Conversing with Mark Labberton

Dishonesty is becoming more and more incentivized. The rise of AI has made it easier to hide cheating and harder to catch it. And a utilitarian attitude about bending the truth is leading to an all-out honesty crisis. New tools that save us time and optimize our effort also offer new opportunities for deception. Nonetheless, research suggests honesty is still the character trait we value highest. What is the real value of honesty today, and what can we do to preserve it?

Christian Miller, the A.C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University and former director of the Honesty Project, has spent fifteen years studying virtue and character. His new book, The Honesty Crisis, finds that recipe at work in six corners of public and private life at once.

In this conversation with Mark Labberton, Christian Miller explains what virtue is and why it has to come from good intentions. They discuss how Miller's Christian faith sits alongside a virtue ethics he reached on strictly philosophical grounds, why students cheat more when they believe their peers do as well, and how an honour code works as a kind of moral reminder. They also take up the hunger for status behind celebrity dishonesty and how that creeps into ordinary lives, the arrival of the honesty crisis 2.0 in preaching, Mark's contrast between sermon as an expression of character versus sermon as an expression of performance, and what happens when people seek love from AI companions that cannot love them back.

Episode Highlights

• "I couldn't go to bed at night without worrying. Is someone tomorrow going to cheat me, steal from me, lie to me, mislead me, BS me? All these ways in which you would fail to be honest."

• "Dishonesty is becoming more incentivized. It's more tempting . . . [and] it's easier to get away with dishonesty. . . . So when you put those two features together, you have a really bad recipe for preserving honesty."

• "The single biggest predictor of student cheating is perceived cheating by peers."

• "Celebrity is something that's quite addictive. When you get a little bit of it, you want more. And so that can lead you to do dishonest things as a means to acquire greater celebrity."

• "AI comes along. Here we have the honesty crisis 2.0. 1.0 was the internet; 2.0, I think now, is AI."

About Christian Miller

Christian B. Miller is the A.C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University. A specialist in ethics, virtue, and character, he has written more than 140 academic papers and six monographs, including The Character Gap: How Good Are We?; Honesty: The Philosophy and Psychology of a Neglected Virtue; and, most recently, The Honesty Crisis. He also directed the Honesty Project, one of the largest research initiatives ever undertaken on honesty. He lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, with his wife and three children.

Helpful Links and Resources

• The Honesty Crisis: Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue in an Increasingly Dishonest World, by Christian Miller: https://christianbmiller.com/the-honesty-crisis

• The Character Gap: How Good Are We?, by Christian Miller: https://christianbmiller.com/the-character-gap

• Honesty: The Philosophy and Psychology of a Neglected Virtue, by Christian Miller: https://christianbmiller.com/academic-research

• The Honesty Project at Wake Forest University: https://honestyproject.philosophy.wfu.edu

• "Confronting the Honesty Crisis," Miller's essay on AI cheating in Merion West: https://www.merionwest.com/confronting-the-honesty-crisis

Show Notes

• Christian Miller grew up in Florida, studied philosophy at Princeton, earned his PhD at Notre Dame, and has taught at Wake Forest for twenty years.

• "Where does morality come from? Is it objective? Is it subjective or relative?"

• The virtue revival: Alasdair MacIntyre, Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Slote, Rosalind Hursthouse, Christine Swanton, Stanley Hauerwas

• Defining virtue: a pattern of behaviour across situations and over time rooted in good motivation

• Fruit of the Spirit, three theological virtues, four cardinal virtues, Aquinas, sanctification

• "One of the main works of the Holy Spirit is precisely bound up with becoming a more virtuous person."

• Wake Forest psychologists had participants force rank sixty characteristics

• "We would not be able to trust other people."

• Six honesty crises: deepfakes, internet infidelity, political misinformation and fake news, celebrity and influencer culture, AI student cheating, sermon plagiarism

• AI cheating: efficiency, effectiveness, evasiveness

• Celebrity: status, a public persona and a private self

• Self-benefit, egoism, sin

• "We read the honour code, then we sign our name, and then we take the test."

• Human character: a mixed bag, image of God and original sin

• Students recite the honour code aloud before each bluebook exam, professor included

• Transparency vs. hiddenness: LinkedIn, emails, text messages

• English king who required ministers to try to give one original sermon a month

• "A third to a half of pastors would be willing to engage in some kind of substantive internet plagiarism."

• Plagiarism, misleading, cheating, BS justifications

• "The honour code that is lifted up for you in preaching . . . should be the worship of the church itself."

• "I can describe love. I can even imitate love." (Claude, Anthropic's AI model)

• AI romantic companions, one in seven, searching for love

• Perfect, flawless, infinite love

#Honesty #Virtue #Ethics #AIEthics #Character #Philosophy #Faith #Preaching #AcademicIntegrity #ConversingPodcast

Political scientists once theorized that roughly every thirty years, a major election shuffles each party's constituencies. But Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University, disagrees. Groups tend to shift slowly over time, she says—not as a sea change or red/blue wave in one dramatic election. When it comes to the 2026 midterm elections in America, she offers a patient and unsentimental perspective: We are still hyper-partisan, and party realignment takes years, even decades.

In this conversation with Mark Labberton, Gillespie comments on voter turnout research, racial authenticity in black politics, realignment and the 2026 midterms, and Christian nationalism and the gospel of grace.

Episode Highlights

• "It takes years for a realignment to manifest. So in all honesty, I need another fifteen, twenty years' worth of data before we actually know that these shifts are happening."

• "You don't want to be so blinded by your hope that you can't actually properly discern what's happening in front of you."

• "I get to the major and minor prophets, I read them very, very differently now. … You see the corruption that they were speaking to and you recognize it in your own time."

