What happens when an ancient discipline built to remake the self in the context of a way of life and normative map gets sold back to us as lifehacking for stress relief and optimization?

Experimental psychologist Miguel Farias, co-author of The Buddha Pill and founding director of the Brain, Belief, and Behaviour Lab at Coventry University, has spent two decades studying what meditation actually does to people, and what modern appropriation has forgotten about ancient tradition.

“The possibilities of self-deception are endless. … The mind is clever, so you have to move beyond that level of cleverness.”

In this episode with Evan Rosa, Farias returns to the oldest question in the contemplative traditions: What is this self, and how might it change? He moves from the Delphic command to “know thyself,” through the charioteer of Plato and the Katha Upanishad, to Teresa of Ávila’s interior castle and the delights of prayer that arrive as gift rather than achievement. Along the way he argues that modern meditation, including much Western Buddhist practice, rests on a naive confidence that we can do this alone, when nearly every tradition insists on the opposite: you need guides, community, and a map, because our capacity to fool ourselves runs deep.

Together they discuss why insight alone rarely changes anyone, the difference between change and transformation, how cognitive psychology misread Pascal’s reasons of the heart, and the paradox of rigorous self-mastery practiced in order to let go. They also take up the question of Freud’s lasting relevance, mindfulness as a placating opiate rather than a rupture of conformity, why hours of daily meditation can coexist with selfishness, suffering as fuel for transformation rather than something merely to soothe, Francis of Assisi’s gratitude for Sister Death, and what a seeker without a tradition’s map can do when meditation stirs up more than expected. The conversation closes on Ezekiel’s promise of a heart of flesh in place of a heart of stone, a week spent caring for the sick at Lourdes, and the claim that sudden awakenings come more often from encounters with other people than from sitting alone.

Episode Highlights

• ”Here you do indeed have a major difference between all these spiritual traditions and modern meditation, including Western Buddhist meditation, which is very new in the sense that it has this exceedingly naive idea that you can do this by yourself.”
• ”No, no, no, no, do not trust yourself. That’s actually a major thing. You need other people… the possibilities of self-deception are endless.”
• ”You can meditate for 23 hours a day and have all these wonderful, blissful experiences. And then for the one hour that you’re not meditating, you can be the most selfish bastard on earth.”
• ”The mind is clever, so you have to move beyond that level of cleverness. And in many, many ways, what’s the best thing that meditation is doing for many people today is to help them learn how to unlearn many of the stupid things we have learned.”
• ”You exert this astonishing level of control so that you can entirely let go of it.”
• ”Now I tell my colleagues who do mindfulness, the way to hell is paved with good intentions. There’s a deep wisdom in this.”
• ”What these traditions… are talking about is really the transformational possibility of suffering. How suffering can be a tool, can be an energy, can be an oil, fuel for something deep.”
• ”If you start moving across too many wells, because you’re thirsty and you’re looking for water, if you move from well to well… and as you just sip from it, you may end up dying of thirst.”
• ”Most tales we have of sudden enlightenment are not the outcome of meditation, they’re the outcome of encounters with others.”
• ”What matters is that your heart is pure. It is a heart of flesh. It is a heart that allows light in. It is not a heart of stone.”

About Miguel Farias
Miguel Farias is an experimental psychologist, associate professor, and founding director of the Brain, Belief, and Behaviour Lab at Coventry University. He studied psychology and psychotherapy at the University of Lisbon before earning his doctorate in experimental psychology at Oxford, where he lectured. He co-wrote, with Catherine Wikholm, ”The Buddha Pill: Can Meditation Change You?” and is lead editor of ”The Oxford Handbook of Meditation.” His research spans belief, ritual, pilgrimage, and meditation, including the first randomized controlled trial of yoga and meditation in prisons. In 2026 he launched ”The Buddha Pill Podcast,” a documentary series on meditation.

Special thanks to Steve Porter and the Martin Institute for Christianity & Culture at Westmont College. For more information visit https://www.westmont.edu/about/institutes-and-centers/martin-institute.

Made possible in part by the Templeton World Charities Foundation

Helpful Links and Resources

• Miguel Farias website: https://miguelfarias.co.uk/
• Miguel Farias, Coventry University research profile: https://www.coventry.ac.uk/research/researchers/dr-miguel-farias/
• The Buddha Pill: Can Meditation Change You?, by Miguel Farias and Catherine Wikholm: https://www.amazon.com/Buddha-Pill-Can-Meditation-Change/dp/1786782219
• The Oxford Handbook of Meditation, edited by Miguel Farias, David Brazier, and Mansur Lalljee: https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/40700
• The Buddha Pill Podcast, Part 1, via Templeton World Charity Foundation: https://www.templetonworldcharity.org/blog/the-buddha-pill-with-miguel-farias-part1-what-is-meditation
• The Interior Castle, by Teresa of Ávila (Christian Classics Ethereal Library): https://www.ccel.org/ccel/teresa/castle2.html
• Pascal’s Pensées (Project Gutenberg): http://www.gutenberg.org/files/18269/18269-h/18269-h.htm
• Canticle of the Creatures, by Francis of Assisi (Franciscan Friars): https://friars.us/article/2025/01/11/franciscans-celebrate-800th-anniversary-of-canticle-of-the-creatures

Show Notes

• Colossians, Freud, and the old self
• Know yourself: the Delphic inscription behind philosophy and religion
• Plato and the Katha Upanishad on the charioteer and the horses
• Not a perennialist: where the Buddha departed from his Hindu context
• Embodied ascetic practices for mastering the passions
• Teresa of Ávila’s Interior Castle: https://www.ccel.org/ccel/teresa/castle2.html
• Delights of prayer, and what effort achieves versus what arrives as gift
• Pascal’s reasons of the heart, misread by cognitive psychology
• A Thai temple advertising willpower, with an inner sanctuary for asking grace
• Why the traditions distrust solo practice and insist on guides and community
• A Hindu priestess on long hours of meditation coexisting with selfishness
• Insight versus assimilation
• Change versus transformation
• Unlearning what a clever, overeducated mind has absorbed
• Conformity and obedience in the most individualistic culture
• The paradox of rigorous self-control practiced so control can be surrendered, the margin where real creativity and uniqueness begin
• Thérèse of Lisieux’s garden of saints against spiritual monoculture
• Freud taught in Oxford literature degrees, not psychology
• Therapeutic meditation as placebo or opiate rather than a rupture of conformity
• Why alleviating suffering and being transformed by it are different goals, with Christianity treating suffering as fuel for drawing closer to God
• Francis of Assisi’s Canticle and gratitude for Sister Death: https://friars.us/article/2025/01/11/franciscans-celebrate-800th-anniversary-of-canticle-of-the-creatures
• An unsettled atheist after a retreat, and an Iranian exile angry at religion
• Moving from well to well without drinking deeply
• Enlightenment through encounters with others, not solitary sitting
• Ezekiel’s heart of stone and heart of flesh
• A first week caring for the sick at Lourdes and a heart slowly exercised into new sensitivity

#ForTheLifeOfTheWorld #Meditation #Mindfulness #Contemplation #ChristianSpirituality #PsychologyOfReligion #TeresaOfAvila #SpiritualFormation #Podcast

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Miguel Farias
• Special thanks to Steve Porter and the Martin Institute for Christianity & Culture at Westmont College
• Made possible in part by the Templeton World Charities Foundation
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Noah Senthil
• 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 took Odysseus ten years to sail home from Troy to Ithaca; we can fly the same distance in about an hour. But faster travel hasn't brought us any closer to home. We can know more, do more, and connect more than ever, and yet our ability to belong to our own reality seems to be shrinking. Philosopher Ian Marcus Corbin, who teaches at Harvard Medical School and directs Harvard's Public Culture Project, takes up that paradox in his new book, To Arrive Where We Started: Belonging in the Modern World. The title comes from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, and Corbin reads Eliot's lines as something like a mission statement for humanity: the point of the journey is not to escape reality or optimize our way around it, but to truly belong to it.

