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

Help us improve the podcast! Click here to take our listener survey —5 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 rea...

Help us improve the podcast! Click here to take our listener survey —5 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....

Can you spare 3 minutes to take our listener survey? After the survey closes, we'll randomly select 5 respondents to receive a free, signed, and personalized copy of Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most. Click here to take the survey! Thank you for your honest feedback and support! “For theology to be worth anything, it must traffic in real life, and that real life begins in the heart.”...

There’s 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...

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 world—and 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...

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. He’s 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...

What are the economic forces that underly racist thinking? What are the theological dimensions of racism? How does the “political economic distortion of the divine economy” 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 uniq...

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 conversatio...

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. Bu...

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 idolatry—a 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: Ame...

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 Christ—a love that suffers with—can be a transformative experience to heal trauma, pain, and deal with p...

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...

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 joy—which 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, redem...

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...

Part 2 of 4 in our 2023 Advent Series. David Dark introduces a new way of thinking about non-violent resistance, which he dubs "Robot Soft Exorcism," whereby, in an appeal to our common humanity, we call each other out of the potentially violent power structures and systems we all (knowingly or unknowingly) inhabit.  Show Notes Help the Yale Center for Faith & Culture meet a $10,000 matching chall...

To read is human. Even as literacy rates or the quality of that literacy make us nervous for the future, the act of reading looks like it’s somewhere near the essence of what it means to be human. Because reading doesn’t end, or even start, with books. Reading is this search for meaning. A turning and tuning of our senses outward. Looking for symbols, looking for signs of life. It’s the longing fo...

Help the Yale Center for Faith & Culture meet a $10,000 matching challenge for podcast production; visit faith.yale.edu/give to donate today. A special Advent bonus episode on hope. Theologian Miroslav Volf reflects on "Hope is the thing with feathers" by Emily Dickenson, comments on the dark hope of Martin Luther & the Apostle Paul, and how hope and endurance are intrinsically connected in Christ...

As you listen today, would you consider helping the Yale Center for Faith & Culture meet a $10,000 matching challenge for  2024 podcast production? visit faith.yale.edu/give to donate today. "Christians are called to collaborate without compromise and to critique without dualism." (N.T. Wright, from today's episode) What better way to secure the greatness of your political state (or maybe politica...

“Gratitude enlivens the world.”  Gratitude is the emotional expression of the interchange of love between giver and receiver. So of course we’re looking for more of that in public—it’s the very evidence of giving to one another, grace with each other, beneficence for one another. In this conversation, Miroslav Volf and Evan Rosa discuss this remarkable interchange of love between giver and receive...

Recent psychological studies find that gratitude can help us create, cultivate, and maintain the kinds of relationships that make life worth living. Other studies are finding that gratitude is far more complicated, and plays a nuanced role in our complex emotional lives. Research psychologist Jo-Ann Tsang (Baylor University) joins Ryan McAnnally-Linz to talk about the complicated emotional world t...

Why do we like horror films? Why do we gravitate to the theatre for a collective catharsis—living out our nightmares vicariously through the unwitting victim on the screen? What draws us to the shadows? All the more poignant for the Christian who shouldn’t watch the bad movies. But let’s take the point seriously: How might we watch horror films Christianly? Which is to say: How do we watch them we...

Activist, Pastor, and Global Leader Evan Mawarire reflects on the role of Christian faith in democratic leadership, specifically looking at three significant Gospel passages that reveal not just Jesus’s approach to leadership, but how he teaches his disciples to lead with peace, humility, compassion, and faith. In Mark 4, we find Jesus leading from peace, rest, control, and trust, peacefully sleep...

“Wrestling with oneself, with one’s past, with one’s relationships, with God … These stories push us to use disability to think about the human condition more broadly.” Longstanding narratives about disability shaped our emotional responses, our caregiving responses, and our social commentary, and our treatment of the disabled. But what if we saw disability as the site of divine revelation about G...

  Show Notes Salty: Lessons on Eating, Drinking, and Living from Revolutionary Women Creative non-fiction and “essays” as a genre “I guess what I was trying to do was come up with ways into the lives of these women who I find interesting. That would also be compelling to someone who had never heard of them.” Dinner party Hannah Arendt and her cocktail parties A subversive feast among friends Argui...

Show Notes Instructive irony: Evan’s disabling experience of setting up a microphone for a podcast interview Three ways to think about disability: Minority Model (Impairment of Individuals), Social Model (Societal factors create impairment), and Political Model (emerges from collective action and identity; generated from Americans with Disabilities Act) Chronic pain, real suffering All three model...