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Summary

Rich Lusk discusses the importance of recapturing the gospel of the kingdom and the need for Christians to engage in the culture war. He emphasizes the role of the church in discipling all spheres of life and the importance of a biblical worldview. Lusk highlights the impact of living under Christ's lordship and the positive effects it has on individuals and society. He also discusses the evangelistic opportunities in the culture war and the need for Christians to be a witness in their families, communities, and nations. Lusk concludes by discussing the potential impact of Christian magistrates ruling according to God's word. The conversation explores the role of the state as a ministry of justice and the benefits of having Christian rulers. It also discusses the differences with Stephen Wolfe's book and the importance of pastors engaging in political theology. The limitations of social media and the need to correct false teachers are also addressed. The conversation concludes with a promotion of the book and its purpose in sparking further exploration of related topics.

Takeaways

The gospel of the kingdom encompasses more than just individual salvation and includes the transformation of all aspects of life and society.

The church plays a central role in discipling all spheres of life and should provide a biblical framework for understanding vocation, politics, economics, and other areas.

Engaging in the culture war is necessary for Christians to uphold biblical values and bring transformation to society.

Living under Christ's lordship brings order, beauty, and flourishing to individuals and society.

Christian magistrates have the opportunity to rule for the common good according to God's word and be a blessing to their people. The state is a ministry of justice and should reflect God's design for governance.

Christian rulers can be a blessing to all, promoting the common good.

Pastors should engage in political theology and discuss political matters from the pulpit.

Social media has limitations and can often lead to unproductive and divisive conversations.

False teachers and compromised teachers need to be corrected within the church.

The book serves as an introduction to the church's relationship with culture and encourages further exploration of related topics.

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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

The fourteenth and final episode in our series on the Sermon on the Mount, from Matthew 7:15-23. False prophets, happy hometowns and shifting sands!

Download more Tent Courses and Resources HERE. 

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A preview of a conversation between Tent co-hosts and colleagues Natasha Beckles, Chris Marchand and Sean McCoy about their personal experiences with racism, god, guns and patriotism. The full conversation is available on the Patreon page. Just one of many, many, high quality bonus episodes available to patrons. Become a Fellow Traveller today to access them all!

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Jesus's teaching to be in but not of the world (John 17:14-15) has gone from a mode of prophetic witness that could lead to martyrdom, to bumper sticker ethics that either feeds the trolls or fuels the tribe. We're in a moment where the ways that Christianity's influence on culture—and vice versa—are writ large and undeniable. And yet, how are we to understand it? How are we to live in light of it? How does that relationship change from political moment to political moment? In this conversation, ethicist Luke Bretherton (Duke Divinity School) joins Matt Croasmun to reflect on the purpose of theology as a way of life committed to loving God and neighbor; the essential virtue of listening and its role in public theology; the interrelation between Church and World; the temptation to see the other as an enemy to be defeated rather than a neighbor to be loved; and how best to understand secularism and religiosity today.

Show Notes 

• Do you call yourself a theologian? 
• “You can't understand the water you're swimming in without understanding something of the theological frameworks that have helped shape it”
• Where does the idea that our contemporary context is secular come from? 
• “The world is as furiously religious as ever”
• People think that our modern age is like a shower, that we can just “step into the shower and be washed clean from the foul accretions of superstition and step out enlightened, rational men and women,” but we're actually in a ‘jacuzzi’ of ideas
• The internet and plurality of opinion
• What happens when we step away from the institutional framework of the Church?
• “Who tells the children what Christianity is, who tells the children, what Islam is?”
• Do you actually want to show up on a Sunday? 
• Then tension between believing and belonging
• Sacrality and its many guises 
• “The many forms of life which we don't necessarily name as religious, but they're functioning in that way”
• How do we name them? 
• If you talk to an atheist, they feel marginalized in this country, but if you talk to an Evangelical Christian they feel the same way 
• “Everyone feels under threat, whether you're a humanist or an atheist or a Christian or Muslim”
• “But if you take the victim view, it generates a failure of imagination, a failure of patience, and a failure of paying attention”
• Churches talk a lot about how to speak but not about how to listen 
• “What does Christian listening look like in a pluralistic context?”
• Learning something about God by talking to an atheist
• Listening is pointing to what is already there: “We point to what Christ and the Spirit are already doing. And it is a privilege is to participate in that.”
• What is truth?
• “It is how well you love God and neighbor. And the apprehension of the truth is measured by the quality of the relationships”
• “So, I think faith begins with hearing and listening first”
• What’s right with theology? 
• How can we have a synthesis of tradition and critique? 
• Having a sensitivity to political order and whether it is constructive or destructive is theological work 
• Epistemic humility and interdisciplinary study 
• The beauty in becoming aware of what you don’t know 
• What is the state of the field right now? 
• The overemphasis on the hermeneutics of suspicion, and the world as it is versus the world as it should be
• Cynicism and redundancy
• “If all we’re saying is that wolves eat sheep, well, we kind of knew that already”
• What is a realistic hopefulness? What does ‘the world as it should be’ feel, taste, smell like? 
• What is the purpose of theology? 
• It “articulates what it means to heal a particular form of life in the light of who we understand God to be”
• “There shouldn't be an over-inflation of what theology, as a technical act, does. But neither is it nothing”
• “It is a cultivation of a faithful, hopeful and loving way of being alive”

