“Humility is ultimately the gift that frees us from that selving project, as I call it. Roman Williams talks about the history of radical Christianity, focusing particularly on the desert monks as they're engaged in the crazy project of un-selfing, of trying to leave behind the ego-bound self. Trusting that reliance on God and one another is enough.”

Kent Dunnington is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Biola University. He's editor of The Uncertain Center: Essays of Arthur McGill, and the author of Addiction and Virtue: Beyond the Models of Disease and Choice*. His 2019 book just came out: Humility, Pride, and Christian Virtue Theory. In it, he presents his own account of humility and it's a radical one. So in this conversation we discuss humility—in its ancient, scriptural, monastic, and Medieval Christian contexts; some damning criticisms of Christian virtue; Jesus' radical vision of flourishing and eternal life, which includes self-sacrifice; the temptation toward ego building and self-improvement; and Dunnington's own view of humility as “radical un-selfing.”

Show Notes

• 6:37—On how he got into the study of humility and why it’s important, the lack of humility in contemporary American culture and politics, the influence of Christianity on humility, and Immanuel Kant
• 11:00—On the Nietzschean critique of humility and Christianity, conceptions of the good/eternal life, the language of wholeness, and self-sacrifice and resurrection
• 14:51—“I argue that it's important that, for Jesus, the life of glorification, to use the language in Philippians, is not separable from the life of humiliation.”
• 16:08—“The good news of the gospel, I take it, is that we really can give of ourselves without any limitation, in the hopes of discovering resurrected life, which is the discovery that endless self-sacrifice is actually eternal life.”
• 17:31—On a feminist and womanist critique of humility and self-sacrifice: do they perpetuate systems of oppression?, Christian and Pagan “wholeness,” the abuse of humility (and all of the virtues), humility as voluntary, and the monastic tradition and humility
• 20:50—“The project of embarking on the quest for humility is one that has to be undertaken voluntarily. It has to be an invitation that one receives from God. We are never in a position to recommend it or enforce it on others.”
• 22:28— On the “developmental trajectory” of humility, the penultimate and the ultimate, Bonhoeffer, Simone Weil, and pride
• 25:25—On imitation, dependence, development of the self, Augustine, and “radical un-selfing”
• 27:34—On his autobiography, the humility of his family, and the obsession with subjectivity
• 30:01—“You don't become humble by becoming interested in humility. You become humble by becoming interested in other people, and most especially, in God.”
• 32:17—On the attractiveness of humility, a positive account of humility, Simone Weil on affliction and love of others, and loving in the absence of pride
• 35:39—“If humility is a genuine virtue, where we know how to go on, even though we don't know who we are, it means that we can continue to love, even when everything we thought we needed to be an impressive self is under challenge or is gone.”
• 37:35—On “mundane humility,” dependence, Immanuel Kant on humility and beggars, and St. Francis of Assisi

Credits

• Hosted and produced by Evan Rosa
• Resource of the Biola University Center for Christian Thought, which is sponsored by generous grants from the John Templeton Foundation, Templeton Religion Trust, and The Blankemeyer Foundation
• Theme music by The Brilliance
• Production and Engineering by the Narrativo Group. More info at Narrativogroup.com
• Edited and mixed by TJ Hester
• Production Assistance by Kaleb Cohen
• Follow: @EvanSubRosa / @BiolaCCT / cct.biola.edu

“So Jesus steps inside of that and lives a life of sheer life. And that itself was the critique of the political order. So what did they try to do? Kill him. They killed him, but then they discovered that they're trying to kill what's unkillable. Christians call this the resurrection. The death of Jesus wasn't necessary. It was the cultural reflex against a form of life that did not need death or its negative other to anchor.”

J. Kameron Carter does theology with urgency. Why? Because he reads these times as urgent. His theology is responsive to the moment we're in. In this conversation, we discuss the black experience of a structurally anti-black world; the meaning of belonging and communion; how race factors in America's struggle for belonging to each other; the difference between black misery and white melancholy; and the presumption of comfort and alleviation of suffering that whiteness assumes. We also cover atonement theology; the erroneous logic of false ownership; and the unkillable, vibrant life of Jesus the slave. J. Kameron Carter is Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University Bloomington, author of Race: A Theological Account, editor of "Religion and the Future of Blackness," and is currently at work on his next book, Black Rapture: A Poetics of the Sacred.

Show Notes

• 3:50—On his name (and what the J. stands for)
• 6:44—On suffering, the tension between the wound and the blessing, and Harriet Jacobs’ “loophole of retreat”
• 9:30—“That negotiation between what we might say the tension between the wound and the blessing, it marks black existence insofar as anti-blackness is structurally the condition of possibility of the society that has come to bear the name the United States of America.”
• 9:58—Harriet A. Jacobs on her “loophole of retreat”; a reading from her Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
• 12:14—On structural and individual racism
• 12:46—Rodney King: “Can we all get along?”
• 18:10—On skepticism toward structural problems, structures that create conditions of misery, and the presumptions of whiteness
• 22:54—“What I think we have talked ourselves into is a claim that might go like this. Suffering and misery are always already, they are never not racialized.”
• 24:25— Ad Break: “Charting a Course Through Grief” A free 8-week ecourse with a variety helpful resources on grief. cct.biola.edu/grief
• 27:10—On the logic of atonement, a structure of misery and melancholy, a new cultural imagination, and the way forward
• 29:49—“What if the death of Jesus was about the destruction of an imagination that pits life against death and death against life altogether? What if it's the destruction of that?”
• 34:57—On Jesus’ incarnation and Christianity’s need to move against itself
• 37:15—On false ownership, “Christian supersessionism,” Jesus as slave within a particular structure of domination, and Dostoevsky and the illegibility of God
• 39:21—“The structure of ‘It belongs to me and not to you’ took on the veneer of colonialism, generating what we now call race. Racism is a specific iteration of Christian supersessionism of the gentiles. It's a theological problem.”