• "I see it as a power grab. This is people who are trying to reclaim power, seize power, and then they want to do it with sort of the imprimatur of Jesus around it—but this isn't about Jesus, this is about their own self-aggrandizement."

• "You're trying to get people to conform to a particular way that, behind closed doors, you can't even live up to."

• "My responsibility is to not look to circumstances, to not look to people around me for my comfort and my hope, because if I did I would just despair, but to remember that Christ is calling me to abide in him."

About Andra Gillespie

Andra Gillespie is associate professor of political science and graduate faculty in sociology at Emory University, where she directs the James Weldon Johnson Institute. Her research focuses on the political leadership of the post–civil rights generation and race and voting behaviour. She is the author of The New Black Politician: Cory Booker, Newark, and Post-Racial America and Race and the Obama Administration; editor of Whose Black Politics?; and coauthor, with Shayla C. Nunnally, of An Introduction to African American Politics. A Yale PhD holder, she worked as an analyst for Democratic pollster Mark Mellman before joining Emory.

Helpful Links and Resources

• Whose Black Politics? Cases in Post-Racial Black Leadership, edited by Andra Gillespie: https://a.co/d/0j42FVEF

• Race and the Obama Administration: Substance, Symbols, and Hope, by Andra Gillespie: https://a.co/d/059YKuFz

• The New Black Politician: Cory Booker, Newark, and Post-Racial America, by Andra Gillespie: https://a.co/d/0e4zn1AM

• "The Effects of Canvassing, Telephone Calls, and Direct Mail on Voter Turnout," Gerber and Green's 1998 New Haven field experiment: https://isps.yale.edu/research/publications/isps00-001

• Street Fight, Marshall Curry's documentary of the 2002 Newark mayoral race: https://tribecafilm.com/news/512c0e971c7d76d9a9000648-tribeca-takes-marshall-cu

• Andra Gillespie, Emory University Department of Political Science: https://polisci.emory.edu/people/biography/gillespie-andra.html

• Andra Gillespie on X: https://x.com/AndraGillespie

Show Notes

• Framing the conversation: 2026 Midterm Election Day

• Gillespie describes the influences that led to her vocation as a political scientist, and why deep burning questions should drive anyone toward a PhD.

• 1998 New Haven experiment suggesting personal contact drives turnout: "The Effects of Canvassing, Telephone Calls, and Direct Mail on Voter Turnout"

• "I walked up to him and said, 'Did you know that canvassing can increase voter turnout by nine percent?' And he's like, 'Really? I'm getting ready to run for mayor.'"

• 2002 Newark mayoral race, Street Fight documentary, racial authenticity, and the field notes behind her first book

• "It takes years for a realignment to manifest."

• 2024 shifts among black and Latino voters, the black gender gap, and turnout over conversion

• Why the president's party usually loses midterms, and how inflation hits the most vulnerable

• Midterm patterns, divided government, and inflation's sharper bite for families with thin buffers

• Georgia: 2021 runoff mobilization, an incumbent's Senate race, a tied governor's race, down-ballot stakes

• Deep reset or short-term reaction?

• Holding hope and realism together

• Rereading the major and minor prophets in a corrupt age

• On Christian nationalism: "I see it as a power grab. … This isn't about Jesus, this is about their own self-aggrandizement."

• Pluralism without coercion: "Growing up, my mom always talked about how you couldn't be the Holy Spirit for other people."

• Proverbs 14:34 (NIV): "Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin condemns any people."

• On legislated morality and hypocrisy: "You're trying to get people to conform to a particular way that, behind closed doors, you can't even live up to."

• "Credible witness," words and deeds as one. Matthew 7:28–29 (NIV): "When Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were amazed at his teaching, because he taught as one who had authority, and not as their teachers of the law."

• Hope in Christ when circumstances offer none

#Conversing #Midterms2026 #ElectionDay #GeorgiaPolitics #BlackPolitics #ChristianNationalism #FaithAndPolitics #PoliticalScience

What would it mean to fear rightly—to both fear God and "fear not," to both validate the terror that fits with traumatic events and quell the fright and learn to regulate? For Kutter Callaway, there are deep theological and psychological opportunities available in the horror film genre. To some, that might seem rather inconsistent. But in his new book, Be Afraid: What Horror Reveals About Facing the Darkness, Callaway makes the case that Christians need to be able to face and integrate the undeniable horrors that haunt us.

In this conversation with Mark Labberton, Callaway reflects on why the Christian life might be more about discipling fear than eliminating it, how the best horror films can help people integrate trauma rather than defeat it, and why our deepest dread may be of living as vulnerable creatures more than of death itself.

They compare Mark's deliberate encounters with severe poverty around the world, reconsider the terrifying elements of the Christmas narrative, open up the dark and neglected corners of Scripture, and ask whether horror trivializes the powers and principalities or exposes how we are implicated in them.

Episode Highlights

• "If the God of the Christian tradition is in fact the … God around which all of reality turns, it's interesting to me that the … crux, literally, of that story is possibly one of the most horrific things that we could imagine."

• "The command … is far less 'do not have fear' but rather 'This is a very fear-inducing situation, but you can trust the person who's here, the person who's delivering the message.'"

• "Rarely can we eliminate the trauma. … But there are ways we can live with it … integrate it as if it's the monster under our basement that we almost nurture."

• "I think we're afraid of living as vulnerable creatures."

• "If you want a story, if you want a God that has seen and experienced the depths of your trauma and your horror and your chaos, boy, have I got a story for you."

• "There's not a lot of space in Christian circles to really talk about the fears that drive most of our life."

• "I, too, become the monster."

