Episodios
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How do you find hope when you can only see yourself and your future in light of your past mistakes? When youâre certain that everyone on the outside looking in is doing the same, punishing you, immobilizing you, invisibilizing youâŠ?
Seems the only way out of that spiral is the âGod Who Sees.â
Practical theologian Sarah Farmer joins Evan Rosa to discuss her recent book, Restorative Hope: Creating Pathways of Connection in Womenâs Prisons. She describes the experience of prisonâthe ways it constrains movement, how it abridges and threatens agency, and how the constant surveillance leaves a person breathless. She illuminates the approach to theological education she and her colleagues put on offer for these women, these incarcerated theologians whose very lives were the texts to learn from. Sarah offers a contribution from Womanist Theology: Dolores Williamsâ re-narration of Hagarâfrom the book of Genesisâthe forgotten, quote, âinvisibilizedâ Egyptian slave of Abraham and SarahâHagar, the woman who named God, âEl Roiâ⊠the God who sees. And she imagines a restorative hope built around self-respect and identity, connection, and resilienceâa hope that shines even into the darkness of a womenâs prison cell.
Show Notes
Get your copy of Restorative Hope: Creating Pathways of Connection in Womenâs Prisons
Production Notes
This podcast featured Sarah FarmerEdited and Produced by Evan RosaHosted by Evan RosaProduction Assistance by Alexa RollowA Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/aboutSupport For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give -
Protests dominate the news. And while weâre familiar with freedom of speech, free exercise of religion, and freedom of the pressâwhat about the freedom of assembly? The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitutionâalso contains âthe right of the people peaceably to assemble.â
But what exactly does that secure? How does this foundational, but often forgotten, right impact the shape of democracy, undergirding and making possible a flourishing public life? And are we prepared to defend the full application of these rights to our political rivals? Those we disagree with?
Legal scholar John Inazu (Washington University, St. Louis) joins Evan Rosa for a discussion of the freedom of assemblyâits history, meaning, interpretation, and applicationâas well as how it impacts the ability for citizens to gather to demonstrate and protest.
Show Notes
Read the Constitution of the United States of America (1787)Learning toGet your copy of Libertyâs Refuge: The Forgotten Freedom of AssemblyClick here to download a free version of Libertyâs Refuge.The First AmendmentIntroducing peaceable assembly.âI was working for a federal judge and working on a First Amendment case, looked down at the text of the First Amendment and saw the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and I thought to myself, I've had three years of law school and four years of legal practice, and I've never thought about the Assembly Clause.âEcclesia as a counter political entityâI canât assemble alone.ââKnow Your Rightsâ by The ClashThree historical points about interpreting the assembly clauseThe grammar of the assembly clauseAssembly and Petition are two distinct rightsThe right of associationThe right of privacyAssembly is the right of associationWhere are the limits of a protest? Under assembly? Or under the free speech clause.âwe ought to care about the values that drive different parts of the Constitution.âThe groupnessâthe idea of collective expressionUnderstanding the âpeaceableâ side of assemblyâThe best law enforcement understand that there has to be some breathing space.âReform mode vs revolution modePolicing assembly as more of an art than a sciencePeaceable assembly and collective belongingâCivil liberties are for losers.âPractical steps to upholding peaceable assembly as a right and civil libertyExercise your rightsDefend the rights of everyoneAbout John Inazu
John Inazu is the Sally D. Danforth Distinguished Professor of Law and Religion at Washington University in St. Louis. He teaches criminal law, law and religion, and various First Amendment courses. He writes and speaks frequently about pluralism, assembly, free speech, religious freedom, and other issues. John has written three booksâincluding Learning to Disagree: The Surprising Path to Navigating Differences with Empathy and Respect (Zondervan, 2024) and Libertyâs Refuge: The Forgotten Freedom of Assembly (Yale, 2012)âand has published opinion pieces in the Washington Post, Atlantic, Chicago Tribune, LA Times, USA Today, Newsweek, and CNN. He is also the founder of the Carver Project and the Legal Vocation Fellowship and is a senior fellow with Interfaith America.
Image Citation
Original caption: âDemonstrators sit, with their feet in the Reflecting Pool, during the March on Washington, 1963] / WKL."
Original black and white negative by Warren K. Leffler. Taken August 28th, 1963, Washington D.C, United States (@libraryofcongress).
Colorized by Jordan J. Lloyd.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA https://www.loc.gov/item/2011648314/
Production Notes
This podcast featured John InazuEdited and Produced by Evan RosaHosted by Evan RosaProduction Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, and Tim BergelandA Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/aboutSupport For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give -
"Having lost a sense of the sacred, the only thing we want is acquisitivenessâmore of everything. How can we break this vicious cycle of avarice? It seems to me that the only way we can possibly reign this in on ourselves is some retrieval of the sense of the sacred, something beyond ourselves.
And I think that relearning humilityârealizing that a parasitic pathogen can spread across the globe and wreak havoc as it didâbrings us to the question again of the sacred.
Dare we speak of a God who is worthy of all our desire? That we as creatures might want with all of our heart, all of our mind, to contemplate. Should anything less deserve our desiring really? Clearly there's a hierarchy of desire, but what is our overarching desire? Can we gamble on reimagining the wonder of a capacious God of endless surprises?" (Micheal O'Siadhail, from the episode)
About Micheal O'Siadhail
Micheal O'Siadhail is an award-winning poet and author of many collections of poetry. His Collected Poems was published in 2013, One Crimson Thread in 2015 and The Five Quintets in 2018, which received Conference on Christianity and Literature Book of the Year 2018 and an Eric Hoffer Award in 2020. His latest works are Testament (2022) and Desire (2023). He holds honorary doctorates from the universities of Manitoba and Aberdeen. He lives in New York.
Show Notes
Micheal OâSiadhail, DesireRecitation: EpigraphUsing poetry as a means to record the COVID-19 PandemicUsing words to process emotionHuman desire for more; greedThe internet as a driving force for consumptionConsumerism feeding climate changeBreaking the cycle by retrieving the sacredâBlessâ is not a word used easily in our cultureRecitation: Pest 12Gratitude within anxietyRecitation: Pest 20Stewarding the earthRecitation: Habitat 13What is worthy of our desire?The âstabilitasâ of being where you areWanting acquisitiveness more than the sacredTruly being known versus being famousRecitation: Behind the Screen 17Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious GenerationRecitation: Behind the Screen 20The temptation towards certaintyRecitation: Behind the Screen 1Trusting the God of surprisesâDare we speak of a God who is worthy of all our desire?âRecitation: Desire 24 & 25âOn Earth as it is in Heavenâ as a dreamReordering and re-educating our desireUnity and Denise Levertovâs concept of âOne-ingâProduction Notes
This podcast featured Micheal OâSiadhailEdited and Produced by Evan RosaHosted by Evan RosaProduction Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, and Tim BergelandA Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/aboutSupport For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give -
Flannery OâConnor is known for her short stories in which âA Good Man Is Hard to Find.â But itâs often those ugly, mean, disgusting, scandalizing, violent, weird, or downright hateful characters in Flannery OâConnor stories that become the vessels of grace delivered.
So, how should we read Flannery OâConnor?
