“Wrestling with oneself, with one’s past, with one’s relationships, with God … These stories push us to use disability to think about the human condition more broadly.”

Longstanding narratives about disability shaped our emotional responses, our caregiving responses, and our social commentary, and our treatment of the disabled. But what if we saw disability as the site of divine revelation about God’s kingdom and our place in it? As an expression of power and wisdom and agency, rather than a merely a source of suffering and lack and ignorance.

Calli Micale (Palmer Theological Seminary) joins Evan Rosa to discuss how disability reframes our humanity in the Bible. They reflect on three passages: starting in the Old Testament—in Genesis 32—with the story of Jacob wrestling with the Angel, and walking away with much more than a limp and a new name. Continuing with the Gospel, John 9, the story of the Man Born Blind, famous for at least two reasons: the utter stupidity of the disciples to assume “Rabbi, who sinned that this man was born blind?” and the utter visceral of having Jesus make mud with his spit and rub it in the man’s eyes. And finally The Gospel of Mark, chapter 5, the story of the bleeding woman—a story of reaching out in desperate faith, an act of incredible agency and audacity, to touch the edge of Jesus’s garment and be healed.

Whether its intellectual disability or physical disability, and regardless of how its acquired, disability plays a role in what we might call God’s subversive kingdom. God’s upside-down-ness (or, maybe we should say human upside-down-ness). The least of these in the eyes of human society are chosen by God to communicate the good news of shalom and justice and salvation—that even those who are already “whole” can be saved.

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

Show Notes

• Artwork: “Untitled (The Bleeding Woman)”, Unknown, Fresco, 4th Century AD, Catacombs of Marcellinus and Peter, Rome, Italy
• Artwork: “The Healing of the Man Born Blind”, Duccio, 1311, Tempera on wood, National Gallery, London
• Artwork: “Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel)”, Paul Gauguin, 1888, Oil on canvas, Scottish National Gallery
• Genesis 32:22-32 (see below for full text)
• “Wrestling with oneself, with one’s past, with one’s relationships, with God”
• Disability as a plot device: exploit
• Elaborate disguise of Jacob’s impersonization of Esau
• Each of us wrestles with our identity
• “No one can see God and live”
• Jacob’s limp: a narrative and metaphorical significance
• Is disability a sign of or consequence of one’s sinfulness?
• Is disability a divine punishment?
• Subverting our understanding of disability
• “Disability extends beyond Jacob’s physical form and continues to influence the the community—how they relate with their tradition and their practices.”
• “The memory of the struggle with God and the intimate presence of God in the wrestling in the body, and then is preserved in memory of the body.”
• Is being struck on the hip socket a blessing to Jacob?
• The wounds of martyrs as battle wounds
• Disability becomes inextricable from histories of violence
• Is it Jesus that strikes and maims Jacob’s hip?
• John 9: The Man Blind from Birth
• Jesus rejects the assumption that disability is a punishment for sin.
• “Dumb and blind”
• Disability as the site of divine revelation
• Jesus spitting in the mud is kind of gross. It takes a lot of spit to make that much mud.
• Vulnerable and visceral moment of pasting dirty mud
• The question of Jesus’s sin (for breaking Sabbath law) is now in play
• An extended metaphor about where knowledge and wisdom apply.
• Mark 5: The Hemorrhaging Woman
• Agency and Power
• Mutual caregiving within disabled communities
• “These stories push us to use disability to think about the human condition more broadly.”

Genesis 32

The same night he got up and took his two wives, his two maids, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. He took them and sent them across the stream, and likewise everything that he had. Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket; and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, ‘Let me go, for the day is breaking.’ But Jacob said, ‘I will not let you go, unless you bless me.’ So he said to him, ‘What is your name?’ And he said, ‘Jacob.’ Then the man said, ‘You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.’ Then Jacob asked him, ‘Please tell me your name.’ But he said, ‘Why is it that you ask my name?’ And there he blessed him. So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, ‘For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved.’ The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip. Therefore to this day the Israelites do not eat the thigh muscle that is on the hip socket, because he struck Jacob on the hip socket at the thigh muscle.

John 9

As he walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ Jesus answered, ‘Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him. We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.’

When he had said this, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man’s eyes, saying to him, ‘Go, wash in the pool of Siloam’ (which means Sent). Then he went and washed and came back able to see. The neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar began to ask, ‘Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?’ Some were saying, ‘It is he.’ Others were saying, ‘No, but it is someone like him.’ He kept saying, ‘I am the man.’ But they kept asking him, ‘Then how were your eyes opened?’ He answered, ‘The man called Jesus made mud, spread it on my eyes, and said to me, “Go to Siloam and wash.” Then I went and washed and received my sight.’ They said to him, ‘Where is he?’ He said, ‘I do not know.’

They brought to the Pharisees the man who had formerly been blind. Now it was a sabbath day when Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes. Then the Pharisees also began to ask him how he had received his sight. He said to them, ‘He put mud on my eyes. Then I washed, and now I see.’ Some of the Pharisees said, ‘This man is not from God, for he does not observe the sabbath.’ But others said, ‘How can a man who is a sinner perform such signs?’ And they were divided. So they said again to the blind man, ‘What do you say about him? It was your eyes he opened.’ He said, ‘He is a prophet.’

The Jews did not believe that he had been blind and had received his sight until they called the parents of the man who had received his sight and asked them, ‘Is this your son, who you say was born blind? How then does he now see?’ His parents answered, ‘We know that this is our son, and that he was born blind; but we do not know how it is that now he sees, nor do we know who opened his eyes. Ask him; he is of age. He will speak for himself.’ His parents said this because they were afraid of the Jews; for the Jews had already agreed that anyone who confessed Jesus to be the Messiah would be put out of the synagogue. Therefore his parents said, ‘He is of age; ask him.’

So for the second time they called the man who had been blind, and they said to him, ‘Give glory to God! We know that this man is a sinner.’ He answered, ‘I do not know whether he is a sinner. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.’ They said to him, ‘What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?’ He answered them, ‘I have told you already, and you would not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become his disciples?’ Then they reviled him, saying, ‘You are his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses. We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know where he comes from.’ The man answered, ‘Here is an astonishing thing! You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes. We know that God does not listen to sinners, but he does listen to one who worships him and obeys his will. Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.’ They answered him, ‘You were born entirely in sins, and are you trying to teach us?’ And they drove him out.

Jesus heard that they had driven him out, and when he found him, he said, ‘Do you believe in the Son of Man?’ He answered, ‘And who is he, sir? Tell me, so that I may believe in him.’ Jesus said to him, ‘You have seen him, and the one speaking with you is he.’ He said, ‘Lord, I believe.’ And he worshipped him. Jesus said, ‘I came into this world for judgement so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.’ Some of the Pharisees near him heard this and said to him, ‘Surely we are not blind, are we?’ Jesus said to them, ‘If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, “We see”, your sin remains.

Mark 5:25-34

See also Luke 8:43-48 and Matthew 9:20-22

Now there was a woman who had been suffering from haemorrhages for twelve years. She had endured much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had; and she was no better, but rather grew worse. She had heard about Jesus, and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak,  for she said, ‘If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.’ Immediately her haemorrhage stopped; and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease.  Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, ‘Who touched my clothes?’ And his disciples said to him, ‘You see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, “Who touched me?”’ He looked all round to see who had done it.  But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the whole truth. He said to her, ‘Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.’

About Calli Micale

Calli Micale is Assistant Professor of Theology and Ethics and Director of the MDiv Program at Palmer Theological Seminary. She is a theologian with a particular interest in the ethical implications of theological talk for the whole of human life. Her research brings together the history of Christian thought with sustained attention to rhetoric as it grounds perceptions of the body and health in Western societies. She joined the Palmer Theological Seminary faculty in 2023 after earning a PhD from Yale University.

Writing and teaching correspond in Dr. Micale’s work to form students as faith leaders oriented towards gender, disability, and racial justice. She has published articles with the Journal of Disability and Religion and the Disability Studies Quarterly (forthcoming). Micale is currently working on a book manuscript, tentatively titled Crip Conversion: Narratives of Disability and Grace. The book analyzes the stories theologians tell about intellectual disability and argues that deploying intellectual disability as narrative metaphor allows one to come at the Protestant tradition from a helpful vantage point—such that the significance of sensation for the reception of grace comes to the fore.

