Trinity Forum Conversations

Latest Episodes:

Words Against Despair with Christian Wiman Aug 12, 2025

Show notes

Our guest this episode is the poet Christian Wiman, a master of the written – and spoken – word. After long wandering, he returned to the Christian faith in which he’d been raised, in part because of a terminal cancer diagnosis – one he has now long outlived. Both before and after his diagnosis, and his return to faith, his experience of despair has fueled his powerful poetry. In grappling with it, Christian uses words in ways that are a tonic against despair.

“I deal with despair because…I don’t know how not to, and it would be an evasion not to. And I think if you don’t feel it, then you’re not paying attention.”

This podcast is drawn from an online conversation from 2024. We hope this conversation will resonate with you as you explore the good, the true, and the beautiful in your own corner of creation.

If it does, please consider joining the Trinity Forum community as a member, at ttf.org. You can find the full video of this conversation there too. And while you’re here, please subscribe to this podcast on your chosen platform.

Authors and books mentioned in the conversation:

Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair, by Christian Wiman

Marilynne Robinson

Danielle Chapman

William Bronk

William Wordsworth

Every Riven Thing, by Christian Wiman

My Bright Abyss: Meditations of a Modern Believer, by Christian Wiman

Prayer, by Carol Ann Duffy

The Bible and Poetry, by Michael Edwards

Augustine of Hippo

Bittersweet, by George Herbert

Surprised by Joy, by C.S. Lewis

Richard Wilbur

Jürgen Moltmann

When the Time’s Toxins, by Christian Wiman

Related Trinity Forum Readings:

Augustine’s Confessions

Devotions by John Donne, paraphrased by Philip Yancey

God’s Grandeur: the Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins

Bulletins from Immortality, by Emily Dickinson

Wrestling with God, by Simone Weil

How to be a Patriotic Christian

Life, Death, Poetry & Peace with Philip Yancey

The Fall, the Founding, and the Future of American Democracy

Fear and Conspiracy with David French

To listen to this or any of our episodes in full, visit ttf.org/podcast and to help make content like this possible, join the Trinity Forum Society.

Spiritual Formation Through our Imaginations Aug 05, 2025

Show notes

In this Trinity Forum Conversation, author Lanta Davis, along with special guest host and Trinity Forum Senior Fellow Jessica Hooten Wilson, delve into the power of imagination and its role in our spiritual formation. The discussion centers on Davis's book Becoming by Beholding, which explores Christian imagination through art, literature, and historical practices.

These friends and scholars discuss the transformative potential of engaging with sacred art, the virtues, and traditional practices like Lectio Divina:

"In Jesus's parables ... He's constantly showing us that there's more hidden behind the surface than we think. The mustard seed is not just a mustard seed. Yeast is not just yeast ... Jesus shows us heavenly meanings ... This is what the incarnation helps us understand, that the divine is not just up above. It's all around us. It's here and now. That when God became matter, all the material world changed because of it."

We hope this conversation will resonate with you as you explore the good, the true, and the beautiful in your own corner of creation.

This podcast is an edited version of our Online Conversation recorded in March 2025. You can access the full conversation with transcript here .

Learn more about Lanta Davis and Jessica Hooten Wilson.

Episode Outline

00:00 Welcome and Introduction

04:47 Exploring the Power of Imagination

05:37 The Concept of Becoming by Beholding

07:46 Living in an Enchanted World

10:53 Tradition and the Logic of Eternity

13:49 Orthodoxy, Orthopraxy, and Orthopathy

17:22 The Role of Icons and Medieval Bestiaries

23:25 Lectio Divina and Imaginative Prayer

27:20 Virtues and Vices: A Deeper Look

30:38 Understanding Virtue and Its Historical Context

31:37 The Practicality of Virtue Personifications

32:32 Teaching Virtues in Everyday Life

33:50 Exploring Courage Through Art

36:30 Incorporating Virtue in Contemporary Art

38:15 Imagination and Its Role in Understanding Reality

45:28 Scripture, Culture, and the Fruits of the Spirit

49:49 Global Christian Art and Imagination

51:34 Resources for Teaching and Engaging with Art

54:46 Travel and Exploration of Christian Art

56:33 Desire, Trust, and Identity in Modern Culture

59:39 The Last Word with Lanta Davis

Authors and books mentioned in the conversation:

Becoming by Beholding, by Lanta Davis
Jessica Hooten Wilson
Ralph C. Wood
In the Beauty of Holiness, by David Lyle Jeffrey
Luke Ferriter
“Hurrahing in Harvest”, byGerard Manley Hopkins
Four Quartets, by T. S. Eliot
Orthodoxy, byG. K. Chesterton
Flannery O’Connor
Grace Hammond
On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books, by Karen Swallow Prior
Alan Noble
A Secular Age, by Charles Taylor
Dorothy Sayers
The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri
James K.A. Smith
Kristin Lavransdatter, by Sigrid Undset
John Donne
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Related Trinity Forum Readings:
Kristin Lavransdatter, by Sigrid Undset
Spirit and Imagination: Reflections from Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Strangest Story in the World, by G.K. Chesterton

Beauty, Music, and Spiritual Formation with Keith and Kristyn Getty Jul 29, 2025

Show notes

Our Summer 2025 series, Beside Still Waters, focuses on the places where creativity brings life into a world fatigued by brokenness and division. From jazz to Jane Austen and in between, this season we’ll focus on the ways literature and the arts can refresh and challenge our inner lives—and connect us with the Creator of the good, the true, and the beautiful.

In this episode, our guides are modern hymn writers Keith and Kristyn Getty. Back in 2019, we hosted a live Evening Conversation in which they explored the ways in which music can speak to our spiritual hunger and shape our sense of beauty, truth, and purpose:

"Our singing doesn't just affect each one of us. We are a witness to the world around us. When we sing, we are always a witness."

We hope this conversation will resonate with you as you explore the good, the true, and the beautiful in your own corner of creation.

Learn more about the Gettys.

Watch our Evening Conversation.

Authors, artists, and books mentioned in the conversation:

Peter Kreeft

The Republic, by Plato

Damon of Athens

Sing: How Worship Transforms your Life, Family, and Church, by Keith and Kristyn Getty

Unwearied Praises: Exploring Christian Faith Through Classic Hymns, by Dr. Jeff Greenman

The Pedagogy of Praise, by Dr. Jeff Greenman

John Lennox

Lucy Shaw

Eugene Peters

J.I. Packer

Martin Luther

Leonard Bernstein

Amy Carmichael

Cecil Frances Alexander

Os Guinness

Charles Spurgeon

Lloyd Jones

D.L. Moody

Related Trinity Forum Readings:

Handel’s Messiah

Related Conversations:

Waiting on the Word with Malcolm Guite

Poetry & Beauty in Solitude with Dana Gioia

Reading Jane Austen: A Novel Approach to Virtue Jul 22, 2025

Show notes

Our Summer 2025 series, Beside Still Waters, focuses on the places where creativity brings life into a world fatigued by brokenness and division. From jazz to Jane Austen and in between, this season we’ll focus on the ways literature and the arts can refresh and challenge our inner lives—and connect us with the Creator of the good, the true, and the beautiful.

In this episode, our focus is Jane Austen, and our guide is Karen Swallow Prior, one of our Trinity Forum Senior Fellows.

Karen explores the faith-informed perspective on virtue that Austen’s novels reflect:

"Underneath the surface [Austen] is inviting us to look at our own interactions with one another, our own misperceptions, and misreadings, and I think that’s really why her work has remained so endearing to us today; because she reveals the truths of our human condition that never change, and that we’re always wrestling with."

Jane Austen’s world and concerns seem distant from ours. Yet across the centuries, she illuminates the importance of the seemingly mundane, and the path towards repaired and rightly ordered relationships.

If this work resonates with you, consider joining the Trinity Forum community as a member, at ttf.org. This episode is drawn from an online conversation held in 2021. You can find the full video of this conversation here. And while you’re here, please subscribe to this podcast.

Authors and books mentioned in the conversation:

Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen
Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman
Praying with Jane, by Rachel Dodge
Alasdair MacIntyre
William Shakespeare

Related Trinity Forum Readings:

Pride and Prejudice, a Trinity Forum Reading by Jane Austen
Bulletins from Immortality, a Trinity Forum Reading by Emily Dickinson
Revelation, a Trinity Forum Reading by Flannery O’Connor
God's Grandeur , a Trinity Forum Reading by Gerard Manley Hopkins

The Inklings, Creativity, and Community with Diana Glyer Jul 15, 2025

Show notes

Today’s guide is the author and professor Diana Glyer. She’ll be talking about the lives and work of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and their beloved community known as the Inklings.