Jessica Hooten Wilson (Pepperdine University) joins Evan Rosa to open up about Flannery OâConnorâs life, her unique perspective as a writer, the theological and moral principles operative in her work, all as an immense invitation to read OâConnor and find the beauty of Godâs grace that emerges amidst the most horrendous evils. Includes a discussion of Flannery OâConnorâs short story, âGreenleaf.â
Show Notes
Check out Jessica Hooten Wilsonâs presentation of Flannery OâConnorâs final, unfinished novel: Flannery OâConnorâs Why Do the Heathen Rage?Click here for an online copy of âGreenleafâ to follow along with our analysisSpiritual formation through the works of Flannery OâConnorHow to read for a flourishing lifeâGreenleafâ by Flannery OâConnorFlannery OâConnorâs reading grounded in tradition of early church mothers and fathers.Paying attention to every individual word.First word: Mrs. Mays looses her agency.Europa & the Bull, Ovidâs MetamorphosisMrs. Mayâs blinds as hiding pieces of reality, shutting out GodThe spiritual truth of the story is concealed when not read attentively and intentionallyFlanneryâs writings defying instant gratificationâThe wrong kind of horrorâThe development of American consumerismShowing versus enjoying violenceSacramental readingThe Holy FoolThe Violent Bear It Away as a hymn to the eucharistOâConnor requires spiritual reading.A summary of âGreenleafâPierced by the bull, a violent union of Savior and sinnerOâConnorâs Christian characters; âA Good Man is Hard to FindâCharacters changing and choosing faith before death.The final paragraph of âGreenleafâMrs. Greenleaf as the opposite of Ivan Karamazov, in The Brothers KaramazovOpening to the world with the knowledge of GodPentecostalism and zeal in âGreenleafâStabbed in the heart, medieval mysticismâLord, help us dig down under things and find where you areâAbout Jessica Hooten Wilson
Jessica Hooten Wilson is the Fletcher Jones Endowed Chair of Great Books at Pepperdine University (â23) and previously served as the Seaver College Scholar of Liberal Arts at Pepperdine University (â22-â23). She co-hosts a podcast called The Scandal of Reading: Pursuing Holy Wisdom with Christ & Pop Culture, where she discusses with fellow authors, professors, and theologians with Claude Atcho and Austin Carty. She is the author of Flannery OâConnorâs Why Do the Heathen Rage?: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at a Work in Progres*s (Brazos Press, January 23, 2024); Reading for the Love of God: How to Read as a Spiritual Practice (Brazos Press, 2023);* Scandal of Holiness: Renewing Your Imagination in the Company of Literary Saints (Brazos Press, 2022) which received a Christianity Today 2023 Award of Merit (Culture & the Arts) and a Midwest Book Review* 2023 Silver Book Award (Nonfiction â Religion/Philosophy); co-author with Dr. Jacob Stratman of Learning the Good Life: Wisdom from the Great Hearts and Minds that Came Before (Zondervan Academic, 2022); Giving the Devil his Due: Demonic Authority in the Fiction of Flannery OâConnor and Fyodor Dostoevsky* (February 28, 2017), which received a 2018 Christianity Today Book of the Year Award in the Culture & the Arts; as well as two books on Walker Percy: *The Search for Influence: Walker Percy and Fyodor Dostoevsky* (Ohio State University Press, 2017) and Reading Walker Percyâs Novels (Louisiana State University Press, 2018); most recently she co-edited Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: *The Russian Soul in the West* (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020).
She has received numerous fellowships, grants, and awards, including a Fulbright Fellowship to the Czech Republic, an NEH grant to study Dante in Florence in 2014, and the Biola Center for Christian Thought sabbatical fellowship. In 2018 she received the Emerging Public Intellectual Award given by a coalition of North American think tanks in collaboration with the Centre for Christian Scholarship at Redeemer University College, and in 2019 she received the Hiett Prize in Humanities from The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture.
Production Notes
This podcast featured Jessica Hooten WilsonEdited and Produced by Evan RosaHosted by Evan RosaProduction Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, and Tim BergelandA Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/aboutSupport For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give -
This conversation is based on a free downloadable resource available at faith.yale.edu. Click here to get your copy today.
âWe may heed the call of Jesus to follow me and find him leading us right into the home we already have.â (Ryan McAnnally-Linz)
What are the possibilities of homemaking in a world out of joint? What does it mean for Christians to be on a pilgrimage? To be sojourners in the world?
Ryan McAnnally-Linz joins Evan Rosa to discuss what it means for Christian life to be a journey not from here to there, but from here to ⊠here. Together they discuss what it means for the world to be the home of God; the task of resisting the âdysoikosâ (or the parodic sinful distortion of home); the meaning of Christian life as a pilgrimage; and three faithful ways to approach the work of homemaking that anticipates how the world is becoming the home of GodâRyan introduces examples from Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement, Julian of Norwich, and a modern-day farming family.
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We need the world to understand it. Human embodied experience and material life in the world has a profound effect on our thinkingânot just poetry and pop music, but our intellectual reflections, philosophical theories and scientific observations, to the most mundane conversations.
Take a closer look at human language and ideas, and weâll find we are deeply embedded, grounded, and built on a foundation of metaphor. That last sentence, for instance, depends on the metaphor KNOWLEDGE is a BUILDING. But navigating this terrain can be treacherous and we can easily get lost (another metaphor: LIFE is a JOURNEY). But to be a tree planted by streams of water, bearing fruit, flourishing with vibrant leaves, we can allow our roots to sink down into this reality and bloom and reach upward (YOU are a TREE).
Theologian Joy Marie Clarkson joins me and Macie Bridge today for a conversation about metaphor. Itâs brimming and full of metaphor itself (that oneâs KNOWLEDGE is a CONTAINER), but itâs not too meta.
Joy is research associate in theology and literature at Kingâs College London. Sheâs the author of Aggressively Happy: A Realistâs Guide to Believing in the Goodness of Life, as well as her most recent You Are a Tree: And Other Metaphors to Nourish Life, Thought, and Prayer. Her writing has also appeared in The Tablet, Christianity Today, and Plough Quarterly. She is the Books and Culture Editor for Plough Quarterly and hosts a podcast called Speaking with Joy.
Together we discuss: How we see ourselves as human: Are we trees? Are we machines? The beauty of language and the glory of poetry to reveal intangible or invisible wisdom and experience. Joy explains the hidden negation in metaphors and the dance between subjective convention and objective realities. We revel and play with language and its particularity. We discuss Julian of Norwich on Jesus as the source of motherhood. J.R.R. Tolkien on technology and redemption through trees and dark journeys. And we explore the many metaphors that seem to undergird Christian theological reflection on flourishing life.
About Joy Clarkson
Joy Marie Clarkson is research associate in theology and literature at Kingâs College London. Sheâs the author of Aggressively Happy: A Realistâs Guide to Believing in the Goodness of Life, as well as her most recent You Are a Tree: And Other Metaphors to Nourish Life, Thought, and Prayer. Her writing has also appeared in The Tablet, Christianity Today, and Plough Quarterly. She is the Books and Culture Editor for Plough Quarterly and hosts a podcast called Speaking with Joy. Check out her Substack here.
Show Notes
Explore the book: Joy Clarkson, You Are a Tree: And Other Metaphors to Nourish Life, Thought, and PrayerJoy Clarksonâs SubstackMetaphor embedded throughout thought and languageAre you a machine? Are you a tree?Hidden negation within metaphorsBill Collins poem, âLitanyâ: âYou are the goblet and the wine.âAristotle on metaphor: Carry over the properties of one thing to another.Whispering ânot really thoughâMetaphors about God and internal or hidden negationComplexity of the worldPosture of humilityLiteral language is a kind of trick to think that âwe actually have said the thing finally and completely.âThomas Aquinas, medieval theologians and speaking about God by way of analogyâThe words we can say about God kind of come from, the perfections we perceive and things in the world.âMedieval bestiariesâThe true panther is Christ.ââThe sweet breathed, multicolored Christ panther.âWhen language falls shortPseudo-Dionysus the AreopagiteUnspeakability of things and the radical particularity of languageJulian of Norwich, Jesus as the source of motherhood: âJesus our true mother.âBobby McFerrinâs âThe 23rd PsalmâMetaphors about humanityHumanity as machines vs humanity as treesMechanical metaphors for humanity fall short and become dangerous when it implies that we are only as good as our productivityTrees are an older and more mysterious metaphor for human beings.Security and successâtop dog vs underdogMetaphor: SUCCESS is UP and climbing the corporate ladderâWe need each other.âThe Giving Tree and Treebeard from J.R.R. Tolkeinâs, The Lord of the Rings*The Two Towersâ*Saruman vs the Ents and ecological and technological ethics that provide insight for our humanity and lived environmentThe Christian life as a metaphorâYou are Godâs poem. You are kind of this living, breathing poem that's drawing its imagery from the goodness of God.âPoesis and the imago DeiPhenomenological description of things in everyday lifeâPaying attention to those kind of very everyday experiences just filled me personally with a sense of how densely meaningful and poetic our everyday lives are.âProduction Notes
This podcast featured Joy Marie ClarksonEdited and Produced by Evan RosaHosted by Evan RosaProduction Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, & Tim BergelandA Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/aboutSupport For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give -
Help us improve the podcast! Click here to take our listener surveyâ5 respondents will be randomly selected to receive a signed and personalized copy of Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most.
