and confusing, and at worst an offensive waste of an opportunity to make a larger statement before an audience of 133 million viewers.

In my humble opinion, both get it wrong. Kendrick Lamar simply does not work this way.

If it was the biggest diss track of all time, it wasn’t aimed merely at Drake, but America. And if it was offensive, it was because of its moral clarity and force, striking a prophetic chord operating similar to a parable.

Jesus and Kendrick on Prophecy and Parables

Parables, according to Jesus, are meant to give more to those who already have, and take away from those who already have nothing (Matthew 13:13). Because, as the prophet Isaiah says, “seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand” (Isaiah 6:9).

At this point, it’s possible that you’re entirely confused, and if so, I’d invite you to hang with me and lean in. Watch it again, listen more closely. Because rap, according to Jay Z, is a lean-in genre. You can’t understand it without close examination, without contextual, bottom-up, historical appreciation, or without a willingness to be educated about what it’s like to be Black in America.

But I guarantee you that in Kendrick Lamar’s outstanding choreographed prophetic theatre, there’s much more going on—”there’s levels to it”—to quote Lamar.

You Picked the Right Time, but the Wrong Guy

And if you want it clearly spelled out for you—a cleaner, smoother, tighter, more palatable, less subtle social commentary that can be abstracted from history, circumstance, and the genre of rap itself so that it can be rationally evaluated—well, you’re occupying the exact position Kendrick is critiquing, which he prophetically predicts in the very performance itself. As he warns us:

The revolution 'bout to be televised You picked the right time, but the wrong guy

Still, what was that?? First, it’s public performance art, so just let it land. Watch it again. Notice something new. Submit yourself to it. Let it change you.

The Black American Experience in Hip Hop and Kendrick Lamar

And if you really want to understand it, you need to be open to the possibility that some social commentary can only be understood in light of certain lived experiences. In this case, at least the Black American experience. And then, rather than demanding that Kendrick explain it to you in your own vernacular, listen to what he’s already said. Lean in an listen to his whole body of work, learn his story, expertly rendered in jaw-dropping lyrical performance. Drive with him through his childhood streets of Compton on Good Kid M.A.A.D. City. Journey with him from caterpillar to butterfly on To Pimp a Butterfly, look in the mirror presented before you in the Pulitzer-prize winning DAMN., hear out his messy psyche laid bare in Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers, take a ride with him in GNX…

In the days following Kendrick’s super bowl performance, J Kameron Carter, Professor of African American Studies, Comparative Literature, and Religion at the University of California at Irvine, called for a more in-depth study of the 13-minute performance, noting that:

“[B]lack performance carries within it an interrogation of the question of country as the problem and question of US political theology and the legacy of Christian empire.”

This episode isn’t meant to close any books or offer a full explanation of Kendrick’s performance, let alone his music, but just to lean in, and to quote Kendrick, “salute truth and the prophecy.”

Production Notes

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

In this conversation, Pam King and Jamie Aten join Evan Rosa to discuss:

• Each of their personal encounters with disasters—both fire and cancer
• The psychological study of disaster
• The personal impact of disaster on mental, emotional, and spiritual health
• The difference between resilience and fortitude
• And the theological and practical considerations for how to live through disastrous events.

This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale Foundation. Visit tyndale.foundation to learn more.

About Pam King

Pam King is Executive Director the Thrive Center and is Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science at Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy. She hosts the With & For podcast, and you can follow her @drpamking.

About Jamie Aten

Jamie D. Aten is a disaster psychologist and disaster ministry expert. He helps others navigate mass, humanitarian, and personal disasters with scientific and spiritual insights. He is the Founder and Executive Director of the Humanitarian Disaster Institute and Disaster Ministry Conference and holds the Blanchard Chair of Humanitarian & Disaster Leadership at Wheaton College. And he’s the author of *A Walking Disaster: What Surviving Katrina and Cancer Taught Me about Faith and Resilience.*

Show Notes

• Humanitarian Disaster Institute
• Spiritual First Aid
• Jamie Aten’s A Walking Disaster: What Surviving Katrina and Cancer Taught Me about Faith and Resilience
• The Thrive Center at Fuller Seminary
• Pam King’s personal experience fighting fires in the Eaton Fire in January 2025
• 5,000 homes destroyed
• 55 schools and houses of worship are gone
• “Neighborhoods are annihilated …”
• Jamie Aten offers an overview of the impact of disasters on humanity, and the human response
• 1985: 400% increase in natural disasters globally
• Japan 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami
• Haiti 2010 earthquake
• Physical, emotional, spiritual
• Infrastructural impacts that set up disasters
• USAID support
• Jamie Aten’s experience during Hurricane Katrina
• Personal disasters
• Jamie Aten’s experience with colon cancer
• “Evacuation Impossible”
• Impact of disaster on personal sense of thriving
• Thriving vs surviving
• Understanding trauma
• Collective traumatic events
• The historically Black multigenerational community in Altadena
• What constitutes thriving?
• Thriving as adaptive growth: with and for others
• Self-care is not just me-care, but we-care.
• Trauma brain and the cognitive impacts of disaster
• The psychological study of disaster: grapefruit vs beachball
• Humanitarian Disaster Institute
• Spiritual First Aid
• A rupture of meaning making
• Place and spirituality and the impact of disaster on sense of place
• Bethlehem pastor Munther Isaac’s “Christ in the Rubble”
• Finding meaning in both the restructuring or rebuilding, but also in the rubble itself
• Hope embodied in service
• Everything is a cognitive load
• Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz’s The Home of God: A Brief Story of Everything
• Psychological and trauma-informed care
• ”One of the things that we found was that when people received positive spiritual support, that they reported lower levels of trauma, lower levels of depression and lower levels of anxiety.”
• Bless CPR
• BLESS: Biological, Livelihood, Emotional, Social, Spiritual
• “What’s the most pressing need?”
• Spiritual health
• Spirituality and our ultimate sources of meaning
• Transcendence
• Lament as a practice for dealing with disaster
• Prayer or sacred readings
• Meaning making and suffering:  Elizabeth Hall (Biola University) and Crystal Park (University of Connecticut)
• Baton Rouge Flood 2016
• Navigating suffering
• Religion in disaster mental health
• Faith as a predictor for resilience
• Meaning making outside of religion
• Mr. Rogers: “Look for the helpers”
• Best disaster preparedness: “Get to know your neighbor.”
• “Proximity alone is not what it takes to become a neighbor.”
• Neighbors helping neighbors
• Managing burnout in helpers
• “Spiritual self-aid” instead of “self-care”
• Self-care is like surfing
• “God holding the fragmented pieces of me”
• “God’s love is with me.”
• Spiritual fortitude in personal and natural disasters

Production Notes

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

In this episode, Ryan McAnnally-Linz welcomes Ryan Darr (Assistant Professor, Yale Divinity School) to reflect on some of the most pressing issues in environmental ethics and consider them through philosophical, ecological, and theological frameworks.

Together they discuss:

• What and who matters in environmental ethics: Only humans? Only sentient animals? Every life form? The inorganic natural world?
• The significance and difference between global and individual scale of climate issues
• The ethics of climate change denial
• Environmental justice and moral obligations to the environment—the question of what we owe to animals and the rest of the natural world
• The importance of biodiversity and the impact of species loss and extinction
• The ethics of eating animals
• The problems with human consumption of the natural world
• And the impact of cultivating a wider moral imagination of our ecological future

About Ryan Darr

Ryan Darr Ryan Darr is Assistant Professor of Religion, Ethics, and Environment at Yale Divinity School. His research interests include environmental ethics, multispecies justice, structural injustice, ethical theory, and the history of religious and philosophical ethics. He is currently writing a book that defends an account of environmental and multispecies justice as a framework for thinking ethically about the crisis of biodiversity loss and mass extinction. He is also developing an ongoing research project exploring the relationship between individual agency and responsibility and structural justice and injustice with a particular focus on environmental and climate issues.