As a candidate for ordination in the ELCA with 10+ years of preaching experience, Dr. Micale delights in the variety of ways her students take up theological resources for ministry and social justice action. In each course, she aims to take students beyond learning concepts by letting divergent beliefs shape and change their perspective on what really matters—their own intellectual and spiritual lives called to make a difference in the world

Production Notes

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

Show Notes

• Salty: Lessons on Eating, Drinking, and Living from Revolutionary Women
• Creative non-fiction and “essays” as a genre
• “I guess what I was trying to do was come up with ways into the lives of these women who I find interesting. That would also be compelling to someone who had never heard of them.”
• Dinner party
• Hannah Arendt and her cocktail parties
• A subversive feast among friends
• Arguing in order to find out what you think
• Thinking as a conversation with the self
• Love in the specificity of relationship
• Amor mundi—love of the world
• “Loving the world means working on two specific tasks. The first is to doggedly, insist on seeing the world just as it is with its disappointments and horrors and committing to it all the same. The second is to encounter people in the world and embrace their alterity, or difference.”
• Arendt’s “banality of evil”
• The importance of letter-writing for sharing the self and inhabiting a years-long friendship
• Edna Lewis, Freetown, Virginia, and “The Taste of Southern Cooking”
• Farm-to-table cooking used to be out of economic necessity, not a hip or high fine dining experience
• Edna Lewis’s Southern identity: "Lewis defines Southern as the experience of an emancipated people and their descendants, a cultural and culinary heritage to be proud of a distinctly American culture. And as she offers definitions, readers are reminded, she's refusing to be defined by anyone but herself.”
• “What Is Southern?” Gourmet Magazine—reclaiming Southern cooking for Black Southerners
• The Los Padres National Forest Supper Club
• Babette’s Feast (1987)
• The menu from Babette’s Feast
• The place of joy and pleasure in a flourishing spiritual life
• Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb
• Food and recognition
• “Learning how to taste”
• “Every dinner party is an act of hope.”

About Alissa Wilkinson

Alissa Wilkinson is a Brooklyn-based critic, journalist, and author. She is a senior correspondent and critic at Vox.com, writing about film, TV, and culture. She is currently writing We Tell Ourselves Stories, a cultural history of American myth-making in Hollywood through the life and work of Joan Didion, which will be published by Liveright.

She's contributed essays, features, and criticism to a wide variety of publications, including Rolling Stone, Vulture, Bon Appetit, Eater, RogerEbert.com, Pacific Standard, The Dallas Morning News, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Books & Culture, Christianity Today, and others. I’m a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, the National Society of Film Critics, and the Writers Guild of America, East, and was an inaugural writing fellow with the Sundance Institute’s Art of Nonfiction initiative. She's served on juries at the Sundance Film Festival, DOC NYC, Sheffield Doc/Fest, the Hamptons International Film Festival, and others, and selection committees for groups including the Gotham Awards and the Sundance Documentary Film Program.

In June 2022, her book Salty: Lessons on Eating, Drinking, and Living from Revolutionary Women was published by Broadleaf Books. In 2016, her book How to Survive the Apocalypse: Zombies, Cylons, and Politics at the End of the World was released, co-written with Robert Joustra.

I frequently pop up as a commentator and guest host on radio, TV, and podcasts. Some recent appearances include CBS News; PBS Newshour; CNN International Newsroom; BBC America’s Talking Movies; NPR's Morning Edition, All Things Considered, On Point, and 1A; HBO’s Allen v. Farrow; AMC's James Cameron's Story of Science Fiction; WNYC's The Takeaway; ABC's Religion & Ethics and The Drum; CBC Eyeopener, Vox’s Today, Explained and The Gray Area; and many more. 

For 14 years, until the college ceased offering classes in 2023, she was also an associate professor of English and humanities at The King’s College in New York City, and taught courses in criticism, cinema studies, literature, and cultural theory. She earned an M.F.A in creative nonfiction from Seattle Pacific University, an M.A. in humanities and social thought from New York University, and a B.S. in information technology from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

You can read my most up-to-date work on my Vox author page, or subscribe to my mostly-weekly newsletter. 

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Alissa Wilkinson
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Liz Vukovic, 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

Show Notes

• Instructive irony: Evan’s disabling experience of setting up a microphone for a podcast interview
• Three ways to think about disability: Minority Model (Impairment of Individuals), Social Model (Societal factors create impairment), and Political Model (emerges from collective action and identity; generated from Americans with Disabilities Act)
• Chronic pain, real suffering
• All three models are important
• “Look at the arrangement of society—the conditions of possibility that empower our lives or that create obstacles to our flourishing.”
• How to Speak About Disability 101
• Care, solidarity, advocacy, and inclusion
• Understanding the ethics of disability through stories: narratives of the body, biblical narratives of healing, and theological stories
• Augustine’s City of God and moral impurity and the wounds of martyrs as glorified and amplified in resurrected bodies
• The hurt of “fixing” those with disabilities
• Doubting Thomas and exploring the resurrection wounds of Christ
• Story: Physical disability and amputation
• “It always starts with thinking about the loss”
• Hope and possibility through the loss
• Religion and spirituality as a tool to both help and also a self-critique of the “wholeness” or “normal” narrative.
• Critiquing the brokenness-wholeness narrative of disability
• “Drawing attention to the site of divine activity.”
• Is disability connected to sin?
• John 9:1-41: Jesus Heals the Man Born Blind
• Slowness, constancy, unwavering faith
• Story: Intellectual disability and autism
• Oxana’s Cymbalstern
• Cymbalstern (or Zimbelstern) is a star-shaped organ stop that makes a clanging, ringing sound during organ playing.
• Xenophobia, fear of difference, and stigma
• Calli reacts to the truism: “There are only two kinds of people: those who are disabled and those who will be disabled.”
• Visible and invisible disabilities: depression, anxiety, and mental health
• Are disabled lives worth living?
• Story: A surgeon develops multiple sclerosis
• Radical dependence on others
• Power, agency, and interdependency on others
• Start with the bare conditions of possibility, and then how those conditions of possibility change when disability emerges?

About

Calli Micale is Director of the MDiv Program; Assistant Professor of Theology and Ethics at Palmer Theological Seminary. She is a theologian with a particular interest in the ethical implications of theological talk for the whole of human life. Her research brings together the history of Christian thought with sustained attention to rhetoric as it grounds perceptions of the body and health in Western societies. She joined the Palmer Theological Seminary faculty in 2023 after earning a PhD from Yale University.

Writing and teaching correspond in Dr. Micale’s work to form students as faith leaders oriented towards gender, disability, and racial justice. She has published articles with the Journal of Disability and Religion and the Disability Studies Quarterly (forthcoming). Micale is currently working on a book manuscript, tentatively titled Crip Conversion: Narratives of Disability and Grace. The book analyzes the stories theologians tell about intellectual disability and argues that deploying intellectual disability as narrative metaphor allows one to come at the Protestant tradition from a helpful vantage point—such that the significance of sensation for the reception of grace comes to the fore.

As a candidate for ordination in the ELCA with 10+ years of preaching experience, Dr. Micale delights in the variety of ways her students take up theological resources for ministry and social justice action. In each course, she aims to take students beyond learning concepts by letting divergent beliefs shape and change their perspective on what really matters—their own intellectual and spiritual lives called to make a difference in the world.

Production Notes

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

Where does boredom come from? Have humans always experienced boredom, or has it only come on in the entertainment age, having more time than we know what to do with? Kevin Gary (Valparaiso University) is author of Why Boredom Matters: Education, Leisure, and the Quest for a Meaningful Life. He joins Drew Collins & Evan Rosa to reflect on the discontent and disconnection that boredom constantly threatens. They discuss the phenomena of boredom, the childhood experience of it, whether its good or bad, the definition of boredom, its connection to entertainment and education, and finally the role of attention and leisure in cultivating a healthy understanding and response to being totally bored out of our minds.

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

About Kevin Gary

Kevin Gary is a Professor of Education at Valparaiso University. He has a Ph.D. in cultural and educational policy studies from Loyola University Chicago with a focus in the philosophy of education and an M.A. in systematic theology from the University of Notre Dame. His teaching experience includes 10 years of teaching theology at Loyola Academy High School in Wilmette, Illinois.; seven years as a professor of education and philosophy at Goshen College in Goshen, Indiana; 8 years as a professor of education at Valparaiso University in Valparaiso, Indiana; and one year as faculty director of Goshen College’s international studies program in Lima, Perú.

Dr. Gary’s research is primarily in philosophy of education. He recently published, Why Boredom Matters: Education and the Quest for a Meaningful Life with Cambridge University Press in 2022. K-12 educators (and parents) face bored students every day. Drawing on multiple disciplines Dr. Gary makes a case for teachers guiding students to engage with boredom constructively, steering clear of restless boredom avoidance on the one hand, or passive submission to boredom on the other.

Dr. Gary has published in multiple journals, including Educational Theory, the Journal of Philosophy of Education, and Studies in Philosophy and Education.

Dr. Gary is one of the founding executives of the North American Association for Philosophy and Education (NAAPE), launched in 2018. NAAPE provides an international forum for scholars working at the intersection of philosophy and educational thought, where disciplines such as ethics, political philosophy, epistemology, philosophical anthropology, history, and others meet the practical challenges of teaching and learning.

Dr. Gary is passionate about liberal education, especially within the context of a Christian liberal arts university, which aims to cultivate practical wisdom, compassion, and a Renaissance spirit.

