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

Latest Episodes:

Chinese Political Theology: Protests in Blood Letters, Freedom, and Religion in China Today / Peng Yin Mar 20, 2024

Show notes

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"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 whole—the 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 do—both 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 life—looking 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

Religion’s role in Chinese political thought.
Thinking beyond Communist Authoritarianism and Christian Nationalism.
American foreign policy framed as “good, democratic” US versus “authoritarian, atheistic” China.
Chinese Communist party borrowing from Christian Utopianism
Sole-salvific figure: Not Christ, but the Party
Chinese Communism is a belief, not something that is open to verification. It’s not falsifiable.
Did the communist party borrow from Christian missionaries?
Communist party claiming collective cultivation over Confucianism’s self cultivation.
History of religious influence in Chinese political thought
Religion’s contemporary influence in Chinese public life
Lin Zhao, Christian protestor.
Lin Zhao as “exceptional instance of what Christianity can do: both the moral courage and the spiritual resource to resist totalitarianism.”
“New Cold War Discourse”
Chinese immigration influx after 1989 Tiananmen Movement.
Inhabiting a space between two empires.
“God's desire for human happiness is not simply embodied in one particular nation in an ambiguous term.”
The nexus of democracy, equality, and theological principles
Historical impacts of religion in Chinese public life—particularly in Confucianism and Buddhism and eventually Christianity
Peng reflects on his own moral sources of hope and inspiration—which 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 University’s 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. Yin’s research has been supported by the Louisville Institute, Political Theology Network, Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History, and Yale’s Fund for Gay and Lesbian Studies.

A recipient of Harvard’s Derek Bok Certificate of Distinction in Teaching, Yin teaches “Comparative Religious Ethics,” “Social Justice,” “Mysticism and Ethical Formation,” “Christian Ethics,” “Queer Theology,” and “Sexual Ethics” at STH. At the University, Yin serves as a Core Faculty in Women’s, 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-Linz
Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
Hosted by Evan Rosa
Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, & Tim Bergeland
A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

The Transforming Fire of Theological Education: Learning to See the World / Mark Jordan Mar 14, 2024

Show notes

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 Teaching—along the way, he reflects on Christian pedagogical principles; the question of the teacher’s 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 learning—and 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: “In 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.”
The parables of Jesus are themselves a pedagogy. They are “enigmatic, provoking, sometimes deliberately elusive” in order to “stop the hearer in his tracks or her tracks.”
The 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: “Faith is a divine gift.”
Teachers often communicate to their students in bodily and affective ways in addition to the actual words they use: “Bodies learn best from bodies.”
Mark Jordan's thoughts on teaching are especially true of theological education, but they can be true of other subjects as well.
“Education depends on desire.” 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 “is beginning to mistake [the teacher] for the actual point of the course.”
Theological education can and is taking place everywhere, not just in the classroom setting.
“The question is not, will there will be a future of theology? It's where will there be a future of theology?”
In 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 Croasmun
Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
Hosted by Evan Rosa
Production Assistance by Alexa Rollow, Macie Bridge, and Tim Bergeland
A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

The Heart of Theology: Emotions, Christian Experience, & the Holy Spirit / Simeon Zahl Mar 06, 2024

Show notes

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“For theology to be worth anything, it must traffic in real life, and that real life begins in the heart.”

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 John’s College, Oxford. Prior to his return to Cambridge he was Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Nottingham.

Show Notes

Explore Simeon Zahl’s The Holy Spirit & Christian Experience
“For theology to be worth anything, it must traffic in real life, and that real life begins in the heart.”
Theology becoming abstracted from day to day life
“There 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.”
“Real life begins in the heart.”
God is concerned with the heart.
Emotion, desire, and feelings
Where does love come in?
Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon
Philip Melanchthon’s 1521 Loci Communes: Defining human nature through the “affective power”
Affect versus rationality at the center of Christian life
Credibility, plausibility, and livability of Christianity
Authenticity and the disparity between values and beliefs and real lives.
Doctrine of Grace
Enabling a hopeful honesty
“What Christianity says and what it feels need to be closer together.”
Evangelical conversion in George Elliot’s novella, Janet’s Repentance
“Ideas are often poor ghosts; our sun−filled 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.” (George Eliot)
Art’s ability to speak to desire.
T.S. Eliot: “Poetry operates at the frontiers of consciousness.”
Exhausted by religious language
How the aesthetic impacts the acceptance of ideas
Durable concepts
Where theological doctrine comes from
Simeon Zahl: “In 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.”
“People were worshipping Christ before they understood who he was.”
“Speaking about human experience just is speaking about the doctrine of the Holy Spirit.”
Desire and emotion as pneumatological experience
Sourcing emotional and experiential data for theological reflection
Ernst Troelsch: “Every metaphysic must find its test in practical life.”
“The half-light of understanding”
Nietzsche: “The hereditary sin of the philosopher is a lack of historical sense.”
Augustine’s transformation of desire
Emotional experience as inadequate tool on its own
Noticing our own emotional experiences
“If you want to pay attention to the Holy Spirit in theology, that means you have to pay attention to embodied experiential realities.”
Worshipping of God as Trinity before identifying the doctrine of the Trinity
Karen Kilby’s “apathetic trinitarianism”
Pentecostalism, affect, and play
Establishing a spiritual connection between you and God
Touch, sweat, and movement
Nemi Waraboko’s The Pentecostal Principle: Ethical Methodology in New Spirit
Openness to new things, dynamism
Play and grace
An embarrassment of play, in the best way possible
The freedom of the Spirit: free to get it wrong in a “relaxed field”
Grace as the ultimate “relaxed field”