His first book, The Best Effect: Theology and the Origins of Consequentialism, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2023. The book offers a new, robustly theological story of the origin of consequentialism, one of the most influential views in modern moral theory. It uses the new historical account to intervene in contemporary ethical debates about consequentialism and about how ethicists conceive of goods, ends, agency, and causality.

Prior to joining the YDS faculty, Ryan held postdoctoral fellowships at the Princeton University Center for Human Values (2019-22) and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music (2022-24).

Show Notes

• Get your copy of Ryan Darr’s The Best Effect: Theology and the Origins of Consequentialism
• Complex ethical questions about climate change
• Enmeshed in environmental systems
• A crash course in environmental ethics
• Which entities should we be thinking about ethically?
• Are human beings the most important morally and ethically speaking?
• What about animals, plants, or other kinds of life?
• What about other species of animals
• Anthropocentrism: Only humans matter.
• Sentientism: Only sentient animals matter
• Biocentrism: Every life form matters
• Can we apply justice and rights to animals?
• The polar bear on melting ice was the poster child for climate change; but this was a mistake because the effects on human beings is massive.
• “All of us are affected.”
• “We’re all vulnerable to climate change. …. kidding themselves and need to think more about this.”
• Global south
• Climate negotiations: Who needs to lower emissions and how? And how do we adapt?
• Massive overwhelm at the scope of environmental problems: “Only massive changes can make a difference.” But “I have to change my life.”
• How should we navigate the scale issue?
• Don’t let large scale or small scale issues or changes eclipse the other.
• Political action is crucial
• “We need people willing to respond in the ways they can, where they are.”
• Climate change denial
• “There’s a lot of money flowing here.” Fossil fuel interests and others muddy the waters and create conflicts
• “If it’s the case that millions of lives are at stake … I don’t see how some doubt
• Reasons why people might deny climate change
• “It’d be nice if climate change wasn’t real, but …”
• Environmental justice and injustice
• Toxicities released into the natural environment
• Conservation and biodiversity loss
• Approximately 8 million species on earth
• It’s standard to lose a handful per million per year
• Generally, you’re supposed to get more species on earth, short of a mass extinction event
• But extinction rate is something like 100x to 1000x faster
• Defaunation—reduction of fauna on earth
• Measuring the biomass of various species (Humans make up 30% of the world’s biomass.)
• Changes linked to colonialism and global capitalism
• Why would God have created such a diverse species
• Thomas Aquinas on why God created a world full of biodiversity: to reflect God’s extensive perfection
• “On this view, the world is show less
• What are the ethics of
• Example: Wolves were intentionally eradicated in America, because “who wants a wolf in their neighborhood.”
• Justice-oriented “Rights” and what we owe to each other, versus non-justice
• Do we have obligations to animals?
• Example: Kicking a Cat
• “The Incredulous Stare”
• Jainism and “ahiṃsā” (non-injury, no-harm, or non-violence toward all life forms, down to microbes)
• “I’m inclined to think that I have obligations to almost all animals.”
• At least “animals who are sentient”—desires, frustration of desires, pain, etc.
• Is it permissible to eat meat?
• Factory-farmed meat (effectively tormented)
• Animal life has become commodity—valuable solely because of its use and with no regard for their well-being.
• Consumers, Producers, and Wendell Berry: How should social roles relate to each other?
• “Any question about justice have to begin from concrete social positions.”
• Maintaining action and creativity
• Practical recommendation for action to align our lives with our values
• “I read fiction and short stories that tell stories of human beings in futures drastically affected by climate change as a way to open up my imagination to what’s possible.”
• Dystopian narratives: leading to a sense of futility and hopelessness.
• “I don’t think we know where anything is headed.”
• “Humans have lived through upheaval so many times, and have found ways. … ‘People kept on baking bread as the Roman Empire fell.’”
• Yale Divinity School class: “Eco-Futures”—imagining lives lived well in painful situations
• If not hope, a sense of determination to do what can be done with the time that we have.
• Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future: a technocratic novel about politics and policy solutions
• Short fiction on Grist—Imagine 2200: Write the Future
• Margaret Atwood, Everything Change

Production Notes

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

Why is God hidden? Why is God silent? And why does that matter in light of faith, hope, and love?

In this episode, philosopher Deborah Casewell joins Evan Rosa for a discussion of divine hiddenness. Together, they reflect on:

Simone Weil’s distinction between abdication and abandonment

Martin Luther’s theology of the cross

The differences between the epistemic, moral, and existential problems with the hiddenness of God

The terror, horror, and fear that emerges from the human experience of divine hiddenness

The realities of seeing through a glass darkly and pursuing faith, hope, and love

And finally, what it means to live bravely in the tension or contracdition between the hiddenness of God and the faith in God’s presence.

About Deborah Casewell

Deborah Casewell is Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Chester. She works in the areas of philosophy and culture, philosophy of religion, and theology & religion, in particular on existentialism and religion, questions of ethics and self-formation in relation to asceticism and the German cultural ideal of Bildung. She has given a number of public talks and published on these topics in a range of settings.

Her first book. Eberhard Jüngel and Existence, Being Before the Cross, was published in 2021: it explores the theologian Eberhard Jüngel’s philosophical inheritance and how his thought provides a useful paradigm for the relation between philosophy and theology. Her second book, Monotheism and Existentialism, was published in 2022 by Cambridge University Press as a Cambridge Element.

She is Co-Director of the AHRC-funded Simone Weil Research Network UK, and previously held a Humboldt Research Fellowship at the University of Bonn. Prior to her appointment in Bonn, she was Lecturer in Philosophy at Liverpool Hope University and a Teaching Fellow at King’s College, London. She received her PhD from the University of Edinburgh, my MSt from the University of Oxford, and spent time researching and studying at the University of Tübingen and the Institut Catholique de Paris.

Show Notes

• Mother Teresa on God’s hiddenness
• Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, edited by the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk
• What does it mean for God to be hidden?
• Perceived absence
• Simone Weil on God’s abdication of the world for the sake of the world
• The presence of God. This should be understood in two ways. As Creator, God is present in everything which exists as soon as it exists. The presence for which God needs the co-operation of the creature is the presence of God, not as Creator but as Spirit. The first presence is the presence of creation. The second is the presence of decreation. (He who created us without our help will not save us without our consent. Saint Augustine.) God could create only by hiding himself. Otherwise there would be nothing but himself. — Simone Weil, in Gravity and Grace, “Decreation”
• Abdication vs. Abandonment
• A longing for God, who is hidden, unknown, unperceived, and mysterious
• Martin Luther’s theology of the cross
• “Hidden in the suffering and ignominy of the cross.”
• “God is powerful but chooses not to be in relation to us.”
• Human experiences of divine hiddenness
• Three ways to talk about hiddenness of God
•  
  1. epistemic hiddenness:  ”if we were to grasp God with our minds, then we'd be denying the power of God.”
• Making ourselves an idol
• The Cloud of Unknowing and “apophatic” or “negative” theology (only saying what God is not)
•  
  1. Moral hiddenness of God: “this is what people find very troubling. … a moral terror to it.”
•  
  1. Existential hiddenness of God: “where the hiddenness of God makes you feel terrified”
• Revelation and the story of human encounter or engagement with God
• “Luther is the authority on the hiddenness of God in the existential and moral sense.”
• The power of God revealed in terror.
• “God never becomes comfortable or accommodated into our measure.”
• ”We never make God into an object of our reason and comfort.”
• Terror, horror, and fear: reverence of God
• Marilyn McCord Adams, *Christ & Horrors—*meaning-destroying events
• “That which is hidden terrifies us.”
• Martin Luther: “God is terrifying, because God does save some of us, and God does damn some of us.”
• The “alien work of God”
• “Is Luther right in saying that God has to remain hidden, and the way in which God has to remain hidden  has to be terrifying? So there has to be this kind  of background of the terrifying God in all of our relations with the God of love that is the God of grace that, that saves us.”
• Preserving the mystery of God
• We’re unable to commodify or trivialize God.
• Francis Schaeffer’s He Is There and He Is Not Silent
• “Luther construes it as a good thing.”
• Suffering, anxiety, despair, meaninglessness
• Humanity’s encounter with nothingness—the void
• “Interest in the demonic, or terror, as a preliminary step into a  full religious or a proper religious experience of God.”
• Longing for God in the Bible
• Noah, Moses, David
• “The other side of divine hiddenness is human loneliness.”
• Loneliness and despair as “what your life is going to be like without God.” (Barton Newell)
• Tension in the experience of faith
• 1 Corinthians 13:12:  ”Now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know even as I also am known.”
• Faith, hope, and love abides in the face of epistemic, moral, and existential hiddenness of God.
• The meaning of struggling with the hiddenness of God for the human pursuit of faith, hope, and love
• “Let tensions be.”
• ”But you've always got to keep the reality of faith, hope, and love, keep hold of the fact that that is a reality, and that can and will be a reality. It's, it's, not to try and justify it, not to try and harmonize it, but just to hold it, I suppose. And hold it even in its contradiction.”

