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

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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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 powerful emotions.

About Bo Karen Lee

Bo Karen Lee, ThM '99, PhD '07, is associate professor of spiritual theology and Christian formation at Princeton Theological Seminary. She earned her BA in religious studies from Yale University, her MDiv from Trinity International University in Deerfield, Illinois, and her ThM and PhD from Princeton Seminary. She furthered her studies in the returning scholars program at the University of Chicago, received training as a spiritual director from Oasis Ministries, and was a Mullin Fellow with the Institute of Advanced Catholic Studies. Her book, Sacrifice and Delight in the Mystical Theologies of Anna Maria van Schurman and Madame Jeanne Guyon, argues that surrender of self to God can lead to the deepest joy in God. She has recently completed a volume, The Soul of Higher Education, which explores contemplative pedagogies and research strategies. A recipient of the John Templeton Award for Theological Promise, she gave a series of international lectures that included the topic, “The Face of the Other: An Ethic of Delight.”

She is a member of the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women, and the American Academy of Religion; she recently served on the Governing Board of the Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality, and is on the editorial board of the journal, Spirtus, as well as on the steering committee of the Christian Theology and Bible Group of the Society of Biblical Literature. Before joining Princeton faculty, she taught in the Theology Department at Loyola College in Baltimore, Maryland, where she developed courses with a vibrant service-learning component for students to work at shelters for women recovering from drug addiction and sex trafficking. She now enjoys teaching classes on prayer for the Spirituality and Mission Program at Princeton Seminary, in addition to taking students on retreats and hosting meditative walks along nature trails.

Show Notes

• Help the Yale Center for Faith & Culture meet a $10,000 matching challenge for podcast production; click here to donate today.
• Macie Bridge and Evan Rosa introduce the episode
• The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola
• Christ in solidarity with me
• Who was Ignatius of Loyola?
• The Life of Christ by Ludolf of Saxony
• Four weeks: beloved, walking with Christ in his ministry, walking with Christ in his suffering, knowing the risen Christ
• “Gazing upon God who gazes upon me in love.”
• How does God look upon me? How do others look upon me? How do I look upon myself?
• Attachment Theory in Psychology
• Still Face Experiment and Trauma
• Trauma is the opposite of human flourishing
• Learned secure attachment
• Growing in confident awareness of God’s love for me through prayer, meditation, and community.
• First image of God comes through human relationships
• Anger
• Bo’s experience of dealing with trauma during 2022’s wave of violence against Asian Americans
• Prayer, doubt, and whether God is with us
• Hearing the wailing of women
• Mary holding the collapsed Christ
• “Bo, they killed me too.”
• “I was companioned in my grief.”

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Bo Karen Lee
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge
• 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

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 world of understanding and belonging and well-being.

Graham Ward (University of Oxford) joins Ryan McAnnally-Linz to reflect on the purpose of theology, Christology as the place where the divine and the human come together, trauma, restlessness, fear, the human capacity for creativity and destruction (and which will we choose?), and how the Gospels offer a new sense of belonging.

About Graham Ward

Graham Ward is Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford and is author of several books, including How the Light Gets In and Another Kind of Normal.

Show Notes

• Graham Ward’s Ethical Life books under discussion in this episode: How the Light Gets In and Another Kind of Normal
• Creating inner coherence through a systematic theology
• Scripture as the common text all Christians return to
• Reading with a sense of original language
• “We do believe God speaks to us through the scriptures.”
• Writing titles that invite non-Christians to the books
• “There’s a lot of the church who are not in church on Sunday.”
• “I always think that, one, theology lost in a sense when it became professionalized. And two…theology has got to be pastoral.”
• “Good writing can find the phrasing which unlocks experiences that other people have had.”
• Theology as speaking more to being human than being divine
• Dogma (Matt Damon and Ben Affleck) and the problem with “Buddy Jesus”
• Theology that defamiliarizes Christ
• The strangeness of Christ as drawing out
• Balancing defamiliarization with the glory of Creation
• None of us actually know what the resurrection truly means
• Trauma in the early church
• “What is it we're looking for in our restlessness?”
• Restlessness as fundamentally connected to our fear
• The conflict between losing control in Christ, and being a predatory creature
• Grace breaking through in the rubbish heap, like sunlight on a violet
• “This is the hard love which demanded God's sacrifice, but also demands my sacrifice of what I think love should be.”
• Julian of Norwich
• “I was just playing with the phrase ‘because the devil is in the detail’, and it's not, it's God that's in the detail.”
• Will you be creative or will you be destructive?
• The role of the church in people who are discerning
• Mystagogy, living what you worship
• The role of liturgy in community
• Fragmentation and non-belonging within our contemporary relationships
• The gospels as incorporating a new type of belonging

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Graham Ward
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge
• 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

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, redemptive self-love, virtuous pride, and critical engagement with the world. Then Willie James Jennings offers a definition of joy as an act of resistance against despair and its forces that lead to death. He presents a creative, communal joy characterized by fullness, connected to but transcending grief and sorrow.