In this episode drawn from an online conversation held in February of 2021, Diana focuses on how creativity thrives within small clusters of like-hearted people. We hope you enjoy reflecting on the potential of your own friendships and communities to be culture-shaping.

Authors and books mentioned in the conversation:

The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as Writers in Community, by Diana Glyer

Bandersnatch: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and the Creative Collaboration of the Inklings, by Diana Glyer

The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien

Charles Williams

C.S. Lewis

Shakespeare

Owen Barfield

Hugo Dyson

Out of the Silent Planet, by C.S. Lewis

Jerry Root

The Weight of Glory, by C.S. Lewis

Related Trinity Forum Readings:

On Friendship, by Cicero

The Golden Key, by George MacDonald

The Oracle of the Dog, by G.K. Chesterton

The Lost Tools of Learning, by Dorothy Sayers

Related Conversations:

Suffering, Friendship, and Courage: What Lewis & Tolkien Teach Us About Resilience & Imagination, an Online Conversation with Joe Loconte

Music, Creativity & Justice with Ruth Naomi Floyd Jul 08, 2025

Show notes

How should we live faithfully within a world created to be good and beautiful, and yet everywhere marred by ugliness and injustice?

Jazz vocalist and composer Ruth Naomi Floyd will guide us in bringing together music, creativity, and justice, and help us think about our roles in repairing, re-envisioning, and creating new places of beauty and flourishing:

We know that art shapes and reshapes us and that it’s there in the cross of Jesus, I believe, where beauty and violence collided and beauty won. And so that act of loving someone…purposely trying to love someone, especially those that seem or are viewed or deemed unlovable, is…directly connected and intrinsically connected to our art making.

We hope you are encouraged by Ruth’s artistic journey, as she helps us to find beauty in the midst of suffering, and to express love through creativity.

This podcast is an edited version of an online conversation recorded in 2021. Watch the full video of the conversation here, and learn more about Ruth Naomi Floyd.

Authors and books mentioned in the conversation:
The Frederick Douglass Jazz Works
It Was Good, Making Music to the Glory of God, by Ruth Naomi Floyd
The Problem of Good, by Ruth Naomi Floyd
Dr. John Nunez
Toni Morrison
Martin Luther King Jr.
Vincent van Gogh
Hans Christian Andersen
Miles Davis
Francis Schaeffer
Joshua Stamper

Related Trinity Forum Readings:
A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Letters from Vincent van Gogh
Letter from Birmingham Jail, by Martin Luther King Jr.
Revelation, by Flannery O’Connor
Bulletins from Immortality, by Emily Dickinson

Related Conversations:
A New Year With The Word with Malcolm Guite

To listen to this or any of our episodes in full, visit ttf.org/podcast and to join the Trinity Forum Society and help make content like this possible, join the Trinity Forum Society

The Cost of Ambition with Miroslav Volf Jun 24, 2025

Show notes

In this episode we’re joined by theologian and bestselling author Miroslav Volf of Yale Divinity School. His latest book is The Cost of Ambition: How Striving to Be Better Than Others is Making Us Worse.

The question he explores is one that relates to all of us: how can we find a way to strive for excellence, rather than for superiority over those around us?

Finding new insights in familiar Biblical passages and the Christian tradition, he’ll help us to defy our culture of merciless ambition:

Let’s dare trust in the God who comes down to serve those who are a refuse of society. And let’s trust in that unconditional love of God that takes those of us who are nothing and places us to become sharers of the community of those who are God’s beloved children.

This episode is drawn from an online conversation held in 2025. It’ll give you a sense of what the Trinity Forum is about: a community of people working to keep the Christian intellectual tradition alive, and to nurture new growth in it in our time, for the renewal of our culture.

If that resonates with you, please join the Trinity Forum as a member at ttf.org. We hope you enjoy the conversation.

Living Well and Dying Well with Lydia Dugdale Jun 10, 2025

Show notes

This conversation is on the practical wisdom the Christian tradition offers for something that affects all of us: matters of life and death. Dr. Lydia Dugdale will be our guide.