"There were a lot of people with moral courage to resist, to protest the communist revolutions, but few of them had the spiritual resource to question the system as a whole. Many intellectuals really protested the policies of Mao himself, but not the deprivation of freedom, the systematic persecution, the systematic suppression of religion and freedom as a wholeâthe entire communist system. So I think that's due to Lin Zhao's religious education. It's very helpful to have both moral courage and spiritual theological resource to make certain social diagnosis, which, I think, was available for Lin Zhao. So I would think of her as this exceptional instance of what Christianity can doâboth the moral courage and the spiritual resource to resist totalitarianism." (Peng Yin on politically dissident Lin Zhao)
What are the theological assumptions that charge foreign policy? How does theology impact public life abroad? In this episode, theologian Peng Yin (Boston University School of Theology) joins Ryan McAnnally-Linz to discuss the role of theology and religion in Chinese public lifeâlooking at contemporary foreign policy pitting Atheistic Communist China against Democratic Christian America; the moving story of Christian communist political dissident Lin Zhao; and the broader religious, philosophical, and theological influences on Chinese politics.
Show Notes
Religionâs role in Chinese political thought.Thinking beyond Communist Authoritarianism and Christian Nationalism.American foreign policy framed as âgood, democraticâ US versus âauthoritarian, atheisticâ China.Chinese Communist party borrowing from Christian UtopianismSole-salvific figure: Not Christ, but the PartyChinese Communism is a belief, not something that is open to verification. Itâs not falsifiable.Did the communist party borrow from Christian missionaries?Communist party claiming collective cultivation over Confucianismâs self cultivation.History of religious influence in Chinese political thoughtReligionâs contemporary influence in Chinese public lifeLin Zhao, Christian protestor.Lin Zhao as âexceptional instance of what Christianity can do: both the moral courage and the spiritual resource to resist totalitarianism.ââNew Cold War DiscourseâChinese immigration influx after 1989 Tiananmen Movement.Inhabiting a space between two empires.âGod's desire for human happiness is not simply embodied in one particular nation in an ambiguous term.âThe nexus of democracy, equality, and theological principlesHistorical impacts of religion in Chinese public lifeâparticularly in Confucianism and Buddhism and eventually ChristianityPeng reflects on his own moral sources of hope and inspirationâwhich arise not from the State, but from a communion of saints.About Peng Yin
Peng Yin is a scholar of comparative ethics, Chinese theology, and religion and sexuality. He Assistant Professor of Ethics at Boston Universityâs School of Theology. He is completing a manuscript tentatively entitled Persisting in the Good: Thomas Aquinas and Early Chinese Ethics. The volume explores the intelligibility of moral language across religious traditions and rethinks Christian teaching on human nature, sacrament, and eschatology. Yinâs research has been supported by the Louisville Institute, Political Theology Network, Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History, and Yaleâs Fund for Gay and Lesbian Studies.
A recipient of Harvardâs Derek Bok Certificate of Distinction in Teaching, Yin teaches âComparative Religious Ethics,â âSocial Justice,â âMysticism and Ethical Formation,â âChristian Ethics,â âQueer Theology,â and âSexual Ethicsâ at STH. At the University, Yin serves as a Core Faculty in Womenâs, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program, and as an Affiliated Faculty in Department of Classical Studies and Center for the Study of Asia. In 2023, Yin will deliver the Bartlett Lecture at Yale Divinity School and the McDonald Agape Lecture at the University of Hong Kong.
Production Notes
This podcast featured Peng Yin & Ryan McAnnally-LinzEdited and Produced by Evan RosaHosted by Evan RosaProduction Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, & Tim BergelandA Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/aboutSupport For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give -
Help us improve the podcast! Click here to take our listener surveyâ5 respondents will be randomly selected to receive a signed and personalized copy of Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most.
What are the goals of education? Are we shaping young minds or corrupting the youth? Theologian Mark Jordan joins Matt Croasmun for a conversation about the meaning of theological education today. Mark is the R. R. Niebuhr Research Professor at Harvard Divinity School, and is the author of ten books, including Telling Truths in Church: Scandal, Flesh, and Christian Speech. He came on the show to discuss his 2021 book, Transforming Fire: Imagining Christian Teachingâalong the way, he reflects on Christian pedagogical principles; the question of the teacherâs power and the potential to enact an abusive pedagogy; he looks at the enigmatic, provoking, and sometimes deliberately elusive teaching strategy of Jesus through his parables; the role of desire in learningâand a shared love for the divine between teacher and student; he acknowledges the expansiveness of theological education that occurs outside a classroom setting; and he questions the very purpose of Christian theological education.
Mark D. Jordan is the R. R. Niebuhr Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School. He is the author of ten books, including Telling Truths in Church: Scandal, Flesh, and Christian Speech. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright- Hays Fellowship, and a Luce Fellowship in Theology.
Show Notes
Check out Mark Jordan's book Transforming Fire: Imagining Christian Teaching.Louis Agassiz's story of the fish exemplifies a strong pedagogy.Teaching should center on the text itself, not the teacher: âIn the space between the text and the student, I need to just step aside as far as possible and put the fish on the table.âThe parables of Jesus are themselves a pedagogy. They are âenigmatic, provoking, sometimes deliberately elusiveâ in order to âstop the hearer in his tracks or her tracks.âThe shift of theological education primarily from monastic schools to universities suggests the site of divine revelation is also primarily confined to the university classroom.The shift of theological education to universities also requires theological education to follow the schedule of a university which limits the time some texts require to be read properly.The texts being taught intend to transform students' lives with the lessons they hold.Teachers of Christian theology can invite transformation, but ultimately divine action is beyond teachers' control: âFaith is a divine gift.âTeachers often communicate to their students in bodily and affective ways in addition to the actual words they use: âBodies learn best from bodies.âMark Jordan's thoughts on teaching are especially true of theological education, but they can be true of other subjects as well.âEducation depends on desire.â That is, it depends on the student and teacher's shared love for the divine, for other people, and for the world.Using the model of Jesus, who gently corrected his students' misguided expectations of him, teachers can also gently correct a student who âis beginning to mistake [the teacher] for the actual point of the course.âTheological education can and is taking place everywhere, not just in the classroom setting.âThe question is not, will there will be a future of theology? It's where will there be a future of theology?âIn many universities and seminaries, the time and expense of formal theological education prevent potential students from undergoing academic training. How can we reimagine theological education to allow for greater accessibility, even to those not interested in professional formation as a church leader?Production Notes
This podcast featured Mark Jordan and Matt CroasmunEdited and Produced by Evan RosaHosted by Evan RosaProduction Assistance by Alexa Rollow, Macie Bridge, and Tim BergelandA Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/aboutSupport For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give -
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âFor theology to be worth anything, it must traffic in real life, and that real life begins in the heart.â
Theologian Simeon Zahl (University of Cambridge) joins Evan Rosa to discuss his book, The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience, reflecting on emotion and affect; the livability of Christian faith; the origins of religious ideas; the data of human desire for theological reflection; the grace of God as the ultimate context for playfulness and freedom; and the role of the Holy Spirit in holding this all together.