About Kutter Callaway

Kutter Callaway is the William K. Brehm Chair of Worship, Theology, and the Arts at Fuller Theological Seminary, where he is also associate dean of the Center for Advanced Theological Studies. He holds two PhDs from Fuller, in theology and in psychological science. His newest book, Be Afraid: What Horror Reveals About Facing the Darkness, grew out of his Christianity Today podcast of the same name. Earlier books include Watching TV Religiously, Scoring Transcendence, and the co-authored Deep Focus. An ordained Baptist minister, he lives in Los Angeles with his wife and three daughters.

Helpful Links and Resources

• Be Afraid: What Horror Reveals About Facing the Darkness, by Kutter Callaway: https://www.ivpress.com/be-afraid

• Be Afraid book website: https://www.beafraidbook.com

• Be Afraid podcast (from Christianity Today): https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/podcasts/be-afraid

• Conversing episode 67: Scott Derrickson on fear: https://fullerstudio.fuller.edu/scott-derrickson-on-fear

Show Notes

• Fear and faith

• How many "fear not" commands are in the Scriptures?

• "Fear not" is regularly spoken in genuinely terrifying moments, pointing toward trust in the messenger rather than literal fearlessness

• Perfect love casting out fear vs. the fear of the Lord as wisdom's beginning

• What it means to disciple fear, instead of avoiding or eliminating fear

• Theology of pop culture meets psychological science

• Christian filmmakers calling horror the most theological genre

• Post-COVID theaters were rescued by horror, representing nearly 20 percent of movie ticket sales

• Callaway's personal exposure-therapy experiment

• Horror subgenres

• Individual and inherited trauma in recent horror

• The Babadook: a mother who keeps the monster in the basement rather than destroying it, a picture of trauma integrated instead of defeated

• Self-conscious vulnerability

• Terror management theory

• Fear of living as fragile creatures running deeper than fear of death

• Callaway's lifelong dread of creepy dolls (e.g., Chucky from Child's Play)

• The real case behind The Exorcism of Emily Rose and the unexpected spiritual toll

• New empathy for first responders

• Limit experiences: becoming a parent, losing a child

• Guided, deliberate exposure to severe poverty in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the US

• Voyeurism, poverty porn, and needing a community of wisdom afterward

• A Christmas Carol as ghost story

• The slaughter of the innocents

• The cross as brutal state-sponsored execution

• Scripture's neglected dark texts and the rarity of sermons on Judges

• School shootings, LA fires, and everyday dread

• Readers who avoid horror, starting with his mom

• Does horror trivialize the powers and principalities?

• The Exorcist as serious, terrifying gospel proclamation

• Stranger Things and monsters made by institutions meant to protect children

• Theological failure as downstream of artistic failure

• Horror that implicates the viewer in the evil

#Horror #HorrorMovies #FaithAndFear #Halloween #Theology #FaithAndCulture #ChristianFaith #BeAfraid #Conversing

There is a secret history of white Christian women, says historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez (bestselling author, Jesus and John Wayne). And the thread of this history brings together Evangelicals, Mormons, mainline Christians—connecting them to New Thought (a movement emphasizing the power of the mind to shape reality), Hallmark movies, mommy bloggers, and multi-level marketing.

In her latest book, Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made, Du Mez tells the story of a single promise: that total surrender of the will unlocks holiness and happiness. Often masquerading as personal empowerment, the products and slogans of this ideological history elevate the vulnerability and domesticity of women, thereby contributing to systems of manipulation and abuse.

In this conversation with Mark Labberton, Du Mez explains how holiness evangelicalism and the secular philosophy of New Thought were braided together to influence women, and how its culture marketed as empowerment created byproducts of self-blame, submission, and control. They discuss Hannah Whitall Smith's feminist defiance; the little-known "deconstruction era" of Elisabeth Elliot; the demonizing of doubt in high-control religion and multi-level marketing; the line running from Christian Reconstructionism to today's rhetoric of "toxic empathy"; and how to return to the gospel of the Christ who relinquishes power.

Episode Highlights

• "There is no sense of the common good. There is no sense of common grace. There's no sense of grace, period."

• "The past is always going to be more complicated and more interesting—and I would argue more useful—than the simplistic narratives that we like to tell ourselves."

• "Christian literature, she says, is neither Christian nor literature. It's propaganda. Right? It's simply telling evangelical readers what they want to hear, but it is not true."

• "When you embrace that theology and ideology, if things don't work out well for you, it's your own fault. It has to be your own fault … within holiness theology and within the philosophy of positive thinking, doubt is literally demonized. Doubt is of the devil."

• "She never confused submission to God to submission to men. She was a feminist. She was a preacher. She certainly wasn't going to submit to her husband, who was a jerk."

• "… a gospel which is more in line with the gospel of Jesus Christ, one in which Christ divests himself of power and continually disappoints his followers who want that power."

About Kristin Kobes Du Mez

Kristin Kobes Du Mez is a New York Times bestselling historian, professor of history at Calvin University, and a Senior Democracy Fellow with the Public Religion Research Institute. Her work sits at the intersection of gender, religion, and politics. She is the author of A New Gospel for Women, on the Christian feminist reformer Katharine Bushnell; Jesus and John Wayne; and, most recently, Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made. She holds a PhD from the University of Notre Dame and grew up in a Dutch Reformed community in small-town Iowa.