Show Notes

• Help the Yale Center for Faith & Culture meet a $10,000 matching challenge for podcast production; click here to donate today.
• Macie Bridge and Evan Rosa introduce the episode
• Stacey Floyd-Thomas explains Black joy
• "This Joy That I Have"
• "The world didn't give it / the world can't take it away."
• Beauty and Blackness
• Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye
• Womanist Theology
• Radical subjectivity
• Communitarian 
• Redemptive self-love
• Critical engagement
• Female agency in the Gospels
• Mary and Jesus at the Wedding in Cana
• Mary and Martha
• Syro-Phoenician Woman
• Willie James Jennings defines joy—"an act of resistance against despair"
• "Resisting all the ways in which life can be strangled and presented to us as not worth living"
• Singing a song in a strange land
• Making productive use of pain, suffering, and the absurd—taking them serious
• How does one cultivate joy? You have to have people who can show you how to sing a song in a strand land, laugh where all you want to do is cry, and how to ride the winds of chaos.
• "In contexts where your energies have to be focused on survival, it doesn’t leave a lot of energy for overt forms of complaint—you’re spending a lot of energy just trying to hold it together."
• The commercialization of joy in the empire of advertising—contrasting that with the peoples serious work of joy
• The work and skill of making something beautiful out of what has been thrown away
• Segregated joy—joy in African diaspora communities
• Joy is always embedded in community logics
• The Christological center of joy
• Pentecost joy—joy together
• Geographies of joy: Christians tend not to think spatially, but we should
• Public rituals bound to real space
• Hoping for joyous infection, where the space has claimed you as its own
• Where can joy be found? The church, the hospital room, the barber shop and beauty shops—“things are going to be better"

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Stacey Floyd-Thomas and Willie James Jennings
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge
• 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

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 his experience as an Aboriginal Australian, the son of Wiradjuri and Gamilaraay people in the Outback of New South Wales, Australia. He tells the story of his family’s Christian faith and Aboriginal identity—how the two work together. He shares the sense of aboriginal homelessness and displacement and his efforts to seek justice for Aboriginal people in modern Australia, a place with no memory. He teaches us the meaning of Yindyamarra Winhanganha—which is Wiradjuri concept meaning a life of respect, gentleness, speaking quietly and walking softly, in a world worth living in. He comments on declining democracy, how to live with dignity after catastrophe, what it means to be both nothing and everything—and we learn from Stan about the power of silence to speak to the unspeakable.

About Stan Grant

Stan Grant is an indigenous aboriginal Australian journalist, former war correspondent, and an award-winning author of multiple books, including 2023's The Queen Is Dead: Time for a Public Reckoning (Harper Collins). He served in high profile roles in Australia as a current affairs and news presenter with Channel 7, CNN, SBS and the ABC. He was recently appointed inaugural Director of the Constructive Institute Asia Pacific in the Faculty of Arts at Monash University.

