What In God's Name

What role does contemporary “white shock” have to play in the larger story of systemic racism/inherent alienation in our American history and culture? How is God present in our tears? These questions rise, as Chris introduces his new short film documenting a quilt project memorializing the last words of George Floyd. Our show pushes back against the unexamined, often unconscious ways that we frame...

What is the deeper story, the bigger story, the longer story, the theological story, that George Floyd’s killing is part of? And how does this chapter end? Our show pushes back against the unexamined, often unconscious ways that we frame public questions using political or economic modes of thinking. We aim to be part of a growing movement of people who are critical of the narrowness of political...

Can a Christian anthropology of suffering be translated into non-Christian language, such that that anthropology can enter public conversation NOT as specialized religious language, but as a generalized insight into human nature—an insight that leads to richer connections and more humane ways to order our common life?   Our show pushes back against the unexamined, often unconscious ways that we fr...

If we just stay committed, will we eventually win?  Our show pushes back against the unexamined, often unconscious ways that we frame public questions using political or economic modes of thinking. We aim to be part of a growing movement of people who are critical of the narrowness of political and economic categories, and who want to revive a vision of human flourishing that is grounded in the wi...

Is it true that to come out of pandemic time better than we went in, we must allow ourselves to be touched by others’ pain? Our show pushes back against the unexamined, often unconscious ways that we frame public questions using political or economic modes of thinking. We aim to be part of a growing movement of people who are critical of the narrowness of political and economic categories, and who...

What are the questions we should be asking ourselves as a society about our year’s experience with pandemic time? How has our society’s performance in the last year contrasted with our response to 9/11? Our show pushes back against the unexamined, often unconscious ways that we frame public questions using political or economic modes of thinking. We aim to be part of a growing movement of people w...

We’ve certainly blown past 100,000 Covid deaths in the United States. That was a potential threshold scenario we considered with sadness in this replay from May 7, 2020, when Covid deaths had just gone over the 65,000 mark. What In God’s Name is about to embark on a mini-series of shows reflecting on the last year of pandemic time. In preparation, we go back to the beginning months. What have we s...

How have we aged, how have we grown, over the last year?   It’s time to remember where we were when pandemic time began, as a baseline to consider the future. Today’s show is a replay from March 2020.   What rings true, now, in hindsight? Our show pushes back against the unexamined, often unconscious ways that we frame public questions using political or economic modes of thinking. We aim to be pa...

We re-ask Shayna’s question from two weeks ago: is the church in a particularly good position to be a model for building community? Are the spiritual resources available to faith communities especially helpful in creating healthy connections between people? What does the parable of the Good Samaritan have to do with countering the impersonal forces that reduce humans to commodities? Is there an al...

Cancel culture. What is it? Can it have any role in building the beloved community? Or is it more closely akin to old retributive systems of justice, like “an eye for an eye?” Our show pushes back against the unexamined, often unconscious ways that we frame public questions using political or economic modes of thinking. We aim to be part of a growing movement of people who are critical of the narr...

If toxic individualism is the spiritual disease of today’s United States, what is the healing balm? Today we peel back layers of “beloved community.” What is beloved community? How does it come to be? What are the prime features? Are faith communities uniquely situated to nurture this kind of community? And what characteristics will individuals need to strengthen, when they commit to such a commun...

Toxic individualism. The phrase captures one feature of our era here in the United States: the apotheosis of individualism, or as Paul Krugman in the New York Times put it in a column last July: the cult of selfishness. What is the difference between a view of the human being that sees the human being as participating in divinity, versus being divine? How does that distinction play out in real lif...

Toxic individualism. The phrase captures one feature of our era here in the United States: the apotheosis of individualism, or as Paul Krugman in the New York Times put it in a column last July: the cult of selfishness. Try this for a definition: toxic individualism results when the individual is separated from a higher moral order, and the individual then becomes the location for the sacred. Rece...

Toxic individualism. The phrase captures one feature of our era here in the United States: the apotheosis of individualism, or as Paul Krugman in the New York Times put it in a column last July: the cult of selfishness. Shayna traces our current condition of individualism run amok—of individualism untethered to a higher moral order—as having arisen out of decades of erosion of respect for the dign...

We recorded this show before the chaos began in Washington, surrounding the Electoral College certification; it just wasn’t that hard to see what was coming. Our thrust: the richness of the intellectual tradition of conservative thought is being squandered. What passes, in unexamined conversation and in lazy journalism, as “conservatism,” is not. “Repubican” does not mean “conservative.” Conservat...

“You can’t legislate the heart; you can’t legislate the spirit.” Willie Bodrick (Twelfth Baptist Church, Roxbury MA) responds to the question of the limits of politics and legislation to bring needed transformation and healing to the painful history of race in our country. Why can’t laws change hearts? What does this mean for other contentious issues in our common life? And while we note the limit...

Laura Everett (Massachusetts Council of Churches) and Willie Bodrick (Twelfth Baptist Church, Roxbury MA) reflect on how the life of the spirit is present in public space, as part of our common life, and how it’s important to discern that spirit within the conflicted story of race in our country. This is an excerpt from a What In God’s Name webinar from October 28, 2020. The full webinar is on our...

Divergent voices with different starting points, and different assumptions about the world, share a critique of modern America: we are too focused on the material. What makes for a meaningful life? What constitutes human flourishing? We may not find unanimity in a positive answer, but there is increasing agreement, in certain quarters, in rejecting purely economic or material measures of meaning a...

What is the stillness that is poised, potent, powerful? How might obedience to a loving authority—either a person, or a high ideal—help create a stillness in us that leads us to fuller living? How does the dominance of political and economic modes of thinking and acting (what we understand as “culture”) make talk of stillness marginal, if not meaningless? What kind of society do we want to create,...

Hope. One way to understand the human emotion of hope is seeing it as a particular kind of story we tell ourselves about the future. Chris outlines two different possible stories about the future of our American society. One story is more hopeful, the other bleaker. How might your view of the nature of human goodness affect the story you tell yourself about the future? Would you see divine interve...

Through the lens of legacy: looking at societal connection from the perspective of what we leave, when we leave. This week’s death of Pat Quinn, one of the co-founders of the “ice bucket challenge” to raise funds for and awareness of ALS, prompts our show today. Mostly, we live as though we will always be here. Lack of awareness of our limitations, including the limitation of finite time, leads to...

When you’re with Uncle Bob at the dinner table, do you try to reconcile with him by listening sympathetically to his ideas, or do you confront him with the truth so that he will, at some point, repent of his errors? If someone is acting poorly, do you try to see things from her point of view, or do you stand with conviction for a better way? Can we approach our fellow Americans with BOTH convictio...

We’re not politically divided anymore. It’s more complex than that, and potentially more dangerous. What happens when there is no commonly accepted authoritative voice for what is so, and what is not so, in the world? What happens when half the people think a certain kind of behavior is shameful, and another half think it is praiseworthy? Our show pushes back against the unexamined, often unconsci...

Some things stay the same, no matter who wins the presidential election. What are those things? How can we address them? Is it true that our political problems do not have political solutions? Our show pushes back against the unexamined, often unconscious ways that we frame public questions using political or economic modes of thinking. We aim to be part of a growing movement of people who are cri...

What In God’s Name talked with Sarah Drummond, Founding Dean of Andover Newton Seminary at Yale Divinity School, last winter, before the pandemic changed our lives. The insights that Sarah offers from her book “Dynamic Discernment: Reason, Emotion, and Power in Change Leadership” are helpful to us all, as we negotiate change in these challenging times. What is discernment? What are its constituent...