About Simeon Zahl
Simeon Zahl is Professor of Christian Theology in the Faculty of Divinity. He is an historical and constructive theologian whose research interests span the period from 1500 to the present. His most recent monograph is The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience, which proposes a new account of the work of the Spirit in salvation through the lens of affect and embodiment. Professor Zahl received his first degree in German History and Literature from Harvard, and his doctorate in Theology from Cambridge. Following his doctorate, he held a post-doc in Cambridge followed by a research fellowship at St Johnâs College, Oxford. Prior to his return to Cambridge he was Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Nottingham.
Show Notes
Explore Simeon Zahlâs The Holy Spirit & Christian ExperienceâFor theology to be worth anything, it must traffic in real life, and that real life begins in the heart.âTheology becoming abstracted from day to day lifeâThere is a tendency that we have as human beings, as theologians to do theology that gets abstracted in some way from the concerns of day to day life that we get caught up in our sort of conceptual kind of towers and structures or committed to certain kinds of ideas in ways that get free of the life that Christians actually seem to lead.ââReal life begins in the heart.âGod is concerned with the heart.Emotion, desire, and feelingsWhere does love come in?Martin Luther and Philip MelanchthonPhilip Melanchthonâs 1521 Loci Communes: Defining human nature through the âaffective powerâAffect versus rationality at the center of Christian lifeCredibility, plausibility, and livability of ChristianityAuthenticity and the disparity between values and beliefs and real lives.Doctrine of GraceEnabling a hopeful honestyâWhat Christianity says and what it feels need to be closer together.âEvangelical conversion in George Elliotâs novella, Janetâs RepentanceâIdeas are often poor ghosts; our sunâfilled eyes cannot discern them; they pass athwart us in thin vapour, and cannot make themselves felt. But sometimes they are made flesh; they breathe upon us with warm breath, they touch us with soft responsive hands, they look at us with sad sincere eyes, and speak to us in appealing tones; they are clothed in a living human soul, with all its conflicts, its faith, and its love. Then their presence is a power, then they shake us like a passion, and we are drawn after them with gentle compulsion, as flame is drawn to flame.â (George Eliot)Artâs ability to speak to desire.T.S. Eliot: âPoetry operates at the frontiers of consciousness.âExhausted by religious languageHow the aesthetic impacts the acceptance of ideasDurable conceptsWhere theological doctrine comes fromSimeon Zahl: âIn what ways are theological doctrines themselves developed from and sourced by the living concerns and experiences of Christians and of human beings more broadly? Doctrines do not develop in a vacuum or fall from the sky, fully formed. Human reasonings, including theological reasonings, are never fully extricable in a given moment from our feelings, our moods, our predispositions, and the personal histories we carry with us. furthermore, as we shall see in the book, doctrines have often come to expression in the history of Christianity, not least through an ongoing engagement with what have been understood to be concrete experiences of God's spirit and history.ââPeople were worshipping Christ before they understood who he was.ââSpeaking about human experience just is speaking about the doctrine of the Holy Spirit.âDesire and emotion as pneumatological experienceSourcing emotional and experiential data for theological reflectionErnst Troelsch: âEvery metaphysic must find its test in practical life.ââThe half-light of understandingâNietzsche: âThe hereditary sin of the philosopher is a lack of historical sense.âAugustineâs transformation of desireEmotional experience as inadequate tool on its ownNoticing our own emotional experiencesâIf you want to pay attention to the Holy Spirit in theology, that means you have to pay attention to embodied experiential realities.âWorshipping of God as Trinity before identifying the doctrine of the TrinityKaren Kilbyâs âapathetic trinitarianismâPentecostalism, affect, and playEstablishing a spiritual connection between you and GodTouch, sweat, and movementNemi Warabokoâs The Pentecostal Principle: Ethical Methodology in New SpiritOpenness to new things, dynamismPlay and graceAn embarrassment of play, in the best way possibleThe freedom of the Spirit: free to get it wrong in a ârelaxed fieldâGrace as the ultimate ârelaxed fieldâProduction Notes
This podcast featured Simeon ZahlEdited and Produced by Evan RosaHosted by Evan RosaProduction Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, & Tim BergelandA Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/aboutSupport For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give -
Thereâs a 500-year history of social justice activism that emerged from Christianity in the Americas, and it comes to us through the Brown Church. Rev. Dr. Robert Chao Romero (Associate Professor of Latina/o Studies at UCLA) joins Evan Rosa to discuss the history of Christian racial justice efforts in the Americas, as well as a constructive and faithful exploration of Christianity & Critical Race Theory. He is a historian, legal scholar, author, a pastor, and an organizer who wants to bring the history of Christian social justice around race to bear on the systems and structures of racism we see in the world today. He is an Asian-Latino who straddles the worlds of Chinese and Mexican heritage; Latin American history and Law; scholarship and a pastoral ministry; and a contemplative and an activist. Heâs author of Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology, and Identityâand is co-author (with Jeff M. Liou) of Christianity and Critical Race Theory: A Faithful & Constructive Conversation.
About Robert Chao Romero
Rev. Dr. Robert Chao Romero is "Asian-Latino," and has been a professor of Chicana/o Studies and Asian American Studies at UCLA since 2005. He received his Ph.D. from UCLA in Latin American History and his Juris Doctor from U.C. Berkeley. Romero has published more than 30 academic books and articles on issues of race, immigration, history, education, and religion, and received the Latina/o Studies book award from the international Latin American Studies Association. He is author of Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology, and Identity, which received the InterVarsity Press Readersâ Choice Award for best academic title; as well as his most recent book, Christianity and Critical Race Theory: A Faithful & Constructive Conversation, co-authored with Jeff M. Liou. Romero is a former Ford Foundation and U.C. President's Postdoctoral Fellow, as well as a recipient of the Louisville Institute's Sabbatical Grant for Researchers. Robert is also an ordained minister and community organizer.
Show Notes
Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology, and IdentityChristianity and Critical Race Theory: A Faithful and Constructive ConversationAbout Robert Chao RomeroAsian-Latino HeritageSpiritual Borderlands and liminalityThe 500-year history of the Brown ChurchFr. Antonio de Montesinos and the first racial justice sermon in the AmericasBartolome De Las Casas and concientizaciĂłn (repentance, metanoia)Mision IntegralChristianity & Critical Race TheoryThe four basic tenets of Critical Race Theory and how Christians can understand them in light of the GospelHope and eschatological vision for justice and unityThe imago DeiProduction Notes
This podcast featured Robert Chao RomeroEdited and Produced by Evan RosaHosted by Evan RosaProduction Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, and Tim BergelandA Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/aboutSupport For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give -
What would it mean for us to take Christianity seriously as a way of life, a set of practices and ways of being in the worldâand not merely a list of beliefs?
Theologian Kevin Hector (University of Chicago Divinity School) joins Ryan McAnnally-Linz for a discussion of his latest book, Christianity as a Way of Life. Together they reflect on the practice of Christianity; the role of devotion to God in framing the importance of Christianity to a practitioner; the unique practices embedded in the life of Christians; the plausibility of Christianity today; what it means to see Jesus in people and look for the image of God in others; the practices of imitation and forgiveness; the conflicted character of Christian experience; loving God as loving what God loves; the significance of shame; and what it means to renarrate your life in light of the Gospel.