Helpful Links and Resources

• Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made, Kristin Kobes Du Mez's 2026 book: https://kristindumez.com/books/live-laugh-love/

• Live Laugh Love book club discussion guide (free): https://kristindumez.com/discussion-guides/lll-book-club-discussion-guide/

• Jesus and John Wayne, Du Mez's 2020 bestseller: https://kristindumez.com/books/jesus-and-john-wayne/

• A New Gospel for Women, Du Mez's first book, on Katharine Bushnell: https://kristindumez.com/books/new-gospel-for-women/

• Du Mez CONNECTIONS (Substack): https://kristindumez.substack.com/

• Kristin Du Mez on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/kkdumez.bsky.social

• The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life, Hannah Whitall Smith's 1875 classic: https://ccel.org/ccel/smith_hw/secret/files/secret.htm

• Elisabeth Elliot: A Life, Lucy S. R. Austen's biography: https://www.crossway.org/books/elisabeth-elliot-hcj

Show Notes

• Why history? And why now?

• Undergrad indecision: pre-med, German major, then history, since everything has a history

• Instilling curiosity over provocation

• Evangelical views that treat history as apologetics

• Dutch Reformed upbringing: critical, intellectual, light on evangelism

• Christian Reformed critics who sound like evangelical ones, as distinct traditions turn de facto evangelical

• Three layers: consumer culture, porous traditions, systems of control

• Holiness theology and total surrender: The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life, by Hannah Whitall Smith (1875)

• New Thought and the belief in the power of the mind to shape reality

• Prosperity gospel, free markets, baptizing the rich

• Empowerment and lost agency

• Self-blame loops, demonized doubt, multi-level marketing (MLM) economics

• Hannah Whitall Smith's defiance of male authority, and a life that undercut her own book

• Elisabeth Elliot's forgotten deconstruction era, uncovered in the Wheaton archives: doubting holiness promises, rejecting evangelical jargon, and calling Christian publishing propaganda

• Remarriage and a return to the trappings she once rejected

• Self-consciousness and self-critique

• Christian nationalism, hierarchy, and Christian Reconstructionism

• Transactional faith and the toxic empathy discourse

• Forgiveness for powerful insiders, punishment for outsiders

• Saint and sinner at once

• Why manipulation works, and the gospel of a Christ who relinquishes power

How can a Christian humanitarian organization keep Christ at the center of its mission while working in the world's most difficult places, with thousands of staff spread across dozens of countries and cultures? Gary Haugen, founder and CEO of International Justice Mission, and Kevin Jenkins, former president and CEO of World Vision International, both understand their organizations to be foundationally Christian. But even in ministries where you would expect spiritual formation to be at the center, it takes work to help large global teams live up to their mission.

Speaking with Mark Labberton before a live audience at International Justice Mission's Cornerstone 2026 event, Haugen and Jenkins link missional success to the slow and unglamorous work of spiritual formation at the individual and relational level. Keenly aware of the gap between what Christians (and Christian organizations) say they believe and what they actually do, they consider how the outward work of ministry connects to the inward work of discipleship to Christ, wrestling with the very idea of a "Christian" organization.

In this episode, Haugen and Jenkins consider their own formation as Christians and as leaders; Dallas Willard's definition of belief as acting as if something is true; the risk of prayerless striving that can overtake even the best kinds of work; IJM's daily 11 a.m. prayer pause; Henri Nouwen's concept of moving from solitude to community to ministry; and the long-term accountability friendships that keep leaders honest.

Episode Highlights

• "There wasn't anybody in the world who would identify me as a Christian because of the way I loved other people." (Gary Haugen)

• "'God, if you would give me the gift of a spiritual quiet time, I will dedicate an hour a day of my life to you for the rest of my life.' … That is such a dangerous prayer." (Kevin Jenkins)

• "You believe something when you act as if it's true. That is a really troublesome claim for a Christian." (Haugen)

• "I experienced the way prayerless striving could overcome me even in a good thing, and even [with a] felt sense of calling from God." (Haugen)

• "To be purposely somewhat provocative: There's no such thing as a Christian organization." (Jenkins)

• "It's impossible to be in humanitarian work and not believe in evil. Impossible." (Jenkins)

• "Humanitarian work is very difficult. … Who knew it would be so hard to try to do good?" (Kevin Jenkins)

About Gary Haugen

Gary Haugen is the founder and CEO of International Justice Mission. Before founding IJM in 1997, he was a human rights attorney at the US Department of Justice, and in 1994, he directed the United Nations' investigation in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide. His books include Good News About Injustice, Just Courage, and, with Victor Boutros, The Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence. A graduate of Harvard and the University of Chicago Law School, he has been recognized by the US State Department as a Trafficking in Persons "Hero."

About Kevin Jenkins

Kevin Jenkins served as president and CEO of World Vision International from 2009 to 2019, the organization's seventh president. He came to the role after more than a decade as a World Vision child sponsor, volunteer, fundraiser, and board member in Canada, and after a twenty-five-year business career that included leading Canadian Airlines and The Westaim Corporation and serving as managing director of the private equity firm TriWest Capital Partners. Born in Western Canada, he holds a law degree from the University of Alberta and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Helpful Links and Resources

Gary Haugen, International Justice Mission Global Leadership: https://ijm.org/leadership/global

Gary Haugen's books with InterVarsity Press, including Good News About Injustice and Just Courage: https://ivpress.com/gary-a-haugen

The Locust Effect, Gary Haugen and Victor Boutros (Oxford University Press, 2014): https://www.thelocusteffect.com

Kevin Jenkins's leadership transition, World Vision International: https://www.wvi.org/pressrelease/world-vision-international-announces-ceo-transition

The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard: https://dwillard.org/books/divine-conspiracy

Community, Henri Nouwen, opening with "From Solitude to Community to Ministry": https://www.henrinouwen.org/books/community

IJM memorial for Willie Kimani, Josephat Mwenda, and Joseph Muiruri: https://www.the-star.co.ke/news/2018-06-23-ijm-holds-willie-kimanis-2nd-memorial-in-dandora/

Show Notes

• Spiritual formation as real progress in the spiritual life, in imitation of Christ and out in the public square

• John 13:35: "By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another."