In this episode with Evan Rosa, Corbin unpacks why so many of us feel, as Rilke put it, not really at home in our interpreted world, and why technology may leave us suffering too little to live out the old mythic lessons of departure and return. Together they discuss why coming home first requires a breaking, from the Lakota vision quest to Eliot's apophatic poetry, and what it means for a world to decay, leaving people with no past and no future, whether their culture has been devastated or they are being raised on ten-second clips. They also explore what Corbin calls “ownerism,” the high fences and heated pools we build when the world stops feeling like home, along with contempt for the world, collapsing birth rates, and the dream of escaping the planet, to Mars or into the metaverse. Along the way, Corbin draws on Simone Weil's wager that we could not be born at a better time than when we have lost everything, and on Father Zosima's call in Dostoevsky to love all of God's creation, every leaf and every ray of light, as a way back into belonging.

Episode Highlights

• "For me, feeling like I belong in my world and I understand it and I fit it's never been a simple thing, and I've always had the sense that this is something I was questing towards."
• "That's either a world in decay or that's a world that hasn't had the chance to get fully formed in the first place. And I think that's an incredibly strange and dangerous place to be."
• "Maybe it takes you 10 years to get back to Ithaca or whatever. But… to be a young person striking out into the adult world with very little sense of what matters to you or who you are or where you come from, gosh… I wouldn't trade with them."
• "It looks to me honestly like a society hurtling. And I don't know what we're hurtling towards, but we're hurtling. And like with scant ability to look up and ask, 'Well, is that where we wanna go?'"
• "The world is not a home to us, right? It is this empty, cruel thing. So the best I can do is throw up some really high fences, get a nice heated pool, right? Get a nice security system."
• "We can't just produce and promulgate whatever the consumer will click on because I am a weak man, and I will click on things, right, that aren't in the long run good for me."
• "Take a good teacher who cares a lot and take one really good book and 12 kids and put them in a room with no distractions and no telephones… and my goodness, you'll have the most transformative and beautiful experience of learning and community you could hope for."
• "Every good thing around you will die, as will you. And you have to be strong enough to stand there and take that punch, right?"
• "Who's the crazy one here?… I sound woo-woo, but the system that I'm pushing back against is kinda suicidal."

About Ian Marcus Corbin

Ian Marcus Corbin is a philosopher on the neurology faculty at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, director of Harvard's Public Culture Project, and an instructor at the HMS Center for Bioethics. His first book, "To Arrive Where We Started: Belonging in the Modern World," was published by Yale University Press in 2026. He studied politics, religion, and philosophy at Gordon College, Oxford, Yale, and Boston College, and has written for The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Plough. Before all that, he founded and ran a contemporary art gallery in Boston's South End.

Helpful Links and Resources

• To Arrive Where We Started: Belonging in the Modern World, by Ian Marcus Corbin: https://www.amazon.com/Arrive-Where-We-Started-Belonging/dp/0300263627
• Ian Marcus Corbin's website: https://www.ianmarcuscorbin.com/about
• Ian Marcus Corbin on Substack: https://ianmarcuscorbin.substack.com/
• The Public Culture Project at Harvard: https://artsandhumanities.fas.harvard.edu/public-culture-project
• Radical Hope Retrospective, an interview with Jonathan Lear: https://socialconcerns.nd.edu/virtues/magazine/radical-hope-retrospective-an-interview-with-jonathan-lear/
• Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot: https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/four-quartets-t-s-eliot/237356

Show Notes

• Four Quartets and Duino Elegies
• Belonging as a lifelong, never-finished quest
• Apophatic breaking: old certainties collapsing so something new can be seen
• Lakota vision quest: fasting, sleeplessness, and a vision the elders help interpret into an adult role in the tribe
• Rites of passage and the communal structure that catches you afterward
• Smartphones, rural Uganda, and the lure of the city
• Crow people, cultural collapse, and Jonathan Lear's Radical Hope
• Radical Hope Retrospective, an interview with Jonathan Lear: https://socialconcerns.nd.edu/virtues/magazine/radical-hope-retrospective-an-interview-with-jonathan-lear/
• Simone Weil on being born at the right time
• World decay
• Critiques of Rawlsian liberalism from Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre
• Survey data on young adults lacking meaning and purpose
• Ten-second clips, endless takedowns, and the struggle to form convictions worth dying for
• Wittgenstein's rough ground
• Meme culture: real ingenuity inside a nihilistic vacuum
• Home as the place one starts from, and a generation sent out without one
• Odysseus and the archetypal departure and return
• Progress as a stand-in for providence
• Falling birth rates and worldwide pessimism about the future
• Rilke and oikophilia
• Contemptus mundi and odium mundi
• Mars and the metaverse as twin escape routes from Earth
• Hans Jonas on a natural world emptied of care
• Ownerism: fences, heated pools, and a paranoid intuition of scarcity
• Black Elk in New York City
• Consumerism as a life lived in anticipation
• Iris Marion Young and the myth of the calculating, self-made individual
• Dostoevsky's Zosima and loving every leaf
• One good teacher, one good book, twelve students, no phones
• Learning to look at death and finitude without turning away
• Piety toward the places and moments we are given
• Graduates booing AI boosterism at commencement, and a generation that may refuse the deal on offer

#Belonging #Alienation #Philosophy #MeaningCrisis #TechnologyAndSociety #TSEliot #FaithAndCulture #ForTheLifeOfTheWorld #Podcast #Yale #Harvard

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Ian Marcus Corbin
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Noah Senthil
• 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

Everything is “maxxed” right now, and the news cycle in particular seems to be historymaxxing, insisting that things have never been worse than they are now. And the threats are real, from AI and global warming to election integrity—foreign affairs gone wrong, and violence abroad, in our homes, and in our schools. But the news maxxes us on fear, and so do politicians and corporations, because they want us to do something. If theologian Lee C. Camp is right, history was already maxed at the incarnation, and it came through a subversive way of life: humble, compassionate, at times angry, but radical and scandalous all the same. Camp, author of Scandalous Witness: A Little Political Manifesto for Christians and founder and host of the nationally syndicated podcast and radio show No Small Endeavor, argues that the idolatry of the nation state, and even the effort to legislate Christian morality and values into a political movement, is a subversion of Christianity.

“I think people will better understand Christianity. They stop thinking about it as a religion and think of it more as an interpretation of human history.”