Show Notes

• Kevin Gary’s Why Boredom Matters: Education and the Quest for a Meaningful Life
• A quick and incomplete history of boredom
• The Preacher of Ecclesiastes laments over human toil, “everything is vanity and chasing after wind” around 250 BC. “The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear with hearing.”
• Stoic Roman philosopher Seneca noticed a nauseating tedium in his famous letter “On Tranquility,” describing a familiar quote “vacillation of a mind that nowhere finds rest, and the sad and languid endurance of one’s leisure. Thence comes mourning and melancholy and the thousand waverings of an unsettled mind, which its aspirations hold in suspense, and then disappointment renders melancholy. Thence comes that feeling which makes men loathe their own leisure and complain that they themselves have nothing to be busy with.”
• The ancient Christian monks of the desert struggled with the noonday demon of acedia, a spiritual boredom with their vocation of prayer and faithfulness.
• Aquinas and other scholastics disciplined the “roving mind.”
• Variants of the English “boredom”—including being bored to death!—show up in Lord Byron, Charles Dickens, and Herman Melville in the mid 19th century.
• Kierkegaard calls it the root of all evil.
• Heidegger sees it in a positive light, saying that philosophy begins in the nothingness of boredom.
• C.S. Lewis’s Uncle Screwtape advises that “anything or nothing is sufficient to attract the wandering attention” of Jr. Demon Wormwood’s human patient.
• The French bourgeoisie nailed it with ennui that many a suburban latchkey kid can relate to.
• In the King-Kubrick masterpiece, The Shining, boredom goes very dark when “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”
• Boredom for children: How to respond to the boredom children feel
• Is boredom bad or good?
• What’s the definition of boredom?
• Tolstoy on boredom
• Kierkegaard on living life to avoid boredom
• Kierkegaard as a form of existential despair; boredom as an indicator that we’re not comfortable with ourselves.
• Chasing novelty, looking for the new; or giving up and resigning our agency
• Heidegger was influenced by Kierkegaard; and thought you must push through it to find your true, authentic self.
• Kierkegaard’s view of the “authentic self” is the self resting in God.
• “Schola” (Latin): attentively receptive.
• Simone Weil on tedium, boredom, and attention
• Living in an “attention economy” and controlling or stewarding others’ attention
• Attention as an antidote to boredom
• Simone Weil’s experience working in a car factory and losing her sense of agency and self
• Philosopher Albert Borgmann on “focal practices” and guardrails.
• Go chop wood for an hour, and simply do it.
• Go for a walk for an hour without your smartphone.
• Boredom and entertainment in a perverse binary orbit
• Simone Weil “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God” in Waiting for God (link to PDF)
• Entertainment is, therefore, not the problem.
• “The entertainment-boredom cycle just becomes more boring.”
• Leisure as antidote to boredom
• Sabbath as oasis from work filling up our lives.
• Thomas Aquinas’s “roving mind”
• Let’s go birding!
• Liturgy as the guardrails of attention
• Be an apprentice and learn to experience and perceive in a new way.
• Mindful in the mundane
• Gordon Wood’s History of the American Revolution: politicians as “disinterested men of leisure”
• Fighting against instrumentalization.
• Intrinsic goods of doing the dishes.
• “The bored mind is missing an opportunity for leisure.”
• “I like to fish… and any fishing guide will tell you they call it fishing, not catching, for a reason.”
• “Having resources does not guarantee the experience of leisure.”
• Josef Pieper and Abraham Heschel and the tradition of Intellectus and Wonder
• How leisure as both active and contemplative, and its role in a flourishing life

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Kevin Gary and Drew Collins
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge and Logan Ledman
• 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
• Special thanks to the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information, visit tyndale.foundation.

The final installment of our 5-part book club series on Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most, produced and hosted by Kelly Corrigan, and featuring Claire Danes & Kate Bowler. Special thanks to the Warren Smoot Carter III and Meagan Carter Charitable Fund for making this series possible.

Show Notes

• https://katebowler.com/about/
• https://divinity.duke.edu/faculty/kate-bowler
• https://www.kellycorrigan.com/podcast

About Kelly Corrigan

Kelly Corrigan has written four New York Times bestselling memoirs in the last decade, earning her the title of “The Poet Laureate of the ordinary” from the Huffington Post and the “voice of a generation” from O Magazine.  She is curious and funny and eager to go well past the superficial in every conversation.  More on KellyCorrigan.com.

Show Notes

• This episode featured Kelly Corrigan, Kate Bowler, and Claire Danes
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Kaylen Yun, and Logan Ledman
• Special thanks to Tammy Stedman, Kelly Corrigan, and the Warren Smoot Carter III and Meagan Carter Charitable Fund
• 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

Show Notes

• https://katebowler.com/about/
• https://divinity.duke.edu/faculty/kate-bowler
• https://www.kellycorrigan.com/podcast

About Kelly Corrigan

Kelly Corrigan has written four New York Times bestselling memoirs in the last decade, earning her the title of “The Poet Laureate of the ordinary” from the Huffington Post and the “voice of a generation” from O Magazine.  She is curious and funny and eager to go well past the superficial in every conversation.  More on KellyCorrigan.com.

Production Notes

• This episode featured Kelly Corrigan, Kate Bowler, and Claire Danes
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Kaylen Yun, and Logan Ledman
• Special thanks to Tammy Stedman, Kelly Corrigan, and the Warren Smoot Carter III and Meagan Carter Charitable Fund
• 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

Today’s episode is part 3 of a 5-part book club series produced and hosted by Kelly Corrigan. The PBS host and author of four New York Times bestselling memoirs is taking a deep dive into the latest book from the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. Written by Miroslav Volf, Matt Croasmun, and Ryan McAnnally-Linz, Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most, the book is based on a Yale College course that takes up some of the most pressing questions of life, but doesn’t keep the implications, challenges, confusion, and demands of those questions at arms length. Both the course and the book invite life-long learners to ask, “For any idea, if that idea were true, how would your life have to change?”

In this episode, Kelly convenes a podcast book-club with two really cool friends: Kate Bowler—host of the Everything Happens podcast and Associate Professor of American Religious History at Duke Divinity School—and celebrated actress Claire Danes, who starred in the Showtime series Homeland and the 90s MTV hit series My So-Called Life.

If you’re interested in reading along with Kelly, Kate, and Claire, please visit lifeworthlivingbook.com—that’s where you can find links to buy the book and a free discussion guide when you sign up for the Life Worth Living email list.

About Kelly Corrigan

Kelly Corrigan has written four New York Times bestselling memoirs in the last decade, earning her the title of “The Poet Laureate of the ordinary” from the Huffington Post and the “voice of a generation” from O Magazine.  She is curious and funny and eager to go well past the superficial in every conversation.  More on KellyCorrigan.com.

Production Notes

• This episode featured Kelly Corrigan, Kate Bowler, and Claire Danes
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Kaylen Yun, and Logan Ledman
• Special thanks to Tammy Stedman, Kelly Corrigan, and the Warren Smoot Carter III and Meagan Carter Charitable Fund
• 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

Today’s episode is part 2 of a 5-part book club series produced and hosted by Kelly Corrigan. The PBS host and author of four New York Times bestselling memoirs is taking a deep dive into the latest book from the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. Written by Miroslav Volf, Matt Croasmun, and Ryan McAnnally-Linz, Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most, the book is based on a Yale College course that takes up some of the most pressing questions of life, but doesn’t keep the implications, challenges, confusion, and demands of those questions at arms length. Both the course and the book invite life-long learners to ask, “For any idea, if that idea were true, how would your life have to change?”

In this episode, Kelly convenes a podcast book-club with two really cool friends: Kate Bowler—host of the Everything Happens podcast and Associate Professor of American Religious History at Duke Divinity School—and celebrated actress Claire Danes, who starred in the Showtime series Homeland and the 90s MTV hit series My So-Called Life.

If you’re interested in reading along with Kelly, Kate, and Claire, please visit lifeworthlivingbook.com—that’s where you can find links to buy the book and a free discussion guide when you sign up for the Life Worth Living email list.

About Kelly Corrigan

Kelly Corrigan has written four New York Times bestselling memoirs in the last decade, earning her the title of “The Poet Laureate of the ordinary” from the Huffington Post and the “voice of a generation” from O Magazine.  She is curious and funny and eager to go well past the superficial in every conversation.  More on KellyCorrigan.com.

Production Notes

• This episode featured Kelly Corrigan, Kate Bowler, and Claire Danes
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Kaylen Yun, and Logan Ledman
• Special thanks to Tammy Stedman, Kelly Corrigan, and the Warren Smoot Carter III and Meagan Carter Charitable Fund
• 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

"Your life is too important to be guided by anything less than what matters most."

Part 1 of a 5-part book club series on Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most. Written by Miroslav Volf, Matt Croasmun, and Ryan McAnnally-Linz, the book is based on a Yale College course that takes up some of the most pressing questions of life, but doesn’t keep the implications, challenges, confusion, perplexity, and demands of those questions at arms length. Both the course and the book invite life-long learners to ask, “For any idea, if that idea were true, how would your life have to change?”

Later in the series, Kelly is joined by Kate Bowler—host of the Everything Happens podcast and Associate Professor of American Religious History at Duke Divinity School—and actress Claire Danes of the Showtime series Homeland and the '90s MTV series My So-Called Life.

This series is produced and hosted by Kelly Corrigan and was originally featured on the Kelly Corrigan Wonders podcast and Kate Bowler's Everything Happens podcast.

If you’re interested in reading along with Kelly, Kate, and Claire, please visit lifeworthlivingbook.com—that’s where you can find links to buy the book and a free discussion guide when you sign up for the Life Worth Living email list.