Show Notes

• To learn more about Stan Grant and the Constructive Institute, click here.
• What is home in a place of exile?
• Coolah, New South Wales, Australia
• Entering “Australia”
• What it means to be an indigenous person—an Indigenous Australian or Aboriginal in particular
• Australia is a place with no memory.
• Stan Grant’s Christian faith: “Waiting for God”
• Simone Weil and giving voice to affliction through silence and waiting
• What it is to be nothing
• Suffering and meaninglessness
• “We find our nothingness, which is everything.”
• “I don't have to look for the meaning of affliction and I don't have to look for someone to answer for that affliction, because Christ is already there to hold the weight of that affliction.”
• Biame—Aboriginal Creator God Spirit—Rainbow Serpent
• Depth of spiritual connection to place
• “Jesus is a tribal man, living in a place of occupation.”
• Jesus’s totem: Water
• Deep time, deep silence
• A breaking point with modernity
• “We are, at our essence, spiritual people, poetic people of place. We are not political people of enlightenment, and that, that is a hard weight to bear, to live as poetic people of God in a world of politics that seeks to kill God.”
• Responsibility
• Yindyamarra winangana—”respect in a world worth living in”
• “I am not responsible for what I do. I'm also responsible for what you do. And that is the essence of what it is to be a First Nations person in Australia. That is the essence of It is a respect and a responsibility beyond who we are, but connects us to where we are.”
• 1 Peter 2:17: “Honor everyone.”
• Individual identity vs communal belonging
• Uluru Statement, “Makarrata”
• Australia is the only Commonwealth country that has not recognized First Nations peoples politically, and given them a voice to Australian Parliament.
• Secondary citizenship
• Struggle of Aboriginal Australians
• What is it to live with catastrophe?
• “The absence of love makes us know love is real.”
• The Crow People: Chief Plenty Coups: “After that, nothing happened.”
• How to live with dignity after catastrophe.
• Miroslav Volf on remembering rightly
• “This is my quest to try to understand those things. And it's the quest of an exile. It's, it's exile that I was forced into, that my people were forced into, that I share with others, that I seek to embrace as an exile of silence, an exile of love, and an exile of belonging and not identity. James Joyce, James Baldwin, Tony Morrison, these people have shared this journey, the great poets, the great writers, the great artists who have sought to give expression to that sense of what it is to be exiled from the modernity of who we are, what we all want to be something. And maybe when we are reduced to nothing, we may find what it is to be everything.”
• After Queen Elizabeth died
• A people of suffering, but not tragedy
• What it means to be human: Born from the dust
• Self-giving and Yindyamarra
• Weightlessness of liberalism
• America: Can it hold the weight?
• Declining democracy around the world
• “There’s no ancestors in Rawls. There’s no history in Rawls.”
• “For me, a life worth living is to know where I am.”

Production Notes

• This podcast featured journalist Stan Grant
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge
• 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

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 challenge for podcast production; click here to donate today.
• Evan Rosa & Macie Bridge introduce the episode
• Thomas Merton, “The Time of the End Is the Time of No Room” in Raids on the Unspeakable, pages 51-52 (check it out): “Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for him at all, Christ comes uninvited. But because he cannot be at home in it, because he is out of place in it, and yet he must be in it, his place is with those others for whom there is no room. His place is with those who do not belong, who are rejected by power because they are regarded as weak, those who are discredited, who are denied the status of persons, tortured, exterminated. With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in this world. He is mysteriously present in those for whom there seems to be nothing but the world at its worst.” 
• David Dark's Robot Soft Exorcism Twitter Thread: https://twitter.com/DavidDark/status/1012804184868048896
• Robot Soft Exorcism
• Ephesians 6:12: "For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places."
• Walter Wink's Powers series
• Turning the other cheek; demanding to be punched as an equal
• "Robot soft exorcism is inviting someone to be a human being rather than just being their position."
• Breaking it down: The Robot Part
• Breaking it down: The Exorcism Part
• Thoreau: "We all crave reality."
• Buddhists surrendering a spirit of conflict or difference before parting
• Karl Barth: If you don't have any solid difference with the person with whom you exchange the peace of Christ, the peace of Christ isn't there because the peace has to overcome some kind of difference."
• Opinion, Posture, Position: None ever have to be confused with one's identity.
• Divesting ourselves of the power we carry through the world
• Breaking it down: The Soft Part
• Civil Rights Movement is actually the Non-Violent Movement of America
• "One human exchange at a time."
• Mantra: "I wrestle not against flesh and blood." (Ephesians 6:12)
• Advent/Christmas as the prototypical Robot Soft Exorcism
• Bruce Coburn: "Redemption rips through the surface of time in the cry of a tiny babe."
• "We're really going against the news cycle if we insist on the meaning of human history being in this manger scene. To be alive to it, to be citizens of a better future than what is being settled for by our robot overlords."

Production Notes

• This podcast featured David Dark
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge
• 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

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 for a message in a bottle, in hopes of discovering, making, and living in a shared meaning together. Jessica Hooten Wilson (Pepperdine University) and Matthew J Smith (Hildegard College) join Evan Rosa to discuss the joys and perils of reading, how to make young readers, how to teach and cultivate mature readers in the university context, and the significance of reading as a Christian spiritual practice.

Help the Yale Center for Faith & Culture meet a $10,000 matching challenge for podcast production; visit faith.yale.edu/give to donate today.

About Jessica Hooten Wilson

Jessica Hooten Wilson is the Fletcher Jones Endowed Chair of Great Books at Pepperdine University and formerly Louise Cowan Scholar in Residence at the University of Dallas. She is the author of several books, most recently Reading for the Love of God. Her book Giving the Devil his Due: Flannery O’Connor and The Brothers Karamazov received a 2018 Christianity Today book of the year in arts and culture award  and The Scandal of Holiness received a 2022 Award of Merit. In 2019 she received the Hiett Prize for Humanities from the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. Other awards include a Fulbright Fellowship to Prague, an NEH to study Dante in Florence, a Biola University sabbatical fellowship funded by the John Templeton Foundation, and the 2017 Emerging Public Intellectual Award. She is a Senior Fellow at The Trinity Forum.