Credits

• Hosted and produced by Evan Rosa
• Resource of the Biola University Center for Christian Thought, which is sponsored by generous grants from the John Templeton Foundation, Templeton Religion Trust, and The Blankemeyer Foundation
• Theme music by The Brilliance
• Production and Engineering by the Narrativo Group. More info at Narrativogroup.com
• Edited and mixed by TJ Hester
• Production Assistance by Kaleb Cohen
• Follow: @EvanSubRosa / @BiolaCCT / cct.biola.edu

“I want to encourage Christians to stop trying to explain away evil and take people to the cross. And that is the strangeness of the Christian story. If someone has been abused, you don’t say, 'This is why it happened' or 'Look how you’re going to grow through this.' In their pain ... they ask you, 'Why would God do this? What does God think about this?' Your only answer is, 'Let me take you to a bleeding and dying savior.'”

Kelly M. Kapic is Professor of Theological Studies at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia. But, perhaps more central to this conversation, he is a human living through both the pains and the joys of being on this earth. That is what we talk about here, guided by Kelly’s newest book, Embodied Hope: A Theological Meditation on Pain and Suffering. In this episode, Kelly reflects on the linkage between theology and biography, the need for lament, the finitude and goodness of the human body, and the meaning of hope in the context of pain and suffering.

Show Notes

• 3:48—On theology and biography.
• 6:52—On pain, the goodness of human bodies, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and dependency.
• 7:15—“Pain itself tends to make us more aware of our bodies. One of the challenges for people who suffer though is then to start to hate your body, to think that your body is the problem.”
• 8:21—“We confuse dependency with sin all the time. And the way I would put it is we confuse finitude and sin all the time.”
• 9:10—“The heart of western culture in the last several hundred years where we’ve bought into this myth of rugged individualism and the autonomous self. I make myself. I am myself. No one should tell me. That just doesn’t fit with reality, of how we live. And all that happens in suffering is it makes us much more aware of that if we’re paying attention.”
• 10:31—On lament and the danger of justifying evil.
• 12:45—On the problem with theodicies, the sovereignty of God, and the meeting of pain and hope at the Cross.
• 13:25—“People often think that when their friend is suffering that they need to explain why this is happening. And I would basically say I think theodicies have a place in the classroom. It’s a legitimate philosophical discussion. Has no place in the home of the griever.”
• 16:53—“The cross and resurrection allow radical honesty about our pain while also maintaining hope. What happens is we tend to choose hope and then eliminate the honesty, or the honesty and eliminate hope. We shouldn’t choose. Lament allows us to be as brutally honest as we need to be and yet still have hope.”
• 17:34—Ad Break: “Charting a Course Through Grief” A free 8-week ecourse with a variety helpful resources on grief. cct.biola.edu/grief
• 20:24—On a “defiant hope,” Job, and the geography of suffering.
• 20:56—“We have this defiant hope, a defiant hope which is both lamenting and hopeful. And the hope does not undermine the lament, it makes sense of the lament.”
• 22:30— “In grace you don’t just have to live there all the time, but let’s not pretend it goes away.”
• 25:13—On community, faith, hope, and love.
• 26:15—“The faith is not something we generate, it’s something we receive. It’s a gift from God, it’s the faith. It’s the faith of the saints before us, the church’s faith. So I need to have faith, but it’s the community. So what happens then is when you’re suffering, often we struggle to have faith, and the people of God believe for us. And in that way they represent us to God. And they believe when we can’t. And similarly with hope, when we’re suffering, it’s very hard to generate hope, to cling to hope. But the people of God can embody hope for us and in that way they represent God to us. And then love is the context, otherwise it becomes plastic.”
• 28:03—“It would surprise a lot of Christians to realize people who are seriously suffering, whether from surgeries or from psychological or other kinds of things, they commonly will say the hardest time for them in their week is Sunday morning, actually going to church.”
• 30:35—On commitment, the myth of autonomy, and witness.
• 32:03—“The way we love those who suffer is we remain faithful, and we have to remember that it’s not just us caring for them. They actually care for us… They teach us about God. They teach us about ourselves. It’s got to be mutual.”
• 35:56—“If you have not developed the muscles of lament and of empathy, because if you yourself haven’t experienced it, you think it’s not real. And that’s a denial of our world. That’s a myth, and that’s a problem.”
• 36:34—“'God is faithful' doesn't mean that, if this is an evil thing, it's a good thing. It just means that God can and does even show up there. And His grace can be found even in the midst of the hurt and suffering.”

Credits

• Hosted and produced by Evan Rosa
• Resource of the Biola University Center for Christian Thought, which is sponsored by generous grants from the John Templeton Foundation, Templeton Religion Trust, and The Blankemeyer Foundation
• Theme music by The Brilliance
• Production and Engineering by the Narrativo Group. More info at Narrativogroup.com
• Edited and mixed by TJ Hester
• Production Assistance by Kaleb Cohen
• Follow: @EvanSubRosa / @BiolaCCT / cct.biola.edu

"For me, it was always a challenge, on the one hand, to honor what I was feeling—the rage that was inside against injustice—but on the other hand, to honor the beauty of the Christian faith that has a particular way of dealing with these kinds of situations which is a reconciliation through embrace of the enemy." 