Production Notes

This podcast featured Simeon Zahl
Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
Hosted by Evan Rosa
Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, & Tim Bergeland
A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

A Voice Crying Out: Brown Church & Critical Race Theory / Robert Chao Romero Feb 29, 2024

Show notes

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 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. He’s author of Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology, and Identity—and 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 Readers’ 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 Identity
Christianity and Critical Race Theory: A Faithful and Constructive Conversation
About Robert Chao Romero
Asian-Latino Heritage
Spiritual Borderlands and liminality
The 500-year history of the Brown Church
Fr. Antonio de Montesinos and the first racial justice sermon in the Americas
Bartolome De Las Casas and concientización (repentance, metanoia)
Mision Integral
Christianity & Critical Race Theory
The four basic tenets of Critical Race Theory and how Christians can understand them in light of the Gospel
Hope and eschatological vision for justice and unity
The imago Dei

Production Notes

This podcast featured Robert Chao Romero
Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
Hosted by Evan Rosa
Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, and Tim Bergeland
A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Christianity as a Way of Life: Practice & Belief / Kevin Hector Feb 22, 2024

Show notes

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 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 one’s way of perceiving and being in the world or, in sum, as a way of life. And in his forthcoming book-project, tentatively entitled “Life as a Theological Project: Creating a Usable Past,” 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 Christians
Losing God to Christian practices
Devotion as God’s importance being important to you.
Imitation as practice for learning devotion.
LeBron James as an example of devotion
“The Martha Stewart effect”
Being yourself as a form of devotion
Mother Teresa and “seeing Jesus in people”
Looking for the image of God in others
The 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 resentment
How transparent are we to ourselves?
Practice as building habitual reflexes
Practices make it more and more sensible to orient towards God
Shame in Hector’s Christian framework
Marilynne Robinson’s Lila

Production Notes

This podcast featured Kevin Hector
Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
Hosted by Evan Rosa
Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, & Tim Bergeland
A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Renovating the Heart of Our Politics / Michael Wear Feb 14, 2024

Show notes

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 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 Willard’s 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. Michael’s 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 Birmingham’s 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 Wear
Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
Hosted by Evan Rosa
Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, & Tim Bergeland
A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Asian Americans, Racism, and Capitalism / Jonathan Tran Feb 07, 2024

Show notes

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 unique experience of Asian Americans, and Jonathan’s 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 community—Redeemer 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 God’s 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 God’s original revolution.

Show Notes

The roots of Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism
Are we thinking about racism backwards?
Race as a self-interpreting category
Is race just obvious? Is it just about the racialized relationships we have with each other?
“Rather 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?”
What is political economy?
Connecting an understanding of economy to God’s essence and existence
“The structure of creation is in a sense hardwired as gift.”
“One 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.”
Gift economy
Pope Francis’s “Our Common Home”
“What is the material political economy out of which the concept and category of race began?”
“Race was utilized in Europe and America to create a kind of ideological justification for relationships of property and labor.”
Race and unjust labor practices
Is capitalism coextensive with racism?
Marxism vs theological answers to the problem of capitalism and racism
Understanding Marxism with an example: Waco, Texas
Black Marxism as a corrective to White Marxism
Christianity and Moral Psychology
Anti-racism, post-racialism, identitarianism
Reverse engineering racism to produce Black dignity, Black power, or Black politics
Giving race explanatory power
“I’m not essentially Asian, but I've been racialized as an Asian person.”
Does racism against Asian Americans count?
Double marginalization: first by racism, then by anti-racism
Foucault’s “history of the present”
“[Race] is necessarily binary thinking.”
Meritocracy and capitalism
Case Study: Redeemer Community Church in San Francisco (https://www.redeemersf.org/)
The Joy–Dispossession Elipse: “Joy without dispossession is escapist. Dispossession without joy is sadist.”
The Gospel as proclamation instead of resistance
“Marxists in our sense are waiting for the revolution to start. Christians are leaning into a revolution that's a few thousand years old.”