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Deborah Casewell
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Emily Brookfield, Alexa Rollow, & Zoë Halaban
• 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

Now 4 years past Jan 6, 2021 and anticipating the next term of presidential office, Yale professors Eliyahu Stern and Philip Gorski join Evan Rosa for a conversation about religion, politics, and the shape of Christian nationalism now.

Together they discuss what religion really means in sociological and historical terms; the difference between religions of power and religions of law or morality; the American syncretism of pagan Christianity (perhaps captured in the Qnon Shaman with the horns and facepaint); the connection between nationalism and the desire to be a Chosen People; the supersessionism at the root of seeing the Christian conquest of America as a New Jerusalem; and how ordinary citizens come to adopt the tenets of Christian Nationalism.

Eliyahu Stern is Professor of Modern Jewish Intellectual and Cultural History in the Departments of Religious Studies and History and his current project is entitled No Where Left to Go: Jews and the Global Right from 1977 to October 7.

Philip Gorski is Frederick and Laura Goff Professor of Sociology at Yale University and is author of The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy (with Samuel Perry) as well as American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present.

Special thanks to our production assistant Zoë Halaban for pitching this conversation.

About Eliyahu Stern

Eliyahu Stern is Professor of Modern Jewish Intellectual and Cultural History in the Departments of Religious Studies and History. Previously, he was Junior William Golding Fellow in the Humanities at Brasenose College and the Oriental Institute, University of Oxford. He is the author of the award-winning, The Genius: Elijah of Vilna and the Making of Modern Judaism (Yale University Press in 2012). His second monograph Jewish Materialism: The Intellectual Revolution of the 1870s (Yale University Press, 2018) details the ideological background to Jews’ involvement in Zionism, Capitalism, and Communism. His courses include The Global Right: From the French Revolution to the American Insurrection, Secularism: From the Enlightenment to the Present, Modern Jewish Intellectual History, The Holocaust in Culture and Politics. He has served as a term member on the Council on Foreign Relations and a consultant to the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, Poland. Currently, he is a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the Center of Jewish History.

His latest project is entitled No Where Left to Go: Jews and the Global Right from 1977 to October 7.

About Philip Gorski

Philip S. Gorski is a comparative-historical sociologist with strong interests in theory and methods and in modern and early modern Europe. He is Frederick and Laura Goff Professor of Sociology at Yale University. His empirical work focuses on topics such as state-formation, nationalism, revolution, economic development and secularization with particular attention to the interaction of religion and politics. Other current interests include the philosophy and methodology of the social sciences and the nature and role of rationality in social life. He’s author with Samuel L. Perry of The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy, as well as American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present.

Show Notes

• Trump: “I’m a nationalist.”
• Increased ownership and proud identification as Christian Nationalism
• Eliyahu Stern, No Where Left to Go: Jews and the Global Right from 1977 to October 7
• The human practice of religion
• “ The way one person will invoke Christianity will be something very different than say the way a church or the way another person or another religious figure is going to invoke that term.”
• Humility and a leap
• “ The History of the Sacred from Babylon to Beyoncé”
• Religion vs “The Sacred”
• ”Western nationalism itself is, the offspring of a Christian supersessionist appropriation of Judaism.”
• “A new chosen people”
• The Deep Story Philip Gorski tells in The Flag and the Cross
• Pagan understandings of nationalism
• “The Deep Story runs something like this. America was founded as a Christian nation. The founders were Orthodox Christians. The founding documents were based on quote, biblical principles or perhaps even divinely inspired. The United States has a special role to play. In history as an exceptional or chosen nation in order to carry out that mission, it's been blessed with unique power and prosperity. But the project, the mission, and also the prosperity and the power are all increasingly endangered by the presence of non-whites, non-native born people, non-Christians on American soil.”
• Covenantal logic
• The tendency to see oneself as “Chosen”
• England, Netherlands claiming the mantle of Chosenness for political purposes
• “Jews are sitting around the world and they're trying to figure out how to unchosen themselves.”
• Supersessionism and the interpretation of the Old Testament
• The Promised Land Story: American Conquest
• The Exemplary Story: A Shining City on a Hill
• How do we gather and absorb political narratives like Christian Nationalism?
• How is Christian Nationalism passed on?
• Larger network of international Christian Nationalisms
• The Arms Race or Game of Thrones that Nationalisms assume
• Russian Christian Nationalism and recovering a “Christian Civilization”
• Christian Nationalism is a political strategy
• “ I don't think anybody … believes for a second that Donald Trump, or Vladimir Putin, or for that matter, Viktor Orban are serious Christians by any reasonable definition of that term.”
• “White-supremicism in more acceptable garb.”
• Losers of free market economics
• Free Market Capitalism and erosion of social bonds and relationships
• Strong borders, blood and soil
• Fear of immigrants
• Trust
• What is the deeply felt need of someone who comes to identify as a Christian Nationalist?
• Human needs threatened by social instability and inequality
• Lip service for the sake of power
• What “Christian” does next to “Nationalism”
• Trump embraces Nationalism for himself
• Globalism vs Nationalism
• Second Iraq War as a mistake
• “Proponents are not religious in the conventional sense”
• “ When we're talking about Christian nationalism, we have to first and foremost recognize that we're talking about a different understanding of Christianity than what Americans are accustomed to seeing as the dominant understanding of what that term signifies.”
• The crucial distinction between Religions of Power and Religions of Morality
• Powerful protector
• “Modern-day Cyrus”—The comparison between Trump and the biblical figure of Cyrus
• What is religion? What kind of religion is operative in Christian Nationalism?
• ”It is not just centered in evangelicalism anymore.”
• First Things and Catholic Integralism
• New Apostolic Reformation
• Dominion Theology
• “This is about occupying institutions, seizing power, and using the state to impose a particular vision and a particular hierarchy.”
• Jan 6, 2021
• Rising paganism in America
• “How could Christians embrace Trump?”
• Merging of Shamanism and Christianity on Jan 6
• Trancendental versus immanent versions of Christianity
• Neo-paganism and magical understandings of the world
• Concerns and hope as Trump takes office in January 2025
• Further toward the politics of grievance and victimization
• “Trump as a backstop”
• Israel’s reliance
• Can Trump negotiate international peace?
• “The cynical side of me says  my greatest hope lies in Trump's failures.”
• Hope for more careful, nuanced conversations about Christian Nationalism

Production Notes

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

(Simone Weil, Gravity & Grace)

“That's how the figure of Christ comes into this idea of the madness of love. It's that kind of mad, self emptying act completely. And it's the  one thing, she says, it's the only thing that means that you  are able to love properly. Because to love properly, and therefore to be just properly, you have to love like Christ does. Which is love to the extent that you, that you empty yourself and, you know, die on a cross.” (Deborah Casewell, from this episode)

This is the third installment of a short series on How to Read Simone Weil—as the Mystic, the Activist, and the Existentialist.