For theologian Miroslav Volf, it's important that a theologian stand in the fissures—the cracks of human life—helping to mend and tie and heal the fractures that characterize that life, directing humanity back to its telos—its animating purpose and ultimate goal. Volf is the Henry B. Wright Professor of Systematic Theology at Yale Divinity School and founding director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. He was educated in his native Croatia, the United States, and Germany, earning doctoral and post‑doctoral degrees with highest honors from the University of Tubingen in Germany. He has written or edited more than 20 books and over 90 scholarly articles, including Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation, The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World, and his latest, co-authored with Matthew Croasmun, For the Life of the World: Theology That Makes a Difference.In this interview, Volf reflects on the challenge of living a theology in the fissures of life; the often irreducible complexity of human experience; how Volf's own biography and personal experience with oppression during the Cold War impacted his theology; the centrality of memory to forgiveness; and the importance of living as a porous, open self—open to encountering and embracing the other.

Show Notes

• 3:23—On having an eros for theology.
• 5:13—A Kingdom of God theology: on the public and the private. “I want to make sure though that on the public theology, we understand something that spans the space between the most intimate desires of our hearts to the largest structures that shape the character of our world, that all is in the purview of theology.”
• 7:17—On theology as more than intellectual puzzles. “I think theology has puzzles, as I said, but it is about the mystery of God, the mystery of human existence together with God.”
• 9:25—On the job of the theologian. “It's living with this fissure. It's bridging this gap. It's leading the world to that for which it has been created, that it is a job of a theologian.”
• 12:32—A short biography of Miroslav Volf: “In some ways, I can say that in this regard my theology is trying to articulate their lives in theological terms and make the lives of these people who have shaped me and my vision, make these lives speak to others.”
• 14:30—On God’s grace even through the suffering.
• 16:22—A lie that saved the Volf family. “God of truth delivering him through a lie, that too was successfully told, that was also his experience.”
• 18:31—Ad Break: “Charting a Course Through Grief” A free 8-week ecourse with a variety helpful resources on grief. cct.biola.edu/grief21:16—On unjust interrogations, rage, and enemy love.
• 24:00—“Love of enemy is the fundamental Christian command. You take love of enemy out of Christian faith, you un-Christian Christian. There cannot be Christian faith without love of enemy. That's, I think, at the foundation, not as a moralizing stance but as a character of God and therefore as a demand and as an opportunity for us as human beings.”
• 25:06—On forgiveness and reconciliation.
• 27:04—Created in the image of exclusion: on being formed by and treating others with exclusion.
• 30:22—On the self and the other. “Open to the other means open to interactive exchanges with the other, which change you in the process of engaging the other.”
• 32:13—“This is a story of our lives at varieties of levels. I think this kind of openness to the other, this kind of sense of sturdy self that can change and yet remain itself is what we need to nurture, which is just a different way of saying of being lovingly open to another and finding one's identity in love toward the other.”
• 33:59—On reconciliation, memory, and suffering.
• 33:59—“Memory is central to forgiveness because forgiveness concerns the past”
• 36:11—“There is a tendency to being completely absorbed by suffering, to think that the entirety of the identity of the perpetrator consists in having inflicted suffering on you, that the entirety of your own identity consists in having suffered that injury.”
• 37:52—On the cross as communion for both perpetrators and victims.
• 39:34—On suffering, abandonment, and hope.
• 41:26—“There is no intellectually compelling answer to the experience of living either on Friday or on Saturday. We have to live it through, and it's only at the end of our lives and of the history that the story can be told in such a way that the suffering has not been fully senseless. I believe that that's part of Christian faith and Christian hope, Christian living with non‑understanding in the midst of suffering in which one finds oneself, in the hope that despite my non‑understanding, God is present and will lead me through the suffering to Resurrection.”

Credits

• Hosted and produced by Evan Rosa
• A resource of the Biola University Center for Christian Thought, which is sponsored by generous grants from the John Templeton Foundation, Templeton Religion Trust, and The Blankemeyer Foundation
• Theme music by The Brilliance
• Production and Engineering by the Narrativo Group. More info at Narrativogroup.com
• Edited and mixed by TJ Hester
• Production Assistance by Kaleb Cohen
• Follow: @EvanSubRosa / @BiolaCCT / cct.biola.edu

"By our nature, we are eccentric. We're off center. The world has its own center: fallen, lost, though many ways good. Christians have a different center. Christ is our center. That makes us stand out if we're faithful in ways that are odd. That's who the saints are. The saints are the odd wads who have stood out from society—cultures they would have been predicted to conform to."

Oddities, weirdos, monsters—what is the place of the strange and monstrous in literature and film? And how does can these products of the human imagination help us understand the fallen condition of humanity?—both in the great depths of sin, and in the heights of redemptive possibility.

Ralph C. Wood has served as University Professor of Theology and Literature at Baylor University since 1998, and taught at Wake Forest University prior to that. He is an expert on 19th- and 20th-century literature, especially at the intersection of Christianity and secularity. He’s author and editor of many books and articles, including Tolkien Among Moderns, Chesterton: The Nightmare Goodness of God, Literature and Theology, Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South, The Gospel According to Tolkien, and The Comedy of Redemption: Christian Faith and Comic Vision in O’Connor, Percy, Updike, and De Vries.

In this episode, Ralph Wood casts light on the monstrosity of humanity, the goodness of God, and finding grace and hope along the dark terrain of human history, all through the lens of literature and faith.