Production Notes

This podcast featured Jonathan Tran & Matt Croasmun
Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
Hosted by Evan Rosa
Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, & Tim Bergeland
A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Becoming Whole in a Fragmented Age / Anne Snyder Jan 31, 2024

Show notes

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 violence—listening 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 doesn’t 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 Roundtable‘s Character Initiative, a program seeking to help foundations and business leaders strengthen “the middle ring” of morally formative institutions. Her path-breaking guidebook, The Fabric of Character: A Wise Giver’s 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 bachelor’s degree from Wheaton College (IL) and a master’s degree from Georgetown University. She currently lives in Washington, D.C.

Show Notes

“Whole person revolution”
Individual whole person as head, heart, and helping hands.
We are porous to our contexts
The individual as a part of a greater whole.
Exploring fear in our societies to understand the other
Wholeness must be considered on the granular level and broad scale
A “hard won” wholeness
Healing relational divides and brokenness
Curling inward around oneself
Watching cynicism arise in the vacuum of encounter

Production NOtes

This podcast featured Anne Snyder
Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
Hosted by Evan Rosa
Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, and Tim Bergeland
A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Listeners Dare: Courage and the Act of Sermon-Listening / Will Willimon Jan 24, 2024

Show notes

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 scenario—the preaching and hearing of the gospel, things get interesting.

Whether its from the window of St. Peter’s 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 Sermon
Preaching 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.
“Christian sermons, ought to arise out of an encounter with scripture.”
The 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 sermon
Verse-by-verse discovery in a sermon
One definition of preaching is “a biblical preacher goes to the biblical text hoping to make a discovery. Then you announce that discovery to the congregation.”
At 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.
“Preaching is a confrontation with the God who came to us, who is a Jew from Nazareth, who lived briefly, died violently, and rose unexpectedly—preaching is about that.”
Listening, and listening to God, are skills that can be cultivated.
“We have a revealing, talkative, loquacious God.”
It 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.
“Listeners are the playground of the Holy Spirit.”
Preachers 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 “hard sayings” of Jesus
Listeners Dare! :) Will mentions a teenagers compliment to him once: “That was the most f—ed up thing I have ever heard… it was wonderful.”
The courage to keep listening

About 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 Willimon
Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
Hosted by Evan Rosa
Production Assistance by Alexa Rollow, Macie Bridge, and Tim Bergeland
A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Power & American Evangelicalism: Sword or Cross? / Tim Alberta Jan 08, 2024

Show notes

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: 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 erodes
the impact of Constantinian Christianity and the Christian embrace of power, influence, and glory in American public life
the difference between Christ and Christendom, and our allegiance to one or the other
and the meaning and unique threat of idolatry—which takes on a unique form in contemporary American life.

Show Art

Grégoire Guérard, “The Arrest of Christ”, circa 1520-1522, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dijon, France

About Tim Alberta

Visit Tim’s 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 politics—the battles over health care and immigration on Capitol Hill; the election and presidency of Donald Trump; the ideological warfare between and within the two parties—Tim 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 America—and 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 Glory
Intellectually re-examining the faith of childhood
A generational disillusionment in today’s exit from Christianity
Generational break in attitude & behavior
Distance from the moral majority generation to evaluate critically
Inverse relationship where the more one learns about Christ, the less they like Christianity
The creation of the secular, evil “other”
“They created this other, this outsider, this enemy that had to be defeated.”
Current 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. Lewis
“One way to find meaning is to locate an enemy.”
From Cal Thomas’s Blinded by Might” —”Unless 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.”
The church most often seems to thrive when it is at the margins.
“We 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.”
Satan’s temptation of Christ in the Gospel of Luke—the temptation to bow down.
St. Peter, “Blessed are you Simon bar Jonah…” and then… “Get behind me Satan.”
Reaching for the sword versus reaching for the cross
The impact of Constantinian Christianity
John Dixon’s Bullies and Saints
Constantine wielding Christianity to dominate—the imposition of Christian faith
“Is Christianity an end or is it a means to an end?”
“It's easy to forget about the teachings of Christ if you are preoccupied with the, crusades of Christianity”
“An idol is something that starts as a good and healthy thing, but then becomes the ultimate thing.”
America as a kingdom
American Christendom as a source of idolatry
Baptizing the American experience and past
E.g., Thomas Jefferson, Donald Trump, and Paula White
“The 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.”
Mike Pence, and “Let us set our eyes on Old Glory.”
“Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever.”
An age of gnawing unknowns
Tim Alberta’s reflections on his father
“Keep your eyes fixed on Jesus.”
The influence of Jesus’s life and teaching
“We are in sales, not management.”

Production Notes

This podcast featured Tim Alberta
Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
Hosted by Evan Rosa
Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, and Tim Bergeland
A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
Support 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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