About Luke Bretherton

Luke Bretherton is Robert E. Cushman Distinguished Professor of Moral and Political Theology and senior fellow of the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. Before joining the Duke faculty in 2012, he was reader in Theology & Politics and convener of the Faith & Public Policy Forum at King's College London. His latest book is Christ and the Common Life: Political Theology and the Case for Democracy (Eerdmans, 2019). His other books include Resurrecting Democracy: Faith, Citizenship and the Politics of a Common Life (Cambridge University Press, 2015), which was based on a four-year ethnographic study of broad-based community organizing initiatives in London and elsewhere; Christianity & Contemporary Politics: The Conditions and Possibilities of Faithful Witness (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), winner of the 2013 Michael Ramsey Prize for Theological Writing; and Hospitality as Holiness: Christian Witness Amid Moral Diversity (Routledge, 2006), which develops constructive, theological responses to pluralism in dialogue with broader debates in moral philosophy. Specific issues addressed in his work include euthanasia and hospice care, debt and usury, fair trade, environmental justice, racism, humanitarianism, the treatment of refugees, interfaith relations, secularism, nationalism, church-state relations, and the church’s involvement in social welfare provision and social movements. Alongside his scholarly work, he writes in the media (including The Guardian, The Times and The Washington Post) on topics related to religion and politics, has worked with a variety of faith-based NGOs, mission agencies, and churches around the world, and has been actively involved over many years in forms of grassroots democratic politics, both in the UK and the US. His primary areas of research, supervision, and teaching are Christian ethics, political theology, the intellectual and social history of Christian moral and political thought, the relationship between Christianity and capitalism, missiology, interfaith relations, and practices of social, political, and economic witness. He has received a number of grants and awards, including a Henry Luce III Fellowship (2017-18).

Production Notes

• This podcast featured ethicist Luke Bretherton and Matt Croasmun
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production & Editorial Assistance by Nathan Jowers and Annie Trowbridge
• Illustration: Luke Stringer
• 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

Prof. Norman Wirzba is a leading figure in the field of fields. He cares about farming, food, our connected lives and the justice that is inherent in living at peace with the land. Along with frequent collaborators such as Wendell Berry, Robert MacFarlane and others, Norman thinks deeply about the Anthropocene - our current age of significant human impact on the Earth's geology and ecosystems. Norman is based at Duke University where he is the Gilbert T. Rowe Distinguished Professor of Christian Theology and the Senior Fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics. His latest book is "This Sacred Life: Humanity's Place in a Wounded World".

You can find out more about Norman and his work HERE.

We discuss friend of the show Steve Bell in the episode and play Steve's song "In Praise of Decay" from the album Wouldn't You Like To Know.

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In this episode, I am joined by Dr. Thomas Kidd, Vardaman Endowed professor of History at Baylor University and author of a new book with Yale University Press titled Thomas Jefferson: A Biography of Spirit and Flesh.

Meet Dr. Kidd: 

Thomas Kidd is the Associate Director of Institute for Studies of Religion and the James Vardaman Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University. He has written for outlets including the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. Kidd blogs at “Evangelical History,” and at The Gospel Coalition website. His recent works include Who is an Evangelical?: A History of a Movement in Crisis (Yale University Press, 2019) and Benjamin Franklin: The Religious Life of a Founding Father  (Yale University Press, 2017).

Resources:

• Thomas Jefferson by Thomas Kidd
• Notes on the State of Virginia by Thomas Jefferson
• Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation between Church and State by Daniel Dreisbach
• The Hemingses of Monticello by Annette Gordon-Reed

The Digital Public Square is a production of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and is produced and hosted by Jason Thacker.