This week, Evan Rosa invites Deborah Casewell, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chester, author of Monotheism & Existentialism, and Co-Director of the Simone Weil Research Network in the U.K.—to explore how to read Simone Weil the Existentialist.

Together they discuss how her life of extreme self-sacrifice importantly comes before her philosophy; how to understand her central, but often confusing concept of decreation; her approach to beauty as the essential human response for finding meaning in a world of force and necessity; the madness of Jesus Christ as the only way to engage in struggle for justice and how she connects that to the Greek tragedy of Antigone, which is the continuation of the Oedipus story; and, the connection between love, justice, and living a life of madness.

About Simone Weil

Simone Weil (1909–1943) was a French philosopher, mystic, and political activist. She’s the author of Gravity and Grace, The Need for Roots, and Waiting for God—among many other essays, letters, and notes.

About Deborah Casewell

Deborah Casewell is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chester, author of Monotheism & Existentialism, and is Co-Director of the Simone Weil Research Network in the U.K.

Show Notes

• Simone Weil’s Gravity & Grace (1947) (Available Online)
• Deborah Casewell’s Monotheism & Existentialism
• Simone de Beauvoir’s anecdote in Memories of a Beautiful Daughter: “Shouldn’t we also get people’s minds, not just their bodies? Weil: “You’ve never been hungry have you?”
• Leon Trotsky yells violently at Weil
• The odd idolizing of Weil without paying attention to her writing
• ”You get a kind of, as you say, a kind of odd idolization of her, or a sense in which  you can't then interact so critically   or systematically with her philosophy, because her figure stands in the way so much, and the kind of the respect that people have.”
• Anti-Semitism despite Jewishness
• Simone Weil’s relationship to food: an unhealthy role model
• “She’d reject anything that wasn’t perfect.”
• Extreme germophobe
• Expression of solidarity with the unfortunate
• Her life comes before her philosophy. Being, you might say, comes before thinking.
• Weil’s life of extreme self-sacrifice as “mad”—alienating, insane, strange to the outside world.
• “ I think an essential part of, to an essential part of understanding her is to understand that   world is kind of structured and  set up in such a way that it runs without God, without the supernatural, God's kind of abdicated through the act of creation. And as a result, the universe operates through necessity and through force. So left to its own devices, the universe, I think, tends towards crushing people.”
• Abandonment vs abdication
• People possess power and ability and action—a tension between activity and passivity
• Weil’s Marxism and theory of labor and work
• Activity becomes sustained passivity
• Consent, power, and the social dynamics of force and necessity
• I think she sees the best human existence is to be in a state of obedience instead. And so what you have to do is relinquish power over people.
• The complexity of human relationships
• “She was a very individual person … a singular, individual life.”
• The Need for Roots
• “And this is what I do like about Simone Weil—is that she's always happy to let contradictions exist. And so when she describes human nature and the needs of the soul, they're contradictory. They all contradict each other. It's freedom and obedience.”
• Creating dualisms
• She is a dualist
• Simone Weil on Beauty and Decreation
• ”Decreation is essentially your way to exist in the world ruled by force and necessity without succumbing  to force and necessity, because in a way there's less  of you to succumb to force and necessity.”
• Platonic idea of Metaxu
• Weil on the human experience of beauty—” people need beautiful things and they need experiences of beauty in order to exist in the world, fundamentally… if this world is ruled by force and necessity.”
• The unity of the transcendentals of beauty and truth and goodness—anchored in God
• Weil’s Platonism
• Weil as religious existentialist, as opposed to French atheistic existentialist
• “ For her, God is the ultimate reality, but also God is love. And so the goal of human existence, I think, is to return to God and consent to God. That's the goal of human life.”
• “What are you paying attention to?”
• The madness of Christ
• The struggle for justice
• “Only a few people have this desire for justice, this madness to love.”
• Existentialism and Humanism: “Sartre says that  man is nothing but what he makes of himself.”
• Making oneself an example
• “The real supernatural law, which is mad and unreasonable, and it doesn't try to make accommodations and get on with the world and deal with tricky situations. It's just mad.”
• Simone Weil on Antigone and the continuation of the Oedipus story
• Summary of the Greek tragedy, Antigone
• “And so Antigone says, the justice that I owe is not to the city. It's not so that the city can, you know, continue its life and move on. The justice that I owe is to the supernatural law, to these more important primordial laws that actually govern the  life and death situations and the situation of your soul as well. And that's why she does what she does. She's obedient to the unwritten law rather than the written law.”
• “The love of God and the justice of God is always going to be mad in the eyes of the world.”
• ”The spirit of justice is nothing other than the supreme and perfect flower of the madness of love.”
• The mad, self-emptying love of Christ
• “That's how the figure of Christ comes into this idea of the madness of love. It's that kind of mad, self emptying act completely. And it's the  one thing, she says, it's the only thing that means that you  are able to love properly. Because to love properly, and therefore to be just properly, you have to love like Christ does. Which is love to the extent that you, that you empty yourself and, you know, die on a cross.”
• Does Weil suggest an unhealthy desire to suffer?
• “ It hurls one into risks one cannot run. If one has given one's heart to anything at all that belongs to this world. Um, and the outcome to which the madness of love led Christ is, after all, no recommendation for it.”
• “But if the order of the universe is a wise order, there must sometimes be moments when, from the point of view of earthly reason, only the madness of love is reasonable. Such moments can only be those when, as today, mankind has become mad from want of love. Is it certain today that the madness of love may not be capable of providing the unhappy masses, hungry in body and soul, with a food far easier for them to digest than our inspirations to a less lofty source? So then, being what we are, is it certain that we are at our post in the camp of justice?”
• “ From a loftier view, only the madness of love is reasonable.”
• “Only the madness of love can be the kind of love that actually helps people in the world. Fundamentally, that people, even though they know it's mad, and they find it mad, and they would sometimes rather not see it, they need that kind of love, and they need people who love in that kind of way. Even if it's not the majority, people still  need that. And so in some way, the way in which  she is, and the way in which she sees Christ being, is indispensable. Even though the path that you have to go down has nothing to recommend, as she says, in the eyes of the reasonable world, nothing to recommend it. It's the only just thing to do. It's the only just and loving thing to do in the end.”

Production Notes

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

This was one of the central animating questions in Simone Weil’s thought that pushed her beyond philosophy into action. Weil believed that genuinely asking this question of the other, particularly the afflicted other, then truly listening and prayerfully attending, would move us toward an enactment of justice and love.

Simone Weil believed that any suffering that can be ameliorated, should be.

In this episode, Part 2 of our short series on How to Read Simone Weil, Cynthia Wallace (Associate Professor of English at St. Thomas More College at the University of Saskatchewan), and author of The Literary Afterlives of Simone Weil: Feminism, Justice, and the Challenge of Religion and Evan Rosa discuss the risky self-giving way of Simone Weil; her incredible literary influence, particularly on late 20th century feminist writers; the possibility of redemptive suffering; the morally complicated territory of self-sacrificial care and the way that has traditionally fallen to women and minorities; what it means to make room and practicing hospitality for the afflicted other; hunger; the beauty of vulnerability; and that grounding question for Simone Weil political ethics, “What are you going through?”