About Kevin Hector
Kevin Hector is the Naomi Shenstone Donnelley Professor of Theology and of the Philosophy of Religions; also in the College. His teaching and research are devoted largely to interpretive questions, particularly (a) how best to understand faith commitments, and (b) how the outworking of such commitments can shed light on broader cultural issues. Hector's first book, *Theology without Metaphysics* (Cambridge University Press, 2011), thus defends a novel approach to the problem of metaphysics by developing a philosophically-informed and critically-articulated theology of language. In his second book, The Theological Project of Modernism: Faith and the Conditions of Mineness (Oxford University Press, 2015), Hector explores the idea of 'mineness,' in the sense of being able to identify with one's life or experience it as self-expressive, by tracing the development of this idea in modern theology. His third book, Christianity as a Way of Life: A Systematic Theology (Yale University Press, 2023) argues that we can understand Christianity as a set of practices designed to transform oneâs way of perceiving and being in the world or, in sum, as a way of life. And in his forthcoming book-project, tentatively entitled âLife as a Theological Project: Creating a Usable Past,â Hector focuses on memoirs as a site of theological reflection, not least because memoirs shed light on issues that people wrestle with more generally.
Follow him on Twitter/X here.
Show Notes
Check out Christianity as a Way of Life: A Systematic Theology (Yale University Press, 2023)Disconnect between academic theology and ordinary ChristiansLosing God to Christian practicesDevotion as Godâs importance being important to you.Imitation as practice for learning devotion.LeBron James as an example of devotionâThe Martha Stewart effectâBeing yourself as a form of devotionMother Teresa and âseeing Jesus in peopleâLooking for the image of God in othersThe hermeneutical circle: making sense of the parts through the whole, and revising our sense of the whole through the parts.Nick Wolterstorff, forgiving as naming the wrong as a wrong, while excusing is ignoring the wrong.Indignation versus resentmentHow transparent are we to ourselves?Practice as building habitual reflexesPractices make it more and more sensible to orient towards GodShame in Hectorâs Christian frameworkMarilynne Robinsonâs LilaProduction Notes
This podcast featured Kevin HectorEdited and Produced by Evan RosaHosted by Evan RosaProduction Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, & Tim BergelandA Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/aboutSupport For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give -
With unflagging and unwavering hope in our civic life Michael Wear (Center for Christianity & Public Life) wants to renovate the character of Christian political engagement. Heâs a former White House and presidential campaign staffer and his new book is called The Spirit of Our Politics: Spiritual Formation and the Renovation of Public Life.
In this conversation with Evan Rosa, he reflects on what it means to seek the good of the public; the problem of privatization; what it means to be politically homeless and how to avoid angst about that; the meanings of political parties and how we end up fractured and confused when we look for an identity in them; he reflects on Dallas Willardâs epistemological and moral realism and its prospects for political life; and the virtue of gentleness and giving away the last word.
About Michael Wear
Michael Wear is the Founder, President and CEO of the Center for Christianity and Public Life, a nonpartisan, nonprofit institution based in the nation's capital with the mission to contend for the credibility of Christian resources in public life, for the public good. For well over a decade, he has served as a trusted resource and advisor for a range of civic leaders on matters of faith and public life, including as a White House and presidential campaign staffer. Michael is a leading voice on building a healthy civic pluralism in twenty-first century America. He has argued that the spiritual health and civic character of individuals is deeply tied to the state of our politics and public affairs.
Michael previously led Public Square Strategies, a consulting firm he founded that helps religious organizations, political organizations, businesses and others effectively navigate the rapidly changing American religious and political landscape.
Michael's next book, The Spirit of Our Politics: Spiritual Formation and the Renovation of Public Life, will be released on January 23, 2024. Michaelâs first book, Reclaiming Hope: Lessons Learned in the Obama White House About the Future of Faith in America, offers reflections, analysis and ideas about the role of faith in the Obama years and what it means for today. He has co-authored, or contributed to, several other books, including Compassion and Conviction: The AND Campaign's Guide to Faithful Civic Engagement, with Justin Giboney and Chris Butler. He also writes for The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Catapult Magazine, Christianity Today and other publications on faith, politics and culture.
Michael holds an honorary position at the University of Birminghamâs Cadbury Center for the Public Understanding of Religion.
Michael and his wife, Melissa, are both proud natives of Buffalo, New York. They now reside in Maryland, where they are raising their beloved daughters, Saoirse and Ilaria.
Production Notes
This podcast featured Michael WearEdited and Produced by Evan RosaHosted by Evan RosaProduction Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, & Tim BergelandA Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/aboutSupport For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give -
What are the economic forces that underly racist thinking? What are the theological dimensions of racism? How does the âpolitical economic distortion of the divine economyâ impacts the contemporary experience of and response to racism?
In this episode, Jonathan Tran (Baylor University) joins Matt Croasmun to discuss his book, Asian Americans & the Spirit of Racial Capitalism, focusing on the unique experience of Asian Americans, and Jonathanâs own experience growing up as a war refugee in southern California; where race and racialized thinking really comes from and how we can understand its history and its impact today; Christian moral psychology; meritocracy and capitalism; and they discuss a unique Christian communityâRedeemer Community Church in San Francisco that offers a unique experiment in bearing witness to the economic and racial realities of life today, but through the theological framing of the Gospel.
About Jonathan Tran
Jonathan Tran is a theologian and ethicist, and is Associate Dean for Faculty in the Honors College and Professor of Theology in Great Texts at Baylor University. His research focuses on the human life in language, and what that life reveals about God and Godâs world. Lately, that research has focused on race and racism, and his book Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism attempts to present racism as a theological problem, a political economic distortion of the divine economy, and a problem given to the usual redress, the church laying claim to Godâs original revolution.
Show Notes
The roots of Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial CapitalismAre we thinking about racism backwards?Race as a self-interpreting categoryIs race just obvious? Is it just about the racialized relationships we have with each other?âRather than thinking of race as basic, we want to ask the question, when and where and how did race come to capture our imaginations, such that we just now assume it as basic?âWhat is political economy?Connecting an understanding of economy to Godâs essence and existenceâThe structure of creation is in a sense hardwired as gift.ââOne of the first ways we talked about the gospel in the early church was as the divine economy, an economy of gratuity and grace over and against the world's privation and predation.âGift economyPope Francisâs âOur Common HomeââWhat is the material political economy out of which the concept and category of race began?ââRace was utilized in Europe and America to create a kind of ideological justification for relationships of property and labor.âRace and unjust labor practicesIs capitalism coextensive with racism?Marxism vs theological answers to the problem of capitalism and racismUnderstanding Marxism with an example: Waco, TexasBlack Marxism as a corrective to White MarxismChristianity and Moral PsychologyAnti-racism, post-racialism, identitarianismReverse engineering racism to produce Black dignity, Black power, or Black politicsGiving race explanatory powerâIâm not essentially Asian, but I've been racialized as an Asian person.âDoes racism against Asian Americans count?Double marginalization: first by racism, then by anti-racismFoucaultâs âhistory of the presentââ[Race] is necessarily binary thinking.âMeritocracy and capitalismCase Study: Redeemer Community Church in San Francisco (https://www.redeemersf.org/)The JoyâDispossession Elipse: âJoy without dispossession is escapist. Dispossession without joy is sadist.âThe Gospel as proclamation instead of resistanceâMarxists in our sense are waiting for the revolution to start. Christians are leaning into a revolution that's a few thousand years old.âProduction Notes
This podcast featured Jonathan Tran & Matt CroasmunEdited and Produced by Evan RosaHosted by Evan RosaProduction Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, & Tim BergelandA Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/aboutSupport For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give -
Imagine a future that brings personal and communal wholeness, a commitment to truth even when it hurts, and the beauty of pursuing integration in the wake of fragmentation. Anne Snyder joins Evan Rosa to talk about her vision and hopes for a whole-person revolution that honors our moral complexity, holds us accountable to virtue, and seeks a robust form of love in public life.
In this conversation they discuss: the meaning of wholeness and what it could mean to become a whole person; the importance of character, virtue, and moral formation; our need to come to terms with violenceâlistening to the language of threat and safety and preservation and protection; tribalism, fear, and moral realities; the ideas at the root of democracy; the connection between cynicism, distrust, and a feeling of threat and need to survive; and Anne describes a hard-won wholeness rooted in a sober and persevering hope that doesnât die.