In this episode with Evan Rosa, Camp revisits the newly released edition of the book, with a new preface, and makes the case that stories and history, far more than rational argument, are what change how we see the world. Together they discuss what it means to be formed by history and by story, the early twentieth-century Protestant roots of Christian nationalism, Christian values as a parody of Christianity, and the difference between bearing witness and wielding power. They also take up the gravedigger dilemma, the irony of fearful people bringing about the very decline they dread, and what it means to be a neighbor across ideological difference, with stops along the way at a firebombed bus in Camp's native Alabama, a row of Confederate gravestones in his hometown cemetery, and Eboo Patel's account of rival fire departments in Mostar.

Episode Highlights

• "as conservatives increasingly get swept up into the American political moment, there's this new kind of idolatry, I think, of the nation state."
• "I generally find the whole Christian values movement destructive to Christianity … when you talk about you're wanting to prioritize certain so-called values and then by hook or by crook, you do whatever you need to to try to get those propagated. You've subverted Christianity."
• "I think people will better understand Christianity. They stop thinking about it as a religion and think of it more as an interpretation of human history."
• "we believe that death has been overcome by life. That hostility has been overcome by love. That the way even of love of enemies has trounced upon all of the handmaidens of death."
• "those who are insisting, no, we wanna bring Christianity back to the public square. By and large may be doing much, much more damage than the secularists ever were able to do to Christianity."
• "When you show up with curiosity in a public space it's remarkable what kinds of beautiful moments can occur."
• "that one story, you know, opened up a huge vista to me of like, what have I been blind to? What's been going on that I've not paid any attention to?"
• "We can act as if we are not shaped by historical time, place, location, historical contingency, but that just makes us blind to it because we are, and that's just what it means to be human."
• "a lot of those are seen as scandalous because we've forgotten what Christianity is … we're screwing up right and left because we have refused to take seriously the basics of scripture and the basics of the Christian story."
• "you are my neighbor. Regardless of what you claim about the identity of Jesus or the identity of, of Muhammad, you are my neighbor. And I owe to you love and I owe to you respect and I owe to you hospitality."

About Lee C. Camp

Lee C. Camp is the creator and host of No Small Endeavor, a podcast and radio show exploring what it means to live a good life. For 27 years he taught theology and ethics at Lipscomb University in Nashville, concluding his tenure as a Distinguished Faculty Fellow. He is the author of "Mere Discipleship," "Who Is My Enemy?," and "Scandalous Witness: A Little Political Manifesto for Christians," now in paperback with a new preface. An Alabamian with a PhD in moral theology from Notre Dame, he shares life with his wife, Laura, three adult sons, and a havapoo named Otis.

Helpful Links and Resources

• Scandalous Witness: A Little Political Manifesto for Christians, by Lee C. Camp: https://www.eerdmans.com/9780802877352/scandalous-witness/
• Mere Discipleship: Radical Christianity in a Rebellious World, by Lee C. Camp: https://bakerpublishinggroup.com/books/mere-discipleship-2nd-edition/229392
• Lee C. Camp's site, featuring the Scandalous Witness online course: https://www.leeccamp.com/scandalous
• No Small Endeavor, Lee C. Camp's podcast and public radio show: https://www.nosmallendeavor.com/
• No Small Endeavor on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nosmallendeavor/
• Eyes on the Prize, the civil rights documentary series, PBS American Experience: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/eyesontheprize/
• The Democratization of American Christianity, Nathan O. Hatch (Yale University Press): https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-300-05060-8

Show Notes

• Everything maxxed: a news cycle history-maxing on fear
• History maxxed at the incarnation
• Scandalous Witness, begun after 2016, now in a new edition with a new preface
• A Christian voice beyond partisan left and right
• Early 20th-century Protestant liberalism and Christian nationalism
• Woodrow Wilson's post-presidency tour casting America as the world's savior
• 19th-century Restorationist leaders: pacifist, anti-militarist, critics of robber barons and Jim Crow Christianity
• Idolatry of the nation state
• Religions of morality vs. religions of power
• Christian values as a subversion of Christianity
• Christianity as an interpretation of human history
• The kingdom of God breaking into history
• Bearing witness vs. wielding power, from the Moral Majority to MAGA
• The gravedigger dilemma: defenders of public Christianity eroding respect for it
• Fear bringing about what it dreads
• Individual vs. system
• Broken friendships, churches, families; prudence over argument
• Hosting No Small Endeavor: hospitality and curiosity amid disagreement
• Hume, reason, and the passions
• Humans as creatures shaped by story
• A seminary screening of Eyes on the Prize, a firebombed bus near his Alabama childhood home, and a new, systemic view of faith
• Nietzsche and the philosopher's missing historical sense
• A teenage argument over baptism with a Southern Baptist history teacher
• Alexander Campbell, John Locke, and the myth of standing outside history: The Democratization of American Christianity, Nathan O. Hatch: https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-300-05060-8
• Two rows of Confederate gravestones in the hometown cemetery
• The fifteen propositions, read aloud
• Provocative, not novel: basic Christianity forgotten
• Letting familiar convictions feel strange again
• Classical political liberalism and its relative goods
• Mostar, Bosnia, and fire departments divided by faith
• Neighbor-love regardless of creed

#LeeCamp #ScandalousWitness #ChristianNationalism #FaithAndPolitics #PoliticalTheology #ChristianWitness #NoSmallEndeavor #Pluralism #ForTheLifeOfTheWorld

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Lee Camp
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Noah Senthil
• 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

Human growth can seem to just happen—genes, care, and nurture set each of us on a trajectory across the lifespan. But how do people actually grow toward wholeness, and is virtue even the point?

Psychologists Liz Hall and Todd Hall of Biola University’s Rosemead School of Psychology, coauthors of Relational Spirituality, bring psychological science and Christian theology together to answer. The conversation grows out of the Martin Institute’s Practice Unto Virtue project, which gathered theologians, psychologists, philosophers, and biblical scholars at Westmont College in spring 2026 to ask how Christian practices like prayer, fasting, and service form Christlike virtue.

In this episode, Liz and Todd Hall explain a relational account of human transformation: We are formed in relationship, grow through relationship, and relationship is where growth is headed. Their answer to the workshop’s question is direct—virtue alone is not the telos of spiritual growth. The goal is intimacy with God, union with Christ, and practices and virtues matter because they grow out of that union, support it, and make more room for it.

They discuss implicit, gut-level relational knowledge, attachment filters and relational contrast experiences, and why willpower, spiritual highs, intellectualizing, and spiritual bypass so often leave the deepest layer of the self untouched. They also take up whether suffering can lead to growth or whether we grow in spite of it, drawing on Crystal Park’s meaning-making model, Liz’s own cancer diagnosis, the practice of lament, Eleonore Stump on sin as inner fragmentation, and Gordon Smith’s picture of human agency nested within God’s love.

With special thanks to Steve Porter and the Martin Institute for Christianity and Culture at Westmont College, and to the Templeton World Charity Foundation, which helped fund the Practice Unto Virtue workshop.

