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

"God's patience empowers us to act. ... Human beings are called to respond to God's patience. Human beings are called to make good on God's patience. The covenant of grace, which is fulfilled in Christ and which is animated by the spirit, makes that a possibility. It's not an easy possibility of real life. I mean, not just because of sin and finitude, but because of the complexities of the world t...

What does patience have to do with money? It's much more than timing the market just right. The economic factors of our market economy hold great sway over our relationship to the past, present, and future. Theologian Kathryn Tanner reflects on the ways finance-dominated capitalism controls our experience of time, and offers insights for a Christian approach to living in the present, informed by a...

Modern life presents a crisis of time, bringing the value of patience into question. Andrew Root joins Ryan McAnnally-Linz to provide some context for our modern patience predicament. As a professor of youth ministry at Luther Seminary, he has years of both experience and careful thinking about what it means for kids, families, churches, and communities to flourish in an impatient world, cultivati...

"Be with me, Madam Jazz, I urge you now, / Riff in me so I can conjure how / You breathe in us more than we dare allow." (Micheal O'Siadhail, The Five Quintets) Irish poet Micheal O'Siadhail and theologian David Ford discuss the improvisational jazz that emerges in the interplay of poetry and theology, riffing on life and love, the meaning of covenant, retrieving wisdom from history, and imagining...

"The artist has the ability to direct the attention of the audience. If you agree to engage with their work, then they will show you something. And you agree to pay attention to that thing. And I think the act of attending to things is basically the act of love. And when I look at the life of Christ, he's forever drawing people's attention to things as lessons or just things they wouldn't have see...

Is it possible for anyone to change their mind anymore?  Matt Croasmun welcomes theologian and ethicist Nichole Flores (University of Virginia) onto the show for a discussion of changing our minds in political and religious contexts. They discuss the meaning of intellectual, political, and religious conversion; how aesthetic and emotional experience of beauty is often the key ingredient in changin...

In celebration of Juneteenth, Jamal-Dominique Hopkins and Angela Gorrell offer appreciation Old Testament scholar Charles B. Copher and Christian Educator Anne Streaty Wimberly.  About Charles B. Copher Charles Buchanan Copher (1913-2003), a United Methodist minister and Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Scholar, held an illustrative academic career at his alma mater, Gammon Theological Seminary, which l...

"It's not just internal peace. It's internal healing. Healing of your memory."  (Kevin Lau) After suffering a brutal knife attack that nearly killed him, journalist Kevin Lau, then editor-in-chief of Ming Pao, chose to forgive his two attackers. Since then, he has continued to support social participation through deep Christian spirituality. In this episode, he is joined by theologian Andrew Kwok...

"Jesus is the great kintsugi master."  "Something that's broken is already more valuable than when it's whole."  "The imagination creates, through the fractures, a river of gold, a mountain of gold."  Makoto Fujimura joins Miroslav Volf to discuss Art & Faith: A Theology of Making . Fujimura is a painter who practices the Japanese art of nihonga , or slow art. His abstract expressionist pieces are...

How should we respond to the pain of others? We are too often quick to justify God's permitting horrendous evils, answering why, and talking too much. In this episode, theologian David Kelsey reflects on Human Anguish and God's Power, noticing the anomaly of evil and its wild and inexplicable grip on creatures, the constant temptation of such creatures to talk and explain evil in the face of other...

"I am because they were." Lisa Sharon Harper joins Miroslav Volf to discuss the significance of narrative history for understanding ourselves and our current cultural moment; the sequence of repeated injustices that have haunted America's past and directly impacted Black Americans for hundreds of years; the Christian nationalist temptation to hoard power; the necessary conditions for true repair,...

A conversation on the ancient wisdom of Christian forgiveness, between Yale psychologist Laurie Santos (host, The Happiness Lab) and Miroslav Volf. Recently appearing on The Happiness Lab, Miroslav and Laurie discuss his older brother's tragic death as a child and his family's response to forgive. Miroslav reflects on the formative impact of these events. He contrasts forgiveness as an obligation...