• Dallas Willard's The Divine Conspiracy: https://dwillard.org/books/divine-conspiracy

• Practicing Christlikeness the way a runner trains for a marathon

• Not merely converts, but disciples—apprentices of Jesus

• Henri Nouwen's book Community on solitude, community, and ministry: https://www.henrinouwen.org/books/community

• A risky retreat prayer that opened the way to more than three decades of daily quiet time

• Thirty years of monthly accountability calls

• The crisis of male friendship

• The Rwandan genocide and the founding of International Justice Mission

• Belief measured by action

• Prayerless striving

• IJM's daily 11 a.m. prayer pause

• Romans 1:1 in The Message and the idea of a kingdom assignment: "I, Paul, am a devoted slave of Jesus Christ on assignment, authorized as an apostle to proclaim God's words and acts. I write this letter to all the believers in Rome, God's friends."

• Christian identity as something to fight for, with Harvard and the YMCA as cautionary tales

• John 15:5 and work of eternal value: "I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing."

• Ephesians 6:12 and evil in humanitarian work: "For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms."

• Kenya, 2016: Murder of IJM lawyer Willie Kimani, his client, and their driver

• Steadiness, grief, and a resurrected Jesus

• The easy yoke of Jesus

• The importance of Sabbath rest and reorientation

• Timely truth-telling with love across cultures

#Conversing #SpiritualFormation #InternationalJusticeMission #WorldVision #ChristianLeadership #DallasWillard #HenriNouwen #FaithAndJustice #Humanitarian #Podcast

What if the deepest problems in American life were pre-political? It's often said that "culture is upstream from politics"—meaning that what we see in political news, speeches, ads, debates, and elections is symptomatic of a deeper cause. The conflicts, troubles, injustices, and sufferings that many people experience as political are more likely rooted in moral and spiritual crises.

This week's episode marks ten years of Conversing, which launched on October 8, 2016. To celebrate, Mark Labberton is joined by David Brooks, a staff writer at The Atlantic and presidential fellow at Yale's Jackson School of Global Affairs. He is also the host of a brand-new podcast, The Permanent Questions.

In this episode, Mark and David wrestle with what asking questions actually does to a person and discuss the styles of great interviewers, why schools seem to train curiosity out of children, the human urge to control, how AI hollows us out and dehumanizes the people around us, and what moral formation looks like in a classroom—and a podcast.

Episode Highlights

• "I felt over that time that the problems in our life were pre-political. They were in our culture. They're in our spiritual core."

• "I've asked millions of people millions of questions. How many times has anybody ever said, 'None of your damn business'? And the answer is zero. No one has ever said that to me."

• "My style has always been student. Teach me … I just treat people as teachers who can tell me something I don't know … People like to be treated as sages, it turns out, including me."

• "One of the dumbest pieces of advice we give to people is to come up with your own values. Come up with your own philosophy of life. Unless your name is Aristotle, you probably can't do that."

• "If there were settled answers to these biggest questions, we could just read one book and it would be over."

• On AI: "For those who like to think, we will use it to think more. … The rest of us will use it to think less."

• "The problem is that as we think more highly of AI, we think less highly of humans."

• "Morality is about love."

About David Brooks

David Brooks is a writer at The Atlantic, a presidential fellow at Yale's Jackson School of Global Affairs, and the host of the weekly video podcast The Permanent Questions. He spent twenty-two years as a columnist at The New York Times and has long been a commentator on PBS NewsHour. His books include The Road to Character, The Second Mountain, and How to Know a Person. His first real job in journalism was as a police reporter for the City News Bureau of Chicago.

Helpful Links and Resources

• The Permanent Questions podcast: https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/the-permanent-questions

• David Brooks at The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/author/david-brooks

• How to Know a Person, David Brooks's 2023 book, Penguin Random House: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/652822/how-to-know-a-person-by-david-brooks

• Comment magazine's fall 2026 issue on control, built around Hartmut Rosa's thought: https://comment.org/product/the-paradoxes-of-control-44-3-fall-2026

• Hartmut Rosa's The Uncontrollability of the World, reviewed in the Los Angeles Review of Books: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/control-everything-on-hartmut-rosas-the-uncontrollability-of-the-world

Show Notes

• Ten years of Conversing and thanks to those behind it

• A new podcast: The Permanent Questions

• Hosting is harder than expected; twenty-five pages of notes

• Meghan Sullivan's "God and the Good Life" course at Notre Dame

• Confessional writing assignment that moved bereaved families

• Leaving the Times; problems that are pre-political, rooted in culture and the spiritual core

• The Great Conversation

• Belonging versus autonomy, spirit versus mind, equality versus achievement

• Police reporting in Chicago, asking questions on the worst day

• Questions as generosity and an act of seeing

• Genesis: the two opening questions, self-examination and communion

• Interviewing styles: transaction, seduction, charm, and the student

• Why permanent questions stay unsettled: souls, moderation versus speed

• The garden of Eden: Eve, the tree, and the limits of curiosity

• Who defines urgency, and which question is most urgent now

• Resonance, control, and the fading of love in American life

• Declining marriage, fertility, observance, and patriotism

• Questions per hour: toddlers, first graders, fifth graders

• The scale story: experimenting versus covering content

• Frankenstein versus Faust: Will AI kill us or hollow us out?