Episode Highlights

• ”What we’re aiming for is not a self-improvement project of little aspects of ourself that we’re building up like a tower of Legos or something.” (Liz Hall)
• ”I wanna be very careful here not to say that suffering is what changes people … because that’s making something that’s intrinsically bad into maybe something good. We don’t wanna go there. But suffering provides an opportunity.” (Liz Hall)
• ”Because of how intrinsically relational we are, the pathways to change are also relational. So the goal is relational. The pathways are relational.” (Liz Hall)
• ”It’s not suffering per se that causes growth. It’s the processing of suffering in a particular way in the context of relationship.” (Todd Hall)
• ”Our agency operates completely inside the circle of God’s love and action and is a response to it and a participation in the life and love of the Trinitarian God.” (Todd Hall)
• ”It’s not just to become a better person for the sake of being a better person, which often reduces down to oh, that’s gonna promote my own happiness … No, it’s for the goal of deeper intimacy with Christ and union with Christ.” (Todd Hall)
• ”They have limitations and sometimes I don’t like what comes out of their mouth … but all of that is grist for the mill, isn’t it?” (Liz Hall)

About Liz Hall and Todd Hall

Liz Hall and Todd Hall are professors of psychology at Biola University’s Rosemead School of Psychology and coauthors of Relational Spirituality: A Psychological-Theological Paradigm for Transformation. Liz, a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, researches suffering, meaning-making, and lament; her newest book, with Kelly Kapic and Jason McMartin, is ”When the Journey Hurts.” Todd, a faculty affiliate of the Harvard Human Flourishing Program, is the author of The Connected Life and founder of the Relational Spirituality Academy, which trains Christian leaders in relational approaches to formation. They live in Southern California and have two adult sons.

Helpful Links and Resources

• When the Journey Hurts, Kelly M. Kapic, Liz Hall, and Jason McMartin: https://ivpress.com/when-the-journey-hurts
• Relational Spirituality, Todd W. Hall with M. Elizabeth Lewis Hall: https://ivpress.com/relational-spirituality
• The Connected Life, Todd W. Hall: https://www.ivpress.com/the-connected-life
• Dr. Liz Hall, website and resources on lament and meaning-making: https://www.drlizhall.com
• Relational Spirituality Academy, Todd Hall’s training site: https://www.relationalspirituality.co/
• Practice Unto Virtue, Martin Institute Christian Formation Workshop 2026 sessions (Conversatio Divina): https://conversatio.org/collections/christian-formation-workshop-2026-practice-unto-virtue-the-role-of-christian-practices-in-virtue-formation/
• Crystal L. Park, ”Meaning Making Following Trauma” (Frontiers in Psychology): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8984472
• Eleonore Stump, Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Suffering: https://academic.oup.com/book/12824
• Gordon T. Smith, Called to Be Saints: An Invitation to Christian Maturity: https://ivpress.com/called-to-be-saints

Show Notes

• Integrating psychology and theology
• Psychological science and Scripture woven into one picture of the person”
• Theology setting the scope of the good life, psychology fleshing it out
• Symptom-level change versus deeper relational transformation
• Implicit relational knowledge
• Growth as expanded capacity for relationship with God and others, not a stack of isolated strengths
• Putting ourselves in the path of change through gratitude exercises and spiritual disciplines
• Controlling change as a way of coping with anxiety and emotional pain
• Misguided approaches: willpower, spiritual highs, intellectualizing, spiritual bypass
• The implicit self and gut-level memory
• Interpersonal neurobiology and affective neuroscience
• Attachment filters from early relationships, running automatically
• Relational contrast experiences as the engine of deep change
• Augustine’s restless heart and a shared human disconnection
• Suffering as accelerant, not a different pathway of change
• Post-traumatic and stress-related growth
• Suffering as opportunity for growth, never good in itself
• When suffering breaks the habitual defenses that kept pain at bay
• Global and situational meaning, discrepancy, and distress
• Crystal L. Park, ”Meaning Making Following Trauma”: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8984472
• A cancer diagnosis and the harder question of trusting God with one’s own children
• Deep growth as identity-disrupting, so resisted even when desired
• Union with Christ as the goal of formation; human agency nested within divine action
• Gordon T. Smith, ”Called to Be Saints”
• Lament, gratitude, and identifying with Christ’s suffering
• Sin as inner fragmentation, and virtue as the healing that frees us for intimacy with God
• Sanctification and intimacy moving in both directions
• God as both context and goal of growth
• Imperfect church communities as raw material for patience and agape love

#ForTheLifeOfTheWorld #SpiritualFormation #RelationalSpirituality #AttachmentTheory #PsychologyAndTheology #Sanctification #Suffering #Lament #ChristianPsychology #Flourishing

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Elizabeth Hall and Todd Hall
• Special thanks to Steve Porter, The Martin Institute for Christianity and Culture at Westmont College, and the Templeton World Charity Foundation
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Noah Senthil
• 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

Technology, Aaron Cline Hanbury suggests, is never a purely neutral tool. But the history of ethical thinking about technology shows that as long as there's been technology, there's been anxiety about it. Or perhaps more accurately, anxiety about what we might do with it. And increasingly, what it might do to us.

A journalist, founding editor of Common Good magazine, and author of Wired for Wonder, Hanbury came of age as the internet entered the home and has spent his career reporting from the places where technology, faith, and everyday life collide. Rather than offering another list of screen-time tips, he asks a deeper question: How do we relate to the things we make?

In this conversation with Evan Rosa, Hanbury wrestles with what it means to be human when the machines we’ve made can do more and more. He criticizes the seduction that we should embrace technology simply because it is inevitable. He explores how connection, efficiency, and unrestrained technological freedom quietly became unquestioned goods, why our powers of attention are eroding in real time, and wonders what it might take—personally, communally, and structurally—to reclaim our humanity through presence, and the rough ground of embodied life.

About Aaron Cline Hanbury

Aaron Cline Hanbury is a writer and editor whose essays and profiles have appeared in The Atlantic and elsewhere. He is the founding editor of the award-winning magazine Common Good and a past editor of RELEVANT. He writes about the places where technology, faith, and ordinary life meet. His book, Wired for Wonder: Dispatches on Technology, Culture, God, and Self, breaks open the tired binary between tech optimists and Luddites in the context of memoir, ethics, journalism, and theology.

Helpful Links and Resources

• Wired for Wonder: Dispatches on Technology, Culture, God, and Self, by Aaron Cline Hanbury: https://www.broadleafbooks.com/store/product/9798889833451/Wired-for-Wonder
• Aaron Cline Hanbury's website: https://aaronclinehanbury.com/
• Aaron Cline Hanbury's Substack: https://aaronclinehanbury.substack.com
• Aaron Cline Hanbury on X: https://x.com/achanbury
• Common Good magazine: https://commongoodmag.com/author/aaron-cline-hanbury/
• Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, Albert Borgmann: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/T/bo23186480.html
• The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt: https://www.anxiousgeneration.com/book
• Hannah Coulter, Wendell Berry's novel: https://www.counterpointpress.com/books/hannah-coulter/