Show Notes

• 1:18—Frankenstein, "It's alive!!"
• 1:34—King Kong
• 1:48—The Wolfman
• 1:59—The Blob
• 2:17—Godzilla
• 2:20—Gremlins (mogwai!)
• 2:32—Alien
• 2:37—The Fly
• 2:44—The scariest and goriest of them all...
• 3:02—A Quiet Place
• 3:14—Stranger Things
• 5:35—Ralph Wood's early life and how he came to love books
• 7:12—Reading is under threat; "sustained imaginative sympathy"—how to be a good reader
• 11:55—Poetry as the highest of literary forms—"Above all, learn to read poetry. Poetry was once, I'm sure you know, the common pastime of every educated person. It's now almost entirely lost."
• 13:30—There is no such thing as "Children's Books"
• 14:07—On the Catholic writers of the 20th Century—the echoes of their imagination; their strange, violent, grotesque characters
• 17:39—"Catholics have a tremendous advantage over us Protestants in having at the core of Catholic faith and worship, the sacramental imagination. ... I'm glad to see that in our time, evangelicals are recovering that sacramental imagination because without it, we're doomed."
• 20:15—Ad break. "Charting a Course Through Grief"
• 22:13—What we can learn by thinking of ourselves as 'monsters'—"Not all that is monstrous is evil."
• 29:30—Christian Eccentricity; Christ as our center; man as the good monster, not just the evil monster
• 32:12—On Chesterton's fiction: "Chesterton's fiction has about it that wonderful lightness, comedy, paradox of the Christian faith. He defines paradox wonderfully. 'Paradox,' he says, 'is truth standing on its head and waving its legs to get our attention. It's truth upside down.' Of course, that's what the Kingdom is, the Kingdom is the world turned upside down."
• 32:52—Chesteron on "Nightmare" and encounter with horror
• 34:45—Is there any hope of waking from the nightmare? Chesterton as Augustinian
• 35:35—The Ballad of the White Horse—"I tell you naught for your comfort. Yea, naught for your desire, save that the sky grows darker yet, and the sea rises higher. Night shall be thrice night over you, and heaven an iron cope. Do you have joy without a cause? Yea, faith without a hope?"
• 37:25—"Christians don't live on the hope that things are going to get better. If we live by that hope, we might quote St. Paul, 'We of all men are most hopeless.' Things are not going to get better. The trajectory of history is not upward, onward, progressive, but always an undulating hope, followed by loss of hope, followed by new hope, etc."
• 38:15—Death has already been conquered
• 40:26—"My best teachers were those who really pushed my nose into the cold snows of modern horror. That's my point. Unless you face the horror, that's what the cross is, the ultimately horrible event that we call, as Elliot says, 'Good Friday,' because God made it good. Not only in the Resurrection, but of course in calling us to live out the life of the cross, being willing to die without earthly hope, but in the confidence of hope beyond hope."

Credits

• Hosted and produced by Evan Rosa
• Resource of the Biola University Center for Christian Thought, which is sponsored by generous grants from the John Templeton Foundation, Templeton Religion Trust, and The Blankemeyer Foundation
• Theme music by The Brilliance
• Additional Scoring by Una and the Sound
• Production and Engineering by the Narrativo Group. More info at Narrativogroup.com
• Edited and mixed by TJ Hester
• Production Assistance by Kaleb Cohen
• Follow: @EvanSubRosa / @BiolaCCT / cct.biola.edu

“We must re-mythologize. We must see myth not as the flight from reality, but as the flight to reality. And if we thus love and value myth, we will make them because we are creators made in the image of the Creator. And that’s what Lewis did. That’s what Tolkien did.” Peter Kreeft is Professor of Philosophy at Boston College and has written upwards upwards of 75 books of philosophy, theology, apologetics, essays, reflections, and more, not to mention his frequent public lectures and articles, though he considers his own approach to philosophy as no more than a shell full of water in the shoreless sea of God's infinity. In this episode, Dr. Kreeft’s reflections each felt like their own short and yet quite expansive essays, spanning from surfing and sanctification to C.S. Lewis and mythology. Rather than presenting it conversationally, we’ve queued up each topic to let Peter Kreeft be Peter Kreeft.

Show Notes

• 3:30—Peter Kreeft on Peter Kreeft
• 3:46—On surfing, the ocean, and heavenly life.
• 4:06—“Surfing, I think, is preparation for heaven. Because if you’re a soul surfer, instead of a hot-dogger, you just follow the wave and you become part of the greater being and in heaven we’ll surf on God.”
• 5:38—“In Perelandra, the wave is a symbol of God’s will… so you simply follow the wave of God’s will, that’s the secret of sanctity.”
• 6:04—On sanctification, perfection, and the summum bonum.
• 6:59—“That process looks different for everybody because everybody is different. The road, the story of everybody is different. That’s why God created billions of different people, not just one. And that’s why heaven is going to be endlessly interesting because we’ll share each other’s stories and enter into each other’s stories.”
• 7:17—On Gabriel Marcel, being, goodness, and personhood.
• 8:44—On becoming a saint.
• 9:53—“I personally believe that when we get to heaven we're going to be very surprised at who's there. How did you get there? Your theology was all askew. Well, yeah, but God saw deeper than that. He saw a heart that sought Him, and He Himself said, “All who seek me will find me."”
• 10:28—Ad Break: “Charting a Course Through Grief” A free 8-week ecourse with a variety helpful resources on grief.
• 12:24—On psychology and modernity.
• 13:43—On the soul, Henri Bergson and mathematical bees, science, and what human persons are.
• 17:32—“The soul is not physical, but it is the soul of a physical body, and the body is not spiritual, but it's a body of the spiritual soul. Whenever you touch one, you touch the other. Just as you can't change the meaning of a book without changing its words, or change the words without changing the meaning. Anything that affects the body as a whole affects the soul too, and anything that affects the soul also affects the body.”
• 18:39—On intellectual virtue and civil discourse. “I think the two most important virtues of the mind are also moral virtues, honesty and prudence, or the fanatical search for truth on the one hand and practical wisdom on the other hand.”
• 19:53—On love.
• 20:44—“Only if you love somebody do you really know them. This is why God is so wise because He loves. Love opens the eye, the eye of the heart, the deepest eye.”
• 20:57—On suffering, Victor Frankl, and the necessity of meaning.
• 21:54—“It's not just the will to live. It's a belief, a faith, a trust that all of life, including suffering, has a meaning, has an outcome.”
• 23:22—Ad break: “Seeking Christian Wisdom for Life’s Biggest Questions” via Biola LEARN (15% off your next course).
• 24:56—On Clive Staples Lewis and his legacy.
• 26:13— “Lewis has done more for welding Christians together and helping them to understand each other, especially by that book Mere Christianity, than anybody else has done. He has shown us what's important and what's less important. He's given us a sense of perspective. 50 years later, he remains utterly up to date, utterly relevant. He's not dated because he deals with the perennial things.”
• 27:25—On Lewis, literature, and telling the truth through fiction.
• 29:02—“Lewis tells it like it is. A lot of people hate him for that. He offended people in his own day. He continues to do so. In fact, if you're not offending anybody, you're not saying anything very important.”
• 29:15—On Peter Kreeft's favorite works of C.S. Lewis.
• 29:45—On Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold, Christianity, and mythology.
• 30:41—“Lewis, like the medievals, was fascinated with allegory and symbolism and thought of this not merely as a literary device but as something in the structure of the universe because things are also symbols. God writes with things as we write with words, and therefore the dispute between let's say the modernists and the fundamentalists about whether the Bible is symbolic or literal is a silly one. It's both. The one does not exclude the other.”
• 32:06—On why dark places are holy places, and how C.S. Lewis embodied that truth. “The holy places must be dark places for two reasons. One, because the darkness is in our own souls, and we project that on to the God that we try to find. The second reason is that there has to be faith. There has to be trust. God can't reveal Himself totally to us and still elicit from us the loving trust that He wants, above all.”
• 33:29—On what we find when we remove our armor and let down our defenses.
• 34:25—On sharks and vending machines: linking the darkness of the ocean with holiness, faith, and the risk that life is.
• 35:14—“Faith is a risk. Love is a risk. Life is a risk. It's a very dangerous thing, being born, but it's an adventure.”