• Skills lost: writing, radiology, navigating Anaheim freeways

• Anthropomorphizing bots and devaluing human workers

• Moral reasoning among AI agents: pure consequentialism, no love

• Moral gestures versus real change: reading scores in Mississippi and California

• Two civil rights movements: one with no concept of sin, one prophetic

• Nonviolence as a strategy for justice

• Moral formation in the classroom: exemplars, traditions, and the teacher herself

• Regret and risk, and what hospice workers hear when people are at the end of their lives

• Why young people are the heroes of the story

#ConversingPodcast #DavidBrooks #ThePermanentQuestions #Curiosity #AI #Humanity #Resonance #MoralFormation #FaithAndCulture #GreatConversation #Humanities

War has wracked Ukraine for 1,678 days—outlasting both World Wars. In this conversation with Mark Labberton, Fyodor Raichynets—a theologian at Ukrainian Evangelical Theological Seminary, pastor of a church in Bucha, and a military chaplain serving on the front lines in Kyiv—explains what it is like to be under near-constant drone and ballistic attack and how that has affected his faith, memory, and experience of time.

War has reshaped the way he loves, forgives, and serves; it has induced a fear even to hope. Together, they discuss trauma as a national condition and the temptation to despair when God seems not to intervene. They also consider the moral wounds soldiers carry from killing, the competing prayers of two mothers inside one congregation, and what it means to see God in the face of the needy—even when the needy include one's enemies.

Episode Highlights

• "'Into your hands I commit my spirit'—and with these words on my lips I go to bed every night ... I go to bed with the thought that I may not wake up in the morning, so I just make sure that my spirit is in his hand."

• "If I have something to share and there is a person that needs it, well, I would share anyway ... Probably that's what the love for the enemies is all about."

• "I jokingly put it that I have this 'planophobia' in the recent years, so I'm even afraid to plan my life, but you know that you cannot do it without any planning."

• "Trauma emerges in a place where you find rescue and where instead of security you find insecurity."

• "I was just thinking how blessed we are that we don't know the future. And this not knowing what is ahead of us keeps us going, in fact."

• "We have fear to hope, because whatever we hoped for over these four years, it just gets worse, not better."

• "Those whom they have killed ... they come to them in their dreams, in their sleep, and they said that they physically sense it. They even sense it that someone is grabbing their hand."

• "One wife would pray ... that God would protect her son not to be drafted. But in the same group there is a mother who asked to pray that God would protect her son on the front line. So what should we pray for?"

• "War creates such a basic need ... you need water, you don't need luxury things. ... So when we see the needy people and we minister to them, that is what makes us a people of a pure heart."

About Fyodor Raichynets

Fyodor Raichynets is a theologian, pastor, and military chaplain in Kyiv, Ukraine. He heads the department of theology at Ukrainian Evangelical Theological Seminary, where he teaches leadership and biblical studies, particularly the Gospel of Matthew, and directs its master's program in transformative leadership. A former student of Miroslav Volf in Osijek, Croatia, he ministered for years across the Balkans. He pastors Bethany Church in Bucha and wrote the chapter on the pure in heart for Beatitudes and Terror: A Ukrainian Theological Response to Russian Aggression. Since the 2022 invasion, he has led relief work among Kyiv's most vulnerable, feeding the elderly and the displaced.

Helpful Links and Resources

• Beatitudes and Terror: A Ukrainian Theological Response to Russian Aggression, the volume with Fyodor Raichynets's chapter on the pure in heart: https://langhamliterature.org/books/beatitudes-and-terror

• Ukrainian Evangelical Theological Seminary: https://uets.edu.ua/en/about-us

• Ways to support UETS relief ministry and the training of ministers: https://uets.edu.ua/en/ways-to-support

• Fyodor Raichynets on Facebook, where he posts daily wartime reflections: https://www.facebook.com/fyodor.Raichynets

• "A Voice from Kyiv," Raichynets's earlier conversation with Miroslav Volf: https://faith.yale.edu/media/a-voice-from-kyiv-fyodor-Raichynets

• Man's Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl, referenced on who survived the camps: https://www.beacon.org/Mans-Search-for-Meaning-P602.aspx

Show Notes

• Kyiv under fire

• A rough night of combined ballistic and drone attack

• Waking to explosions, then morning news of the aftermath

• Two-tier alerts now: yellow for drones, red for ballistic strikes

• Reactive drones flying higher and faster, harder to track or down

• Lecturing to students while watching drone paths on a phone

• A nightly prayer, and sleeping unsure of waking

• "Planophobia," losing the ability to plan anything ahead of time

• No place and no time that feels secure; a wearying insecurity

• The abnormal becoming normal; an average day in Kyiv

• War as trauma

• Trauma as rescue turned insecurity

• The strange grace of not knowing how long war would last

• When prolonged tribulation curdles into temptation

• Wrestling with why God does not simply stop one man's cruelty

• The fear to hope after four years of worsening, not relief

• Frontline confessions, soldiers haunted by those they killed

• A Bucha church tending wives, mothers, and children of soldiers

• Two mothers, one prayer group, opposite prayers over the draft

• Victor Frankl on who survived the camps: Man's Search for Meaning

• A theological perception of time; only the present is given

• War compressing time into loving, forgiving, blessing without delay

• Wisdom as God's truth and character lived in context

• The pure in heart, and seeing God in the needy (Beatitudes and Terror)

• Jesus in the midst of suffering, unlike the pharaohs who cause it

• Adopting soldiers' families; medicine carried to a mother at the front

• Serving civilians who await the Russians, love of enemies in practice

• How to support relief and minister training: Ukrainian Evangelical Theological Seminary

#UkraineWar #Ukraine #Kyiv #Theology #Hope #Trauma #FaithAndWar #Beatitudes #MarkLabberton #Christianity

In a country splitting apart over so much, three words point toward a better way to live: attention, agency, and power. David French returns to Conversing to take up all three. A New York Times opinion writer since January 2023, French writes from a conservative theological background about law, culture, religion, and armed conflict, and has found himself writing directly into the middle of divided hostilities.