We’re in our second episode of a short series exploring How to Read Simone Weil. She’s the author of Gravity and Grace, The Need for Roots, and Waiting for God—among many other essays, letters, and notes—and a deep and lasting influence that continues today.

In this series, we’re exploring Simone Weil the Mystic, Simone Weil the Activist, Simone Weil the Existentialist. And what we’ll see is that so much of her spiritual, political, and philosophical life, are deeply unified in her way of being and living and dying.

And on that note, before we go any further, I need to issue a correction from our previous episode in which I erroneously stated that Weil died in France. And I want to thank subscriber and listener Michael for writing and correcting me.

Actually she died in England in 1943, having ambivalently fled France in 1942 when it was already under Nazi occupation—first to New York, then to London to work with the Free French movement and be closer to her home.

And as I went back to fix my research, I began to realize just how important her place of death was. She died in a nursing home outside London. In Kent, Ashford to be precise. She had become very sick, and in August 1943 was moved to the Grosvenor Sanitorium.

The manner and location of her death matter because it’s arguable that her death by heart failure was not a self-starving suicide (as the coroner reported), but rather, her inability to eat was a complication rising from tuberculosis, combined with her practice of eating no more than the meager rations her fellow Frenchmen lived on under Nazi occupation.

Her biographer Richard Rees wrote: "As for her death, whatever explanation one may give of it will amount in the end to saying that she died of love.

In going back over the details of her death, I found a 1977 New York Times article by Elizabeth Hardwick, and I’ll quote at length, as it offers a very fitting entry into this week’s episode on her life of action, solidarity, and identification with and attention to the affliction of others.

“Simone Weil, one of the most brilliant, and original minds of 20th century France, died at the age of 34 in a nursing home near London. The coroner issued a verdict of suicide, due to voluntary starvation—an action undertaken at least in part out of wish not to eat more than the rations given her compatriots in France under the German occupation. The year of her death was 1943.

“The willed deprivation of her last period was not new; indeed refusal seems to have been a part of her character since infancy. What sets her apart from our current ascetics with their practice of transcendental meditation, diet, vegetarianism, ashram simplicities, yoga is that with them the deprivations and rigors‐are undergone for the pay‐off—for tranquility, for thinness, for the hope of a long life—or frequently, it seems, to fill the hole of emptiness so painful to the narcissist. With Simone Well it was entirely the opposite.

“It was her wish, or her need, to undergo misery, affliction and deprivation because such had been the lot of mankind throughout history. Her wish was not to feel better, but to honor the sufferings of the lowest. Thus around 1935, when she was 25 years old, this woman of transcendent intellectual gifts and the widest learning, already very frail and suffering from severe headaches, was determined to undertake a year of work in a factory. The factories, the assembly lines, were then the modem equivalent of “slavery,” and she survived in her own words as “forever a slave.” What she went through at the factory “marked me in so lasting a manner that still today when any human being, whoever he may be and in whatever circumstances, speaks to me without brutality, I cannot help having the impression teat there must be a mistake....”

[Her contemporary] “Simone de Beauvoir tells of meeting her when they were preparing for examinations to enter a prestigious private school. ‘She intrigued me because of her great reputation for intelligence and her bizarre outfits. ... A great famine had broken out in China, and I was told that when she heard the news she had wept. . . . I envied her for having a heart that could beat round the world.’

“In London her health vanished, even though the great amount of writing she did right up to the time she went to the hospital must have come from those energies of the dying we do not understand—the energies of certain chosen dying ones, that is. Her behavior in the hospital, her refusal and by now her Inability to eat, vexed and bewildered the staff. Her sense of personal accountability to the world's suffering had reached farther than sense could follow.”

Last week, we heard from Eric Springsted, one of the co-founders of the American Weil Society and author of Simone Weil for the Twenty-First Century.

Next week, we’ll explore Simone Weil the Existentialist—with philosopher Deborah Casewell, author of Monotheism & Existentialism and Co-Director of the Simone Weil Research Network in the UK.

But this week we’re looking at Simone Weil the Activist—her perspectives on redemptive suffering, her longing for justice, and her lasting influence on feminist writers. With me is Cynthia Wallace, associate professor of English at St. Thomas More College at the University of Saskatchewan, and author of The Literary Afterlives of Simone Weil: Feminism, Justice, and the Challenge of Religion.

This is unique because it’s learning how to read Simone Weil from some of her closest readers and those she influenced, including poets and writers such as Adrienne Rich, Denise Levertov, and Annie Dillard.

About Cynthia Wallace

Cynthia Wallace is Associate Professor of English at St. Thomas More College at the University of Saskatchewan, and author of The Literary Afterlives of Simone Weil: Feminism, Justice, and the Challenge of Religion, as well as **Of Women Borne: A Literary Ethics of Suffering.

About Simone Weil

Simone Weil (1909–1943) was a French philosopher, mystic, and political activist. She’s the author of Gravity and Grace, The Need for Roots, and Waiting for God—among many other essays, letters, and notes.

Show Notes

• Cynthia Wallace (Associate Professor of English at St. Thomas More College at the University of Saskatchewan), and author of The Literary Afterlives of Simone Weil: Feminism, Justice, and the Challenge of Religion
• Elizabeth Hardwick, “A woman of transcendent intellect who assumed the sufferings of humanity” (New York Times, Jan 23, 1977)
• Of Women Borne: A Literary Ethics of Suffering
• The hard work of productive tension
• Simone Weil on homework: “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God”
• Open, patient, receptive waiting in school studies — same skill as prayer
• “What are you going through?” Then you listen.
• Union organizer
• Waiting for God and Gravity & Grace
• Vulnerability and tenderness
• Justice and Feminism, and “making room for the other”
• Denise Levertov’s  ”Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus”
• “Levertov wrote herself into Catholic conversion”
• “after pages and pages of struggle, she finally says: “So be it. Come rag of pungent quiverings,  dim star, let's try  if something human still can shield you, spark of remote light.”
• “And so she  argues that God isn't  particularly active in the world that we have, except for when we open ourselves to these chances of divine encounter.”
• “ Her imagination of God is different from how I think  a lot of contemporary Western   people think about an all powerful, all knowing God. Vae thinks about God as having done exactly what she's asking us to do, which is to make room for the other to exist in a way that requires us to give up power.”
• Exploiting self-emptying, particularly of women
• “Exposing the degree to which women have been disproportionately expected to sacrifice themselves.”
• Disproportionate self-sacrifice of women and in particular women of color
• Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Borne: ethics that care for the other
• The distinction between suffering and affliction
• Adrienne Rich’s poem, “Hunger”
• Embodiment
• “ You have to follow both sides to the kind of limit of their capacity for thought, and then see what you find in that untidy both-and-ness.”
• Annie Dillard’s expansive attentiveness
• Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and attending to the world: “ to bear witness to the world in a way that tells the truth about what is brutal in the world, while also telling the truth about what is glorious  in the world.”
• “She's suspicious of our imaginations because she doesn't want us to distract  ourselves from contemplating the void.”
• Dillard, For the Time Being (1999) on natural evil and injustice
• Going from attention to creation
• “Reading writers writing about writing”
• Joan Didion: “I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means, what I want and what I fear.”
• Writing as both creation and discovery
• Friendship and “ we let the other person be who they are instead of trying to make them who we want them to be.”
• The joy of creativity—pleasure and desire
• “ Simone Weil argues that suffering that can be ameliorated should be.”
• “ What is possible through shared practices of attention?”
• The beauty of vulnerability and the blossoms of fruit trees
• “What it takes for us to be fed”
• Need for ourselves, each other, and the divine

Production Notes

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

She understood, perhaps more than many other armchair philosophers from the same period, the risk of philosophy—the demands it made on a human life.