About Matthew J. Smith

Matthew J. Smith is Founder and President of Hildgard College in Southern California. He holds a Ph.D. in Literature from the University of Southern California, an M.A. from the University of Connecticut, and a B.A. from Biola University. He taught for ten years at Azusa Pacific University before founding Hildegard College. His scholarship is on medieval and renaissance literature and especially the works of Shakespeare, Milton, Herbert, Donne, and late medieval drama. Dr. Smith is the author and editor of four books: Performance and Religion in Early Modern England: Stage, Cathedral, Wagon, Street (Notre Dame), Face to Face in Shakespearean Drama: Ethics, Performance, Philosophy (Edinburgh), Literature and Religious Experience: Beyond Belief and Unbelief (Bloomsbury), and a recently finished manuscript: Shakespearean Recognitions: Philosophies of the Post-Tragic. He is also an editor of the journal Christianity & Literature and has guest-edited three special issues: The Sacramental Text Reconsidered, Sincerity, a Literary History, and The Future of Christianity and Literature in Literary Studies.

Dr. Smith founded Hildegard College in 2022 with the conviction that higher education needs a reset. Where typical universities are growing ever larger into multi-versities, abandoning the traditional liberal arts and giving students a predominantly anonymous learning experience, Dr. Smith argues that the future of quality education, especially Christian education, is focused, tight-knit, rigorous, and recommitted to the classics of the liberal arts tradition. His vision for Hildegard College is to create an environment where young people can explore the riches of the classical tradition while also exploring and gaining experience in different areas of work—part monastery and part startup incubator. Mentorship, deep learning, and personal formation are the bedrock of a classical education.

Matt Smith lives in Fullerton, CA with his wife and three children. He serves on the boards of Veritas Classical Academy and of the Classic Learning Test. When he isn’t teaching, he cooks, plays soccer, trains in jiu jitsu, mountain bikes, plays with his dog, and writes.

Show Notes

• Help the Yale Center for Faith & Culture meet a $10,000 matching challenge for podcast production; visit faith.yale.edu/give to donate today.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Jessica Hooten Wilson and Matthew J Smith
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge
• 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

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 Christian spirituality. 

Show Notes

• Evan Rosa & Macie Bridge reflect on the theme of the first week of Advent: “Hope”
• “Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul / And sings the tune without the words / And never stops at all / And sweetest in the Gale is heard / And soar must be the storm / That could abash the little bird / That kept so many warm / I've heard it in the chillest land / And on the strangest sea / And yet never an extremity, / It asked a crumb of me” – Emily Dickenson
• “In hope, a future good, which isn't yet, somehow already is”
• Luther – "just as love transforms the lover into the beloved, so hope changes the one who hopes into what is hoped for."
• The present is pregnant with the future
• But hope does not come from what is happening in the present, it is something entirely new
• Hope lives apart from reason
• Hope and God belong together
• “The God who creates out of nothing, the God who makes the dead alive, that God justifies hope that is otherwise unreasonable”
• “Genuine hope remains alive when there is no good reason to expect something positive in the future."
• Hope transfers a person “into the unknown, the hidden, and the dark shadow, so that he does not even know what he hopes for.” Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, 25:364
• "Hope is open to the difference between how we imagined fulfillment and how it arrived, openness even to recognize in the actual fulfillment what we in fact have wanted all along."
• "We are most in need of hope in threatening situations which we cannot control; but it is in those same situations that it is most difficult for us not to lose hope. That is where patience and endurance come in."
• "Hope needs endurance and endurance needs hope. Or: Genuine endurance is marked by hope; and genuine hope is marked by endurance."
• Hope is for no-exit situations.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Miroslav Volf
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge
• 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

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 political party) than to invoke the name of God as being uniquely supportive of your team? It brings a sickening and divisive new meaning to Romans 8:31—”If God is for us, who can be against us?” 

In this episode, revered New Testament scholar N.T. Wright joins Miroslav Volf to discuss Monotheism, Nationalism, & Violence. Together they reflect on the history and current realities of what happens when these three elements converge. The conversation was inspired by N.T. Wright's response to a short digital booklet by Miroslav Volf entitled Monotheism, Nationalism, & Violence: 25 Theses, which is available for download at faith.yale.edu.