Credits

• Hosted and produced by Evan Rosa
• Resource of the Biola University Center for Christian Thought, which is sponsored by generous grants from the John Templeton Foundation, Templeton Religion Trust, and The Blankemeyer Foundation
• Theme music by The Brilliance
• Production and Engineering by the Narrativo Group. More info at Narrativogroup.com
• Edited and mixed by TJ Hester
• Production Assistance by Kaleb Cohen
• Follow: @EvanSubRosa / @BiolaCCT / cct.biola.edu

“How can you know flourishing if you don't understand loss? How can you know liberation if you don't understand what it's like to have your freedom taken away? So, I think that is the hermeneutical entry point for black people of faith, the role that suffering says that something has to be gotten from it or snatched from it.”

Given the fractured state of society, the church very much included, along racial and ethnic lines, we need to seek a deeper understanding of the question of redemptive suffering. That's why we invited Stacey and Juan Floyd‑Thomas to The Table. Stacey is associate professor of Ethics in Society, and Juan is associate professor of African American Religious History, both at Vanderbilt University Divinity School and College of Arts and Sciences. Stacey's research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of ethics, feminism, womanism, black church studies, critical race theory, and postcolonial studies. Juan's work focuses on the intersections of racial identity, religion, popular culture, and political activism in American society. We cover problems of consumerism, pop culture, how we can cure the loss of cultural memory, and a deeper dive into black and womanist perspectives on flourishing, suffering, and theodicy.

Show Notes

• 0:47—Can suffering be redemptive? (With the help of Ivan and Alyosha Karamazov)
• 5:45—The art of quilting. “That's what we realize in our work, that it's at those places that are life affirming, that spark cultural memory, and that transcend people out of what might be a miserable or a mundane stage to something that is larger than them, to something that gives them life.”
• 8:42—On consumerism in America. “Consumption is our worship. Consumption is our spiritual discipline as Americans. It doesn't matter whether that is a super size McDonald's Happy Meal that will kill us and not make us happy.”
• 11:50—St. Augustine, disordered loves, and people as property. “To find yourself in a situation that your standard of what it means to be successful, of what it means to be a human who flourishes at every extent is to covet what you assume other people want and to take ownership of that, losing yourself all the while.”
• 16:30—Stacey on art as a spiritual practice. “Art is about that utopia. It's about that new world making. It's about taking refuse and making something divine, using utility for the purpose of making stained glass where there aren't even windows.”
• 23:05—Ad Break: “Charting a Course Through Grief” A free 8-week ecourse with a variety helpful resources on grief.
• 25:03—The thorny terrain of theodicy and the problem of redemptive suffering through the lens of black experience. “So where theodicy in the typical Christian constructed theological moment is the end of faith for most, it's the beginning for black people.”
• 32:17—“The womanist entry point of suffering.”
• 34:07—Ad break: “Seeking Christian Wisdom for Life’s Biggest Questions” via Biola LEARN (15% off your next course)
• 35:38—Women’s resilience in the face of oppression and suffering.
• 37:36—“In many ways, the black church exists off of the suffering of black women because there's this notion of black women, oftentimes single mothers, who are giving their all to the church… That kind of suffering becomes a virtue for black women, by which black women are kept subjugated and oppressed.”
• 38:06—Can suffering be redemptive? Exploitation, ignorance, re-victimization, and radical enemy love. “What happens when you turn a blind eye to the needs and the miseries of others, but then, to make matters worse, you make them have to relive over and over and over again that source of deepest pain or most awful and miserable state of being.”
• 43:36—Moral exemplars: redemptive suffering through prophetic witness. “It's looking at those who have suffered the most not as property. Not as people without virtue or character or people without value or as problems, but looking at them as moral exemplars who can best diagnose our deficiencies.”
• 44:04—“Black people have been able to, through their suffering, because of their suffering, and seeing the backside and the underside of America, they've been able to clearly articulate the reality of our times, yet show us the promise of our ideals. Suffering is that conscience laden place of knowing the wickedness and depravity that you are presently facing, yet having a realistic hope, not that the art will just miraculously bend towards justice, but if I don't bend it, or like Bree Newsome: if I don't climb that pole to take down that flag, who will?”
• 46:17—“If we don't exemplify, quite literally, what we believe and how deeply we believe these things to be true, who will ever understand or know what the capacity for human transformation really is in this world?”
• 47:50—The sin of not bearing witness and the need for inter-generational conversation. “The greatest sin that we've realized is when there aren't those who are willing to bear witness… And there aren't people who have the audacity or the courage to speak truth to power, or in the words of my grandmother, to tell the truth and shame the devil.”
• 49:28—“If we don't have these intentional conversations, suffering will be for naught because we won't allow for the reality of our situation to help better inform the possibility of our futures.”
• 49:50—“Patchwork redemption”: closing thoughts.