About Kelly Corrigan

Kelly Corrigan has written four New York Times bestselling memoirs in the last decade, earning her the title of “The Poet Laureate of the ordinary” from the Huffington Post and the “voice of a generation” from O Magazine.  She is curious and funny and eager to go well past the superficial in every conversation.  More on KellyCorrigan.com.

Show Notes

• For more information about Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most, visit lifeworthlivingbook.com.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Kelly Corrigan, Miroslav Volf, Matt Croasmun, and Ryan McAnnally-Linz
• Special thanks to Tammy Stedman, Kelly Corrigan, and the Warren Smoot Carter III and Meagan Carter Charitable Fund
• 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 homo sapiens sapiens are “fearfully and wonderfully made,” but why? What’s so special about being human? What makes us unique? And can we equate our uniqueness in the world with the Imago Dei? 

Experimental psychologist and cognitive scientist Justin Barrett joins Evan Rosa to discuss the image of God as a blueprint for each of us as individuals; human uniqueness as a theological and psychological category; the place of homo sapiens among other species; uniquely human capacities, such as executive function, hypersociality, and acquisition of specialized knowledge; the human biological niche construction—or changing the environment—and how our psychological traits factor; the psychological and biological underpinnings of human culture and the problem of creating cities; and how human technology interacts with our biological niche. 

This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of Blueprint 1543. For more information, visit Blueprint1543.org.

Show Notes

• Learn more about bringing psychology to theology at Blueprint1543.org.
• Download your copy of Justin Barrett’s A Psychological Science Primer for Theologians (2022)
• TheoPsych Academy
• Psalm 139: 13-14
  13 For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. 14 I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well.
• Genesis 1:1-31
  26 Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’ 
  27 So God created humankind in his image,
     in the image of God he created them;
     male and female he created them.
  28 God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’ 29 God said, ‘See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. 30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.’ And it was so. 31 God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
• The image of God as a blueprint for each of us as individuals
• Nicholas Wolterstorff’s conception of the Imago Dei in Justice: Rights & Wrongs.
• Some varieties of understanding what about us makes us imagebearers, according to scripture
• Human uniqueness as a theological and psychological category
• Considering the place of homo sapiens among other species
• Uniquely human capacities, such as executive functions of the brain, sense of self, self-regulation and awareness
• Human hypersociality and relationality, and our interpersonal theory of mind
• Attachment as an evolved biological function
• The intellectual capacities for acquiring specialized knowledge like how to use fire, cook, and teach each other
• The human biological niche construction—or changing the environment—and how our psychological traits factor
• The psychological and biological underpinnings of human culture and the problem of creating cities
• How human technology interacts with our biological niche
• Dr. Ian Malcolm "...they didn't stop to think if they should"—from Jurassic Park.

About Justin Barrett

Justin L. Barrett is an honorary Professor of Theology and the Sciences at St Andrews University School of Divinity. An experimental psychologist by training, he is concerned with the scientific study of religion and its philosophical as well as theological implications. He is the author of a number of books including Why Would Anyone Believe in God?, Born Believers: The Science of Childhood Religion, and Religious Cognition in China: Homo Religiosus and the Dragon.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Justin Barrett
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Kaylen Yun, & Logan Ledman
• 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 Blueprint 1543. For more information, visit Blueprint1543.org.

We tend to take these claims for granted: “Human beings are essentially relational.” “No man is an island.” “We’re created for connection.” “We’re made for relationships.” And testing the limits of this can be pretty much diabolical. Evan Rosa traces two stories of parental deprivation: Harry Harlow's "Monkey Love Experiments" and the horror of 1990's discovery of Romanian asylums for orphans, documented in the 1990 report "The Shame of a Nation,” on 20/20.

Then psychologist Mari Clements (Glenville State College, formerly Fuller School of Psychology) discusses the importance of healthy marriage dynamics for young children’s development and how it provides a secure emotional base; the relational imago Dei; the close emotional bonds that must take place early in life in order to provide the relational stability relational creatures need; we talk about important phases of human development, into adulthood; and the theological backdrop to these questions of the human drive and need for emotional connection.

This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of Blueprint 1543. For more information, visit Blueprint1543.org.

About Mari Clements

Mari Clements is Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs and Professor of Psychology at Glenville State College. Prior to this, she taught at Fuller School of Psychology and Penn State University.

Show Notes

• We tend to take these claims for granted: “Human beings are essentially relational.” “No man is an island.” “We’re created for connection.” “We’re made for relationships.” And testing the limits of this can be pretty much diabolical.
• Harry Harlow’s Monkey Love Experiments—Rhesus Monkeys (Video)
• “The Shame of a Nation,” 20/20 (1990) (Video)
• How family dynamics and marital conflict impacts children
• “If you stay in your marriage for the sake of the children, then you deserve, and your child deserves, for you to work on your marriage for the sake of the children. Just being together is actually not better for kids. The kids who look really bad are the kids whose parents are engaged in repetitive and nasty and awful conflict. And they're not getting good models for how to solve problems in their own relationships. They're not getting good models for what to expect from marriage. They're not getting good models for what that marriage relationship is supposed to be.”
• Even four-year-olds notice when parents are in conflict.
• Marriage as a secure emotional base for children.
• Parenting together as stewardship and sacred responsibility
• “In your relationship, you should glorify God better together than you would separately.”
• “There's a very important connection between how it is that children see their parents and how it is they typically see God.”
• Conditional love can produce an earning mindset in a child, not just with respect to the parent, but to God.
• Don’t be a Karen-parent who thinks their child can do no wrong.
• “That's the interesting thing about people, even when they're doing terrible things, they often are doing them for good reasons, right? In therapy you can hear couples say incredibly hurtful and awful things to each other.”
• The relational image of God
• Study of Infants in Orphanages during World War I and World War II: Infants with physical needs taken care of still wasted away and even died without human contact.
• God as Trinity, Jesus as Incarnational
• Relating rightly to our neighbors
• Impact of spousal treatment on how children treat parents and others.
• Wire Monkey vs Soft and Cuddly Monkey
• A close emotional bond must take place early in life in order to provide the relational stability relational creatures need.
• Definition of adulthood
• Babies can do amazing things.
• Still Face Experiment
• Intellectual vs Relational definitions of the Imago Dei
• Intellectual disability
• Bringing psychology into the service of theology

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Mari Clements
• 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
• This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of Blueprint 1543. For more information, visit Blueprint1543.org.

"Theology is truth-apt and truth-aimed." Too often the faith-science debate ends up a zero-sum game where either science or theology overstep their bounds. But analytic theologian Oliver Crisp (University of St. Andrews, Scotland) describes a tapestry of knowledge that requires the best of both worlds. In this episode he discusses the purpose and future prospects of theology in light of empirical and experimental science. How might science, philosophy, and theology can work together to help us understand human uniqueness? Can science help us better understand the imago Dei?

About Oliver Crisp

Oliver D. Crisp (PhD, University of London; DLitt, University of Aberdeen) is the Principal of St. Mary's College, Head of the School of Divinity, Professor of Analytic Theology, and Director of the Logos Institute at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. He has written or edited numerous books, including The Word Enfleshed, Analyzing Doctrine, Deviant Calvinism, and Jonathan Edwards among the Theologians.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured theologian Oliver Crisp
• 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 Blueprint 1543. For more information, visit Blueprint1543.org.

Is your faith a house of cards? If you were wrong about one belief would the whole structure just collapse? If even one injury came to you, one instance of broken trust, would the whole castle fall? If one element was seemingly inconsistent or incompatible—would you burn down the house?

This depiction of the psychology of faith is quite fragile. It falls over to even the lightest breath. But what would a flexible faith be? Resilient to even the heaviest gusts of life’s hurricanes. It would adapt and grow as a living, responsive faith.

This metaphor isn’t too far off from the Enlightenment-founding vision of Rene Descartes—whose Meditations sought to build an edifice of Christian faith on a foundation free from doubt, ambiguity, uncertainty, or falsehoods. Even the slightest of doubts had to be categorically obliterated in order to prove the existence of God and the reality of the soul. He was clear about this in the preface. This was a work of apologetics. And he thought a good offense is your best defense. So he went on a whack-a-mole style doubt-killing spree that he hoped would secure a faith built on certainty.

Now, here’s a question for you: Does a quest for certainty strengthen and fortify the Christian faith? Or does it leave you stranded on the top floor of a house of cards?

Today, we’re continuing our series on Bringing Psychology to Theology, with a closer look at what to do about doubt, uncertainty, and ambiguity, in all sorts of stakes, but especially when it comes to faith.

In this series we’ve been exploring the tools of psychological science that might contribute to a deeper, greater, more nuanced theological understanding of the world.

We began the series by establishing certain normative questions about the integration of psychology and theology—experimental psychologist Justin Barrett offered to Miroslav Volf the suggestion that to build your cathedral of theology, you need the tools of psychological sciences.

Then, developmental psychologist Pamela King offered a vision of thriving that expresses the dynamic, human telos or purpose throughout our lifespan. Research psychologist Julie Exline followed with a psychological exploration of spiritual struggle and one of the most embattled and suppressed of human emotions: anger at God.

