This special episode is taken from the launch of the inaugural Michael J. Gerson Prize for Excellence in Writing on Faith and Public Life. Through this conversation, held at Washington National Cathedral in November 2025, you’ll learn a lot about Michael, and what his legacy means for us now. 

What you’ll hear in this episode is a conversation moderated by Trinity Forum President Cherie Harder on “Conscience, Courage and Craft: The Duty of the Writer in an Age of Confusion.” 

The all-star panelists are Peter Wehner, David Brooks, Christine Emba, Russell Moore, and Karen Swallow Prior. 

You’ll also hear videos provided in Michael’s memory by two of his friends – President Bush, and Bono.

“Our responsibility [as writers] is to … remind our readers and our audiences of the good, the true, the beautiful, the virtuous … to show that those things can be lovely, actually, to redefine those words in ways that don't make them smell of just old books and past lectures that we've moved past, but something that can be alive in this moment.” —Christine Emba

Later that evening, Matthew Loftus was named as the inaugural winner of the award. You can find writings by Matthew, and by Michael Gerson, at TTF.org. You can also find the full YouTube video of the evening there. 

While you’re there, why not consider becoming a member of the Trinity Forum? Join us in exploring timeless Christian wisdom together, so you gain clarity and courage for your own life, and help cultivate a renewed culture of hope - including through next year’s Michael Gerson Prize.

Thanksgiving is much more than a holiday. The practice of gratitude is a biblical command, it’s a Christian virtue, and it’s even one of the best predictors of personal well-being. 

But what does the practice of thanks-giving require? How can we cultivate a spirit and habit of thankfulness with the burdens we bear as individuals, and amidst the sorrows and injustices of a fallen world?

Join us in this episode in discovering formative practices from our Christian tradition that can help each of us cultivate a deeply thankful heart. 

Together we’ll be guided by Cornelius (Neal) Plantinga, theologian and author of Gratitude: Why Giving Thanks Is the Key to Our Well-Being.

 

“Gratitude makes me content because gratitude makes what I have enough.”

This episode is drawn from an online conversation held in 2025. You can find the full video of the conversation on our website, ttf.org. You can become a Trinity Forum Society member there too. 

Join us in exploring timeless Christian wisdom together, so you gain clarity and courage for your own life, and help cultivate a renewed culture of hope.

This is a special episode in memory of Michael Gerson. 

Michael J. Gerson was a White House speechwriter and senior policy adviser, a Washington Post columnist and one of America’s most influential and eloquent commentators. Michael was shaped by his deep Christian faith, and his writing drew from the Christian tradition to call America to greater justice. In particular, he’s remembered for linking that tradition to the global health efforts he championed, including the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR.  

To mark the three years since Michael passed away due to cancer on November 17, 2022, we’re presenting this edited version of his comments at a Trinity Forum evening conversation held in 2016. 

Hearing him again reminds us of Michael’s extraordinary mind, as well as his heart. 

“You can never be too careful when you travel. You can go in search of disease and poverty and stumble upon holy ground, and you can find resilience, courage, and faithfulness that will inspire you and challenge you for the rest of your life.”

You can find the full video of the conversation on our Trinity Forum website, ttf.org. You can become a member there too. 

Join us in exploring timeless Christian wisdom together, so you gain clarity and courage for your own life, and help cultivate a renewed culture of hope.

Does character matter? In the last century, our society shifted away from teaching character in schools in order to focus on different forms of learning. How has that change shaped the world we live in now? Should cultivating character be a focus of education, and can character even be effectively taught in a pluralistic society?

Our guest on today’s podcast is Dr. William Inboden, provost of the University of Texas, and one of our Senior Fellows here at the Trinity Forum. He’ll be our guide as we explore the roles of education, community, and faith in forming people of wisdom and integrity.

What does it mean to be in community? What are the implications of your character for that? Loyalty, honesty. Those are fundamental to building friendships. Integrity, self sacrifice. Those are also fundamental to living for something greater than yourself.

This episode is drawn from an Online Conversation held in 2025. It’ll give you a sense of what the Trinity Forum is about: a community of people renewing our culture by applying wisdom from the Christian tradition, and nurturing its growth. 

In this episode, we explore the life and mind of whom historian Tom Holland calls “17th century Europe’s supreme polymath": Blaise Pascal. 

Our guide is Graham Tomlin, a former bishop in the Church of England. 

Drawing from his book, Blaise Pascal, the Man Who Made the Modern World, Graham brings us on a journey through Pascal’s life, his conversion to Christianity, and his famous argument for belief in God known as “the Wager.”

Together, we’ll explore the ways in which Pascal himself can still be a guide for us today. 

"What else does [man's] craving and helplessness proclaim—but that there was once in man a true happiness of which all that remains is the empty print and trace. This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there, the help that he cannot find in those that are. Though none can help. Because this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object. In other words, by God himself."

This conversation was recorded in August 2025. You can find the original video and transcript here.

