Call and Character

On January 6, white nationalists stormed the US Capitol—many of them carrying banners with phrases like “Jesus Saves” and “Make America Godly Again.” Various symbols and icons could be seen in the swarming crowds, including a ten-foot crucifix that rioters placed in the middle of a prayer circle and a large gallows and noose, that evoked (intentionally or not) the horrendous history of racial lynchings during the Jim Crow era.  The images that started to appear were jarring and revolting, but also reminders that the legacy of ethnic supremacy and nationalism has been part of the American story from its inception. The cross and the lynching tree, the hymns and racist chants, the religious piety and the white nationalism--this is America. It takes an especially adept historian, cultural critic, and public scholar to extract the historical, moral, and theological lessons from these dark, complicated images.  The day before the storming of the Capitol, Zondervan Books released a new volume from our guest, historian Jemar Tisby, How To Fight Racism: Courageous Christianity and the Journey Toward Racial Justice. This new work is a constructive follow up to his first book, The Color of Compromise, a historical analysis of the American church’s complicity in racial injustice. 

The British poet Edward Thomas once wrote an exquisite little poem in which he described a simple, towering plume of smoke rising from a train as “so fair it touched the roar with silence.” In my own encounters with the art of Makoto Fujimura, our guest today, I’ve been overwhelmed, too, by a silence so deep, it roars and arrests the gaze of anyone who pays it attention.   But this is what beauty does. It holds a fragile power to generate meaning and recognition. It resists commodification and crass pragmatism, and invites those who behold it to stop and linger a while. Reading Fujimura’s new book, I was reminded often of the story in the gospels about the woman who came to Jesus with an alabaster jar and poured expensive perfume on his feet, to the displeasure of the disciples. What the woman at Bethany did made no economic or earthly sense. It was an excessive act with no instrumental value. But she saw Jesus as her beloved and knew that he was worth the offering. She took the perfume, itself a finite good, and made it something of infinite value. As the art and writing of Fujimura suggests, these sorts of acts ought to arrest our attention, so that we can model their beauty in our own lives and callings.

Media culture is messier than it ever was. Print journalism has been facing financial pressures for decades, but it’s now subject to partisan politics in increasingly complicated ways. In Christian media, in particular, the polarized politics of the audience and readership can pose challenges for editors and journalists trying to maintain some semblance of objectivity in their reporting. Today, we have a guest, Daniel Silliman, news editor at Christianity Today, who has both studied Christian media culture for years, and is now part of that media culture as well. 

Even for those of us who love to read, literature can seem a luxury at times. The pace of modern life presents a hundred challenges each day that make it simpler to reach for our smartphone, or crash after a long day’s work, or wrestling small children through the bedtime routine—rather than immerse ourselves in a good book. But the imaginative world of literature gives us something other than an easy escape. Our guest today, Jessica Hooten Wilson, suggests that literature—at its best—reminds us that the world is saturated with beauty, meaning, and divine presence, even in the most tedious, challenging, or unlovely parts of life.

If human beings are fundamentally social, needing companionship and community to flourish, this year’s pandemic put many of us to the test. Forced inside for months, separated from friends and family, becoming competent at virtual meetings and webinars—our new normal, ordinary lives would’ve been unrecognizable to ourselves just months prior.  And in the midst of all this uncertainty, questions about mental health and wellbeing rose to the surface. Our guest today, Amanda Zelechoski, along with a friend and collaborator, began drawing on her research on trauma psychology to start conversations about the ways that this year has been odd, challenging, surreal, and in some very tragic cases, unhealthy or even lethal to vulnerable members of society.

In past episodes, we’ve discussed some of the challenges facing the world of higher education, as well as some of the reasons why it’s difficult to address questions of ultimate concern—what makes for a life worth living—when you’re operating in survival mode. How can we get the mental energy think about moral formation when so many social pressures entice us toward pragmatism? How can we be bothered to inquire after truth when false reports and partisan agendas are such an oppressive presence in our digital and personal lives?  Our guest today, Dr. Joseph Clair, draws on the theological and moral legacy of Augustine, the late antique Christian theologian, to think through these issues. 

This past summer forced many of us to rethink what matters most—both personally and professionally. A pandemic that sent many of us home for months, sometimes jobless or furloughed. Emerging social protest movements that drew our attention to systemic injustices and political divisions that threaten the order of things. In anxious times, we might want to ask: what really matters? What sort of person should I be, in order to do justice to my neighbor? What sorts of loves should I cultivate, even when everything seems unstable? What am I called to do, personally and professionally, when things beyond my control have placed a giant question mark on so many things that used to be assumed?  

Thankfully, we have centuries of wisdom to draw on, from Plato and Confucius to Aquinas and Luther, to Mary Wollstonecraft and Frederick Douglass. And our guest today, Dr. Mark Schwehn, has spent decades cultivating this wisdom in the classroom and through his writing. I’m eager to share this conversation with him, and with you, the listeners.

It seems every political community has a Golden Age—an era (real or imagined) when leaders were all virtuous, the people were all happy, and national prominence was obvious to the watching world. In the American context, the idea that our political order is somehow exceptional—the best there ever was—has fascinating history. America, in its origins, was supposed to have a distinctive calling and purpose that set it apart. It was, to borrow the words of Jesus and the Puritan John Winthrop, a City on a Hill, to whom the eyes of all nations turned.  Our guest today, Abram Van Engen, investigates the history of the idea of American exceptionalism, looking at its cultural and even theological origins, as well as the ways in which the idea has been picked up and transformed in contemporary politics. He also raises questions about the ways that the underside of the American experiment (the displacement of indigenous peoples and the enslavement of African men and women) is forgotten in many tellings of the national myth. 

Ideological battle lines are often drawn between those who take the authority of their religious scriptures and traditions seriously, on one side, and those who advocate for social justice and prophetic political witness, on the other. Is this divide real? Do the faithful have to choose between a scriptural tradition and social justice? Or is this a false—even pernicious—dilemma?  Our guest today, Esau McCaulley, argues that the Black church tradition, with its particular historical ways of reading scripture, offers resources to connect the Christian faith with urgent contemporary political concerns. Reading the Bible through the prism of the black American experience offers us a way to rethink theological discussions of race, gender, political resistance, policing, and slavery.

If you were in a classroom and overheard a conversation about things like beauty, playfulness, truth, justice, and love, you might assume you were eavesdropping on a class in philosophy, religion, or perhaps literature. But our guest today, Dr. Francis Su, suggests that these basic concepts are fundamental to the discipline of mathematics. He argues that various practices, habits, and virtues obtained through the study of mathematics can help students flourish as human beings—to enjoy the happiness, peace, or shalom that ancient philosophers in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions described as the ultimate goal of human life.