Show Notes

• Anxiety and technology
• Patient zero for life online—coming of age as the internet entered the home
• Low-church tradition, quick to adopt and ask questions later
• Journalism as a front-row seat to three decades of change
• Early adopter or Luddite? Rejecting the spectrum's false ends
• The device paradigm—technology as pattern, not neutral tool
• A hammer's telos, and why misuse cuts against a tool's design
• Made things have a maker—intentions baked into what we build
• The inevitability argument—get on board or get run over
• Resistance is futile? The Borg, Cannes, and defeatism
• Progress as reversion—tobacco bans, ocean dumping, processed-food rollbacks
• Family Guy, satire, and pulling tech ethics out of the esoteric
• The class and income divide the internet promised to erase
• Online radicalization vs the promise of mass education
• Children as the guinea pigs of early adoption
• Chromebooks, daycares, and offloading discomfort onto kids
• Testing tech on the vulnerable—Jonathan Haidt on teen mental health
• Social media vs attention media—commodifying human focus
• The plug-in drug—parents, screens, and pacified kids
• Focused attention and the feeling of being fully alive
• Connection, efficiency, freedom—goods we stopped questioning
• Dunbar's number and the real limits of friendship
• Online ties without public accountability, and bad formation
• Embodiment, particularity, and getting back to the rough ground
• Wendell Berry's Hannah Coulter and attention that lasts: https://www.counterpointpress.com/books/hannah-coulter/
• Skepticism of individual fixes—structure, policy, and church
• Elementary-school parenting and “the bevy of required apps”

#WiredForWonder #AaronClineHanbury #ForTheLifeOfTheWorld #TechnologyAndFaith #AttentionMedia #DigitalMinimalism #ChristianEthics #AIandHumanity #DeviceParadigm

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Aaron Cline Hanbury
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Noah Senthil
• 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

Civic friendship is not a nicety. For self-governing people, it is a necessity. What happens to a democracy when citizens stop seeing each other as citizens at all?

Robert P. George is Princeton’s McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions (and known for his enduring friendship with Cornel West) argues that “the collapse of civic friendship is a catastrophic threat to public life.”

In this bonus segment from his November 2020 conversation with Evan Rosa, Robert George presents the difference between civility and mere ‘politesse; the habit of wrapping our emotions so tightly around our convictions that we assume a posture of infallibility; and the intellectual humility it takes to consider that a political enemy might have something to teach us as a civic friend. They also discuss the courage required to break ranks—George recounts how he and West, from opposite political poles, each found themselves treated as heretics in 2016 for declining to back their respective party’s nominee—and why he urges his students and his own children to cultivate humility, open-mindedness, and courage, knowing exactly what it can cost to stand by a conscientious belief.

Episode Highlights

• ”Civic friendship is actually important for all sorts of policies, but for a self-governing people, for a democratic people, civic friendship is really critically important.”
• ”But if we do, as we are prone to do, wrap our emotions too tightly around our convictions, then we become dogmatists. Then we become unwilling to consider the possibility that we might be wrong and that a critic might be right.”
• ”This is hard, but it takes humility to recognize that I might be wrong, not merely about the less important superficial and more trivial things of life, but I might be wrong even about the most important things.”
• ”Civic friendship, civility is not just politesse … Civility is something deeper. It is genuinely listening to the guy who disagrees with you … listening with an openness to learning, considering whether in fact he might be right.”
• ”You can’t have an open mind unless you have intellectual humility.”
• ”You can become a heretic very fast by breaking ranks, even on a single issue, if the issue was even moderately important.”
• ”So I really encourage my young people … to try to develop the virtues of intellectual humility, open-mindedness, and courage, because sometimes courage is going to be needed.”

About Robert P. George

Robert P. George is the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. A legal philosopher and public intellectual, he has chaired the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and served on the President’s Council on Bioethics and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. His books include ”Making Men Moral,” ”In Defense of Natural Law,” and ”Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth,” and, with Cornel West, ”Truth Matters,” a dialogue on fruitful disagreement. A West Virginia native, he plays bluegrass banjo and guitar.

Helpful Links and Resources

• Civic Friendship, Courageous Humility, and Seeking Truth Together, Episode 38 and the full interview for this clip: https://faith.yale.edu/media/civic-friendship-courageous-humility-and-seeking-truth-together
• Robert P. George’s website: https://robertpgeorge.com/
• Robert P. George on X: https://twitter.com/McCormickProf
• Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth: Law and Morality in Our Cultural Moment, George’s most recent book: https://www.encounterbooks.com/books/seeking-truth-speaking-truth/
• Truth Matters: A Dialogue on Fruitful Disagreement in an Age of Division, by Robert P. George and Cornel West: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Truth-Matters/Robert-P-George/9798888451700
• Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality, George’s best-known scholarly book: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/making-men-moral-9780198260240
• Election of 1800, from the Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia at Monticello: https://www.monticello.org/encyclopedia/election-1800

Show Notes

• Civic friendship: indispensable and necessary for a self-governing people
• Fellow citizens recast as enemies to be defeated and destroyed
• Are elections as existential contests?—with the losing side expecting retaliation, the winning side claiming the norms
• Breakdown near the founding of the Republic
• The election of 1800, incumbent John Adams against Thomas Jefferson: https://www.monticello.org/encyclopedia/election-1800
• Federalists seeing Jeffersonians as carriers of the French Revolution; Jeffersonians seeing Federalists as would-be British monarchists
• Antebellum America: North and South unable to imagine sharing one republic
• Is our identity constructed around belief?
• Emotional investment in conviction as a good thing in itself
• Wrapping emotions too tightly, and the slide into dogmatism
• A practical posture of infallibility
• Disagreement recoded as moral defect, and friendship ruled out
• Intellectual humility as the missing virtue
• Being wrong about the most important things, not just the trivial ones
• Civility as more than politesse
• Listening with an openness to learning, not waiting for a turn to speak
• Honoring the other as a rational creature with something to teach
• Open-mindedness without paralysis
• A conservative and a democratic socialist as frequent interlocutors: https://www.cornelwest.com/about/
• Courage as a civic virtue
• Tribalism in formal institutions and informal friend circles alike
• Becoming a heretic by breaking ranks on a single issue
• Excommunication, suspicion, and the social cost of independent thought
• Two friends at opposite poles, both out of step in 2016
• Counsel to students and to his own children: humility, open-mindedness, courage

#CivicFriendship #IntellectualHumility #Civility #Polarization #RobertPGeorge #CornelWest #FaithAndCulture #ForTheLifeOfTheWorld

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Robert George
• Hosted and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Production assistance and editing by Noah Senthil
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Why don’t more doctors talk about death? Dr. Lydia Dugdale has been asking this question since she was a medical student. She is the Silberberg Professor of Medicine and directs the Center for Clinical Medical Ethics, and two books on how we die, including "The Lost Art of Dying."

"Most medical professionals today are very unpracticed at talking to patients about their mortality," she says.

Not only unpracticed, but even themselves afraid.

In this bonus clip from Episode 232 with Macie Bridge, Dugdale traces the path from that early perplexity on the wards to the ars moriendi, the medieval art of dying, grounded in the idea that dying is part of living, so if you want to die well you have to live well.

Lydia comments on the emergence of palliative care and the way it let physicians hand conversations about death to specialists; the doctor who inherited the priest's old place at the threshold between life and death; the death anxiety clinicians carry without examining; virtue as preparation for dying, and community as the other half of living well; the unrepresented patients of New York City who die alone; and a grumpy old man, hospitalized for 20 years, who wept when she read aloud what she had written about him.

Episode Highlights

• “Most medical professionals today are very unpracticed at talking to patients about their mortality.”
• “we are really the intermediaries between life and death, I'm not saying we're priests, but that used to be the role of the priest. And so it is now the role of the physician.
• “If you want to die well, you have to live well.”
• We have to be all in or we end up like all of these patients here in New York City who have no one that I can reach out to as they're dying.
• “He started weeping and he said, someone finally saw me. Someone finally saw me. I've been in this hospital for 20 years and I didn't think anyone ever saw me.”