In this episode, I’m joined by Elizabeth Hall of Biola University’s Rosemead School of Psychology. She’s both a clinically trained therapist, helping people deal with life’s difficulties, as well as a psychological researcher exploring human spirituality, personality and character traits, women’s mental health, and human relationships. Most recently she co-authored Relational Spirituality: A Psychological-Theological Paradigm for Transformation, and I asked her to come on the show to talk about her recent work on tolerance for ambiguity in a life of faith.

Here we discuss the domains of psychology and theology and what it means for each to “stay in their lane”; she introduces a distinction between implicit and explicit knowledge, and identifies the social- and self-imposed pressure to know everything with certainty; we reflect on the recent trends toward deconversion from faith in light of these pressures; and she offers psychologically grounded guidance for approaching doubt and ambiguity in a secure relational context, seeking to make the unspoken or implicit doubts explicit. Rather than remaining perched upon our individualized, certainty-driven house-of-card faith; she lays out a way to inhabit a flexible, resilient, and relationally grounded faith, tolerant of ambiguity and adaptive and secure amidst all our winds of doubt.

About Elizabeth Hall

M. Elizabeth Lewis Hall (PhD, Rosemead School of Psychology) is professor of psychology at Rosemead School of Psychology at Biola University, where she teaches courses on the integration of psychology and theology. She has published over 100 articles and book chapters and serves as associate editor for Psychology of Religion and Spirituality. She lives in Whittier, California, with her husband, Todd, and her two sons.

Show Notes

• Relational Spirituality: A Psychological-Theological Paradigm for Transformation
• On the integration of psychology and Christianity in life
• Vocationally; psychology is the “little area of God’s creation” where she gets to work, she attempts to bring it back to Jesus’s lordship
• Jesus as owner of all
• Intellectually; if all truth is God’s truth, she is trying to get the most complete sense of what humans are all about
• God gave us the capacity to study using psychology
• Faith, theology, and religion lend themselves into a psychological domain more than other fields, providing rich content that comes together easily with what the Bible says about humans.
• What helps the intellectual puzzle pieces come together for you?
• “I need to allow theology and psychology to stay in their lanes. I can’t expect more from each discipline than what it is constructed to offer.”
• Ex: Psychology gets in trouble when making prescriptive statements (vs descriptive)
• People are seeking clinical based advice for how to live better
• “When someone sits down with a client to help them with whatever they're dealing with, they do have notions of human flourishing in the background that, whether they've thought through it or not, are going to come up in the course of how the therapy is steered.”
• Defining flourishing is not easy, so choosing criteria becomes difficult for psychology
• What does it mean when doubt enters the mind? When we act on doubts?
• It is difficult to be a Christian with questions about your faith in this current moment.
• Social Pressure:
• We are continually being confronted with people who live and think differently than us, and who seem to be doing well in life, opposed to the homogenous communities we historically lived in.
• Intellectual pressure:
• We naturally want to seek truth that is certain.
• There is a strand of Christianity where we’ve reduced what faith is to an intellectual ascent to the affirmations of our faith.
• What is it to know something? What might psychologists be working with as definitions of knowledge that would offer alternatives to knowledge as certainty?
• A useful distinction from cognitive scientists has been the definition between the explicit and implicit knowing
• We know important things about the world at an implicit level:
• Via nervous systems, without words
• Emotions and relationships
• What are the ways that gut knowledge comes to us, relationally or culturally?
• Our initial reaction to something in our environment is immediately a “push or pull” towards or against that thing. Then it becomes refined by past experiences (culture, past relationships, etc.) This then shapes what happens on the conscious level.
• Being aware of that psychological force between our unconscious and conscious thought becomes important when breaking down doubt in a religious context.
• Hall grew up in the Evangelical church, feeling certain that faith was set of propositions about Jesus and God that was very certain.
• Early church had more of an interpersonal dimension to faith, centering on trust and loyalty.
• Relying on propositions/blanket statement of Christian faith creates a “house of cards” vision of faith: If you pull one card out, all come down.
• This relates to an intellectual need for certainty, but there is also a social dimension to this stack
• Guilt by association: disgust, remorse, shame, around the association of a particular belief with Christianity, which can feed all the way back to one’s experience of God
• This becomes particularly heightened when the larger culture is confronting/criticizing these beliefs or institutions
• Our experienced relationship of God also has implicit foundations
• Studies on deconversion show that people who turn from Christianity find that the reason is usually a perceived injury (with God, another person, the church) that sets off the process
• Many people say “science” is the reason, but it’s not actually until the betrayal of trust comes in that most people start cognitively deconverting
• Most of our shaping and life happens outside of our conscious awareness
• Psychology does not understand well how the explicit knowledge systems can influence our implicit beliefs
• Two kinds of doubt:
• Explicit: content, perceived competing claims with Christianity and (usually) science
• Implicit: betrayal of trust. God has let a person down
• Different people will encounter the same perceived discrepancy and will experience it in vastly different ways.
• It is difficult to be a thoughtful creature and not wonder at how things fit together
• Some people may meet a discrepancy and decide their whole life has been built on a lie
• The factors that allow a person to entertain doubts with more confidence:
• Solid relational attachments (such as parental) early in childhood
• Helps a person to be overwhelmed by a question because they know they have faced and managed similar situations before
• Being okay with doubt: some people can live with it, intellectual resilience
• If it’s very threatening, you have to do something because you can’t live in a state of constant tension: deconverting is one possible solution
• Tension: literal physiological arousal
• How to help people find their way through the doubt:
• Try to make what is implicit, explicit. Explore the process of the doubt.
• Provide a window into a person’s capacity for uncertainty tolerance
• Envisioning faith a different way: Rethinking our churches for relational spirituality
• There are ways to be attuned to caring for peoples relational experiences of the love of God

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Elizabeth Hall
• 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

Sometimes things go wrong. Your British premiere league football club loses a game; maybe your dog eats the birthday party cupcakes; maybe someone cuts you off in traffic. And you get angry—looking for someone to hold responsible.

Sometimes things go wrong in even more serious ways. Your kid’s getting bullied or mistreated; the justice system fails you or someone you love; you’re betrayed or deeply hurt by a friend. And you get angry—still looking to hold them responsible, take a form of vengeance, and even if you can muster the strength to forgive and absolve, the anger might persist.

But what about when things go so seriously wrong in life that questions of meaning, purpose, and sense of existence come under doubt? When there’s no human left to hold accountable, do you then turn your eyes to God—the creator of all of this, you know: “the whole world in his hands” kinda thing?

Have you ever been angry at God?

Today, we’re continuing our series all about “Bringing Psychology to Theology” with a look at the psychology of spiritual struggles and specifically, a scientific study of what happens when we get angry at God. In this series we’ve been exploring the tools of psychological science that might contribute to a deeper, greater, more nuanced theological understanding of the world. 

We started with a conversation between Miroslav Volf and experimental psychologist Justin Barrett. Justin evokes the image of erecting a giant cathedral of theology—and how the task must be done with a variety of tools and subcontracted skills. Then we heard from Pamela Ebstyne King with a developmental approach to thinking about human spirituality, the dynamic nature of human purpose, and how relationships factor in moving from surviving to thriving. 

The hope for this series is to highlight the prospects of a science-engaged theology and how it might contribute to the most pressing matters for how to live lives worthy of our humanity. 

In this episode Ryan McAnnally-Linz is joined by research psychologist Julie Exline. She’s Professor of Psychology of Religion & Spirituality at Case Western Reserve University and author most recently of Working with Spiritual Struggles in Psychotherapy: From Research to Practice. Her research has examined forgiveness, humility, and human spirituality, and she’s widely recognized for her work on the psychology of anger at God and religious struggles. 

In this episode, Julie reflects on the meaning of spiritual struggle, as well as the possible outcomes and factors that contribute to a personal sense of healing and growth. She speaks to the anxiety and fear that seem to hover around an expression of anger toward God, dealing with objections and concerns that it’s immoral or presumes God to be guilty of wrongdoing. And she offers practical considerations in light of the psychological research around what happens when people choose to express their anger at God or not—how different responses of disapproval or acceptance can lead to positive growth or a sense of successfully dealing with the anger.

About Julie Exline

Julie Exline is Professor of Psychology of Religion & Spirituality at Case Western Reserve University and author most recently of Working with Spiritual Struggles in Psychotherapy: From Research to Practice. Her research has examined forgiveness, humility, and human spirituality, and she’s widely recognized for her work on the psychology of anger at God and religious struggles.