In this series, we’ll feature three guests who look at this magnificent and mysterious thinker in interesting and refreshing, and theologically and morally challenging ways.

We’ll look at Simone Weil the Mystic, Simone Weil the Activist, Simone Weil the Existentialist.

First we’ll be hearing from Eric Springsted, a co-founder of the American Weil Society and its long-time president—who wrote Simone Weil: Late Philosophical Writings and Simone Weil for the Twenty-First Century.

In this conversation, Eric O. Springsted and Evan Rosa discuss Simone Weil’s personal biography, intellectual life, and the nature of her spiritual and religious and moral ideas; pursuing philosophy as a way of life; her encounter with Christ, affliction, and mystery; her views on attention and prayer; her concept of the void, and the call to self-emptying; and much more.

About Simone Weil

Simone Weil (1909–1943) was a French philosopher, mystic, and political activist. She’s the author of Gravity and Grace, The Need for Roots, and Waiting for God—among many other essays, letters, and notes.

About Eric O. Springsted

Eric O. Springsted is the co-founder of the American Weil Society and served as its president for thirty-three years. After a career as a teacher, scholar, and pastor, he is retired and lives in Santa Fe, NM. He is the author and editor of a dozen previous books, including Simone Weil: Late Philosophical Writings and Simone Weil for the Twenty-First Century.

Show Notes

• Eric O. Springsted’s Simone Weil for the Twenty-First Century
• How to get hooked on Simone Weil
• “All poets are exiles.”
• Andre Weil
• Emile Chartier
• Taking ideas seriously enough to impact your life
• Weil’s critique of Marxism: “Reflections on the Cause of Liberty and Social Oppression”:  ”an attempt to try and figure out how there can be freedom and dignity in human labor and action”
• “Unfortunately she found affliction.”
• Ludwig Wittgenstein: “Philosophy is a matter of working on yourself.”
• Philosophy “isn’t simply objective. It’s a matter of personal morality as well.”
• ”Not only is the unexamined life not worth living, but virtue and intellect go hand in hand. Yeah. You don't have one without the other.”
• An experiment in how work and labor is done
• The demeaning and inherently degrading nature of factory work
• Christianity as “the religion of slaves.”
• Christianity can’t take away suffering; but it can take away the meaninglessness.
• George Herbert: “Love bade me welcome / But my soul drew back guilty of dust and sin”
• Weil’s vision/visit of Christ during Holy Week in Solemn, France: “It was like the smile on a beloved face.”
• The role of mystery
• Weil’s definition of mystery:  ”What she felt mystery was, and she gets a definition of it, it's when two necessary lines of thought cross and are irreconcilable, yet if you suppress one of them, somehow light is lost.”
• Her point is that whatever good comes out of this personal contact with Christ, does not erase the evil of the suffering.
• What is “involvement in contradiction”
• “She thought contradiction was an inescapable mark of truth.”
• Contradictions that shed light on life.
• Why mysticism is important for Weil: “The universe cannot be put into a box with techniques or tricks or our own scientific methods or philosophical methods. … Mystery instills humility and it takes the question of the knowing ego out of the picture. … And it challenges modern society to resist the idea that faith could be reduced to a dogmatic system.”
• “Faith is not a matter of the intellect.”
• “Intellect is not the highest faculty. Love is.”
• “The Right Use of School Studies”
• “Muscular effort of attention”
• She wanted to convert her Dominican priest friend into the universality of grace—that Plato was a pre-Chrisitan.” (e.g., her essay, “ Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks”)
• “Grace is universal.”
• How school studies contribute to the love of God
• Prayer as attention
• Weil on Attention: “Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object. It means holding in our minds within the reach of this thought, but on the lower level and not in contact with it. The diverse knowledge we have acquired. Which we are forced to make use of. Above all our thought should be empty waiting, not seeking anything but ready to receive in its naked truth. The object that is to penetrate it.”
• Not “detached,” but “available and ready for use”
• Making space for the afflicted other by “attending” to them
• Love that isn’t compensatory
• “The void as a space where love can go”
• What is prayer for Simone Weil?
• Prayer as listening all night long
• “Voiding oneself of secondary desires and letting oneself be spoken to.”
• Is Simone Weil “ a self-abnegating, melancholy revolutionary” (Leon Trotsky)
• Humility in Simone Weil
• “The Terrible Prayer”
• Was Simone Weil anorexic?
• Refusing comfort on the grounds of solidarity
• Self-emptying and grace
• Accepting the entire creation as God’s will
• Simone Weil on patience and waiting
• “With time, attention blooms into waiting.”
• “She’s resistant to the Church, but drawing from Christ’s self-emptying.”
• God’s withdrawal from the world (which is not deism)
• “A sacramental view of the world”
• “ The very creation of the world is by this withdrawal and simultaneous crucifixion of the sun in time and space.”
• (Obsessive) pursuit of purity in morals and thought
• Iris Murdoch’s The Nice and the Good
• “Nothing productive needs to come from this effort.”
• “ She put her finger on what's really the heart of Christian spirituality. … We live by the Word … by our being open to listening to the Word and having that transformed into God’s word.”

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Eric O. Springsted
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Emily Brookfield, Alexa Rollow, Zoë Halaban, & Kacie Barrett
• 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

Together they discuss the eschatological vision of Christopher Columbus; the Puritanical founding of New Haven, Connecticut to be the New Jerusalem; Ronald Reagan’s America as “City on a Hill”; the politics of COVID; the experience of Asian American immigrants in the 19th century; and how scripture shapes the American imagination in surprising and sometimes troubling ways.

About Yii-Jan Lin

Yii-Jan Lin is Associate Professor of New Testament at Yale Divinity School. She specializes in immigration, textual criticism, the Revelation of John, critical race theory, and gender and sexuality. Her book *Immigration and Apocalypse: How the Book of Revelation Shaped American Immigration* (Yale University Press 2024), focuses on the use of Revelation in political discourse surrounding American immigration—in conceptions of America as the New Jerusalem and of unwanted immigrants as the filthy, idolatrous horde outside the city walls.

Her book The Erotic Life of Manuscripts (Oxford 2016), examines how metaphors of race, family, evolution, and genetic inheritance have shaped the goals and assumptions of New Testament textual criticism from the eighteenth century to the present.

Professor Lin has been published in journals such as the Journal of Biblical Literature, Early Christianity, and TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism. She is co-chair of the Minoritized Criticism and Biblical Interpretation section of the Society of Biblical Literature, on the steering committee for the Ethnic Chinese Biblical Colloquium, and on the steering committees for the New Testament Textual Criticism and the Bible in America sections of SBL. She also serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Biblical Literature. Professor Lin is a member of the Society of Asian Biblical Studies, the European Association of Biblical Studies, and an elected member of Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas.