About Lydia Dugdale

Lydia Dugdale is a physician and medical ethicist who has spent fifteen years asking why medicine finds death so hard to talk about. She is the Silberberg Professor of Medicine at Columbia, directs the Columbia Center for Clinical Medical Ethics, and co-directs clinical ethics at NewYork-Presbyterian Milstein Hospital, where she still sees patients. She edited "Dying in the Twenty-First Century" and wrote "The Lost Art of Dying," a modern ars moriendi. She trained at the University of Chicago and Yale-New Haven Hospital, holds a master's in ethics from Yale Divinity School, and in 2025 founded the nonprofit Heal the Nation.

Helpful Links and Resources

• “Dying Alone,” the full Episode 232 with Lydia Dugdale and Macie Bridge: https://faith.yale.edu/media/dying-alone
• Lydia Dugdale's website: https://lydiadugdale.com/
• The Lost Art of Dying: Reviving Forgotten Wisdom, Lydia Dugdale's book: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-lost-art-of-dying-ls-dugdale
• Dying in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Lydia Dugdale: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262534598/dying-in-the-twenty-first-century/
• Columbia Center for Clinical Medical Ethics, which Dugdale directs: https://www.vagelos.columbia.edu/departments-centers/columbia-center-clinical-medical-ethics
• Columbia Center for Clinical Medical Ethics on X: https://x.com/columbia_ccme
• Ars moriendi, the medieval art of dying, at the Morgan Library and Museum: https://www.themorgan.org/blog/new-acquisition-ars-moriendi-blockbook
• Ars moriendi block book, 1475, at the Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov/item/2021666798/
• Lydia Dugdale at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/people/lydia-dugdale-md

Show Notes

• Death anxiety in medicine
• Why doctors avoid frank conversations about mortality
• Palliative care's arrival as a discipline, and what it made possible
• Real gains in symptom relief for the sick and the dying
• The unintended cost: death conversations outsourced to specialists
• Clinicians as intermediaries between life and death
• The priest's old place at the threshold, now the physician's
• Nurses at the bedside, doctors calling the shots on treatment
• Existential questions physicians have never worked through
• A colleague who would never tell a patient they were dying, out of her own fear of death
• Digging into how other times and places handled mortality
• Ars moriendi: the medieval genre on the preparation for death
• Illustrated editions made for people who could not read
• Fifteen years and two books spent reviving the art of dying
• Living well as the precondition of dying well
• Virtue as preparation: hope, patience, joy against bitterness and despair
• The role of community in dying well
• New York's unrepresented patients, dying alone
• A reader estranged from his adult children who committed to years of repair after the book
• Relationship as ongoing work: rupture, forgiveness, iron sharpening iron
• A long-hospitalized patient nobody wanted assigned to their team
• Modeling care for young doctors, and being verbally destroyed in front of them
• Loneliness of the neighbor, the colleague, the checkout person
• Practice as the only way to get better at it

#ForTheLifeOfTheWorld #LydiaDugdale #TheLostArtOfDying #ArsMoriendi #MedicalEthics #DyingWell #Loneliness #EndOfLifeCare

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Lydia Dugdale
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Noah Senthil
• 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 were made by a Maker to be makers. Bruce Herman joins Evan Rosa to diagnose the quiet illness of a passive consumer culture that trains us to sit in front of screens and scroll and take, rather than make. “When we’re not making something, we’re not whole. We’re not healthy.“ His cure is stubbornly ordinary: go make a loaf of bread, grab a stick and start carving, make a good meal or a good cocktail for the person visiting you—anything is resistance to this hypnotic, passive culture.

From episode 216 of the podcast, in this segment, Herman traces what it means to receive art not as a consumer but through submission—not master and slave, but subject to subject, that vulnerable openness that lets a poem or a painting change your life. He reflects on making as human wholeness, the difference between art and info-tainment, why suffering can rip us open to beauty (from Walker Percy’s writing to Christian Wiman’s poetry), Rilke’s charge that “you must change your life,“ hospitality as the ultimate act of art, and Herman’s closing counsel to make out of love, not fear.

Episode Highlights

• We are in relationship, and we were made by a Maker to be makers. If we let that go somehow and we become mere consumers, I think we begin to enter into some kind of illness of one sort or another.
• When we’re not making something, we’re not whole. We’re not healthy. And I don’t want to make an idol out of health either, but I do think our culture is unhealthy right now.
• We think of it as, we’re discerning buyers. But the fact is we’re being turned into very passive creatures.
• One of the best things you can do is go make a loaf of bread. Go out and grab a stick and start carving it. Anything is resistance to this sort of hypnotic passive culture.
• If you want to really receive what a poem is communicating, you have to submit to it. You have to let yourself go and enter into what might feel like a bad risk of being changed.
• Not submit in a sense that I’m a master and you’re my slave. It’s more like you’re a subject and I’m a subject. Mutual submission.
• We’re so guarded so much of the time that it takes something catastrophic to open us up again.
• Do away with the nonsense that you’re not an artist. You can’t help it. You were made by a Maker to be a maker. End of story.
• The ultimate act of art is hospitality, where you’re welcoming someone in, to make something beautiful for them.
• Challenge the bad news with a recognition that daily kindnesses are being poured out everywhere, on every street. Don’t give in to fear, because it’s not a basis for anything good.

About Bruce Herman

Bruce Herman is a painter, writer, and educator whose work has been shown in more than 150 exhibitions across the United States and internationally, and held in collections including the Vatican Museums in Rome, the Cincinnati Museum of Fine Arts, and the Grunewald Print Collection of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. He taught at Gordon College for nearly four decades, where he founded the art department and held the Lothlórien Distinguished Chair in Fine Arts. His books include “Through Your Eyes“ and “Ordinary Saints,“ and he was a collaborator on the touring “QU4RTETS“ project with Makoto Fujimura, Christopher Theofanidis, and Jeremy Begbie. His most recent book, “Makers by Nature: Letters from a Master Painter on Faith, Hope, and Art,“ was published by IVP Academic in 2025.