About Anne Snyder
Anne Snyder is the editor-in-chief of Comment magazine and oversees our partner project, Breaking Ground. She is the host of The Whole Person Revolution podcast and co-editor of Breaking Ground: Charting Our Future in a Pandemic Year, published in January 2022.
Prior to leading Comment, she directed The Philanthropy Roundtableâs Character Initiative, a program seeking to help foundations and business leaders strengthen âthe middle ringâ of morally formative institutions. Her path-breaking guidebook, The Fabric of Character: A Wise Giverâs Guide to Renewing our Social and Moral Landscape, was published in 2019. From 2014 to 2017 Anne worked for Laity Lodge and the H.E. Butt Foundation in Texas, and before that, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, World Affairs Journal and The New York Times. She is a Senior Fellow of The Trinity Forum and a Fellow at the Urban Reform Institute, a Houston-based think tank that explores how cities can drive opportunity for the bulk of their citizens. She has published widely, including The Atlantic Monthly, the Washington Post, Bittersweet Monthly and of course Comment, and now serves as a trustee for Nyack College. Anne spent the formative years of her childhood overseas before earning a bachelorâs degree from Wheaton College (IL) and a masterâs degree from Georgetown University. She currently lives in Washington, D.C.
Show Notes
âWhole person revolutionâIndividual whole person as head, heart, and helping hands.We are porous to our contextsThe individual as a part of a greater whole.Exploring fear in our societies to understand the otherWholeness must be considered on the granular level and broad scaleA âhard wonâ wholenessHealing relational divides and brokennessCurling inward around oneselfWatching cynicism arise in the vacuum of encounterProduction NOtes
This podcast featured Anne SnyderEdited and Produced by Evan RosaHosted by Evan RosaProduction Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, and Tim BergelandA Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/aboutSupport For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give -
We often think of speaking up as an act of courage. And of course, there are times when it most certainly is. But what about the courage to listen? The best kind of generous listening is interesting because it seems to acknowledge and create a mutual agency. The courageous, generous listener grants the speaker an authority to have the floor and make a point or drop a bomb or tell it like it is. But that act of listening is itself an active mode of receptive agency. So the best kind of listening is a truly powerful thing because each party involved in this miracle of communication gets to be present in fullness.
That is not something that can be done by the speaker alone. The ability to create the conditions for that mutual agency is up to the listener. But when you apply that to a religious scenarioâthe preaching and hearing of the gospel, things get interesting.
Whether its from the window of St. Peterâs Basilica, or from the screams of a megaphone wielding street preacher, or the pulpit of your small, faithful community church⊠something profound seems to be happening when we listen to someone speak and illumine the Word of God.
Will Willimon, who has trained many preachers and written several books on preaching and homiletics, has written a book for listeners, both acknowledging and uplifting the act of listening to sermons. Will is Professor of the Practice of Christian Ministry at Duke Divinity School and he came on the show with me to talk about his book, Listeners Dare: Hearing God in the Sermon.
Together we discuss the act of listening and the rare achievement it seems to be; the definition and purpose of a sermon, and what that might mean for its listeners; how to cultivate the charity and courage to listen; and the inherent risk involved in genuinely and generously listening to the gospel.
Show Notes
Listeners Dare: Hearing God in the SermonPreaching is a demanding skill for both preachers and their audiences.Scripture itself pays attention to audiences as well as speakers.Listeners come to sermons with expectations. For sermons to most benefit the audience, preachers can guide their listeners to ask the right questions of a sermon.What is proclamation?Like the Bible itself, sermons can take a wide array of literary forms to communicate the truth of God. Because it proclaims truth about God, the Bible itself can be seen as a sort of sermon.âChristian sermons, ought to arise out of an encounter with scripture.âThe gospels began a new genre of literature to communicate the truth of Christ.The genre or form of sermons continues to evolve and diversify today with outside influences such as TED Talks.Fred Craddock and the narrative unfolding sermonVerse-by-verse discovery in a sermonOne definition of preaching is âa biblical preacher goes to the biblical text hoping to make a discovery. Then you announce that discovery to the congregation.âAt times when a preacher has no audience, such as street preachers, there is still something compelling about the preacher's commitment to their message, that regardless of its reception it must be spoken.Preaching requires charity and risk from listeners, so they can open themselves to the possibility of hearing and being transformed by another's message.Listening requires daring because the gospel message presented by Christian preachers has the power to upend listeners' preexisting beliefs.âPreaching is a confrontation with the God who came to us, who is a Jew from Nazareth, who lived briefly, died violently, and rose unexpectedlyâpreaching is about that.âListening, and listening to God, are skills that can be cultivated.âWe have a revealing, talkative, loquacious God.âIt is helpful for listeners of sermons to assume both the preacher and God hope to communicate with their listeners.Listeners must be willing to learn from, critique, and engage with sermons.âListeners are the playground of the Holy Spirit.âPreachers partner with the Holy Spirit to bring sermons to their congregation, even using difficult passages of scripture to further engage listeners.John 6 and the âhard sayingsâ of JesusListeners Dare! :) Will mentions a teenagers compliment to him once: âThat was the most fâed up thing I have ever heard⊠it was wonderful.âThe courage to keep listeningAbout Will Willimon
The Reverend Dr. William H. Willimon is Professor of the Practice of Christian Ministry at the Divinity School, Duke University. He served eight years as Bishop of the North Alabama Conference of The United Methodist Church, where he led the 157,000 Methodists and 792 pastors in North Alabama. For twenty years prior to the episcopacy, he was Dean of the Chapel and Professor of Christian Ministry at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. He is author of over 100 books, including Worship as Pastoral Care, Accidental Preacher, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony, and his most recent, God Turned Toward Us: The ABCs of the Christian Faith. His articles have appeared in many publications including The Christian Ministry, Quarterly Review, Plough, Liturgy, Worship and Christianity Today. For many years he was Editor-at-Large for The Christian Century. For more information and resources, visit his website.
Production Notes
This podcast featured Will WillimonEdited and Produced by Evan RosaHosted by Evan RosaProduction Assistance by Alexa Rollow, Macie Bridge, and Tim BergelandA Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/aboutSupport For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give -
American Christianity enjoys a great deal of power and influence at home and abroad. Is the church better for it? Is the world better for it? Or is Christian Nationalism just another idolatryâa temptation to take up the sword instead of taking up the cross? Journalist Tim Alberta (The Atlantic, POLITICO) joins Evan Rosa for a discussion of his new book, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism. Tim explains his reporting on American Evangelicalism from 2019 through 2023 as well as his own Christian faith and spiritual background. He also reflects on a variety of challenging issues that influence life far upstream from political theatre, including:
how faith matures or erodesthe impact of Constantinian Christianity and the Christian embrace of power, influence, and glory in American public lifethe difference between Christ and Christendom, and our allegiance to one or the otherand the meaning and unique threat of idolatryâwhich takes on a unique form in contemporary American life.Show Art
GrĂ©goire GuĂ©rard, âThe Arrest of Christâ, circa 1520-1522, MusĂ©e des Beaux-Arts, Dijon, France
About Tim Alberta
Visit Timâs personal website for more of his writing, or follow him on X/Twitter.
Tim Alberta is an award-winning journalist, best-selling author, and staff writer for The Atlantic magazine. He formerly served as chief political correspondent for POLITICO. In 2019, he published the critically acclaimed book, "American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump" and co-moderated the year's final Democratic presidential debate aired by PBS Newshour.
Hailing from Brighton, Michigan, Tim attended Schoolcraft College and later Michigan State University, where his plans to become a baseball writer were changed by a stint covering the legislature in Lansing. He went on to spend more than a decade in Washington, reporting for publications including the Wall Street Journal, The Hotline, National Journal and National Review. Having covered the biggest stories in national politicsâthe battles over health care and immigration on Capitol Hill; the election and presidency of Donald Trump; the ideological warfare between and within the two partiesâTim was eager for a new challenge.