French comments on how attention, agency, and power took shape in him, and how each gets distorted by partisan fundamentalisms (on both the right and left) built to shut conversation down rather than open it up. He and Mark discuss the courage required to seek out the strongest version of an opposing view, the ways we extend ourselves grace we deny to everyone else, the spiritual danger of believing you must hold power before you can do any good, and the Civil Rights Movement's commitment to "reconciliation over victory" as a promising model for Christian public life today.

Episode Highlights

• "One of the things that was so damaging … was that humility was often seen as inconsistent with conviction."

• "A lot of life is … embracing agency and … becoming more and more aware of the tidal forces that brought us to a particular point."

• "Curiosity and openness requires courage because you're told what to think about everybody, and if you … question that, you can be thrown out of your tribe. You can lose your community."

• "We must pursue justice, but when we think we have to have power to pursue justice, then we're on the road to perdition."

About David French

David French is an opinion columnist for The New York Times writing on law, faith, and politics. A graduate of Harvard Law School, he spent much of his career as a constitutional litigator and once led the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. He grew up in the Churches of Christ in Kentucky, studied at Lipscomb University—where he now teaches—and served in Iraq as a US Army judge advocate, earning a Bronze Star. With Russell Moore and Curtis Chang, he created The After Party, a curriculum for Christian political engagement. His most recent book is Divided We Fall.

Helpful Links and Resources

• David French's New York Times column, where he writes on law, faith, and politics: https://www.nytimes.com/by/david-french

• David French on X: https://x.com/DavidAFrench

• The After Party, the Redeeming Babel curriculum for Christian political engagement French made with Russell Moore and Curtis Chang: https://redeemingbabel.org/the-after-party/free-course

• Divided We Fall: America's Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation, French's book on American polarization: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250836731/dividedwefall

• Habits of the Heart by Robert Bellah, a study of American individualism: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520254190/habits-of-the-heart-with-a-new-preface

Show Notes

• Three words to guide public life: attention, agency, power

• A born contrarian shaped by a fundamentalism: "collectively contrarian" yet "individually very conformist"

• Harvard Law exposed how "contingent and place-based my own beliefs are"; experiencing a pull toward "the story behind the story"

• Attention as discipline—seeking "the best expression of opposing views," never the other side's worst

• Partisans slander rather than engage: "language designed to shut off conversation, not to invite it"

• Reading the Bible cover to cover in sixth grade, arriving at the lesson that "we're way too dogmatic about stuff"

• How to embody a faith that can hold conviction and humility side by side

• Agency according to Gandalf: "It's not up to us to determine the times in which we live," only how we respond

• Curiosity requires courage, since dissent threatens loss of community

• Power's real peril—"the spiritually corrupting power of power" and fooling yourself into virtue

• The undermining of justice by seeking to hold and maintain power; examples in Rosa Parks and Jim Crow segregation / Jesus and the Roman Empire

• Christian nationalism as "for the nation to be good, Christians must rule"

• Restoring the Civil Rights Movement's commitment to the way of Jesus: reconciliation, not victory

#DavidFrench #Conversing #FaithAndPolitics #ChristianNationalism #Attention #Agency #Power #Curiosity #CivilRights

Underneath all the political polarization, rage-baiting, punditry, and aggression, there is a crisis of civic agency. American citizens feel politically disempowered and undermined. And the effect, over time, will be that we lose our ability to self-govern. What is needed is a path between belligerence and withdrawal.

In this episode, Michael Wear (Center for Christianity and Public Life, author of The Spirit of Our Politics) joins Mark Labberton to discuss provocation and political effectiveness; the value of gentleness in public life; concrete signs of hope in local political action; the open horizon of the 2028 primaries; and what it would take to reset America's political "agency quotient."

Episode Highlights

• "Checks and balances is just a longer way of saying agency."
• "I think gentleness is profoundly underappreciated. I think that people are on guard for being taken advantage of, for being imposed upon, for being manipulated, for being used."
• "In parenting and in politics … we could really, especially in the moment, delude ourselves into thinking that to get a reaction and to be effective are synonymous."
• "Christians have an alternative imagination that our politics desperately needs, and we're actually robbing the public of that."
• "We continue down this crisis of … both a real and perceived lack of agency, in such a way that the project of self governance is made incoherent."

About Michael Wear

Michael Wear is the founder, president, and CEO of the Center for Christianity and Public Life, a nonpartisan Washington nonprofit that contends for the credibility of Christian resources in public life, for the public good. He directed faith outreach for President Obama's 2012 re-election campaign and served in the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, among the youngest White House staffers in modern history. He is the author of The Spirit of Our Politics and Reclaiming Hope, and co-author of Compassion and Conviction.

Helpful Links and Resources

• Michael Wear's website, with his writing, speaking, and social channels: https://www.michaelwear.com/
• The Spirit of Our Politics, Wear's most recent book: https://www.michaelwear.com/spirit-of-our-politics
• Reclaiming Hope, Wear's first book: https://www.michaelwear.com/reclaiming-hope
• The Center for Christianity and Public Life: https://www.ccpubliclife.org/
• "Politics should not just happen to you": https://theheartofthepublic.substack.com/p/politics-should-not-just-happen-to
• For the Good of the Public Summit, October 5–7, 2026, Washington, DC: https://www.ccpubliclife.org/summit
• Settled, the Minnesota nonprofit building church-based Sacred Settlements: https://www.settled.org/
• Civic Trust, Matt Harder's participatory budgeting organization: https://www.civictrust.us/
• Michael Wear on X: https://twitter.com/MichaelRWear