Credits

• Hosted and produced by Evan Rosa
• Resource of the Biola University Center for Christian Thought, which is sponsored by generous grants from the John Templeton Foundation, Templeton Religion Trust, and The Blankemeyer Foundation
• Theme music by The Brilliance
• Production and Engineering by the Narrativo Group. More info at Narrativogroup.com
• Edited and mixed by TJ Hester
• Production Assistance by Kaleb Cohen
• Follow: @EvanSubRosa / @BiolaCCT / cct.biola.edu

“The heart of Christianity is personal relationship, persons sharing love with each other. And so for Christians, the greatest thing for human being is not character development. It's loving personal relationship. The idea in the Christian tradition is that something about suffering enables you—doesn't make you, but it enables you—to open and open and open and open more deeply to God. When you are more open to God, you are also more open to other people. So that the best thing for human beings in the world is personal relationship. And that's the thing that suffering enables you to have more of.” Eleonore Stump is an exemplar of faith seeking understanding, fides quaerens intellectum. She's a philosopher in the Thomist tradition, which she brings fiercely and beautifully to bear in her incisive philosophical commentary and analysis on difficult matters.

She is the Robert J. Henle Professor of Philosophy at St. Louis University, where she's taught since 1992. She's also an honorary professor at Wuhan University and the Logos Institute at University of St. Andrews in Scotland. She's a professorial fellow at Australian Catholic University. She's published extensively in philosophy of religion, contemporary metaphysics, and medieval philosophy. Her books include a major study of Thomas Aquinas. Her extensive treatment of the problem of evil, Wandering in Darkness, is the focal piece for this interview. Her most recent work on the atonement of Christ came out just last year.

Show Notes

• 3:22—The problem of suffering in the West: "If there is some sort of supernatural entity that watches over human beings, if that entity or entities has care for human beings, and has power and mind, why do we suffer the way we do? What's wrong with our world that it looks like this?"
• 6:07—Suffering and the desires of the heart. “Another way to think about suffering, and it's an age‑old way that is very wise, is to see suffering as a function of what we care about. We care about our own flourishing as the human beings that we are and the things that get in the way of that flourishing, those are the things that cause us suffering.”
• 7:59—A different take on the problem of suffering. “[I]t's what we care about that makes suffering. Therefore, the question is really something like this. If there is an all powerful, all knowing, all good, perfectly loving God, why wouldn't He want you to have what is good for you and what you care about? That's how you would feel toward your own child. Why wouldn't the Deity think that about his children?”
• 8:43—The starting point for the project of theodicy.
• 9:32—Early Christians and the magnificence of being allowed to suffer.
• 11:12—Suffering and the shaping of character. “It's tied to the fact that you know that the children who grow up in highly protective, over protective rich cuddled surrounding where they never face suffering and they never face challenges, you know they're not going come out very well.”
• 12:22—Ad Break: “Charting a Course Through Grief” A free 8-week ecourse with a variety helpful resources on grief.
• 14:35—Loving personal relationship as the purpose of suffering. “The heart of Christianity is personal relationship, persons sharing love with each other. For a Christian, the greatest thing for a human being is not character development, but it's loving personal relationship. The idea in the Christian tradition is that something about suffering enables you, it doesn't make you, but it enables you to open and open and open and open more deeply to God. When you are more open to God, you're also more open to other people, so that the best thing for human beings in the world is personal relationship. That's the thing that suffering enables you to have more of. That's the idea. Of course, it's just an enabling, it doesn't guarantee it. You can become bitter and hateful in suffering also.”
• 15:55—On suffering as a means to human flourishing but in itself: a poison. “The morally sufficient reason for God to allow suffering has to do with the goods that suffering brings, but those goods, closer personal relationship with a loving God and with each other, that doesn't make suffering any less awful and you must never get confused and think it does.”
• 17:40—600 pages on the Problem of Evil in 60 seconds.
• 18:28—Reaching out to others, vulnerability, and the horror of suffering. “The whole Earth is soaked with the tears of the suffering. That is a horrible fact.”
• 19:55—We are both sufferers and perpetrators of suffering. “We perpetrate such ghastly suffering on one another. That's part of the story. That's part of the vulnerability we have to recognize too. We are prone to do these things to one another. That kind of recognition is also important for the problem of suffering.”
• 21:10—Narrative, the details of human life, and the failure of philosophy to answer the problem of suffering. “It is important to understand that suffering has got a lot more human detail, a lot more human complexity to it than something as simple as intrinsic individual valuable characteristics of a person. It's also important to see the details of what a trade could be in any individual life, what you lose in suffering. Think about it this way. In suffering, you lose something that you care about. And if God is going to be justified in allowing that suffering, it has to be that somehow, you get more of what you care about than you would if you hadn't suffered.”
• 25:07—Ad break: “Seeking Christian Wisdom for Life’s Biggest Questions” via Biola LEARN (15% off your next course)
• 26:48—On the suffering of God. “When the Biblical text said, "Jesus weeps." Who's weeping? We have only one candidate. The person of the incarnate Christ is weeping. That person is divine. That's God weeping.”
• 30:22—Being face-to-face with God in uniting relationship. “Union is a matter of being in a position, you might say, to share attention with God, to share face‑to‑face interaction with God.”
• 34:32—On art and suffering. “There is grace though, and wonder on the way. Only they are hard to see, hard to embrace for those compelled to wander in darkness.”