Production assistance is provided by Cameron Hayner. Technical production provided by Owens Productions. It is edited and mixed by Mark Owens.

A Tent Talks first. Listen and lean in, as we are joined by the ground-breaking womanist theologian - the Very Reverend Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas. She is in conversation with our previous tent talk guest and theologian, Dr Selina Stone, and our host Reverend Natasha Beckles. They engage in a rare, rich transatlantic conversation exploring eschatology, church and the scars of Christ.

The Very Reverend Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas serves as the Dean of the Episcopal Divinity School at Union Theological Seminary (https://utsnyc.edu/eds) and the Bill and Judith Moyers Chair in Theology at Union.  She also is Canon Theologian at the Washington National Cathedral and Theologian in Residence at Trinity Church Wall Street. Dean Kelly's latest book is Resurrection Hope: A Future Where Black Lives Matter (November 2021, Orbis Books), She is the author of many articles and books, including Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God, and Sexuality and the Black Church:A Womanist Perspective. You can find her on social media at: @DeanKBD  on Twitter and @EDSatUnion on Facebook.

Dr Selina Stone is Tutor and Lecturer in Theology at St Mellitus College in London and a research consultant. Her PhD completed in 2021 at the University of Birmingham focussed on Pneumatology, Pentecostalism and Social Justice. 

Revd Natasha Beckles is an Anglican priest in the Church of England, who has a background in educational leadership, safeguarding and inclusion. Natasha is curate at St Martin's Gospel Oak, London who has been commissioned to work part-time for London Diocese' Compassionate Communities team, developing and resourcing the mission, partnership working and outreach specifically on the issue of Serious Youth Violence & Contextual Safeguarding. Find her on Instagram at: @natashabeloved

Has anything we make been interesting, useful or fruitful for you? You can support us by becoming a Fellow Traveller on our Patreon page HERE.

Miroslav Volf offers his personal reflections about the war on Ukraine. His theological and ethical commentary speaks to various facets of the situation, including: the global cultural clash between authoritarian nationalism and pluralistic democracy; the primacy and priority of God's universal and unconditional love for all humanity, including evildoers; the call to actively resist evil and guard our humanity; the importance of truth in an age of disinformation and suppression of real facts; the need for Christians to remain "unreliable allies" with governments or parties while remaining faithful to the humanity in the friend, neighbor, stranger, and enemy; but ultimately his message is one to soberly—and dare I suggest joyfully, with unabashed hope—lift up our hearts (and the hearts of those suffering through war, dislocation, death, and destruction) to the Lord.

Episode Art Provided by Fyodor Raychynets. "ні війні!" = "NO WAR!"

Show Notes 

• Gustavo Gutiérrez, On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent
• Gustavo Gutierrez, The God of Life
• Miroslav’s experience in Yugoslavia in the 90s and how it is reflected in Ukraine
• The theological dimension of the war in Ukraine 
• “The war in Ukraine is part of a resurgence of nationalism as a global phenomenon”
• Two types of nationalism: exclusive nationalism, inclusive nationalism or patriotism
• Russian nationalism and the superiority of an ethnic group, the Russian Orthodoxy
• “What is the role of religion in the public sphere?"
• To what extent do Christians have stake in advocating for any position? 
• The birth of Russian Orthodoxy in Kyiv 
• The origins of faith and nation in Russia 
• “Such close ties between religion and religious sacred spaces have made religion complicit in the violence of the state”
• Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
• How Russian Orthodoxy is divided – the war is fought internally, rather than between Roman Catholicism + Protestantism and Orthodoxy on the other 
• the division between The Orthodox Church of Ukraine and Muscovite Patriarchate is reflected in the divisions in global Orthodoxy
• The struggle within Orthodoxy for primacy in Moscow
• God is love
• “God does not simply love and therefore can love or not love, but God actually is love always and without exception. And therefore that the love of enemy is a central tenant of the Christian faith”
• Every single oppressed and suffering person and every single wrongdoer, no matter how heinous the crimes they've committed, every single individual is an object of God's unconditional love.”
• John 1:29  "The Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world"
• “in secular terms, we ought to respect the humanity of each person, even the worst among us, and that we ought to care for them”
• God's love for the weak and assaulted 
• Love for the enemy
• How does this fit with the idea of Jesus’ teaching on non-resistance? 
• “Resistance against the aggressor can be, and I think ought to be, an expression of love, both for the victims of aggression and for the aggressor”
• The Just War Theory: there are different ways to transform an aggressor 
• “I myself do not subscribe to Just War Theory”
• I think that any engagement with the enemy has to be led by the command of love
• Oliver O’Donovan and love of the enemy 
• “The interest of the Christian faith is also interest in the good of the aggressor. And we cannot exempt the aggressor from the universality of the love of God”
• “It's crucial to keep careful watch over the state of our humanity. Evil is infectious, especially for those who struggle against it”
• Collective guilt
• “It has been said that truth is often the first victim of war”
• What is the place of emotions in war? 
• Job and suffering
• “What's really interesting is that Job dares to speak to God. He brings his anger, his lament, his disappointment, all of this displaced before God”
• How truth can transform anger 
• Psalm 137 “Blessed is the one who dashes your little ones against the rock”
• Karl Barth: “Christians and unreliable allies.” Their ultimate allegiance is to God, not to a political party 
• Ron Williams: “God has no particular interest of God’s own”
• The strength of pluralistic democracies 
• “One of the reasons for the rise of authoritarianism is a certain dysfunctionality of pluralistic democracies”
• Reconciliation 
• One way to reconcile is to enforced peace and suppress war 
• But reconciliation is a moral practice 
• “Naming the wrong that has been committed and finding ways to go beyond that, to live together in peace"
• How to sustain hope in the midst of such overwhelming powers of evil
• "sursum corda,”"lift up your hearts," or more literally "hearts up!"