Thank you for joining us in exploring timeless wisdom together, to help you gain clarity and courage for your own life, and to help nurture a culture of renewed hope.

What does redemptive leadership mean? As Christians, we have a unique calling: not just to lead, but to serve. What does this look like in today’s culture, and how can we serve as leaders and foster an environment of abundant grace and joy wherever we are?

Christianity Today’s Dr. Nicole Massie Martin helps us to understand how we can nail outdated models of leadership to the cross, and what it will take to replace them with Biblical ones:

“We need to nail to the cross what is a very secular understanding … of [power, ego, and performance], so that what is resurrected through Christ might be redemptive and bring glory to God and good to the people that we lead.”

This conversation is from an Online Conversation recorded in May 2025. We hope this conversation will inspire you to identify the ways you lead, and how you can step further into leading with grace, humility, and joy.

Authors and books mentioned in the conversation:

• Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, Peter Scazzero
• Killing Comparison: Reject the Lie You Aren’t Good Enough and Live Confident in Who God Made You To Be, Nona Jones

Go deeper into the issues discussed in this episode with these Trinity Forum Readings:

• How Much Land Does a Man Need?; Leo Tolstoy
• A Man Who Changed His Times; William Wilberforce
• Letter from Birmingham Jail; Martin Luther King, Jr.
• Who Stands Fast?; Dietrich Bonhoeffer
• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; Frederick Douglass

What does it mean to walk with God? The spiritual life is so often described as a walk, journey, or pilgrimage that it can be easy to dismiss the practice of walking as a mere metaphor.

But in God Walk, author, pastor, and professor Mark Buchanan explores the way that the act of walking has profound implications for followers of the Way:

“Hurry is the enemy of attentiveness. And so love as attentiveness is listening and caring and noticing, cherishing, savoring, being awestruck, these things that we feel in a relationship. I am deeply loved by this person because they notice me. I think that that’s how God’s built it. And we can’t get that if we’re moving too fast, if we’re in a hurry.”

This episode is drawn from an online conversation held in 2023. It’ll give you a sense of what the Trinity Forum is about: a community of people renewing our culture by applying wisdom from the Christian tradition, and nurturing new growth in it, in our time. 

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

As we ponder the spirituality of walking, our fall Trinity Forum Reading features naturalist Henry David Thoreau’s ruminations on the art of walking, with an introduction by Trinity Forum President Cherie Harder. Stay tuned for pre-ordering later this week, and join our membership to receive a copy mailed directly to you.

Authors and books mentioned in the conversation:

• Aristotle
• Søren Kierkegaard
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• God Walk, by Mark Buchanan
• Simone Weil
• The Three Mile an Hour God, by Kosaku Koyama
• Wanderlust: A History of Walking, by Rebecca Solnit
• Knowing God, J.I. Packer
• Kai Miller

Related Trinity Forum Readings:

• Pilgrim’s Progress, by John Bunyan
• Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard
• God’s Grandeur, by Gerard Manley Hopkins
• Long Walk to Freedom, by Nelson Mandela
• Brave New World, by Alduous Huxley

Related Conversations:

• A New Year With The Word with Malcolm Guite
• Music, Creativity & Justice with Ruth Naomi Floyd
• Pursuing Humility with Richard Foster and Brenda Quinn
• Reading as a Spiritual Practice with Jessica Hooten Wilson

Get tickets for The Rabbit Room's Housemoot.

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

Our theme for this episode is “Untangling Our Knotted-Up Lives,” and our guest is the author and speaker Beth Moore. 

Drawing from her bestselling memoir, Beth helps us work through a challenge we all may face at various times: maintaining resilience — and faithfulness to our vocations — in the face of hardship:

“I’d come to a point where I thought, oh my goodness, I see this. I get what Jesus is doing here, whatever it might be. I had this compelling to share it, and I have throughout my whole adult life.”

This episode is drawn from an online conversation held in 2025. It’ll give you a sense of what the Trinity Forum is about: a community of people renewing our culture by applying wisdom from the Christian tradition, and nurturing new growth in it, in our time. 

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

Go deeper into the topics discussed in this conversation with these Trinity Forum Readings:

• Pilgrim's Progress; John Bunyan
• The Long Loneliness; Dorothy Day
• A Spiritual Pilgrimage; Malcolm Muggeridge
• Confessions; St. Augustine
• The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness; Reinhold Niebuhr

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

Today’s episode concludes our summer series. Our guide today is the acclaimed writer Marilynne Robinson, author of the Gilead series, and much else. 

In this episode, originally an Online Conversation recorded in 2020, Marilynne reflects on the art of writing as a means of exploring truth and engaging questions around learning to live well, to love others, and to create a home and community, in our fractious world:

“The unique brilliance of a human being … is something that we tend utterly to disparage, demean, utterly fail to notice … every person lives out a [life] beautiful, complicated, inaccessible to other consciousnesses. And it is sacred.”

And if this conversation resonates with you, consider joining the Trinity Forum community as a member, at ttf.org. You can find the full video of this conversation there too.