Show Notes

• Get your copy of *Immigration and Apocalypse: How the Book of Revelation Shaped American Immigration, by* Yii-Jan Lin
• Illustration: “John of Patmos watches the descent of New Jerusalem from God in a 14th-century tapestry”—modified and collaged by Evan Rosa
• Christopher Columbus’s eschatological vision
• The Book of Revelation and the heavenly city
• The meaning of “apocalypse”
• New Haven as New Jerusalem
• John Davenport (April 9, 1597 – May 30, 1670) was an English Puritan clergyman and co-founder of the American colony of New Haven.
• Ronald Reagan and America as a “shining city on a hill”
• America as God’s city
• Revelation 21, The New Jerusalem
• “A door that’s always open”
• 1983 as the “Year of the Bible”
• Exclusion, open gates, and America’s immigration policy
• Hospitality
• Outside the gates
• “For some reason, the seer doesn't see just an open  landscape. He sees these definite walls and definite  gates, even though they're open.”
• The book of deeds and the book of life
• Bureaucracy, and entry and exclusion into heaven
• The Good Place
• What was immigration like in the Greco-Roman world?
• Citizenship lists, registrations, and ways of keeping people out
• “If Heaven Has a Gate, a Wall, and Extreme Vetting, Why Can't America?“
• Steve King's tweet in  2019, “Heaven Has a Wall, a Gate, and Strict Immigration Policy, Hell Has Open Borders.”
• Disease and exclusion (COVID-19)
• Disease came from colonizers
• “Disease as a divine act to clear the land”
• Chinese exclusion from America
• Mexican exclusion from America
• ICE was created to enforce laws explicitly excluding Chinese immigrants
• Film: An American Tail
• “The British Invasion”
• China, Enemy of the West, and the Dragon of Revelation 12
• Buddha and the dragon vs the whore of Babylon riding a beast
• “Do American political ideas about immigration start to frame American theological imaginations about the world to come?”
• God’s kingdom and “Empire”
• Fears that feed from theological to political registers
• “What should a Christian posture towards contemporary questions of immigration be?”
• Xenophobia and fear of the stranger
• Finality and satisfaction
• The theological error of identifying America with the New Jerusalem

Production Notes

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

In his recent book, Letters to a Future Saint: Foundations of Faith for the Spiritually Hungry, theologian Brad East addresses future generations of the Church, offering a transmission of Christian faith from society today to society tomorrow. Written as a fellow pilgrim and looking into the lives of saints in the past, he’s writing to that post-literate, post-Christian society, where the highest recommendation of faith is in the transformed life.

Today, Drew Collins welcomes Brad East to the show, and together they discuss: the importance of being passed and passing on Christian faith—its transmission; the post-literacy of digital natives (Gen Z and Gen Alpha) and the role of literacy in the acquisition and development of faith; the significance of community in a vibrant Christian faith; the question of apologetics and its effectiveness as a mode of Christian discourse; the need for beauty and love, not just truth, in Christian witness; how to talk about holiness in a world that believes less and less in the reality of sin; the difference between Judas and Peter; and what it means to study the saints and to be a saint.

About Brad East

Brad East (PhD, Yale University) is an associate professor of theology in the College of Biblical Studies at Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas. In addition to editing Robert Jenson’s The Triune Story: Collected Essays on Scripture (Oxford University Press, 2019), he is the author of four books: The Doctrine of Scripture (Cascade, 2021), The Church’s Book: Theology of Scripture in Ecclesial Context (Eerdmans, 2022), The Church: A Guide to the People of God (Lexham, 2024), and Letters to a Future Saint: Foundations of Faith for the Spiritually Hungry (Eerdmans, 2024).His articles have been published in Modern Theology, International Journal of Systematic Theology, Scottish Journal of Theology, Journal of Theological Interpretation, Anglican Theological Review, Pro Ecclesia, Political Theology, Religions, Restoration Quarterly, and The Other Journal; his essays and reviews have appeared in The Christian Century, Christianity Today, Comment, Commonweal, First Things, Front Porch Republic, The Hedgehog Review, Living Church, Los Angeles Review of Books, Marginalia Review of Books, Mere Orthodoxy, The New Atlantis, Plough, and The Point. You can found out more, including links to his writing, podcast appearances, and blog, on his personal website: https://www.bradeast.org/.

Show Notes

• Letters to a Future Saint: Foundations of Faith for the Spiritually Hungry  by Brad East
• The importance of being passed and passing on Christian faith—its transmission
• Spencer Bogle, the reason Brad East is a theologian
• The post-literacy of Gen Z and Gen Alpha and the role of literacy in the acquisition and development of faith
• The question of apologetics and its effectiveness as a mode of Christian discourse
• The need for beauty and love, not just truth, in Christian witness
• Christianity pre-exists you, and pre-existed literate society. So it can survive post-literacy
• Tik-Tok and getting off it
• “We have to have a much broader vision of the Christian life.”
• The Doctrine of Scripture, by Brad East, Foreword by Katherine Sonderegger
• Cartesian Christianity: me alone in a room, maybe with a flashlight and a bible
• Spiritual but not religious (H/T Tara Isabella Burton)
• We’re not saved individually
• Alice in Wonderland and “believing 17 absurd things every day”
• Is Christian apologetics sub-intellectual and effective?
• Gavin Ortlund, taking seriously spiritual and moral questions with pastoral warmth and intellectual integrity—”a ministry of Q&A”
• Bishop Robert Barron and William Lane Craig
• “People are not going to  be won to the faith through argument. They're going to be won by beauty.”
• Beauty of lives well-lived, integrity, virtue, and martyrdom
• “What lies beyond this world is available in part in this world and so good it's worth dying for.”
• Is Christian apologetics actually for Christians, rather than evangelism?
• “A person’s life can be an apologetic argument.”
• James K.A. Smith: “We don’t want to be brains on sticks.”
• “You’re just going to look bizarre.”
• “Come and see. … If you see something unique or uniquely powerful here, then stick around.”
• Saintliness and a cloud of witnesses
• Why do the saints matter?
• The protagonist of Augustine’s Confessions is actually St. Monica.
• “I want to be like Monica…”
• “For those of us who are drawn into church  history and church tradition and to reading theology,  there is very little as transformative as realizing that history is populated by women and men like us who tried to follow Christ in their own time and place and culture and circumstances,  some of whom succeeded. … Looking at the saints, they make me want to be a better Christian. They make me want to be a saint.”
• How to talk about holiness in a world that believes less and less in the reality of sin.
• Is holiness just connected to purity culture?
• Holiness is very difficult to describe.
• Hauerwas: “Humans aren’t holy. Only God is holy.”
• Holiness as being like God and being set apart and conformed to his likeness
• Holiness is, by rights, God’s alone.
• Appreciating the “everyday saints” among us
• Sanctification as an utterly passive act
• The final words of Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict), “Jesus, ich liebe dich!” (”Jesus, I love you.”)
• Peter and Judas
• Lucy Shaw poem, “Judas, Peter” (see below)
• “There is a way to fail as a Christian. It’s to  despair of the possibility of Christ forgiving you.”
• What it means to journey as a pilgrim towards holiness is, is not to get everything right.
• Shusaku Endo, Silence
• “What I say is we're all Kichichiro. We're all Peter and Judas. We're all bad Christians. There are no good Christians.”
• Kester Smith and returning to baptism
• “Sometimes it might be difficult for me to believe that God loves me.”

“Judas, Peter”

by Lucy Shaw

because we are all 
betrayers, taking 
silver and eating 
body and blood and asking 
(guilty) is it I and hearing 
him say yes 
it would be simple for us all 
to rush out and hang ourselves

but if we find grace 
to cry and wait 
after the voice of morning 
has crowed in our ears 
clearly enough 
to break out hearts 
he will be there 
to ask us each again 
do you love me?

Production Notes

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

In 1845, when he was 27 years old, Henry David Thoreau walked a ways from his home in Concord, MA and built a small house on a small lake—Walden Pond. He lived there for two years, two months, and two days, and he wrote about it. Walden has since become a classic. A treasure to naturalists and philosophers, historians and hipsters, conservationists and non-violent resistors. Something about abstaining from society and its affordances, reconnecting with the land, searching for something beyond the ordinary, living independently, self-reliantly, intentionally, deliberately.

Since then, Thoreau has risen to a kind of secular sainthood. Perhaps the first of now many spiritual but not religious, how should we understand Thoreau’s thought, writing, actions, and way of life?