Production Notes

• This podcast featured theologian Miroslav Volf
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Martin Chan, Nathan Jowers, Logan Ledman, and Annie Trowbridge
• 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

Populism has been at the center of academic and non-academic discussions over the past century and one may argue that there has been an upsurge in populist movements in recent times, often with prominent religious ideals determining the course of political thought. Is populism, then, the source of politics in religion, or does political theology beat at the heart of populism? 

In this episode, Dr. Ulrich Schmiedel, Lecturer in Theology, Politics and Ethics at the University of Edinburgh, and Dr. Joshua Ralston, Reader in Christian-Muslim Relations at the School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh, help listeners find answers to these questions with respect to Europe and America through a discussion of their book "The Spirit of Populism: Political Theologies in Polarized Times."

Guest: Dr. Joshua Ralston and Dr. Ulrich Schmiedel
Host: Leigh Giangreco 

Dr Selina Stone is Tutor and Lecturer in Theology at St Mellitus College in London. Her doctorate was on ‘Holy Spirit, Holy Bodies?: Pentecostalism, Pneumatology and the Politics of Embodiment’. Dr Stone’s research and teaching focus on the themes of politics, power and social justice, which she began exploring as a practitioner while working as a community organiser and programme director at the Centre for Theology and Community from 2013-2017. She is a sought-after speaker and consultant, and from 2021-22 is leading a research project on the wellbeing of UK Minority Ethnic clergy in the Church of England, funded by the Clergy Support Trust.

More about Selina HERE.

Has anything we make been interesting, useful or fruitful for you? You can support us by becoming a Fellow Traveller on our Patreon page HERE.

The third of a series on the Sermon on the Mount. In this episode we focus on Matthew 5:17-26 and discuss how Christ himself fulfills the law, how we can apply the difficult to translate word "raca" to how we treat each other, and what we can learn from Jesus's reference to "Gehenna."

Thanks to Jon and the Dig Deeper team of St Luke's Church for allowing us to release these recordings!

Has anything we make been interesting, useful or fruitful for you? You can support us by becoming a Fellow Traveller on our Patreon page HERE.

Conversations in Atlantic Theory is a podcast dedicated to books and ideas generated from and about the Atlantic world. In collaboration with the Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, these conversations explore the cultural, political, and philosophical traditions of the Atlantic world, ranging from European critical theory to the black Atlantic to sites of indigenous resistance and self-articulation, as well as the complex geography of thinking between traditions, inside traditions, and from positions of insurgency, critique, and counter-narrative.

This discussion is with Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois. He has published widely in popular and academic outlets on theology, political theory, and philosophy, with particular emphasis on politics and the history of Christian thought. Adam has authored ten books, including recent works The Prince of this World in 2016 and Neoliberalism’s Demons in 2018, both with Stanford University Press, and 2020’s Agamben’s Philosophical Trajectory with Edinburgh University Press. His new book, which is our occasion for conversation today, is titled What is Theology? Christian Thought and Contemporary Life, published in late-2021 by Fordham University Press.