Helpful Links and Resources

• Makers by Nature, Bruce Herman’s 2025 book from IVP Academic: https://www.ivpress.com/makers-by-nature
• Bruce Herman’s website and painting archive: https://www.bruceherman.com
• Bruce Herman, artist bio and background: https://www.bruceherman.com/about
• Archaic Torso of Apollo by Rainer Maria Rilke (“You must change your life“), trans. Stephen Mitchell: https://poets.org/poem/archaic-torso-apollo
• Real Presences by George Steiner, on courtesy and hospitality in art: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/R/bo3684420.html
• Christian Wiman: https://poetryfoundation.org/poets/christian-wiman
• QU4RTETS, the collaborative project on T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: https://www.bruceherman.com/series

Show Notes

• Made to make
• We are in relationship; identity begins there, not in isolation
• Makers by nature—letting the maker-impulse go tips us toward illness, moral, mental, and emotional
• Wholeness and health—the claim that not-making leaves us unwell, without idolizing health
• Consumer culture—the commercial aim to sell, and to keep us passive in front of screens
• Discerning buyers, or passive creatures? The illusion of control while being trained to take
• Screens and scrolling
• Political theater and infotainment—very little real journalism left, mostly consumer entertainment
• Neil Postman and amusing ourselves to death as the frame for the diagnosis
• Making as resistance—bake bread, carve a stick, do anything against the hypnotic pull
• Reception as submission—a word out of fashion, reclaimed away from enslavement
• Mutual submission—the erotic analogy, and desire’s corruption in the sexual sins
• To receive a poem you must risk being changed
• Rilke’s Grecian torso and the charge, you must change your life
• Subject to subject, not master and slave
• Walker Percy’s museum story—a painting that blazed into life, then went quiet
• Bringing a friend to re-enter the original encounter vicariously
• The workman through the skylight—catastrophe reopens what habit had closed
• Guardedness—why it can take suffering to break us open
• Christian Wiman—cancer, poetry, and being ripped open toward receptivity
• You might be changed, and it might not be what you wanted; the risk of real encounter
• Make from love, not fear
• Do away with the nonsense that you’re not an artist
• Everyday making—a loaf, a meal, a good cocktail, hospitality
• Hospitality as the ultimate art; George Steiner’s Real Presences and courtesia
• Beauty can be complex, not merely pretty
• Fear-mongers left and right—and why not to listen
• Daily kindnesses—the neighbor, the shoveled driveway, the half-decent casserole
• Welcome to the festival; let the festival begin

#BruceHerman #MakersByNature #ForTheLifeOfTheWorld #FaithAndArt #TheologyOfMaking #ArtAndFaith #Creativity #Hospitality #MakeNotConsume #YaleFaithAndCulture

For twenty years, Christian Wiman has lived with a rare, incurable cancer. In the fall of 2022, during a stretch when the illness was especially bad, he wrote to his friend and Yale colleague Miroslav Volf: “I don’t know what faith means anymore. I’m a 56-year-old with a pile of books behind me and an experimental bone marrow transplant ahead of me, and I don’t know what faith means.” That letter became the seed of an extended correspondence between the poet and the theologian, now published as Glimmerings: Letters on Faith between a Poet and a Theologian.

In this special collaboration with Arc Magazine, editor Mark Oppenheimer sits down with Volf and Wiman to unpack the letters that grew out of their long friendship and years of walking together through New Haven.

They discuss what it means to love God, why doubt and absence might be constitutive elements of faith and presence rather than its opposite, and how a terminal diagnosis changed what each of them was willing to say and how freely they said it. They also trace the thinkers who shaped their thinking along the way, from Simone Weil’s account of attention to Etty Hillesum’s wartime writing, to Abraham Joshua Heschel’s theology of the prophets, and they wrestle openly with where their understandings of Jesus Christ converge and diverge.

Along the way, Wiman reflects on writing from a hospital room at Massachusetts General, on discovering that his fear was never death itself but the fear of dying without God, and on why grief, not fear, is what remains even after that fear falls away.

Episode Highlights

• I don’t know what faith means anymore. I’m a 56-year-old with a pile of books behind me and an experimental bone marrow transplant ahead of me, and I don’t know what faith means.
• I sometimes find it hard to think what it means to love God. I don’t know how to love God.
• Faith is what matters. Belief seems to me a matter of the institution and ascending to creeds and things like that.
• I think most of my theological thinking is existentially motivated. It’s motivated by the kind of inner logic of the trust in which I’m involved.
• Most of the books that I wrote, I’ve written for myself. I’m one of those writers who doesn’t have an audience.
• There is grace in my life if I can just keep my eyes open enough to see it.
• His mistake in some ways lets him see that the world is right, that there’s a rightness to the world.
• What becomes clear is one’s longing for God. Everything is stripped away and very little else seems to matter.
• What I want most in my life is the presence of God. And I fear dying without that. Just being alone at the moment of death.
• I was worried that he won’t have God in that situation of need because attention might be lacking.

About Miroslav Volf and Christian Wiman

Miroslav Volf is the Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School and founding director of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. He is the author of Exclusion and Embrace, the NYT bestseller Life Worth Living (with Ryan McAnnally-Linz and Matt Croasmun), The Cost of Ambition, and more than twenty other books.

Christian Wiman is the Clement-Muehl Professor of Communication Arts at Yale Divinity School. He has written and edited numerous volumes of poetry. He has lived with a rare blood cancer, Waldenström macroglobulinemia, for more than twenty years, an experience he wrote about in his memoirs My Bright Abyss and Zero at the Bone.

Helpful Links and Resources

• Glimmerings: Letters on Faith between a Poet and a Theologian, the book discussed in this episode: https://bookshop.org/p/books/glimmerings-letters-on-faith-between-a-poet-and-a-theologian-christian-wiman/1a13ad79a59080d1
• Miroslav Volf, faculty bio at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/people/miroslav-volf
• Christian Wiman, faculty bio at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/people/christian-wiman
• Arc: Religion, Politics, Et Cetera, the magazine that co-produced this episode: https://arcmag.org/
• John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis: https://rap.wustl.edu/
• My Bright Abyss, Christian Wiman’s earlier memoir on faith and his cancer diagnosis: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374534370/mybrightabyss/
• Miroslav Volf: Disagreeing With You Feels Like Disagreeing With Myself, a Christianity Today profile of the two friends (by Andrew Hendrixson): https://www.christianitytoday.com/2026/01/miroslav-volf-disagreeing-with-you-like-disagreeing-with-myself-christian-wiman/

Show Notes

• Summer break announcement, past-episode recap
• Special crossover episode with Arc Magazine
• Mark Oppenheimer, Arc’s editor, hosts this conversation
• Origin story: a brief email exchange in fall 2022
• Wiman’s diagnosis, Waldenström macroglobulinemia, and a bone marrow transplant
• Twenty years of friendship, marked by weekly walks in New Haven
• The letter that started it: not knowing what faith means anymore
• What does it mean to love God?
• Faith versus belief: creeds compared to a personal relationship
• Doubt as a constitutive element of trust, not its opposite
• Absence and presence, sorrow and joy, held together
• Theology as existentially motivated rather than academic exercise
• Writing for an audience of one, and how that shapes honesty
• Whether a book contract changes how freely you write
• Simone Weil’s idea that attention is what makes God present
• Disagreement over how central Jesus Christ is to each man’s sense of God
• Volf’s Pentecostal upbringing, Wiman’s Southern Baptist roots
• Volf’s sense of God as behind and underneath, not face to face
• Wiman’s youthful epiphany and a memory of his grandmother’s death
• A misread wildflower, a Richard Wilbur poem, grace found in error
• Shai Held’s blurb and why Jewish thinkers rarely appear in Christian theology
• Etty Hillesum, her wartime diaries, her postcard thrown from the train
• Abraham Joshua Heschel’s influence through Sabbath and The Prophets
• Heschel’s idea that faith is fidelity to the moments you once had it
• A letter written from a hospital room at Massachusetts General
• Miroslav’s fear that his letters carried condescension toward a friend in crisis
• Whether a cancer diagnosis changes the fear of death itself
• Grief, not fear, as what remains once the fear of dying is gone
• How the two friends met: through Volf’s wife’s poetry class
• Letter-writing as a lifelong practice for both men beyond this book

#Glimmerings #MiroslavVolf #ChristianWiman #Faith #Doubt #Theology #YaleDivinitySchool #ArcMagazine

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Christian Wiman and Miroslav Volf with Mark Oppenheimer
• Special thanks to David Sugarman and Arc Magazine
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Noah Senthil
• 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

More than forty years after his twenty-five-year-old son Eric died in a climbing accident, philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff joins Miroslav Volf to revisit the grief behind his classic Lament for a Son and his recent Living with Grief.