In this episode, Evan Rosa welcomes Lawrence Buell (Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature Emeritus, Harvard University) for a conversation about how to read Thoreau. He is the author of many books on transcendentalism, ecology, and American literature. And his latest book is Henry David Thoreau: Thinking Disobediently, a brief philosophical biography and introduction to the thought of Thoreau through his two most classic works: “Walden” and “Civil Disobedience.”

In today’s episode Larry Buell and I discuss Thoreau’s geographical, historical, social, and intellectual contexts; his friendship with Ralph Waldo Emerson; why he went out to live on a pond for 2 years, 2 months, and 2 days and how it changed him; the difference between wildness and wilderness; why we’re drawn to the simplicity of wild natural landscapes and the ideals of moral perfection; the body, the senses, attunement and attention; the connection between solitude and contemplation; the importance of individual moral conscience and the concept of civil disobedience; Thoreau’s one night in jail and the legacy of his political witness; and ultimately, what it means to think disobediently.

About Lawrence Buell

Lawrence Buell is Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature Emeritus at Harvard University. Considered one of the founders of the ecocriticism movement, he has written and lectured worldwide on Transcendentalism, American studies, and the environmental humanities. He is the author of many books, including Literary Transcendentalism, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Invention of American Culture, Writing for an Endangered World, and Emerson. His latest book is Henry David Thoreau: Thinking Disobediently, a brief introduction to the thought of Thoreau to his two most classic works: Walden and “Civil Disobedience.”

Show Notes

• Henry David Thoreau: Thinking Disobediently (Oxford 2023) by Lawrence Buell
• Read Walden and “Civil Disobedience” online (via Project Gutenberg)

Production Notes

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

In today’s episode, theologian Miroslav Volf interviews philosopher Charles Taylor about his latest book, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment. In it he turns to poetry to help articulate the human experience of the cosmos we’re a part of.

Together they discuss the modern Enlightenment view of our relation to the world and its shortcomings; modern disenchantment and the prospects of reenchantment through art and poetry; Annie Dillard and the readiness to experience the world and what it’s always offering; how to hold the horrors of natural life with the transcendent joys; Charles recites some of William Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” and Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “The Windhover”; how to become fully arrested by beauty; and the value we find in human experience of the world.

Production Notes

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

In this episode, Evan Rosa welcomes Carlos Eire (T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University) for a discussion of how to read St. Teresa of Ávila, exploring the historical, cultural, philosophical, and theological aspects of her life and writing, and offering insights and close readings of several selections from her classic confession-slash-autobiography, known as La Vida, or The Life.

About Carlos Eire

Carlos Eire is T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University. All of his books are banned in Cuba, where he has been proclaimed an enemy of the state. He was awarded the 2024 Harwood F. Byrnes/Richard B. Sewall Teaching Prize by Yale College, received his PhD from Yale in 1979. He specializes in the social, intellectual, religious, and cultural history of late medieval and early modern Europe, with a focus on both the Protestant and Catholic Reformations; the history of popular piety; the history of the supernatural, and the history of death. Before joining the Yale faculty in 1996, he taught at St. John’s University in Minnesota and the University of Virginia, and was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is the author of War Against the Idols (1986); From Madrid to Purgatory (1995); A Very Brief History of Eternity (2010); Reformations: The Early Modern World (2016); The Life of Saint Teresa of Ávila: A Biography (2019); and They Flew: A History of the Impossible (2023). He is also co-author of Jews, Christians, Muslims: An Introduction to Monotheistic Religions (1997); and ventured into the twentieth century and the Cuban Revolution in the memoir Waiting for Snow in Havana (2003), which won the National Book Award in Nonfiction in the United States and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. His second memoir, Learning to Die in Miami (2010), explores the exile experience. A past president of the Society for Reformation Research, he is currently researching various topics in the history of the supernatural. His book Reformations won the R.R. Hawkins Prize for Best Book of the Year from the American Publishers Association, as well as the award for Best Book in the Humanities in 2017. It was also awarded the Jaroslav Pelikan Prize by Yale University Press.

• The Life of Saint Teresa of Ávila by Carlos Eire (https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691164939/the-life-of-saint-teresa-of-avila )
• The Book of My Life by Teresa of Ávila (https://www.icspublications.org/products/the-collected-works-of-st-teresa-of-avila-vol-1 or https://www.shambhala.com/teresa-of-avila-1518.html )
• A long confession to the Inquisition which had placed her under investigation and read by those who were curious and believed her mysticism might be a fraud
• The Spanish Inquisition in the 16th Century
• Autobiography v. Auto-hagiography
• The chief virtue of sainthood was humility
• Medieval mysticism in the asceticism of monastic communities
• The Reformation’s rejection of monastic communities and their practices
• “You can fast as much as you want, and you can punish yourself as much as you want. That's not going to, uh, make God love you any more than he already does. And it's not going to wipe out your sins. Christ has wiped out your sins. So, all of this, uh, Oh, self obsession and posturing, uh, the very concept of holiness is redefined.”
• Direct experience of the divine in mysticism: purgation (cleansing), feedback from God (illumination), and union with the divine.
• On Loving God by Bernard of Clairvaux (https://litpress.org/Products/CF013B/On-Loving-God)
• Surrendering of the self in order to find oneself, and in turn God
• Interior Castle by Teresa of Ávila (https://www.icspublications.org/products/st-teresa-of-avila-the-interior-castle-study-edition)
• Recogimiento - a prayer in which one lets go of their senses; a form a prayer in which you are just in a chat with a friend
• The Cloud of Unknowing by Anonymous (https://paracletepress.com/products/the-cloud-of-unknowing )
• Meaning that is found without words - recollection and recogimiento
• Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros, Archbishop of Toledo - translation of Rhineland mysticism into Spanish
• Staged approach and a development of spirituality
• “You're doing some transforming of your own, of course, by, you know, being engaged in this, but it's, it's really a gift from God progress and progress. Uh, progress and progress, or, uh, pretty much like an athlete whose skills become better and better and better. Or any artist whose skills improve and improve and improve and improve.Except in this case, there's someone else involved. You're not just working out or rehearsing. It's the other party involved in, in this, uh, phenomenon of prayer.”
• The Four Waters as an image for the progression of prayer
• The irony of Teresa’s writing and her nods to the inquisition found within her writings
• The experience of mysticism and God cannot be understood - it is beyond language
• Repetition in prayer and meditation
• Edith Stein was inspired by Teresa of Ávila
• Monastic life was very isolated and was filled with hard work
• The doubt of her confessors that her visions of Jesus were real
• Responding to the devil with crudeness
• Mystical marriage with Christ
• The Life of Catherine of Siena by Raymond of Capua ( https://tanbooks.com/products/books/the-life-of-saint-catherine-of-siena-the-classic-on-her-life-and-accomplishments-as-recorded-by-her-spiritual-director/ )
• Physical visions and intellectual visions
• Her visions were beyond her control
• Transverberation - a vision of an angel with a spear that she is struck with; pain and bliss simultaneously in the wounding
• God as a very clear diamond
• Teresa of Ávila and the Rhetoric of Femininity by Alison Weber (https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691027449/teresa-of-avila-and-the-rhetoric-of-femininity) - Constant self-humbling of Teresa
• Devotion to heart imagery in mysticism, Catholicism, and Teresa’s spirituality
• They Flew: A History of the Impossible by Carlos Eire (https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300280074/they-flew/)
• The bodily effects and physical nature of Teresa’s mysticism
• mysticism for the masses and books for the laity
• Mysticism is a double edged sword - this is also what makes Jesus threatening in the gospels
• Steven Ozment (Mysticism and Dissent: Religious Ideology and Social Protest in the Sixteenth Century?) https://archive.org/details/mysticismdissent0000ozme/page/n295/mode/2up
• Human nature and our potential
• Great detail and charming in her writing

Production Notes

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