Show Notes

• Working with Spiritual Struggles in Psychotherapy: From Research to Practice
• Spiritual struggles
• The shadow side of religion
• Researching the more challenging side of religion and spirituality.
• Looking at the dark side of things: a defensive pessimist at heart
• Big picture: coping with challenging events around faith
• Conserving beliefs, fitting things in
• Choosing to engage struggle: approach God, seek support, or decline and disengage
• Prayer, talking to God or other trusted people
• Struggling with God versus struggling with another human being
• Growth often comes from staying engaged but addressing the problem
• Being angry at God
• Is it okay to be angry at God?
• “Are you sure you should be studying this?”
• People feel like it’s morally wrong to question God.
• Beth Moore: Questioning God's Authority vs Asking God Questions
• Questioning God's authority is sometimes thought to lead people on a path to spiritual decline.
• Asking God questions can lead people toward growth.
• Feeling angry at God doesn't imply a lack of respect for God.
• Anger and Love are independent of one another.
• "Difficulty Forgiving God"—implying that God did something wrong; now using language "resolving anger at God"
• Anger as a response to injustice.
• Finding a way to live with the problem of evil: Are people wrestling with anger toward God articulating it in a similar way as those worrying about the problem of evil?
• Theodicy
• “Why did God allow…”
• The role of theological presuppositions in anger with God
• Changing beliefs and theological tinkering
• Responding to others who wrestle with anger with God: the gift of presence
• A response of acceptance and affirmation gave people a higher likelihood of reporting they had grown from the experience of anger at God.
• A response of disapproval or moral judgment is associated with attempts to suppress the anger, making it more likely to remain, and can even increase the likelihood of substance abuse.
• Anger with God as part of a healthy, dynamic spiritual life
• Anger as a signal for what matters
• Thinking about anger as part of an ongoing conversation with God: Two-chair technique
• Anger as an approach-oriented emotion—allows you to approach a problem or issue worthy of our attention.
• Using anger as an opportunity to clarify and solve a problem
• Japanese “kintsugi”—golden repairs in the deepest fissures and cracks of life.
• Practical recommendations for resolving anger with God
• Experiential avoidance
• Clarify your feelings and give yourself space to talk about it
• “Shouldn't God be able to handle your anger?”
• You don't have to express your anger disrespectfully; you can show your care and value for the relationship.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Julie Exline
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Kaylen Yun & 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

Acknowledgements

• This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of Blueprint 1543. For more information, visit Blueprint1543.org.

"Usually people think of a telos as an endpoint, but what if we think of telos as a dynamic process that sustains a thriving trajectory for the individual and the world around them? The imago Dei, which is deeply and inherently relational and social—we image God by being our unique selves in unity. So there is the particularity of personhood and the relatedness with other persons, God, and all of creation. And so that was what the reciprocating self was. It's 'How do I grow as a fully differentiated person in relationship and increasing intimacy, increasing contribution with the world around me?' 

To thrive then is to pursue that fullness of self in the context of intimacy and accountability and relationships—not just with those closest to me ... that's essential—but also in contribution to the world beyond the self.

How does our faith, how does our devotion, fuel us to want to continue to reciprocate when life is hard? When there's a pandemic? We need something beyond ourselves, a power beyond ourselves, an orientation beyond ourselves to fuel that interrelatedness between our particularity and the greater good." (Pamela Ebstyne King)

Introduction

At the bedrock of our being as persons is relationality: our ability to be known, to be loved, and to know and love in return. But whoa whoa whoa. Wait a minute. What kind of claim is that? Is that theology or psychology? We’re used to hearing that from the likes of the Jewish existential philosopher and theologian Martin Buber—he’s well known for his suggestion that an intimate I-Thou relationship is what makes for our conscious personhood. It’d be impossible to become an “I” without coming into direct contact with a “You” and seeing it as a “You.” 

But how interesting that research studies in developmental psychology find just that. You can for instance turn to John Bowlby and the beginnings of attachment theory to find that this theological claim holds up once you start testing it with the tools psychological. But more than holds up, the claim that relationality is fundamental to personhood starts to expand and develop nuance by examining the most universal by application in the unique, particular circumstances. Famous psychological experiments like the “Still Face” show how central the reciprocal response of our earliest attachment figure is for our mental health, even as babies. (Check below for an excruciating video example of the Still Face Experiment.)

But this is just one way that developmental psychology might offer some interesting tools to theological reflection. 

And today we’re continuing a new series of episodes on For the Life of the World all about “Bringing Psychology to Theology”—we’re exploring the tools of psychological sciences that might contribute to a deeper, greater, more nuanced theological understanding of the world. Last week we introduced the series with a conversation between Miroslav Volf and experimental psychologist Justin Barrett. Justin evokes the image of erecting a giant cathedral of theology—and how the task must be done with a variety of tools and subcontracted skills.

Well, whether theology is the grand architect of a cathedral of human knowledge or the benevolent and humble Queen of the Sciences—either way we hope this series highlights the prospects of a science-engaged theology and how it might contribute to the most pressing matters for how to live lives worthy of our humanity.

My guest in this episode is Pamela Ebstyne King. She’s the Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science at Fuller School of Psychology and is Executive Director of the Thrive Center for Human Development. An ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church USA, her research has focused on the intersections of developmental and positive psychology, human thriving, and spirituality.

In this episode, we discuss developmental psych as the observational study of human change and plasticity in the midst of a whole complex life; relational attachment for the sake of intimacy and exploration and ultimate purpose or meaning; the proper place of self-love; God’s enabling and loving presence as the ultimate secure attachment figure; the importance of learning, gaining skills, and the pursuit of expertise; The prospects of regaining emotional regulation through relationships; the game changing impact of deliberate psychological and spiritual practices to move us well beyond surviving to a life of thriving.

About Pamela Ebstyne King

Pamela Ebstyne King, Ph.D. joined Fuller Theological Seminary as assistant professor of Marital and Family Studies in 2008, after serving in the School of Psychology for eight years as an adjunct and research professor. She was installed in 2014 with a professorship named for her mentor, Peter L. Benson. In 2021 she was promoted to the position of Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science. Dr. King is also executive director of the Thrive Center for Human Development.

Dr. King’s academic and applied efforts aim to promote a movement of human thriving that contributes to flourishing societies. Her primary academic interests lie at the intersection of thriving and spiritual development. She is passionate about understanding what individual strengths and environments enable humans to thrive and become all God created them to be. She holds particular interest in understanding the role of faith, spirituality, religion, and virtues in this process. To this end she has led in building an empirical field of study of religious and spiritual development within developmental psychology that provides a psychological scientific perspective of spiritual formation.

She has extensively studied and written on conceptualizations of thriving and positive youth development. Her work on telos is noted to provide an interdisciplinary framework for human thriving and flourishing from different philosophical, theological, and cultural perspectives and to provide a structure for understanding practical concepts like purpose, vocation, and joy. Her work combines theology, empirical research, and community engagement to further understand what contexts and settings enable people to thrive. She has conducted research funded by Biologos Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation, the Fetzer Institute, Compassion International, and Tyndale House, among others. In addition to her scholarship, she finds deep joy in teaching and mentoring students at Fuller.

Dr. King is coauthor of The Reciprocating Self: Human Development in Theological Perspective and Thriving with Stone Age Minds: Evolutionary Psychology, Christian Theology & Human Flourishing, coeditor of The Handbook of Spiritual Development in Childhood and Adolescence, and coauthor of the inaugural chapter on research on religious and spiritual development in the seventh edition of the Handbook of Child Psychology and Developmental Science. She has served on the editorial boards of Developmental Psychology, Journal of Positive Psychology, Applied Developmental Science, the Encyclopedia of Applied Developmental Science, and the Encyclopedia of Spiritual Development in Childhood and Adolescence. She has also published articles in the Journal on Adolescent Research, Journal of Early Adolescence, New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, and Journal of Psychology and Christianity. King is a member of the Society for Research on Adolescents, Society for Research on Child Development, and Division 36 of the American Psychological Association.

In addition to her studies at Fuller, Dr. King completed her undergraduate studies at Stanford University and a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford’s Center on Adolescence; she was a visiting scholar under the divinity faculty at Cambridge University. Ordained in the Presbyterian Church (USA), she has led high school and college ministries, and regularly speaks, preaches, and consults for various community organizations and churches. She lives in Pasadena with her husband and three children.

Show Notes

• Martin Buber’s I and Thou
• John Bowlby and Attachment Theory
• Trolick’s Still Face Experiment (Video)
• Justin Barrett & Pamela Ebstyne King, Thriving with Stone Age Minds: Evolutionary Psychology, Christian Faith, and the Quest for Human Flourishing
• Developmental psych as the observational study of human change in the midst of a whole life of complexity
• Plasticity of the human species
• Relational attachment for the sake of intimacy and exploration
• The Impact of environment on genetic expression
• Law if reciprocity
• Fullness of creation, redemption and consummation
• Theology as establishing ends, and psychology as developing towards gods purposes
• How psychology aids in the process of becoming our full selves as selfhood
• The proper place of self-love
• God’s enabling and loving presence
• Thriving as psychological, vs Flourishing as philosophical
• Meaningful life in eudaimonic and hedonistic terms
• Imago dei
• “Back to the future”—understanding the end toward the beginning
• Reading psychology through a teleological lens
• Linear stage theories of development
• Life as a series of cycles
• We can have a telos as a dynamic process
• Thriving as pursuing the fullness of self
• Reciprocity beyond ourselves when life is hard
• Colossians and Jesus as the perfect image of God
• Conformity is not uniformity
• Parenting as helping children to become their unique selves
• Telos as inhabiting the self, the relational, and the aspirational—purpose is found at the intersection of all three
• William Damon on purpose
• Purpose as enduring actionable goal, meaningful to the self and contributing beyond the self
• Learning, gaining skills, and pursuit of expertise
• Meaning making as a dynamic life-long project
• Orienting life in the present moment by tethering to a consummate vision of the future
• Sociality as inherent to human nature
• Goals: self, expertise acquisition, and what we aspire to
• Roles: who we are in our social networks
• Souls: what ideals are most dearly held and most meaningful
• The fundamental rejection of pre autonomy and independence; embrace of our relational selves
• How malleable our brains are through intentional practices
• Making meaning can change your brains
• Surviving vs thriving
• Attachment and regulation
• Regaining emotional regulation through relationships
• The game changing impact of deliberate psychological and spiritual practices—intention, motivation, and goals
• Possible cutoff point — The relation of psychological science and theology
• Psychology as a God-given tool to enable thriving and flourishing
• Known, loved, and loving others
• The role of suffering and loss as part of the thriving process
• For the cynical and jaded: thriving that is real to loss, grief, vulnerability, and daring to thrive

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Pamela Ebstyne King
• 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

Acknowledgements

• This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of Blueprint 1543. For more information, visit Blueprint1543.org.