Click here to download Monotheism, Nationalism, & Violence: 25 Theses, a short digital booklet by Miroslav Volf, via faith.yale.edu.

“In this essay, written in form of 25 interlocking theses, I approach the problem of religiously motivated or legitimized violence by exploring the relation between monotheism and nationalism. The first is allegedly the most violent of all forms of religion and the second one of the most violent forms of political arrangements, especially when it is cut loose from universal moral commitment and tied to some form of tribal identity (“exclusive nationalism”). I argue that monotheism is a universalist creed and that it is compatible only with inclusive nationalism, a nationalism that is a form of special relations framed by a universal moral code. When monotheism is aligned with exclusive nationalism—when it becomes a “political religion” aligned with exclusivist nationalism—monotheism betrays its universality, a feature which lies at its very core, and morphs into violence, generating and legitimizing henotheism: our god of our nation in contrast and competition to other nations with their gods. Alternatively, if monotheism keeps its universality while associated as political religion with exclusive nationalism it will tend to underwrite dreams of nationalist imperialism: our god and our nation as masters of the world.”

Show Notes

• Help the Yale Center for Faith & Culture meet a $10,000 matching challenge for podcast production; visit faith.yale.edu/give to donate today.
• Download Miroslav Volf’s short digital booklet, Monotheism, Nationalism, & Violence: 25 Theses
• Volf introduces Monotheism, Nationalism, & Violence
• “The price monotheism always has to pay for its alliance with exclusive nationalism is the loss of its soul. When monotheism embraces exclusive nationalism, monotheism’s God morphs from the creator and lover of all people and all creatures into a selfish and violent idol of a particular nation.”
• Instrumentalizing God
• What is religion anyway?
• Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept
• Martin Riesenbrot, A Promise of Salvation, A Theory of Religion
• Christians were regarded with suspicion, as atheists
• Wright: “…this leads some to say religion is itself a dangerous and violent thing because it leads to people saying I have this God and he's more important than your God or whatever. And all sorts of violence stem from that. Indeed, one could argue that the Enlightenment's redefinition radical redefinition of the word religion over against its, say, early centuries use, has been part of the problem. But that, that would be perhaps a more polemical thesis.”
• Religion plays an important role in political society.
• How did religion work in the ancient world?
• Is religion a force for evil in society? Working from a secularist paradigm or not?
• Monotheism revised by Christology
• Two Christian groups anathematizing each other
• “Nothing hangs on the word religion.”
• Ultimate allegiance, and to what?
• What are the political responsibilities of the state to religion?
• Naming proper allegiance
• Wright on Jesus and Political Authority in John 19: “In other words, in the famous Romans 13, um, it's not a totalitarian passage, though some have read it like that. But Paul says there is no authority except from God. In other words, there is the one God, but God wants his world to be wisely governed by human authorities. But he will then call them to account. And my favorite passage on that is in John 19, when Jesus is being interviewed by Pontius Pilate. And Pilate says, don't you realize I have the right to have you killed? And Jesus says, and it's extraordinary, think of Johannine theology, that Jesus says this to Pilate. You could have no authority over me unless it was given to you from above and then the corollary is therefore the one who handed me over to you has the greater sin and that's that's a very interesting differentiation which no doubt Pilate couldn't understand at all and of course violence enters in straight away because Pilate's response is to send him off to be crucified.”
• Polycarp (paraphrased by N.T. Wright): “Now I won't worship your God, but I will respect you enough to honor you if you want to have a conversation about this.”
• “That one God is doing justice in the world.”
• Jan Assman: creating the states in which violence in the name of God is possible
• Bringing in atonement theology
• “All three monotheisms in some sense affirm the freedom of religion.”
• Noble ideal of the post-enlightenment world: an inclusive nationalism and inclusive monotheism.
• Freedom of religion
• Christianity as trinitarian monotheism
• Romans 8: Spirit groaning
• Jesus’s cry for dereliction
• Wright: “Collaborate without compromise and to critique without dualism.”

Production Notes

• This podcast featured N.T. Wright and Miroslav Volf
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge
• 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

“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 receiver that leads to gratitude. 

They discuss the meaning of gratitude in emotional, moral, and theological terms; and he introduces a variety of views on gratitude, from the story of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector, to Thomas Aquinas, to Anthony Kronman’s “born-again pagan” critique of Christian gratitude, and finally Martin Luther’s take on gratitude which draws on the Magnificat of Mary, which Miroslav expounds. 

Special thanks to the Gratitude to God Project for helping to make this episode possible.