In 2019, he moved home to Michigan. Rather than cover the 2020 campaign through the eyes of the candidates, Tim roved the country and reported from gun shows and farmers markets, black cookouts and white suburbs, crowded wholesale stores and shuttered small businesses. He wrote a regular "Letter to Washington" that kept upstream from politics, focusing less on manifest partisan divisions and more on elusive root causes: the hollowing out of communities, the diminished faith in vital institutions, the self-perpetuating cycle of cultural antagonism, the diverging economic realities for wealthy and working-class citizens, the rapid demographic makeover of Americaâand the corollary spikes in racism and xenophobia.
Tim joined The Atlantic in March 2021 with a mandate to keep roaming and writing and telling stories that strike at the heart of America's discontent. His work has been featured in dozens of other publications nationwide, including Sports Illustrated and Vanity Fair, and he frequently appears as a commentator on television programs in the United States and around the world. Tim's first book, "American Carnage," debuted at No. 1 and No. 2 on the Washington Post and New York Times best-seller lists, respectively. He lives in southeast Michigan with his wife, three sons, and German Shepherd.
Show Notes
Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power, and the GloryIntellectually re-examining the faith of childhoodA generational disillusionment in todayâs exit from ChristianityGenerational break in attitude & behaviorDistance from the moral majority generation to evaluate criticallyInverse relationship where the more one learns about Christ, the less they like ChristianityThe creation of the secular, evil âotherââThey created this other, this outsider, this enemy that had to be defeated.âCurrent American Christianity is often looking to find our identities on the good side of zero-sum equation.Shrinking our theology into something pathetic and miniscule.St. Augustine, St. Paul, and C.S. LewisâOne way to find meaning is to locate an enemy.âFrom Cal Thomasâs Blinded by Mightâ ââUnless you have the power to right every wrong and cure every ill and what better way to do that than with An all powerful God on your side.âThe church most often seems to thrive when it is at the margins.âWe can understand the relationship between this lust for dominance in our, in a society, the inverse relationship between that lust for dominance and the health of the church.âSatanâs temptation of Christ in the Gospel of Lukeâthe temptation to bow down.St. Peter, âBlessed are you Simon bar JonahâŠâ and then⊠âGet behind me Satan.âReaching for the sword versus reaching for the crossThe impact of Constantinian ChristianityJohn Dixonâs Bullies and SaintsConstantine wielding Christianity to dominateâthe imposition of Christian faithâIs Christianity an end or is it a means to an end?ââIt's easy to forget about the teachings of Christ if you are preoccupied with the, crusades of ChristianityââAn idol is something that starts as a good and healthy thing, but then becomes the ultimate thing.âAmerica as a kingdomAmerican Christendom as a source of idolatryBaptizing the American experience and pastE.g., Thomas Jefferson, Donald Trump, and Paula WhiteâThe other part of it that I find to be uniquely problematic and sometimes just downright gross, is this willful merging of scripture with the American mythos.âMike Pence, and âLet us set our eyes on Old Glory.ââThine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever.âAn age of gnawing unknownsTim Albertaâs reflections on his fatherâKeep your eyes fixed on Jesus.âThe influence of Jesusâs life and teachingâWe are in sales, not management.âProduction Notes
This podcast featured Tim AlbertaEdited and Produced by Evan RosaHosted by Evan RosaProduction Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, and Tim BergelandA Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/aboutSupport For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give -
Help the Yale Center for Faith & Culture meet a $10,000 matching challenge for podcast production; click here to donate today.
Part 4 of 4 in our 2023 Advent Series. Bo Karen Lee discusses how Ignatian spirituality, contemplative prayer, and meditating on the loving gaze and deep compassion of Christâa love that suffers withâcan be a transformative experience to heal trauma, pain, and deal with powerful emotions.
About Bo Karen Lee
Bo Karen Lee, ThM '99, PhD '07, is associate professor of spiritual theology and Christian formation at Princeton Theological Seminary. She earned her BA in religious studies from Yale University, her MDiv from Trinity International University in Deerfield, Illinois, and her ThM and PhD from Princeton Seminary. She furthered her studies in the returning scholars program at the University of Chicago, received training as a spiritual director from Oasis Ministries, and was a Mullin Fellow with the Institute of Advanced Catholic Studies. Her book, Sacrifice and Delight in the Mystical Theologies of Anna Maria van Schurman and Madame Jeanne Guyon, argues that surrender of self to God can lead to the deepest joy in God. She has recently completed a volume, The Soul of Higher Education, which explores contemplative pedagogies and research strategies. A recipient of the John Templeton Award for Theological Promise, she gave a series of international lectures that included the topic, âThe Face of the Other: An Ethic of Delight.â
She is a member of the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women, and the American Academy of Religion; she recently served on the Governing Board of the Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality, and is on the editorial board of the journal, Spirtus, as well as on the steering committee of the Christian Theology and Bible Group of the Society of Biblical Literature. Before joining Princeton faculty, she taught in the Theology Department at Loyola College in Baltimore, Maryland, where she developed courses with a vibrant service-learning component for students to work at shelters for women recovering from drug addiction and sex trafficking. She now enjoys teaching classes on prayer for the Spirituality and Mission Program at Princeton Seminary, in addition to taking students on retreats and hosting meditative walks along nature trails.
Show Notes
Help the Yale Center for Faith & Culture meet a $10,000 matching challenge for podcast production; click here to donate today.Macie Bridge and Evan Rosa introduce the episodeThe Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of LoyolaChrist in solidarity with meWho was Ignatius of Loyola?The Life of Christ by Ludolf of SaxonyFour weeks: beloved, walking with Christ in his ministry, walking with Christ in his suffering, knowing the risen ChristâGazing upon God who gazes upon me in love.âHow does God look upon me? How do others look upon me? How do I look upon myself?Attachment Theory in PsychologyStill Face Experiment and TraumaTrauma is the opposite of human flourishingLearned secure attachmentGrowing in confident awareness of Godâs love for me through prayer, meditation, and community.First image of God comes through human relationshipsAngerBoâs experience of dealing with trauma during 2022âs wave of violence against Asian AmericansPrayer, doubt, and whether God is with usHearing the wailing of womenMary holding the collapsed ChristâBo, they killed me too.ââI was companioned in my grief.âProduction Notes
This podcast featured Bo Karen LeeEdited and Produced by Evan RosaHosted by Evan RosaProduction Assistance by Macie BridgeA Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/aboutSupport For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give -
Help the Yale Center for Faith & Culture meet a $10,000 matching challenge for podcast production; click here to donate today.
How does the light get in? Leonard Cohen suggests, "There's a crack in everything / That's how..." Whether from our restlessness, our fear, or our trauma, to see the world rightly might start with the need to acknowledge the crack in everything.
Only then can we see a new world of understanding and belonging and well-being.
Graham Ward (University of Oxford) joins Ryan McAnnally-Linz to reflect on the purpose of theology, Christology as the place where the divine and the human come together, trauma, restlessness, fear, the human capacity for creativity and destruction (and which will we choose?), and how the Gospels offer a new sense of belonging.
About Graham Ward
Graham Ward is Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford and is author of several books, including How the Light Gets In and Another Kind of Normal.