“If he was worth loving when alive, he was worth grieving when dead.”

In this episode they reflect together on mourning loss, refusing both the consolations of theodicy and the pressure to move on. Together they discuss owning grief rather than disowning it, lament as a cry that transcends analysis, and the limits of explaining suffering through theodicy. They explore Augustine and Calvin on grief, Karl Barth's “nothingness,” universality hidden in particular sorrow, and the prison classroom where incarcerated men claimed their own grief redemptively.

Episode Highlights

"I could not, and would not, allow it simply to heal."

"If he was worth loving when alive, he was worth grieving when dead."

"In my story I always say: I am one who lost a son. That's part of who I am."

"Children should not die at twenty-five years of age. Nobody should die at twenty-five years of age."

"It was good that I loved Eric. It was worth it. So my grief is worthwhile. And, in this world, love and suffering come together."

About Nicholas Wolterstorff

Nicholas Wolterstorff is the Noah Porter Professor Emeritus of Philosophical Theology at Yale University and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. Born in 1932, he earned his PhD at Harvard and taught philosophy for thirty years at Calvin College before joining Yale in 1989. A leading Christian philosopher, he helped develop Reformed epistemology and co-founded the Society of Christian Philosophers. His books span aesthetics, epistemology, justice, and liturgy, including Lament for a Son (1987) and the memoir In This World of Wonders (2019). His son Eric died in a climbing accident in 1983.

Helpful Links and Resources

Lament for a Son, by Nicholas Wolterstorff https://www.eerdmans.com/9781467419239/lament-for-a-son/
Living with Grief, by Nicholas Wolterstorff https://wipfandstock.com/9798385201006/living-with-grief/
Calvin Prison Initiative https://calvin.edu/prison-initiative

Show Notes

Grief as an open wound
Two books, forty years apart: Lament for a Son and Living with Grief
Eric Wolterstorff's death at twenty-five in a climbing accident, Austria, 1983
Lament as a cry, not an analysis
"I could not, and would not, allow it simply to heal."
Grief-process books that failed: "inviting me to look away from Eric"
"If he was worth loving when alive, he was worth grieving when dead."
Owning grief versus disowning it; narrative identity
"I am one who lost a son"; grief as part of who you are
Augustine's moral disowning; shame over loving too much
Owning grief redemptively; good that couldn't have come otherwise
Calvin Prison Initiative, Handlon Correctional Facility, Ionia, MI
Prison classroom: "we were in grief but didn't know how to express it. You have given us the words."
Universality in particularity
The pallet of finished books: "What have I done?"
Grief brought on oneself: "not an assault, but we brought it onto ourselves"
Karl Barth's "nothingness"; evil God will defeat
"Children should not die at twenty-five years of age."
Love that knowingly risks grief: "love and suffering come together"

#NicholasWolterstorff #LamentForASon #LivingWithGrief #Grief #Lament #Theodicy #FaithAndGrief #MiroslavVolf #ForTheLifeOfTheWorld #YaleFaithAndCulture

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Nicholas Wolterstorff with Miroslav Volf
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Noah Senthil
• 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’re used to hostile online encounters with total strangers. It fuels the digital economy. But what if there were a way to experiment with radical emotional honesty with an anonymous other—much the same as you’d experience at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting? The anonymous founder of This Life, an audio-only app built on anonymity, joins For the Life of the World to argue that emotional and spiritual progress is still possible at scale.

"What's really kind is to care about somebody else. And then even more kind than that is to allow somebody else to care about you."

In this episode with Evan Rosa, Justin Smith (a pseudonym) reflects on what he learned in Alcoholics Anonymous, the genius of Bill Wilson, and why our voices carry so much emotional weight, and how sharing them—even (and perhaps especially) anonymously—can be a transformative experience of growth. Together they discuss anonymity as a path to honesty, the "spiritual hitchhiker," negative emotion as a force that wants to win, design as destiny, and becoming a neighbor. They also weigh technology's limits and whether spiritual and emotional progress can scale.

Episode Highlights

"What's really kind is to care about somebody else. And then even more kind than that is to allow somebody else to care about you."

"I believe we live in a society that has given up on the idea of emotional or spiritual progress at scale."

"Honesty with yourself is a skill."

"If you begin to look at unhelpful negative emotion as a force that wants to win, what you'll notice is that we're in a fight that we're not well equipped for."

"Meaningful spiritual development is impossible without honesty with other people."

About Justin Smith

"Justin Smith" is a pseudonym. The guest is the founder of This Life, an audio-only iOS app he describes as an experiment in emotional and spiritual progress, built around anonymity, self-reflection, and what he calls the "spiritual hitchhiker." A Christian shaped by his time in Alcoholics Anonymous and the writing of AA co-founder Bill Wilson, he draws on figures from Martin Luther King Jr. to E.O. Wilson and Fred Rogers to argue that honesty with others is the foundation of spiritual growth. By his request, and in keeping with the episode's premise, his real name, biography, and social accounts are withheld. Learn more about the This Life app on the iOS App Store.

Helpful Links and Resources

This Life: An Experiment (App Store) https://apps.apple.com/us/app/this-life-an-experiment/id6746807306

Alcoholics Anonymous (the "Big Book"), by Bill Wilson: https://www.aa.org/the-big-book

The Twelve Traditions of AA (Tradition Twelve, on anonymity): https://www.aa.org/the-twelve-traditions

"On Being a Good Neighbor," Martin Luther King Jr.: https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/draft-chapter-iii-being-good-neighbor

Show Notes

Anonymous guest, identity withheld

"Justin Smith"—not his real name

The neighbor can be anonymous

Startup founders and self-help gurus—equally annoying

How the app works: an audio-only experiment

Spoken note—talk to yourself, your God, or both

"Spiritual hitchhiker"—paired daily with a stranger

One rule: no politics

"A much more intimate and powerful sort of access to a human consciousness."

The voice as the best vehicle for the spiritual

Looks always color how we treat each other

Design is destiny

"We live in a Star Wars civilization with stone age emotions" (E.O. Wilson)

Bill Wilson refused Yale's honorary doctorate

"Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our traditions, ever reminding us to place principles before personalities." https://www.aa.org/the-twelve-traditions

Negative emotion as a force that wants to win

"Honesty with yourself is a skill."

Mandela, Mother Teresa, Mr. Rogers—all struggled

"Meaningful spiritual development is impossible without honesty with other people."

No longer "people in my way at the Starbucks line"—strangers with inner lives

Personal responsibility and the courage to become a neighbor

#Anonymity #SpiritualGrowth #AlcoholicsAnonymous #BillWilson #Loneliness #DigitalWellbeing #Neighbor #EmotionalHealth #ForTheLifeOfTheWorld #Honesty

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Justin Smith (Pseudonym)
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Noah Senthil
• 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