Imagine building a cathedral with just a hammer and nails. How might theologians today continue to build the grand cathedral where human knowledge meets divine revelation by implementing the tools of psychological science? Experimental psychologist Justin Barrett joins theologian Miroslav Volf for a conversation on how psychology can contribute to theology. This episode is made possible by Blueprint1543.

Introduction

To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Yep, we’ve heard that before. But imagine trying to make that work. Imagine, for instance, the visionary builder of a medieval cathedral… building it only with a hammer and nails.

And you know there’s an analogy coming here. Suppose the cathedral you’re trying to build is nothing less than the human inquiry into the nature of the cosmos and the nature of the God who created them—from the dark matter at the edges of the expanding universe, to the recycled space dust that’s found its way into the pristine fingernails of a newborn baby.

Artfully articulating the nature of reality with nuance and care—saying something true and meaningful about God, people, and thriving in the world we share—the task of theology could be just like that extravagant building project.

But imagine if the theologian only had one tool.

Experimental psychologist Justin Barrett tells a story like this to make a suggestion to theologians to consider how they might incorporate the tools of science—and psychological science in particular—into the building of their theological cathedral.

Justin is long-time researcher in cognitive science of religion. He’s author of a number of books, including Why Would Anyone Believe in God? and Born Believers: The Science of Childhood Religion. He just edited the Oxford Handbook of the Cognitive Science of Religion.

And in 2019 he co-founded Blueprint1543, an organization that’s bringing theologians and scientists together to accelerate better contributions to life’s biggest questions.

And today we’re launching a series of episodes on For the Life of the World that will explore the tools of psychological sciences that might contribute to a deeper and greater theological understanding of the world. By bringing a science-engaged theology to bear on the most pressing matters for how to live lives worthy of our humanity.

Throughout the series, we’re featuring conversations with psychologists who can offer insightful tools for crafting the cathedral where human knowledge meets divine revelation.

About Justin Barrett

Justin L. Barrett is an honorary Professor of Theology and the Sciences at St Andrews University School of Divinity. An experimental psychologist by training, he is concerned with the scientific study of religion and its philosophical as well as theological implications. He is the author of a number of books including Why Would Anyone Believe in God?, Born Believers: The Science of Childhood Religion, and Religious Cognition in China: Homo Religiosus and the Dragon.

Show Notes

• Blueprint1543.org
• Download your copy of Justin Barrett’s A Psychological Science Primer for Theologians (2022)
• TheoPsych Academy
• Normative vision the good life
• Psychology as among the most secular of academic disciplines
• Psychology’s historical (but non-necessary) anti-religious tendencies
• There are plenty of Christian psychologists who are deliberate in thinking about the integration of Christianity and psychology
• Comparing instrumental, explanatory psychology and purposes, meaning, and teleology in theology
• How the purposes of our lives—normative visions—how do they then shape psychological inquiry
• Are questions of the good life matters for science to determine, or are religious and theological perspectives essential to thinking about the purpose and meaning of human life?
• When can theologians and philosophers be helped by psychological science?
• Theologians often make use of psychological claims fairly uncritically—how human minds work, how emotions work, how social relationships work
• Miroslav’s book The End of Memory
• Is the theologian making descriptive psychological claims?
• Are you the theologian making normative claims supported by descriptive psychological claims?
• Are you making claims about what affects texts and rituals and practices have on people?
• Are you constructing an argument that uses intuition as premises?
• Experimental philosophy: Are philosophers’ intuitions universal?
• Can there be an “experimental theology”?
• Being careful about descriptive psychological claims—especially for practical theological questions or lived theology
• Psychology needs to do its own inspecting
• “The science of psychology has a great self-awareness of how we can't trust ourselves. … The entire method is built around, to put it in theological terms, a conviction about total depravity.”
• Methodological rigor in sciences—checking findings with the community
• Cultural situatedness
• E.g., “How well do we know ourselves?”
• Ludwig Wittgenstein: “The world of a happy man is not the same as the world of a sad man.”
• “Affective states shape how we perceive the world.”
• Mary Magdalene’s breaking a precious jar or oil on Jesus’s feet—the smell is refracted through how Judas and Jesus see the world. Judas finds the smell a terrible waste, and Jesus finds the smell beautiful.
• “What we perceive in the world around us is set by our expectations.”
• “Every Christian is a theologian because theology accompanies the life and situatedness of each individual in the world.”

Production Notes

• This podcast featured cognitive scientist Justin Barrett and theologian Miroslav Volf
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• 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

Acknowledgements

This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of Blueprint 1543. For more information, visit Blueprint1543.org.

Micheal O'Siadhail reflects on his latest collection of poetry, Testament. A confession of faith through Psalms refracted through his experience, and the Gospel story retold through rhyme, O'Siadhail's vibrant faith manifests as complaint, longing, grief, mourning, and doubt. With mountains and oceans of poetry written over the past 45 years, he writes on love, loss, modernity, music—all an experiment of drawing the universal down into the particular and right back up again. From Psalm 1, his opening verses, he writes, "Uncloseted, / Things once unsaid my life declares: / My words are prayers my being plays; / Through you I gaze at all I love."

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

Show Notes

• Click here to get your copy of Micheal O'Siadhail's Testament (link)
• Listen to Micheal O'Siadhail and David Ford in Episode 75: "Life Riffs: Improvisation in Poetry, Theology, and Flourishing" (link)
• Religion versus spirituality
• Micheal’s spiritual background
• Psalm 1—”through you I gaze at all I love”
• Time and temporality, finitude and mortality
• John Donne—from sensual love poetry to devotional poetry
• “This God remains on scene.”
• Psalm 46—”all my life depends on friends … You are coring me, hollowing me out to love you more.”
• Dependency in social and spiritual dimensions
• Carapace = a shell, something to hide in
• Individualism and independence: “We are ourselves only in relation to others.”
• The “black hole of the self”
• Hollowing out - “cored out by suffering”
• Psalm 80: “You, not I, stretched out the sky”
• Mourning and grieving loved-ones lost
• Complaining, groaning, doubting—but alongside belief that God is there.
• “Most only groan to those they love.”
• Psalm 80: “Why does your night thief keep ambushing me?
• The tandem psychology of compliant and dependence—and the acceptance of both.
• “Madam Jazz” in Micheal O’Siadhail’s poetry—wild, unpredictable, improvisational nature of God
• The history of jazz and the God of surprises, riffing on creation.
• David Ford and The Gospel of John
• The environmental message of Testament
• Psalm 124: “I cry for us in my intensity.”
• T.S. Eliot: “Old men ought to be explorers”
• “Distracted by distraction from distraction” (T.S. Eliot, from “Burnt Norton”)
• Poetry and universal down to particular
• Hebrew morning prayer
• The connection between Psalter and Gospel in Testament
• Going from mystical poetry to particular incarnation
• “Letting the story tell itself.”
• “I” disappears in Gospel.
• Two thieves
• Legacy
• “Years to leave love’s legacy behind”
• Tetelestai—finishing one’s calling

About Micheal O'Siadhail

Micheal O'Siadhail is a poet. His Collected Poems was published in 2013, One Crimson Thread in 2015 and The Five Quintets in 2018, which received Conference on Christianity and Literature Book of the Year 2018 and an Eric Hoffer Award in 2020. He holds honorary doctorates from the universities of Manitoba and Aberdeen. He lives in New York.

Production Notes

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

Imagine war becoming your new normal. Imagine getting used to things like airstrike sirens. Imagine sleeping through the distant bombs. Imagine passing through the rubble on your way to work, or school, or church.

Over the past year, war has become the new normal for Ukrainian pastor and theologian Fyodor Raychynets. Most of the expectations for how tthis war might go have fallen through. Worst case scenarios have come to pass. And the precarity and fragility of life outside of wartime—well, that continues too.