Show Notes

• Contending for the credibility of Christian resources in public life
• CCPL turns four this October; the For the Good of the Public summit, Oct 5–7 in DC
• Why pairing a think tank with intensive leadership formation is personally sustaining, not just strategic
• Gentleness as an underrated public virtue; bodies relaxing once people sense they won't be imposed upon
• Parker Palmer on a politics made of brokenhearted people
• Getting a reaction versus being effective; the diminishing returns of provocation, until the mission's telos shifts unnamed
• Jesus writing in the sand as an interruption at a moment primed for violence
• Dallas Willard on formation: not the practices but who you are, on the spot
• Pope Leo fielding American-frame questions and answering in ways that break the frame's logic
• The pastor who mistook refreshing RealClearPolitics five times a day for civic involvement
• A caution against a posture toward the church more dour than reality calls for
• Settled's church-hosted Sacred Settlements in Minnesota, built on bipartisan zoning reform: https://www.settled.org/
• Leaving the Obama White House more hopeful than arriving
• A decade that stripped ordinary agency: contested elections, COVID isolation, AGI moguls, social media reversals
• San Francisco AI planning, where "top-down imposition" meant opposite things to technologists and theologians
• Congress's dereliction—Yuval Levin's institutionalism, plus the Chevron and unitary-executive critiques
• Abdication that disempowers not just 435 House members but the voters who sent them
• East-West contrast: California's robber-baron drive and agency reserved for the wealthiest
• Resetting the agency quotient; participatory budgeting via Civic Trust: https://www.civictrust.us/
• Open 2028 primaries in both parties as a possible reopening of the horizon
• Christian agency surrendered through alignment versus exercised through accountable loyalty
• Checks and balances as another name for agency

#CivicAgency #SpiritOfOurPolitics #FaithAndPolitics #Gentleness #ParticipatoryBudgeting #CivicRenewal #ChristianityAndPublicLife #MichaelWear

Production Credits

Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment magazine and Fuller Seminary.

"It is not just that God has a heart for justice," says Sharon Cohn Wu (International Justice Mission), "it is that it is inextricably his character and cannot be otherwise, and that it is so perfectly married with mercy and grace that we somehow survive."

Sharon Cohn Wu has served for more than twenty years with IJM, where she is now regional president of North America. A lawyer (JD, Harvard Law), she has spent her career calling for "loud justice"—that is, visible, swift, community-wide accountability—using the criminal justice system and political will to help IJM achieve its mission to increase freedom and safety for the most vulnerable. She's a key voice in pursuing IJM's stated goal: protection for 300 million people across 46 jurisdictions by 2030, and freedom for more than a million.

With Mark Labberton, she reflects on her calling as a lawyer to stand between vulnerable people and those who would crush them; why we need systems to seek and secure justice for the most vulnerable to violence; the economics of vulnerability and the predators who exploit it; how public accountability changes expectations and what society will tolerate; and what decades of looking at the worst of human behavior have done to Cohn Wu's emotional, moral, and spiritual life.

Episode Highlights

• "Hope is as contagious as despair."
• "In the early days, let's say I might have accidentally over-indexed on rage from time to time."
• "It is not just that God has a heart for justice, it is that it is inextricably his character and cannot be otherwise, and that it is so perfectly married with mercy and grace that we somehow survive."
• "There's nothing inevitable about this type of violence."
• "We need consistent and loud justice. 'Loud' meaning the whole community knows that someone was held accountable for this crime against this small child."

About Sharon Cohn Wu

Sharon Cohn Wu is regional president of North America for International Justice Mission, where she has served for over two decades. She began in casework, went on to lead all of IJM's field programs, and pioneered its Justice System Strengthening projects. She built anti-trafficking operations across South and Southeast Asia, including IJM's first USAID police training grant in Cambodia, and most recently advised the organization on violence against women and children. She studied at the University of Virginia and Harvard Law School and practiced at Arnold & Porter.

Helpful Links and Resources

• International Justice Mission: https://www.ijm.org
• Ending violence against women and children: https://www.ijm.org/our-work/violence-women-children
• IJM's research library and external program evaluations: https://www.ijm.org/studies
• Good News About Injustice, by Gary Haugen: https://www.ivpress.com/good-news-about-injustice
• The Locust Effect, by Gary Haugen and Victor Boutros: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-locust-effect-9780190229269
• The Prophets, by Abraham Joshua Heschel: https://harpercollins.com.au/products/9780063335363
• Become an IJM prayer partner: https://www.ijm.org/get-involved/pray

Show Notes

• Sharon Cohn Wu's vocational background: law as a family trade among lawyers, judges, rabbis, and teachers
• Experience: DOJ Criminal Division; corporate law
• Gary Haugen's Good News About Injustice
• Early years at IJM: gratitude for every single person freed from slavery, prostitution, and dire circumstances
• Shifting from case volume to public justice system performance: police, prosecutors, courts, social services
• "Hope is as contagious as despair," sustained by survivors, staff, and externally audited reductions in violence
• Violence against women and children as a distinct crime: economic exposure, family dissolution, and a justice system survivors avoid
• Justice made loud and public, with visible, swift accountability as social and moral deterrent, leading to cultural change
• IJM's 2030 goal of 300 million protected across 46 jurisdictions and over a million freed—with half a billion as the horizon
• Reality over strategy: a night walk to a Guatemalan police station, Ghanaian survivors warning families about Lake Volta recruitment
• Rage mitigated by conviction that God cares more, praying for the fear of the Lord, and Heschel's The Prophets on injustice as offense against God

#InternationalJusticeMission #IJM #HumanTrafficking #ModernSlavery #JusticeSystems #ViolenceAgainstWomen #FaithAndJustice #Conversing #CommentMagazine #FullerSeminary

Production Credits

Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment magazine and Fuller Seminary.