Lydia has applied practices from this faith tradition in her daily work with patients and families as a physician, professor and medical ethicist in New York City. She draws deeply from it in her book The Lost Art of Dying: Reviving Forgotten Wisdom – which she wrote for her patients, and those who love them:

“[Death] exists as a paradox … death has been conquered in the Resurrection of Christ, and then death is still the last enemy to be destroyed in the final resurrection of the dead.” — Lydia Dugdale

We hope this conversation helps paint a picture of what it means to live as a Christian on the road of life, where death is not the end, but a stop along the way to eternity.

This podcast was recorded with a live audience at a Trinity Forum evening conversation in Nashville in 2025. It’ll give you a good sense of what the Trinity Forum is about: a community of people working to keep the Christian intellectual tradition alive, to nurture new growth in it for society’s renewal, and to make it available to all.

Related Conversations:

Being, Living, and Dying Well, an Online Conversation with Lydia Dugdale

Faith, Health, and Healing, an Evening Conversation with Farr Curlin and Daniel Sulmasy

Suffering and Flourishing: Perseverance and Faith in the Midst of Pain, an Evening Conversation with Dr. Ray Barfield and Rev. Michael Walrond

Reason and Belief with Ross Douthat May 27, 2025

Show notes

In this conversation, author Ross Douthat draws from the tradition to tackle a foundational question: Why believe?

Amid evidence that America’s long trend of secularization has leveled off, a perception of the limits of a strictly materialist worldview, and growing dissatisfaction with “do it yourself” approaches to spirituality, what does traditional faith uniquely offer those seeking truth in our time?

New York Times columnist and author Ross Douthat joins us for this conversation, making the case for Christianity and rejecting atheism, all through the lens of reason:

“I think secularization as a deep and profound phenomenon is not real, as you can tell. I think the world remains shot through with miracle and mystery and enchantment.” – Ross Douthat

We hope this conversation provides a look at faith from a fresh angle, and encourages you in practicing traditional faith as an answer to the search for truth in our time.

This podcast is an edited version of an online conversation recorded in February 2025. Watch the recording here.

Authors and books mentioned in the conversation:

Ross Douthat for The New York Times

Matter of Opinion Podcast

The Deep Places: A memoir of Illness and Discovery

The Decadent Society to Change the Church

To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism

Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics

Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious

Bethel McGrew, on left vs. right brain of Christianity

Related Trinity Forum Readings:

The Wager; Blaise Pascal

The Strangest Story in the World; G.K. Chesterton

A Practical View of Real Christianity; William Wilberforce

God’s Grandeur: Gerard Manley Hopkins selection of poems; Gerard Manley Hopkins

Related Conversations:

A World Transformed with Tom Holland

The Strangest Story in the World: G.K. Chesterton and the Incarnation with Dale Ahlquist

Truth and Trust with Francis Collins

Faith in an Empirical World with Ard Louis and Tremper Longman

Our Souls on Technology with Andy Crouch and Jonathan Haidt May 13, 2025

Show notes

We were made for relationship — to be seen, loved, known, and committed to others. And yet we increasingly find ourselves, in the words of sociologist Jonathan Haidt, “disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.”

On our podcast Haidt and bestselling author Andy Crouch pair up to explore how the technology era has seduced us with a false vision of human flourishing—and how each of us can fight back, and restore true community:

“A person is a heart, soul, mind, strength, complex designed for love. And one of the really damaging things about our technology is very little of our technology develops all four of those qualities.” - Andy Crouch

We hope you enjoy this conversation about the seismic effects technology has had on our personal relationships, civic institutions, and even democratic foundations — and how we might approach rethinking our technologies and reclaiming human connection.

This podcast is an edited version of an online conversation recorded in 2022. Watch the full video of the conversation here. Learn more about Jonathan Haidt and Andy Crouch.

Authors and books mentioned in the conversation:

The Happiness Hypothesis, by Jonathan Haidt

The Coddling of the American Mind, by Jonathan Haidt

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, by Jonathan Haidt

Culture Making, by Andy Crouch

Playing God, by Andy Crouch

Strong and Weak, by Andy Crouch

The TechWise Family, by Andy Crouch

My TechWise Life, by Amy and Andy Crouch

The Life We're Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World,by Andy Crouch

Ernest Hemingway

Francis Bacon