Credits

• Hosted and produced by Evan Rosa
• A Resource of the Biola University Center for Christian Thought, which is sponsored by generous grants from the John Templeton Foundation, Templeton Religion Trust, and The Blankemeyer Foundation
• Theme music by The Brilliance
• Production and Engineering by the Narrativo Group. More info at Narrativogroup.com
• Edited and mixed by TJ Hester
• Production Assistance by Kaleb Cohen
• Follow: @EvanSubRosa / @BiolaCCT / cct.biola.edu

"We're a society that rarely acknowledges death before it happens. Christianity is ongoing training in dying early. That every politic, one way or the other, is a politic that deals with death." Stanley Hauerwas is a theologian, ethicist, one of the most influential public intellectuals in the 20th century, and perhaps most importantly, Texan. He began teaching at the Notre Dame in 1970 and moved to Duke Divinity School in 1983 where he's the Gilbert T. Rowe professor of divinity and law. He's the author of many books, including The Peaceable Kingdom, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony, Living Gently in a Violent World: The Prophetic Witness of Weakness, which was written with Jean Vanier, the founder of L'Arche communities. His most recent book is The Character of Virtue: Letters to a Godson, written to his real life godson, Lawrence Wells, son of Hauerwas' student and friend, Samuel Wells. For a deeply personal approach to his life and work, read "Hannah's Child: A Theologian's Memoir." Here, "Stan the Man" was brutally honest about his take on contemporary American life, the church's political calling, vulnerable about his past pains and personal experience with disability and mental illness. He offered candid and pointed reflections on love, suffering, the practice of theology and what it means to be a Christian.

Show Notes

• 3:31—"What I try to do is to help Christians recover how odd it is that we're Christians...
  I'm in the constant business of trying to help us rediscover what an extraordinary adventure we've been put on by being full lived in God's kingdom in a way that will be very surprising to many people who think that Christianity makes them good middle class citizens of the United States of America."
• 4:33—Bricklaying, craft, and hard work that shaped his habits
• 6:35—The habits of theologians: humility and joy
• 7:20—On his marriage to Anne, mental disability, and Hannah's Child
• 8:30—"Mental illness is a black hole... you have no idea what's going on. ... What you have to remember when someone is mentally ill is they're in pain. They're perpetrating such pain on you, you have trouble remembering they're in pain. I tried to do that. To be as helpful as you can be. The more you try to make things better, things only get worse. At least that was true for me. Every person that's mentally ill is different. Her anger was volcanic. That's what finally killed me. Just absorbing the anger."
• 11:15—Suffering, lament, and grief. Naming the Silences "Silences drip off the edges of words. I think that oftentimes, we're too noisy around people who are suffering, trying to make things OK. What they absolutely need is presence. They need us to be there."
• 13:25—Wisdom for the sufferer. "It's not just the words, it's who says them. It's very important that the designated person of the community called the priest or the minister know what to say. It's very important that friends know how to be there, as well as not to say too much."
• 14:41—On our social practices of ignoring injustice, ignoring suffering for the sake of our own complacency and comfort. "I'd say, in 100 years, if Christians are people identified as those who do not kill their children or their elderly, we wouldn't have been doing something right." "I think in the name of compassion, we're living in a social order that will increasingly not know what to do with those born dying."
• 17:30—Ad Break: "Charting a Course Through Grief" A free 8-week ecourse with a variety helpful resources on grief.
• 20:22—"The idea that somehow or the other, our lives are meant to be free of suffering just doesn't make much sense."
• 22:30—The vices that stand in the way of American Christianity: lack of candid speech, and more...
• 24:09—On suffering and love.
• 26:01—Love, "apprehending the other as other," marriage. "Christians are obligated to love one another, even if they're married."
• 29:17—God is love. "God is love because what love means is that we didn't have to be... God didn't have to create, but we are as a manifestation of God's unrelenting desire to have us be His friends."
• 29:38—God is enemy. "The transformation of God from enemy to God as the one we love is part of the great challenge of living a Christian life."
• 31:24—"I prefer to cherish wrongs done to me. My sense of who I am is more determined by what I'm against rather than what I'm for. I pray that God can have my loves but not take my hates. If you take my hates, how will I know who I am?"
• 32:09—"Where would I be if I didn't have the church to criticize?"
• 32:16—Hauerwas's message to a society finding itself in hate: "Try some courage."
• 34:10—"The idea that we are Christian nation is an extraordinarily destructive one."
• 35:10—Christianity as a political religion. "Jesus is a politic and it is a politic of the formation of people who live by non resistant love across time by establishing ways of surviving in a violent world by being non violent which is a very dangerous way to be."
• 37:43—"Christianity is ongoing training in dying early. Every politic, one way or the other is a politic that deals with death."
• 38:01—Ad break: "Seeking Christian Wisdom for Life's Biggest Questions" via Biola LEARN (15% off your next course)
• 39:54—On confrontation, conflict, love, and peaceableness.
• 41:30—"Politic of the lie"
• 43:51—The experience of violence; weakness, gentleness, vulnerability, and power. "I think you don't become weak to be weak. Rather the language I refer is you discover how to be gentle. There's hardness to gentleness that makes it possible to not be overwhelmed by the violence but your refusal to let the violence defeat our ability to be friends. Gentleness, I think, is crucial for friendship."
• 47:06—The future of Christianity in America. "I believe God is making us leaner and leaner. As we continue to lose members and the church gets smaller, what I hope is we will discover unity between Christians that we haven't experienced for many centuries."
• 48:08—On writing theology. "I try to write at a very fundamental level that makes contact with what I think every Christian struggles with."