Marilynne Robinson's Novels | Housekeeping, Gilead, Home, Lila, Jack, Reading Genesis

Article in Breaking Ground from our event.

Authors and books mentioned in the conversation:

Marcel Proust

Ralph Waldo Emmerson

Paul Harding

Walt Witman

William Faulkner

John Calvin

Jonathan Edwards

Moby Dick, by Herman Mellville

Piers Plowman, by William Langland

Related Trinity Forum Readings:

• Sacred and Profane Love | A Trinity Forum Reading by John Donne
   
• Bulletins from Immortality | A Trinity Forum Reading by Emily Dickinson
   
• Confessions | A Trinity Forum Reading by Saint Augustine
   
• Brave New World | A Trinity Forum Reading by Aldous Huxley

 

Marilynne Robinson is a novelist, essayist, and teacher, one of the most renowned and revered of living writers. Her novels Housekeeping, Gilead, Lila, and Home have been variously honored with the Pulitzer Prize, National Books Critics Circle Award (twice), a Hemingway Foundation Award, an Orange Prize, The Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, and the Ambassador Book Award. She's also the author of many essays and non-fiction works, including her work, “Mother Country”, and her essay collections, “Death of Adam,” “Absence of Mind,” “When I was a Child I Read Books,” “The Givenness of Things,” and “What Are We Doing Here?”. She's the recipient of the National Humanities Medal and an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In addition to her writing has spent over 20 years teaching at the Iowa Writers Workshop, as well as several universities.

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

Guided by theologian and musician David Bailey and concert pianist and chamber musician Mia Chung, this episode explores the concept that music involves mutual support, balance, and give and take among musicians to create a cohesive experience.

And we reflect on how Christian communities can apply these principles of collaboration and harmony to create faith communities that are transformative:

To the extent that the arts can actually cultivate that practice of incorporating the right hemisphere and in communication with the left, it's always together, you know, they're, complimentary. I think we can benefit each other in terms of community formation, but even benefit our own intellectual lives and the amount of joy we experience living in this world. - Mia Chung

 If this work resonates with you, please consider joining the Trinity Forum community as a society member.

This podcast is an edited version of our Online Conversation recorded in June, 2024. You can access the full conversation with transcript here.

Learn more about Mia Chung and David Bailey.

Episode Outline

00:00 Introduction to Trinity Forum Conversations

00:34 Exploring Music and Christian Community

01:36 Cherie Harder on Cultural Challenges

02:55 Welcoming David Bailey and Mia Chung

04:41 David Bailey's Musical Journey

06:56 Mia Chung's Musical Formation

10:44 The Role of Arts in Reconciliation

13:19 The Power of Music in Community Building

23:17 Reintegration and Reconciliation at MIT

28:52 Challenges and Practices for Reconciliation

30:10 Digital Discipleship and Secular Influence

30:44 The Importance of Fasting and Listening

32:33 Engaging Differently as Followers of Jesus

33:28 The Role of Technology in Information Consumption

34:18 Post-COVID Convening and Empathetic Listening

37:25 The Power of Music and Emotional Expression

40:04 Silence and Contemplative Practices

44:43 Artistic Collaboration and Reconciliation

51:19 Final Thoughts and Encouragement

Authors and books mentioned in the conversation:

Arrabon: Learning Reconciliation Through Community & Worship Music, by David Bailey

Related Trinity Forum Readings:
Hannah and Nathan, by Wendell Berry
Painting as a Pastime, by Winston Churchill
The Four Quartets, by TS Eliot
Letters from Vincent Van Gogh
Spirit and Imagination, selections from Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Why Work?, by Dorothy Sayers
The Loss of the University, featuring the works of Wendell Berry and Jacques Maritain

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

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

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

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

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

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

Authors and books mentioned in the conversation:

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

Marilynne Robinson

Danielle Chapman

William Bronk

William Wordsworth

Every Riven Thing, by Christian Wiman

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

Prayer, by Carol Ann Duffy

The Bible and Poetry, by Michael Edwards 

Augustine of Hippo

Bittersweet, by George Herbert

Surprised by Joy, by C.S. Lewis

Richard Wilbur

Jürgen Moltmann

When the Time’s Toxins, by Christian Wiman

Related Trinity Forum Readings:

Augustine’s Confessions

Devotions by John Donne, paraphrased by Philip Yancey

God’s Grandeur: the Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins

Bulletins from Immortality, by Emily Dickinson

Wrestling with God, by Simone Weil

Related Conversations:
Connecting Spiritual Formation & Public Life with Michael Wear
The Kingdom, the Power & The Glory with Tim Alberta
A Life Worth Living with Miroslav Volf
Towards a Better Christian Politics
Christian Pluralism: Living Faithfully in a World of Difference
What Really Matters with Charlie Peacock and Andi Ashworth
Scripture and the Public Square

How to be a Patriotic Christian

Life, Death, Poetry & Peace with Philip Yancey

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

Fear and Conspiracy with David French

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