Show Notes

• Show Art: Henry Ossawa Tanner, "The Thankful Poor", 1894
• Happy Thanksgiving from the Yale Center for Faith & Culture!
• Gratitude to God Project Website: Psychological, Philosophical and Theological Investigations
• Gratitude as a moral emotion
• “identification of the good for which we should be grateful.”
• The Pharisee & the Tax Collector
• Looking inside the figures of scripture.
• The performance of gratitude
• Why does gratitude seem so important or basic in spiritual life?
• “We should be grateful to our parents for having brought us into the world, raised us, spent all these incredibly long, wakeful hours at the beginning of our lives; and many, many more, many hours and days of worries, gratitude is appropriate. How much then more not to God, to whom we owe everything?”
• Repayment of a debt
• Anthony Kronman, Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan
• Is gratitude too heavy a burden? To somehow pay back God for the gifts of the world?
• Gratitude not as repayment, but as giving an equivalent gift
• John Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost
• Abysmal Gap Between God and Creature
• Aquinas on Gratitude
• Receiving a benefit
• Feeling thankfulness
• Repaying a favor suitably, and according to our means
• The Widow’s Mites
• Joyful recognition
• Recognize that what we have received is in fact a gift
• Recognizing the moral worth of the giver on account of the moral worth of the deed
• I receive the gift not with grumpiness, but with joy—over the giver, over the gift, and spilling over into other aspects of the relationship
• Understanding Martin Luther’s Theology of Gratitude
• Kronman’s misreading of Luther
• Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation: “The love of God does not find, but creates what is pleasing to it.”
• “But if you have somebody who truly gives, selflessly, gifts—then it's a kind of insult to them if you want to treat them as if they were trying to get something out of you for that.”
• Misconstruing the relationship between giver and receiver.
• Thomas Hobbs
• “A circle of mutual benefit” where the person who has power dominates
• The dearth of gratitude in public life today
• Luther on Mary’s Magnificat and “God’s gift-giving to the nobodies of the world”
• “No one can love God unless God makes himself known to that person in the most lovable and intimate fashion. And God can make himself known only through those works of his which he reveals in us, and which we feel and experience within ourselves. But where there is this experience, namely, that he is a God who looks into the depths and helps only the poor, despised, afflicted, miserable, forsaken, and those who are nothing, there the hearty love for him is born. The heart overflows with gladness and goes leaping and dancing for the great pleasure it has found in God.” (from Martin Luther’s Commentary on the Magnificat)
• “God is the one who, in humility, always reaches to that which is lower than God in order to lift it up. And that's how he comes to the nobodies, to the despised, which are primarily the objects of God's love.”

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Miroslav Volf
• Special thanks to Robert Emmons, Pete Hill, and the Gratitude to God Project for helping make this episode possible
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge
• 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

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 that gratitude inhabits, the scientific study of giving thanks and the contexts where its prosocial or adaptive for us, the dark side of gratitude, and the role it plays in a life of flourishing. 

This episode was made possible in part by the support of the Gratitude to God Project.

About  Jo-Ann Tsang

Jo-Ann Tsang is a social psychologist, and is Associate Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychology & Neuroscience at Baylor University.

Show Notes

• Gratitude to God Project Website: Psychological, Philosophical and Theological Investigations
• Tryptophanic food coma dreams of John Madden ranting about football and turducken
• Daniel Tiger: “Sometimes you feel two feelings at the same time, and that’s okay.”
• Empirical psychological research on gratitude
• Intrinsic vs instrumental reasons for being grateful
• Self-determination theory
• The downsides of gratitude
• Gratitude in marriage: matching affective responses of support and gratitude in relationships
• Gratitude toward God
• Julie Exline on Spiritual Struggle (link)
• “It’s not always adaptive to be happy?”
• Prosocial behavior
• Find, Remind, Bind Theory
• What is pro-sociality?
• What is adaptivity?
• Happiness is not always adaptive.
• What’s adaptive depends on your goal in a certain situation.
• Happiness and adaptivity as malleable concepts that depend on your definition of the good.
• Does gratitude reduce protest?
• Increased forgiveness and willingness to accept oppression rather than oppression
• Quietism and perpetuating unjust structures
• Gratitude might put on the brakes for the motivation to protest or press for change
• “Give thanks in all things.” vs “Give thanks for all things.”
• “Life is complicated.”
• Gratitude doesn’t rule out anger
• “How can I feel happy when there’s all these bad things going on?”
• Is gratitude related to prejudice, stigma, or discrimination?
• Why is it we keep chasing after happiness?
• “If you're in a bad relationship, and gratitude's making you stick more strongly with that relationship partner, then that's not good.”
• The role of gratitude in a life worth living

Production Notes

• This podcast featured research psychologist Jo-Ann Tsang and theologian Ryan McAnnally-Linz
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge and Kaylen Yun
• 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

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 well?