A year ago, 20 days into the war, Fyodor joined Miroslav Volf to catch up with his former professor for a conversation on the immediate impact of Russia’s invasion on Ukrainian life and culture. At the time, uncertainty filled the globe. Now, after 387 days of war, the shock has numbed into weariness. But a consistent message of presence pervades Fyodor’s mindset. Providing humanitarian aide, friendship, and surrogate family in the wake of so much destruction and loss, his church in the outskirts of Kiev has grown.

In this episode, Ukrainian pastor and theologian Fyodor Raychynets provides an update on life during wartime, in a war zone—which includes not only the pain of war, but the grief of losing his wife prior to the war, and his adult son just months ago. His faith persists in the face of all the cold reminders of how little control any of us exert on world events such as this. He now turns to the minor prophets—Nahum and Habakkuk in particular—to hope for justice, to complain and express his anger toward God, even with God. And he continues to minister to soldiers and civilians, holding their questions with presence and patience, while preaching a message of hope in the good and resistance to evil.

Thanks for listening friends, even on this 387th day of war in Ukraine.

About Fyodor Raychynets

Fyodor Raychynets is a theologian and pastor in Kyiv, Ukraine. He is Head of the Department of Theology at Ukrainian Evangelical Theological Seminary, where he teaches courses in Leadership and Biblical Studies, particularly the Gospel of Matthew. He studied with Miroslav Volf at Evangelical Theological Seminary in Osijek, Croatia.

Follow him on Facebook here.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured theologians Fyodor Raychynets and Miroslav Volf
• 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

It’s not a popular idea, but secular America is pretty damn religious. Pretty damn liturgical. Pumpkin spice lattes and apple cider donuts are the eucharistic elements of autumn. The militaristic pageantry of the 4th of July. Our children love asking about the next big event. Color coordinated myths drive the year along, shaping us into …. well, I’m not quite sure what this secular American liturgy is shaping us into. But I bet you and I could have had a great conversation about during a Super Bowl party earlier this month—where the eucharistic elements have changed—it’s Buffalo wings and light beer—but it even comes with a sacred gathering of fanatical religious nuts, worshipping the high priest as he barks his coded sermon, and singing along with the high priestesses at halftime, praying all along to the gods of the gridiron to grant victory. When you put it that way, observing Lent—which starts today, Ash Wednesday—seems pretty tame and sensible.

Joining me today on the show is Esau McCaulley—for a discussion of Lent. Esau is associate professor of New Testament at Wheaton college and a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times.

He’s author of Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope, which won Christianity Today’s book of the year award in 2020, as well as a new book, Lent: The Season of Repentance and Renewal, which is part of a series entitled “The Fullness of Time”—which features other authors discussing different seasons of the Christian liturgical year and how it contributes to a Christian understanding of flourishing.

During our conversation, Esau McCaulley and I discuss the Christian practice of Lent—he speaks about it as both a collective wisdom, passed down through generations of Jesus followers, as well as a spiritual rebellion against mainstream American culture. He construes Lent as a season of repentance and grace; he points out the justice practices of Lent; he walks through a Christian understanding of death, and the beautiful practice of stripping the altars on Maundy Thursday; and he’s emphatic about how it’s a guided season of finding the grace to find (or perhaps return) to yourself as God has called you to be.

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

Show Notes

• Lent: The Season of Repentance and Renewal
• Commodifying our rebellion—the agency on offer is a thin, weakened agency.
• Repentance, grace, and finding (or returning to) yourself
• Examination of conscience
• The Great Litany: “For our blindness to human need and suffering, and our indifference to injustice and cruelty. Except our repentance, Lord.”
• The beauty of Christianity
• “Liturgical spirituality is not safe. God can jump out and get you at any moment in the service.”
• “The great thing about the, the, the season of Blend in the liturgical calendar more broadly is it gives you a thousand different entry points into transformation.”
• Lent is bookended by death. Black death, Coronavirus death, War death.
• Jesus defeated death as our great enemy.
• “Everybody that I know and I care about are gonna die. Everybody.”
• “I, as a Christian, believe that because we're going to die. our lives are of infinite value and the decisions that we make and the kinds of people we become are the only testimony that we have and that I have chosen to, to, in light of my impending death, put my faith in the one who overcame death.”
• Two realities: We’re going to die and Jesus defeated death.
• Stripping of the Altars on Maundy Thursday.
• Silent processional in black; Good Friday celebrates no eucharist.
• “I'm, like, the one Pauline scholar who doesn't like to argue about justification all of the time.”
• Good Friday’s closing prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, son of the living God, we pray you to set your passion cross and death between your judgment and our souls.”
• “You end Lent with: Something has to come between God’s judgement and our souls. And that thing is Jesus.”
• “Lent is God loving you enough to tell you the truth about yourself, but not condemning you for it, but actually saying that you can be better than that.”

About Esau McCaulley

Esau McCaulley, PhD is an associate professor of New Testament at Wheaton College in Wheaton, IL and theologian in residence at Progressive Baptist Church, a historically black congregation in Chicago.  His first book entitled Sharing in the Son’s Inheritance was published by T & T Clark in 2019. His second book Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope was published by IVP academic in 2020.  It won numerous awards including Christianity Today’s book of the year. His most recent work was a children’s book entitled Josey Johnson’s Hair and the Holy Spirit for IVP kids. His latest book is *Lent: The Season of Repentance and Renewal.* He is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. His writings have also appeared in places such as The Atlantic, Washington Post, and Christianity Today. He is married to Mandy, a pediatrician and navy reservist. Together, they have four wonderful children. Check out his website at https://esaumccaulley.com/.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Esau McCaulley
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Luke Stringer, 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

The primal scene of domination and slavery inevitably produces struggle. It must. Because domination is the idolatrous effort of one to exert control over the will of the other, and we are compelled as free beings to realize and always live that freedom. So the struggle produces dignity, and that dignity, declared and acted and performed and practiced and sung and chanted and screamed and whispered—when enacted by all human beings against various and sundry forms of domination, it leads to joy and love.

Vincent Lloyd (Villanova University) joins Evan Rosa to discuss his book Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination. We start with what struggle against domination is, especially how it’s expressed in Black life. We entertain the feeling of struggle psychologically and culturally; the ugly and vicious temptation to idolatry that seeking domination and mastery over others entails; how the humanity of both the master and the slave are lost or found; how struggle produces dignity; and an understanding of the debate between seeing dignity as purely intrinsic as opposed to performative. We close by thinking about how the Black struggle for dignity can inform all of us about what it means to actualize our humanity, embrace the power our freedom entails, culminating in joy and love.

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

About Vincent Lloyd

Vincent Lloyd is Associate Professor of Theology and Religious Studies and Director of the Center for Political Theology at Villanova University. He is the author of Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination (Yale University Press, 2022), Break Every Yoke: Religion, Justice, and the Abolition of Prisons, with Joshua Dubler (Oxford University Press, 2019), In Defense of Charisma (Columbia University Press, 2018), Religion of the Field Negro: On Black Secularism and Black Theology (Fordham University Press, 2017), Black Natural Law (Oxford University Press, 2016), The Problem with Grace: Reconfiguring Political Theology (Stanford University Press, 2011), and Law and Transcendence: On the Unfinished Project of Gillian Rose (Palgrave, 2009). Visit his personal website here.

Show Notes

• What is struggle?
• Augustine’s approach to struggle in Confessions: with oneself, with others, with the world, with the powers that be
• Phenomenology of human struggle: What are the features of struggle that land on the human consciousness?
• Struggling against not flesh and blood but powers and principalities.
• Righteous indignation against idolatry
• Rejecting humanity by presenting oneself in a position of mastery
• Making distinctions between individual persons, the vice of the will to dominate, and the system those vices create
• The struggle of a community
• Ontological struggle: Aimed at defeating domination
• “Is struggle dependent on the existence of some prior will to dominate?”
• Understanding oneself as “master” and setting oneself up as a god.
• Mastery is a particularly vicious form of idolatry.
• The primal scene of master and slave is always behind the amorphous systems we struggle against.
• What is the psychology of the will to dominate?
• Is domination a special vice? Or is it a more ubiquitous vice?
• Black theology, Black philosophy, and the experience of the Middle Passage
• Enslavement continues to fuel anti-Blackness
• The humanity of master and slave are both lost
• Black rage and Audrey Lorde’s 1981 “The Uses of Anger”
• Emotion as a symphony, not a cacophony
• Airing rage next to each other and clarifying our vision of the world
• Rethinking Human Dignity
• Retelling the story of democratizing and Christianizing the aristocratic beginnings of “dignity”
• “When we perform dignity, we’re struggling.”
• Distinguishing dignity from respectability (and turning away from respectability)
• “That's where dignity is truly democratized, right? What we all have in common as human is our capacity to turn away from domination, and turn toward the divine. That's where dignity has a universal quality.”
• Understanding the debate between seeing dignity as intrinsic vs dignity as performative or extrinsic.
• “We’re all dominated.”
• How exactly does struggle produce dignity?
• Emmanuel Levinas and responding to the Jewish Holocaust, giving morality new content by tethering it to encounter—seeing the infinite shine through in the face of the other, allowing new concepts to flow through like love and justice.
• How do we finally move from domination, to struggle, to dignity, to joy and love?

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Vincent Lloyd
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• 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