"The tears were always there. / You just didn’t recognize my face." Author, artist, and theologian Sarah Shin reads her poem "Beyond Invisible"—a response to the March 2021 Atlanta shootings that left six Asian women dead—a crescendo of increasing anti-Asian violence. Sarah's poem and her husband Shin Maeng's accompanying illustration ask the pointed question, "Can you see me now?"—dealing with th...

Which is greater: action or contemplation? Which is more excellent and therefore more central and determinative in human flourishing? A life of action—focused outward in service of humanity and exterior, public, practiced love? Or a life of contemplation—focused inward in reflection and meditation and communion with God, a private, interior castle of wisdom? You might be quick to point out that it...

"Kumain ka na ba?”—Have you eaten yet? (Tagalog) This beautiful phrase of welcome and care and intimacy evokes and offers more than just the pleasure and nourishment of a meal. It calls out to the hunger, the thirst, and the need for love that we can greet in one another. David de Leon joins Matt Croasmun for a discussion of hospitality and solidarity and justice, applying the parable of the Great...

"Without living theologically, there can be no theology." (Jürgen Moltmann)  Miroslav Volf interviews his mentor, German theologian Jürgen Moltmann, who reflects on the meaning of joy and its connection to anxiety, fear, wrath, hope, and love. Moltmann tells his story of discovering (or, being discovered by) God as a 16-year-old drafted into World War II by the German Army, enduring the bombardmen...

"Once a person has done evil, they have destroyed a significant part of themselves. They have made that turn towards non-being, non-existence, chaos, disorder, and loss. And so when you execute a person who has already done that kind of moral damage to themselves, not to mention all the damage they've done to other people, but at that point, the only thing remaining in them is the good, which is t...

Enroll now for our 7-week Life Worth Living Course through Grace Farms:  http://gracefarms.org/life-worth-living . The course runs from May 4 to June 15, and we expect it to fill up quickly, so don’t wait to sign up! One of the most prominent visions of the good life present in Disney films could be called "expressive individualism," perhaps best captured by the phrase "you do you." In this episod...

Thinking of the Christian church as a field hospital is a wonderful thought, but what happens when the very place you go to for healing becomes the locus of trauma? What happens to faith and flourishing when the hospital becomes a battlefield? For all the media attention given to cases of spiritual abuse, there is very little by way of psychological research. Dan Koch, host of the podcast You Have...

Theologian Angela Gorrell discusses her book The Gravity of Joy , a theological memoir that lays bare the experience of finding the bright sorrow of joy alongside devastating grief, suffering, and pain. The book recounts her experience of joining the Yale Center for Faith & Culture in 2016 as an Associate Research Scholar for our Theology of Joy and the Good Life Project and to teach our Yale unde...

“For me, the spiritual task is to befriend reality in all its mess and complexity—to do that with grace." Krista Tippett joins Miroslav Volf for a conversation on the importance of engaging otherness on the grounds of our common humanity; her personal faith journey from small town Baptists in Oklahoma, to a secular humanism in a divided Cold-War Berlin, and then back to her spiritual homeland and...

"I look at joy as an act of resistance against despair and its forces. ... Joy in that regard is a work, that can become a state, that can become a way of life." Willie Jennings joins Miroslav Volf to discuss the definition of joy as an act of resistance against despair, the counterintuitive nature of cultivating joy in the midst of suffering, the commercialization of joy in Western culture, joy s...

Matt Croasmun honors theologian Willie Jennings and his work in After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging . Willie Jennings is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology and Africana Studies at Yale Divinity School. Show Notes Willie Jennings, After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging Arvo Pärt’s Te Deum “Be ware the hidden curriculum." White, self-sufficient masculinity: "a way of being that co...

"There is no poverty worse than that which takes away work and the dignity of work. In a genuinely developed society, work is an essential dimension of social life, for it is not only a means of earning one’s daily bread, but also of personal growth, the building of healthy relationships, self-expression and the exchange of gifts. Work gives us a sense of shared responsibility for the development...

"A strange necessity has been laid upon me to devote my life to the central concern that transcends the walls that divide and would achieve in literal fact what is experienced as literal truth: Human life is one and all humans are members of one another" (Howard Thurman, The Luminous Darkness ). Sameer Yadav honors Howard Thurman, minister, theologian, philosopher, civil rights activist. Thurman w...