Theologian and film critic Kutter Callaway (Fuller Theological Seminary) joins Evan Rosa for a discussion of some truly frightening horror films. His new podcast “Be Afraid” is produced by Christianity Today, and explores horror films and the theology and psychology of fearing rightly.

In addition to discussing some of our favorite scary movies Kutter Callaway and Evan Rosa discuss: The psychology of fear and why people might willingly rehearse their fears; the radical vulnerability of human life that makes us susceptible to horrors; the Bible as horror genre; the human inclination toward the numinous, unknown, mysterious, and uncanny; managing our terror about death; and ultimately, how to fear rightly.

This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information, visit tyndale.foundation.

Show Notes

• Listen to Be Afraid, with Kutter Callaway
• What’s so scary about clowns and dolls? And why is Kutter Callaway afraid of them?
• Toy Story as Horror Flick
• The Shining, psychological horror, and when children are involved.
• William James, Father of American Psychology
• Rudolf Otto
• Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans—the numinous, equal parts compelling and terrifying
• Awe and terror—”big, overwhelming, and unknown”
• Marilyn McCord Adams’ Christ & Horrors
• “It brings us to the end of ourselves”
• “There’s nothing to be afraid of” is a lie!
• Should we be afraid?
• “Perfect love casts out fear”
• The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
• Learning how to fear rightly
• Christian leverages fear all the time
• “Fear the one who can destroy both body and soul.”
• M1028—graphically violent and theologically backwards
• What have you learned about fear from a psychological perspective?
• Justin Barrett and the cognitive science of religion
• Humans have the near-universal tendency to infer agency to things that go bump in the night.
• “We don't run from a bear because we're afraid. We're afraid because we're running.”
• Practicing and rehearsing “how to be afraid”
• Storytelling and catharsis
• Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, and feeling the chills of tragedy
• Art and storytelling that traffics in empathy
• Get Out—empathy and viscerally feeling something—”that movie disturbed me on a level that I needed to be disturbed.”
• Paul Riceour on narrative and reappropriation—applied to horror and feeling empathy for the other
• The Exorcist—slow and quiet by modern standards, but outbursts of terror
• Theodicy in The Exorcist
• Are horror films beautiful?

About Kutter Callaway

Kutter Callaway is the William K. Brehm Chair of Worship, Theology, and the Arts, as well as associate dean of the Center for Advanced Theological Studies, and associate professor of theology and culture. He is actively engaged in writing and speaking on the interaction between theology and culture—particularly film, television, and online media—in both academic and popular forums.

Dr. Callaway holds two PhDs, one in theology and the second in psychological science, both from Fuller. His most recent book is Theology for Psychology and Counseling: An Invitation to Holistic Christian Practice (2022). Past books include Techno-Sapiens in a Networked Era: Becoming Digital Neighbors (2020), which he coauthored with Fuller’s Associate Professor of Church in Contemporary Culture Ryan Bolger; The Aesthetics of Atheism: Theology and Imagination in Contemporary Culture (2019); and Deep Focus: Film and Theology in Dialogue (2019). Past books include Breaking the Marriage Idol: Reconstructing our Cultural and Spiritual Norms (2018), Watching TV Religiously: Television and Theology in Dialogue (2016) and Scoring Transcendence: Contemporary Film Music as Religious Experience (2013). In addition, he contributed to God in the Movies (2017); Halos and Avatars (2010), the first book on theology and video games; and Don’t Stop Believin’ (2012), a dictionary of religion and popular culture.

Callaway cochairs the Religion, Film, and Visual Culture group at the American Academy of Religion. He also partnered with Paulist Productions to produce the YouTube series Should Christians Watch? His professional memberships include the American Academy of Religion, American Psychological Association, and the Society of Biblical Literature. He is ordained as a Baptist minister.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Kutter Callaway
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge
• 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
• This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information, visit tyndale.foundation.

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 sleeping in the midst of a storm, while the disciples prematurely conclude: “Don’t you care that we are going to die?” In Mark 10, when two of the disciples play political games for their own glory, Jesus responds with a teaching of humility and a subversive glory—that the greatest will in fact be the servant of all. And in John 13, Jesus displays this humility and compassion by washing the gross and grungy feet of his friends, and teaching Peter that a leader is first a student, and the student isn’t greater than their teacher.

This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information, visit tyndale.foundation.