Credits

• Hosted and produced by Evan Rosa
• Resource of the Biola University Center for Christian Thought, which is sponsored by generous grants from the John Templeton Foundation, Templeton Religion Trust, and The Blankemeyer Foundation
• Theme music by The Brilliance
• Production and Engineering by the Narrativo Group. More info at Narrativogroup.com
• Edited and mixed by TJ Hester
• Production Assistance by Laura Crane
• Follow: @EvanSubRosa / @BiolaCCT / cct.biola.edu

"I'm a Protestant who loves saints," says Jessica Hooten Wilson. Why do we read and write saints' lives? Hagiography is a long-practiced depiction of the holy and often wacky stories of saints and the wondrous elements of their lives as dedicated to God. Jessica Hooten Wilson identifies one of Flannery O'Connor's primary goals in her unfinished novel Why Do the Heathen Rage? as attempting to write a saint's life. And really, from one angle, a great deal of texts are trying to do this. In attempting to articulate the narrative of a saint's life, we are exercising a spiritual imagination for the sake of understanding the fullest expression of Christ in merely human life.

What follows the suggestion of the descent and ascent of saintly lives is a rich conversation about martyrdom, iconography, what it means to understand a great or holy text, as well as an appreciation for the aesthetic side of spirituality.

Click here for images referenced in the interview: Caravaggio's "Salome Holding the Head of John the Baptist"; Marco d’Agrate, Milan Duomo, "St. Bartholomew Flayed"; Nikola Sarić, "21 Libyan Martyrs Icon"

Show Notes

• 1:15—"I'm a Protestant who loves saints." David Lyle Jeffrey's phrase "inextricably middled." How God can create a saint's life in your own life.
• 2:49—Saint Theresa of the Little Way—"Our lives don't have to make headlines to be saints lives."
• 3:50—What to do with the "white-washed" saints stories; "The reason you read the saint story is not because that person was holier than thou, but because God was holy in that person. That's where the beauty of the saint's life comes from."
• 4:33—Augustine's Confessions, Lady Continence, St. Monica
• 5:15—The three great works that everyone should read: Augustine's Confessions, Dante's Divine Comedy, and Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov
• 6:25—O'Connor's use of the Descent-to-Ascent Model of saints lives
• 7:13—Wilson defends O'Connor from the idea that O'Connor is too horrific. "Everyone has hold of the wrong horror." / Reference to "A Good Man is Hard to Find")
• 8:53—Icons, Art, and Martyrdom; Caravaggio's "Salome Holding the Head of John the Baptist"; Marco d’Agrate, Milan Duomo, "St. Bartholomew Flayed"; Nikola Sarić, "21 Libyan Martyrs Icon"
• 9:36—21 Lybian Martyrs (February 12, 2015); Matthew Ayariga: "My God is their God."
• 12:30—The moral and religious uses of art, icons, stories, books, and sacred texts. 
• 13:50—"It reads us rather than us consume it. ... It puts us in a different position in which we can be transformed. We can be read. We can be submissive. We can let go. We can be emptied of self before it, rather than trying to consume or get from it, something."
• 14:55—Flannery: "We make the wrongful assumption that anyone who can read a telephone book can read a short story."
• 15:15—How to read art, literature, and scripture: submissive, selfless, and no presuppositions. 
• 16:30—Reference to A Wrinkle in Time: "You must attempt to understand in a flash."
• 18:00—The humility required to stand under a text in order to understand it.
• 18:27—Flannery O'Connor on self-knowledge: "...self‑knowledge, for O'Connor, is acknowledging what one lacks. It's measuring one's self against the truth, not measuring the truth against one's self."
• 19:50—Self-knowledge: "Self‑knowledge cannot begin by a self-examination of self. It just sounds tautological, even when you try to explain it.
  Instead, you need the perspective of another. Preferably, a transcendent divine perspective to be an honest true perspective. Therefore, you'd be measuring yourself against the truth. You'd be seeing yourself truly as you are. I think there's a reason that Augustine cannot write an autobiography without having a conversion to Christianity."
• 21:41—Really dumb dad-joke about mimes and St. Augustine's "take up and read" passage.
• 22:20—End Interview, Credits

Credits

• Hosted, Produced, and Edited by Evan Rosa
• Sponsored by generous grants from the John Templeton Foundation, Templeton Religion Trust, and The Blankemeyer Foundation
• Theme Music by The Brilliance
• Twittering: @EvanSubRosa and @BiolaCCT

A Christmas Podcast: Evan Rosa interviews analytic theologian Oliver Crisp on the Incarnation of Christ, and how we can learn from the Incarnation about what it is to be human.

Credits

• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Produced by the Biola University Center for Christian Thought
• Sponsored by generous grants from the John Templeton Foundation, Templeton Religion Trust, and the Blankemeyer Foundation
• Theme music by The Brilliance
• Additional scoring by Evan Rosa
• Podcast artwork by Steven Reynolds
• Thanks to Oliver Crisp and Fuller Theological Seminary
• Special thanks to Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen; oh, ah, Comet and Cupid and Donner and Blitzen)—oh yeah, Rudolph too
• Twitter: @EvanSubRosa / @BiolaCCT
• Web: cct.biola.edu