Show Notes
Graham Wardâs Ethical Life books under discussion in this episode: How the Light Gets In and Another Kind of NormalCreating inner coherence through a systematic theologyScripture as the common text all Christians return toReading with a sense of original languageâWe do believe God speaks to us through the scriptures.âWriting titles that invite non-Christians to the booksâThereâs a lot of the church who are not in church on Sunday.ââI always think that, one, theology lost in a sense when it became professionalized. And twoâŠtheology has got to be pastoral.ââGood writing can find the phrasing which unlocks experiences that other people have had.âTheology as speaking more to being human than being divineDogma (Matt Damon and Ben Affleck) and the problem with âBuddy JesusâTheology that defamiliarizes ChristThe strangeness of Christ as drawing outBalancing defamiliarization with the glory of CreationNone of us actually know what the resurrection truly meansTrauma in the early churchâWhat is it we're looking for in our restlessness?âRestlessness as fundamentally connected to our fearThe conflict between losing control in Christ, and being a predatory creatureGrace breaking through in the rubbish heap, like sunlight on a violetâThis is the hard love which demanded God's sacrifice, but also demands my sacrifice of what I think love should be.âJulian of NorwichâI was just playing with the phrase âbecause the devil is in the detailâ, and it's not, it's God that's in the detail.âWill you be creative or will you be destructive?The role of the church in people who are discerningMystagogy, living what you worshipThe role of liturgy in communityFragmentation and non-belonging within our contemporary relationshipsThe gospels as incorporating a new type of belongingProduction Notes
This podcast featured Graham WardEdited and Produced by Evan RosaHosted by Evan RosaProduction Assistance by Macie BridgeA Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/aboutSupport For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give -
Help the Yale Center for Faith & Culture meet a $10,000 matching challenge for podcast production; click here to donate today.
Part 3 of 4 in our 2023 Advent Series. Stacey Floyd-Thomas presents a vision of Black joyâwhich the world can't give and the world can't take away. Looking into several depictions of female agency in the Gospels, she outlines a picture of joy that celebrates beauty, redemptive self-love, virtuous pride, and critical engagement with the world. Then Willie James Jennings offers a definition of joy as an act of resistance against despair and its forces that lead to death. He presents a creative, communal joy characterized by fullness, connected to but transcending grief and sorrow.
Show Notes
Help the Yale Center for Faith & Culture meet a $10,000 matching challenge for podcast production; click here to donate today.Macie Bridge and Evan Rosa introduce the episodeStacey Floyd-Thomas explains Black joy"This Joy That I Have""The world didn't give it / the world can't take it away."Beauty and BlacknessToni Morrison's The Bluest EyeWomanist TheologyRadical subjectivityCommunitarian Redemptive self-loveCritical engagementFemale agency in the GospelsMary and Jesus at the Wedding in CanaMary and MarthaSyro-Phoenician WomanWillie James Jennings defines joyâ"an act of resistance against despair""Resisting all the ways in which life can be strangled and presented to us as not worth living"Singing a song in a strange landMaking productive use of pain, suffering, and the absurdâtaking them seriousHow does one cultivate joy? You have to have people who can show you how to sing a song in a strand land, laugh where all you want to do is cry, and how to ride the winds of chaos."In contexts where your energies have to be focused on survival, it doesnât leave a lot of energy for overt forms of complaintâyouâre spending a lot of energy just trying to hold it together."The commercialization of joy in the empire of advertisingâcontrasting that with the peoples serious work of joyThe work and skill of making something beautiful out of what has been thrown awaySegregated joyâjoy in African diaspora communitiesJoy is always embedded in community logicsThe Christological center of joyPentecost joyâjoy togetherGeographies of joy: Christians tend not to think spatially, but we shouldPublic rituals bound to real spaceHoping for joyous infection, where the space has claimed you as its ownWhere can joy be found? The church, the hospital room, the barber shop and beauty shopsââthings are going to be better"Production Notes
This podcast featured Stacey Floyd-Thomas and Willie James JenningsEdited and Produced by Evan RosaHosted by Evan RosaProduction Assistance by Macie BridgeA Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/aboutSupport For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give -
Help the Yale Center for Faith & Culture meet a $10,000 matching challenge for podcast production; click here to donate today.
How do you speak to the unspeakable? How does a people connected to place retain their sense of meaning and time when they are displaced and ignored? Indigenous Australian journalist and public intellectual Stan Grant (Monash University) joins Evan Rosa for a discussion of his experience as an Aboriginal Australian, the son of Wiradjuri and Gamilaraay people in the Outback of New South Wales, Australia. He tells the story of his familyâs Christian faith and Aboriginal identityâhow the two work together. He shares the sense of aboriginal homelessness and displacement and his efforts to seek justice for Aboriginal people in modern Australia, a place with no memory. He teaches us the meaning of Yindyamarra Winhanganhaâwhich is Wiradjuri concept meaning a life of respect, gentleness, speaking quietly and walking softly, in a world worth living in. He comments on declining democracy, how to live with dignity after catastrophe, what it means to be both nothing and everythingâand we learn from Stan about the power of silence to speak to the unspeakable.
About Stan Grant
Stan Grant is an indigenous aboriginal Australian journalist, former war correspondent, and an award-winning author of multiple books, including 2023's The Queen Is Dead: Time for a Public Reckoning (Harper Collins). He served in high profile roles in Australia as a current affairs and news presenter with Channel 7, CNN, SBS and the ABC. He was recently appointed inaugural Director of the Constructive Institute Asia Pacific in the Faculty of Arts at Monash University.
Show Notes
To learn more about Stan Grant and the Constructive Institute, click here.What is home in a place of exile?Coolah, New South Wales, AustraliaEntering âAustraliaâWhat it means to be an indigenous personâan Indigenous Australian or Aboriginal in particularAustralia is a place with no memory.Stan Grantâs Christian faith: âWaiting for GodâSimone Weil and giving voice to affliction through silence and waitingWhat it is to be nothingSuffering and meaninglessnessâWe find our nothingness, which is everything.ââI don't have to look for the meaning of affliction and I don't have to look for someone to answer for that affliction, because Christ is already there to hold the weight of that affliction.âBiameâAboriginal Creator God SpiritâRainbow SerpentDepth of spiritual connection to placeâJesus is a tribal man, living in a place of occupation.âJesusâs totem: WaterDeep time, deep silenceA breaking point with modernityâWe are, at our essence, spiritual people, poetic people of place. We are not political people of enlightenment, and that, that is a hard weight to bear, to live as poetic people of God in a world of politics that seeks to kill God.âResponsibilityYindyamarra winanganaâârespect in a world worth living inââI am not responsible for what I do. I'm also responsible for what you do. And that is the essence of what it is to be a First Nations person in Australia. That is the essence of It is a respect and a responsibility beyond who we are, but connects us to where we are.â1 Peter 2:17: âHonor everyone.âIndividual identity vs communal belongingUluru Statement, âMakarrataâAustralia is the only Commonwealth country that has not recognized First Nations peoples politically, and given them a voice to Australian Parliament.Secondary citizenshipStruggle of Aboriginal AustraliansWhat is it to live with catastrophe?âThe absence of love makes us know love is real.âThe Crow People: Chief Plenty Coups: âAfter that, nothing happened.âHow to live with dignity after catastrophe.Miroslav Volf on remembering rightlyâThis is my quest to try to understand those things. And it's the quest of an exile. It's, it's exile that I was forced into, that my people were forced into, that I share with others, that I seek to embrace as an exile of silence, an exile of love, and an exile of belonging and not identity. James Joyce, James Baldwin, Tony Morrison, these people have shared this journey, the great poets, the great writers, the great artists who have sought to give expression to that sense of what it is to be exiled from the modernity of who we are, what we all want to be something. And maybe when we are reduced to nothing, we may find what it is to be everything.âAfter Queen Elizabeth diedA people of suffering, but not tragedyWhat it means to be human: Born from the dustSelf-giving and YindyamarraWeightlessness of liberalismAmerica: Can it hold the weight?Declining democracy around the worldâThereâs no ancestors in Rawls. Thereâs no history in Rawls.ââFor me, a life worth living is to know where I am.âProduction Notes
This podcast featured journalist Stan GrantEdited and Produced by Evan RosaHosted by Evan RosaProduction Assistance by Macie BridgeA Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/aboutSupport For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give - Mostrar más