Jemar Tisby, author of the NYT bestseller The Color of Compromise, explains the complicity and compromise of American Christians; the narrative war that confederate monuments wage (and how they were erected much later than you might think); the ugly theological justifications of racism and the shameful history of Christian white supremacy; the fraught project of selectively naming heroes and villains and then memorializing them; and the practical problem of how to go forward rightly from this moment of increased attention to racial injustice.

Get Jemar Tisby's book! The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

Show Notes

• "the North won the Civil War, but the south won the narrative war." - Bryan Stevenson
• The birth of Jim Crow in the Redemption Era – white people taking back the South
• Monuments as reassertion of white supremacy
• The theological significance of the 'Redemption Era'
• Separation of Church and State as a disguise for racism
• The Bible as justification text
• Matthew 6:24 and“You can't serve God and money”
• Problematic historical heroes and the desire for heroes today
• Should we be putting slave holders on pedestals?
• Can we instead honor those who held America to its noble ideals?
• What kind of future can we hope for?
• What confession can look like in communities
• Theologically unpacking repair
• Creative repair
• 2020 and what happened with voting rights
• Christians and reluctance to vote
• What do we do now? Awareness, Relationships, Commitment
• Jesus Christ and relationality
• Relationships as necessary but not sufficient
• Commitment to stand up to racial inequalities

Production Notes

• This podcast featured author and historian Jemar Tisby
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Editorial and Production Assistance by Annie Trowbridge
• 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

Jared Byas is the co-host of The Bible For Normal People podcast and the author of Love Matters More. But we hardly talk about any of those things and instead get stuck into a conversation about power, authenticity, and staying positive in a toxic world! Nietzsche gets name-dropped and Kierkegaard makes an appearance or three.

You can find Jared's podcasts and books HERE.

Has anything we make been interesting, useful or fruitful for you? You can support us by becoming a Fellow Traveller on our Patreon page HERE.

Democracy in America and abroad is under threat. Authoritarian regimes, nationalisms of many stripes, a loss sense of the value of democratic participation among younger generations, and a growing cynicism and suspicion of our neighbors all threaten freedom and flourishing. In this episode, Miroslav Volf, Marilynne Robinson, Charles Taylor, Kevin Lau, and Andrew Kwok comment on what makes or breaks democracy around the world. NOTE: For the Life of the World is running highlights, readings, lectures, and other best-of features until May 1, 2022, when we'll be back with new conversations.

Show Notes

• The concern is with healing our divided country and Church
• How former president Trump’s false allegations of electoral fraud led to violence at the Capitol
• Naming wrongdoing for what it is 
• “At the heart of the current effort to deny and overturn the results of the presidential election is the wounded pride of a man”
• “Many Americans have taken his lie to be their truth. Sadly, but unsurprisingly, among them are many who call themselves Christians.”
• ‘Jesus 2020’
• The theological dimension of these events
• “The salvation (Jesus) offers is not the success of your political candidate or the realization of your national dream”
• Each of us must ask, what will we do with our fear and anger? 
• “We must commit firmly to truth even, and especially when it hurts our pride when we lose”
• “Commitment to the truth is never at odds with love of neighbor.”
• How suspicion has disconnected us from reality, and each other 
• There is something ‘spiritually dead’ about our political climate
• Do young people care about democracy? 
• “Some people might say, well, if we need to choose between prosperity and democracy, we are going to choose prosperity”
• A democracy based on ‘the wealthiest culture that ever lived on earth’
• Democracy’s capacity for great integrity
• “There is no other way of trying to tap this potential that exists in human beings other than democracy.” – Marilynne Robinson
• What are the cultural conditions of democracy? 
• Human beings demand our respect 
• The relationship between human sacrality and democracy 
• Kevin Lau and Andrew Kwok on their hopes for tomorrow from the perspective of Hong Kong Christians
• “For non-western Christians, we always think that democracy is an outcome of Christian spirituality.” 
• The need for internal peace within Christianity
• Healing memory
• “You have to hold on tight to your identity as a beloved child of God”
• Not letting affliction sway you from your true identity
• Only then can you face your memory, and reality 

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Miroslav Volf, Marilyn Robinson, Charles Taylor, Kevin Lau, and Andrew Kwok
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Editorial and Production Assistance by 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

Mark Charles is the son of a Navajo father and a Dutch-American mother. He is an activist, speaker, and author on Native American issues. In 2019, Mark published "Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery" with co-author Prof. Soong-Chan Rah. In 2020 he was an independent candidate for President of the United States. 

If everyone in America who called themselves a Christian was actually a follower of the Way of Jesus, Mark would be the President right now.

All about Mark and his books HERE.

