For the Life of the World / Yale Center for Faith & Culture

“The gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.” Theologian R. Kendall Soulen joins Drew Collins to discuss supersessionism, the name of God (tetragrammaton), the irrevocable covenant between God and the Jews, and the enduring significance of Judaism for Christian theology. Together they explore religious and ethnic heritage, cultural identity, community, covenant, interfaith dialogue, and the...

Clinical psychologist Alexis Abernethy explores burnout, Sabbath rest, and resilience—reframing rest as spiritual practice for individuals and communities. “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, wo...

The Gospel of John is a gospel of superabundance. The cosmic Christ made incarnate would of course yield an absolute superabundance of grace, love, and unity. 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....

Miroslav Volf critiques ambition, love of status, and superiority, offering a Christ-shaped vision of agapic love and humble glory. “’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 t...

Miroslav Volf explores agapic love, creation’s goodness, and God’s grief—an alternative to despair, power, and world rejection. “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 mora...

Miroslav Volf critiques Nietzsche’s vision of power, love, and suffering—and offers Jesus’s unconditional love as a more excellent way. 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, ind...

Miroslav Volf confronts Schopenhauer’s pessimism and unquenchable thirst with a vision of love that affirms the world. “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 ta...

Miroslav Volf on how to rightly love a radically ambivalent world. “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...

What if our relentless drive to be better than others is quietly breaking us? 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, theolog...

Silas Farley, former New York City Ballet dancer and current Dean of the Colburn School's Trudl Zipper Dance Institute, explores the profound connections between classical ballet, Christian worship, and embodied spirituality. From his early exposure to liturgical dance in a charismatic Lutheran church to his career as a professional dancer and choreographer, Farley illuminates how the physicality...

Pope Francis died on Monday April 21, 2025. And to remember and celebrate his life, we’re bringing out an episode from our archives featuring social ethicist and Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, Nichole M. Flores. Ryan McAnnally-Linz interviewed her in early 2021 about Fratelli Tutti, an encyclical teaching he published 6 months into the COVID-19 pandemic. Fr...

“Art is a form of prayer … a way to enter into relationship.” 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 origina...

"Do not be afraid of your fears, but cope with them—learn how to deal with them—because unless you do, you cannot live your life abundantly and fully." (Fyodor Raychynets) Evoking courage, resilience, and faith in the face of overwhelming uncertainty, Ukrainian pastor and theologian Fyodor Raychynets returns to For the Life of the World three years after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In convers...

Mystics and prophets have reported receiving visions from the Divine for centuries—”Thus saith the Lord…”—Hildegard of Bingen, Teresa of Avila, Ignatius of Loyola, Catherine of Siena, or Julian of Norwich. The list goes on. 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 i...

It’s easy to forget how utterly scandalous the concepts of grace and forgiveness are. Grace is an absolutely unmerited, undeserved benevolence. Forgiveness is an intentional miscarriage of retributive justice, ignoring of the wrong by a wrongdoer. In Miroslav Volf’s understanding, forgiveness “decouples the deed from the doer.” Today’s episode features some highlights from Miroslav’s personal refl...

Super Bowl LIX was amazing, but not because of the football, or the commercials. It was the 13-minute half-time tour de force of political theology and protest art, brought to you by Kendrick Lamar. Acting like a parable to offer more to those who already get it, and to take away from those who don’t get it at all, the performance was so much more than a petty way to settle a rap beef. But what ex...

Disaster preparedness is sort of an oxymoron. Disaster is the kind of indiscriminate calamity that only ever finds us ill-equipped to manage. And if you are truly prepared, you’ve probably averted disaster. There’s a big difference between the impact of disaster on physical, material life—and its outsized impact on mental, emotional, and spiritual life. Personal disasters like a terminal illness,...

How should we treat our one and only home, Earth? What obligations do we have to other living or non-living things? How should we think about climate change and its denial? How does biodiversity and species extinction impact human beings? And how should we think about environmental justice, the rights of animals, and the ways we consume the natural world? In this episode, Ryan McAnnally-Linz welco...

Are you there God? It’s me… Why is God hidden? Why is God silent? And why does that matter in light of faith, hope, and love? In this episode, philosopher Deborah Casewell joins Evan Rosa for a discussion of divine hiddenness. Together, they reflect on: Simone Weil’s distinction between abdication and abandonment Martin Luther’s theology of the cross The differences between the epistemic, moral, a...

Is America a nation Chosen by God? A New Jerusalem and Shining City on a Hill? What is the shape of Christian Nationalism today? 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...

“All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception.” … “It is necessary to uproot oneself. To cut down the tree and make of it a cross, and then to carry it every day.” … “I have to imitate God who infinitely loves finite things in that they are finite things.” … “To know that what is most precious is not rooted in exis...

“What are you going through?”  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...

This episode is the first of a short series exploring How to Read Simone Weil. The author of Gravity and Grace , The Need for Roots , and Waiting for God —among many other essays, letters, and notes, Weil has been an inspiration to philosophers, poets, priests, and politicians for the last century—almost all of it after her untimely death.  She understood, perhaps more than many other armchair phi...

Why do we have countries? Why do we mark this land and these people as distinct from that land and those people? What are countries for? Yii-Jan Lin (Associate Professor of New Testament, Yale Divinity School) joins Matt Croasmun to discuss her new book, Immigration and Apocalypse , which traces the development of distinctly American ideas about the meaning of a country, its borders, and crossing...

“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...