Show Notes

• Featured Artwork: “Study, Christ Washing the Feet of the Disciples 1898”, Henry Ossawa Tanner and “Christ Washing the Disciples’ Feet”, Jan Lievens, 1630/35
• Urgency, peace, and the exit door of fear
• The shallow sleep of anxiety
• Jesus calm’s the storm:
  • Mark 4:35-41 — 35 On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, ‘Let us go across to the other side.’ 36 And leaving the crowd behind, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. Other boats were with him. 37 A great gale arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped. 38 But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke him up and said to him, ‘Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?’ 39 He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, ‘Peace! Be still!’ Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm. 40 He said to them, ‘Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?’ 41 And they were filled with great awe and said to one another, ‘Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?’
  • See also: Luke 8:22-25, Matthew 8:23-27
• “Don’t you care that we are going to die?”
• Jesus’s goal of leadership development
• Mark 10:35-45 ****
  • 35 James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came forward to him and said to him, ‘Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.’ 36 And he said to them, ‘What is it you want me to do for you?’ 37 And they said to him, ‘Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.’ 38 But Jesus said to them, ‘You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?’ 39 They replied, ‘We are able.’ Then Jesus said to them, ‘The cup that I drink you will drink; and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized; 40 but to sit at my right hand or at my left is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared.’ 41 When the ten heard this, they began to be angry with James and John. 42 So Jesus called them and said to them, ‘You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. 43 But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, 44 and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. 45 For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.’
• Pastor Evan’s work in Zimbabwe’s Citizen’s movement
• “Lord, give us a seat at the table that decides the future of this nation.”
• Prayer: We ask for harvest, God plants a seed.
• How do we prepare our leaders?
• Luke 6: “The student is not above the teacher.”
• Reversing the roles: being served versus serving
• Leadership is not designed to be comfortable
• People are at their worst when we are in crisis, but this is when we’re supposed to see leaders at their best when we’re in crisis.
• Sheep without a shepherd
• Loss of trust and the Global Trust Barometer
• Leadership is not just about the right skill set, it’s importantly about the right heart set.
• Washing the feet of the disciples
  • John 13:1-17
  • 1 Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. 2 The devil had already put it into the heart of Judas son of Simon Iscariot to betray him. And during supper 3 Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, 4 got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. 5 Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him. 6 He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?” 7 Jesus answered, “You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand.” 8 Peter said to him, “You will never wash my feet.” Jesus answered, “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.” 9 Simon Peter said to him, “Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!” 10 Jesus said to him, “One who has bathed does not need to wash, except for the feet, but is entirely clean. And you are clean, though not all of you.” 11 For he knew who was to betray him; for this reason he said, “Not all of you are clean.” 12 After he had washed their feet, had put on his robe, and had returned to the table, he said to them, “Do you know what I have done to you? 13 You call me Teacher and Lord—and you are right, for that is what I am. 14 So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. 15 For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you. 16 Very truly, I tell you, servants are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them. 17 If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them.
• Humility
• Compassion
• It’s not easy to lead
• Starfish Story: “To that one it made a difference.”
• “Someone who knows how to lead, knows how they have been served themselves.”
• “Where can plant seeds of impact?”
• “How do we faithfully look after these sprouting of servant leadership, of people that understand that leadership is about serving are more than it is about being served.”
• Back to urgency and patience—the only way to plant seeds is to plant now and wait.
• “Where purpose is not known, abuse is inevitable.”
• “There are two most important days in your life—the day you were born and the day you discover why.”
• Patience and the crafting of leadership

About Evan Mawarire

Evan Mawarire is a Zimbabwean clergyman who founded #ThisFlag Citizen’s Movement to challenge corruption, injustice, and poverty in Zimbabwe. The movement empowers citizens to hold government to account. Through viral videos, the movement has organized multiple successful non-violent protests in response to unjust government policy. Evan was imprisoned in 2016, 2017, and 2019 for charges of treason, facing 80 years in prison. His message of inspiring positive social change and national pride has resonated with diverse groups of citizens and attracted international attention.

Evan has addressed audiences around the world, and Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the 100 global thinkers of 2016. The Daily Maverick Newspaper of South Africa named him 2016 African person of the year. Evan is a 2018 Stanford University Fellow of the Centre for Democracy Development and the Rule of Law. He is a nominee of the 2017 Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression awards and the 2018 Swedish government’s Per Anger Prize for democracy actors. He was a 2023 World Fellow at Yale University’s Maurice R. Greenberg World Fellows Program.

Visit his website or follow him on X.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Evan Mawarire
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge & Kaylen Yun
• 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
• This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information, visit tyndale.foundation.