More about Mark's campaign HERE.

Has anything we make been interesting, useful or fruitful for you? You can support us by becoming a Fellow Traveller on our Patreon page HERE.

Miroslav Volf and Evan Rosa consider audience questions and feedback about hopes and fears going into 2022. A reflective conversation about politics and theology, the aims of theological writing, suffering and the problem of evil, the loss of the middle ground in our polarized era (and Miroslav questions whether "middle" is even a Christian category), the primordial goodness of the world and seeing suffering with one eye squinted; and whether theology is for the religious only, or indeed, for the life of the world. NOTE: For the Life of the World will run highlights, readings, lectures, and other best-of features until May 1, 2022, when we'll be back with new conversations.

• Finding light in darkness: “how do we find and recognize the moments of of light?” - Miroslav Volf
• Primordial goodness, positivity more powerful than negativity
• “Where the light gets in” Leonard Cohen
• WWII and joy in times of darkness
• "The beauty before God of the singer who doesn’t know how to sing" - Chrysostom
• Josef Pieper, Only the Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation 
• “A writer is his life.” – Hannah Arendt 
• The writing process as a spiritual exercise: “What are our true aspirations?” 
• “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means, what I want and what  I fear.” - Joan Didion
• Writing in relation to reading
• “There are those who write books and there are those who read them.” – Paul Tillich
• Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society
• Our cultural problem of “struggling to achieve in competitive environments”
• Drew Collins, The Unique and Universal Christ, Refiguring the Theology of Religions
• Oliver Dyer, Homo Novus
• Paul Bloom, The Sweet Spot, The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning
• The idea of the pleasure of pain and suffering
• Martin Luther, Carl Barth, and Jurgen Moltmann as sources of inspiration
• Keith DeRose, Horrendous Evils
• The course “The Problem of Evil” cotaught by Miroslav Volf and Keith DeRose
• The forms of resilience that are embedded in the Christian faith in the face of suffering 
• The relationship between Christianity and suffering 
• “faith can both emerge and be extremely alive in situations that when you step back, you might think would disprove faith.” Miroslav Volf 
• Miroslav’s father finds faith as a Prisoner of War
• "I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing." Flannery O’Connor
• Not being ‘too impressed’ by the negative 
• The relationship between the Church and polarized America 
• “tend to the beauty of the world within do not let the circumstances encroach upon the integrity of the self.” Miroslav Volf 
• The loss of the political middle ground 
• “Christians are unreliable allies” Ron Williams 
• The political middle ground versus the political common ground
• Nationalism and the Church in 2022 
• Resisting the notion of a political Christianity 
• Resisting the return to Christendom 
• "is theology for the religious only, or is such a way of thinking obsolete?"
• The lack of a designated sacred space 
• An orientation towards God as a secular reality, a worldly reality 
• This is the 100th episode, Miroslav looks back. Some favorites: 
  • “Charles Taylor
  • Marilynne Robinson 
  • Chris Wiman
  • Willie Jennings
  • Carrie Day
• " Ignore these walls.” Yvonne Mamarede of Zimbabwe

Production Notes

• This podcast featured theologian Miroslav Volf
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Martin Chan, Nathan Jowers, 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

The full video for "I moved from one South Africa to another" can be found HERE

Common Hymnal is HERE

More about Naomi Tutu HERE

Has anything we make been interesting, useful or fruitful for you? You can support us by becoming a Fellow Traveller on our Patreon page HERE.

Magical thinking has not disappeared from the modern political imagination. Politics is not called the ‘dark arts’ for nothing. Wherever one finds groups and individuals intent on forcing their agenda through the system, silencing their opponents, or decimating their foes with lethal violence, one finds shades of black magic. In service of getting what they want, who among us is not averse to manipulating boardroom membership, stacking church, charity or community organisations with the ‘right’ people, participating in party putsches or enacting ideology purges? Who has not abrogated their responsibility, their voice, their resources or their moral conscience to some promising leader striding across a flag strewn stage, accepting worship and offering the world? Richard Beck joins Stephen Backhouse and guests to talk about the launch of Stephen's new YoHo Journal "Black Magic in White Houses". As befitting a bunch of theology pirates, there is a language warning!

You can purchase a copy of the journal, or subscribe to the series HERE.  For a 10% discount use the code TENT10 at checkout.

More from Richard Beck HERE.  More about the Yoho Journals and Unfiold Media HERE.

Has anything we make been interesting, useful or fruitful for you? You can support us by becoming a Fellow Traveller on our Patreon page HERE.