“For those of us who are drawn into church  history and church tradition and to reading theology,  there is very little as transformative as realizing that history is populated by women and men like us who tried to follow Christ in their own time and place and culture and circumstances,  some of whom succeeded. … Looking at the saints, they make me want to be a better Christian. They make me want to be a saint.” (Brad East, from the episode)

In his recent book, Letters to a Future Saint: Foundations of Faith for the Spiritually Hungry, theologian Brad East addresses future generations of the Church, offering a transmission of Christian faith from society today to society tomorrow. Written as a fellow pilgrim and looking into the lives of saints in the past, he’s writing to that post-literate, post-Christian society, where the highest recommendation of faith is in the transformed life.

Today, Drew Collins welcomes Brad East to the show, and together they discuss: the importance of being passed and passing on Christian faith—its transmission; the post-literacy of digital natives (Gen Z and Gen Alpha) and the role of literacy in the acquisition and development of faith; the significance of community in a vibrant Christian faith; the question of apologetics and its effectiveness as a mode of Christian discourse; the need for beauty and love, not just truth, in Christian witness; how to talk about holiness in a world that believes less and less in the reality of sin; the difference between Judas and Peter; and what it means to study the saints and to be a saint.

About Brad East

Brad East (PhD, Yale University) is an associate professor of theology in the College of Biblical Studies at Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas. In addition to editing Robert Jenson’s The Triune Story: Collected Essays on Scripture (Oxford University Press, 2019), he is the author of four books: The Doctrine of Scripture (Cascade, 2021), The Church’s Book: Theology of Scripture in Ecclesial Context (Eerdmans, 2022), The Church: A Guide to the People of God (Lexham, 2024), and Letters to a Future Saint: Foundations of Faith for the Spiritually Hungry (Eerdmans, 2024).His articles have been published in Modern Theology, International Journal of Systematic Theology, Scottish Journal of Theology, Journal of Theological Interpretation, Anglican Theological Review, Pro Ecclesia, Political Theology, Religions, Restoration Quarterly, and The Other Journal; his essays and reviews have appeared in The Christian Century, Christianity Today, Comment, Commonweal, First Things, Front Porch Republic, The Hedgehog Review, Living Church, Los Angeles Review of Books, Marginalia Review of Books, Mere Orthodoxy, The New Atlantis, Plough, and The Point. You can found out more, including links to his writing, podcast appearances, and blog, on his personal website: https://www.bradeast.org/.

Show Notes

• Letters to a Future Saint: Foundations of Faith for the Spiritually Hungry  by Brad East
• The importance of being passed and passing on Christian faith—its transmission
• Spencer Bogle, the reason Brad East is a theologian
• The post-literacy of Gen Z and Gen Alpha and the role of literacy in the acquisition and development of faith
• The question of apologetics and its effectiveness as a mode of Christian discourse
• The need for beauty and love, not just truth, in Christian witness
• Christianity pre-exists you, and pre-existed literate society. So it can survive post-literacy
• Tik-Tok and getting off it
• “We have to have a much broader vision of the Christian life.”
• The Doctrine of Scripture, by Brad East, Foreword by Katherine Sonderegger
• Cartesian Christianity: me alone in a room, maybe with a flashlight and a bible
• Spiritual but not religious (H/T Tara Isabella Burton)
• We’re not saved individually
• Alice in Wonderland and “believing 17 absurd things every day”
• Is Christian apologetics sub-intellectual and effective?
• Gavin Ortlund, taking seriously spiritual and moral questions with pastoral warmth and intellectual integrity—”a ministry of Q&A”
• Bishop Robert Barron and William Lane Craig
• “People are not going to  be won to the faith through argument. They're going to be won by beauty.”
• Beauty of lives well-lived, integrity, virtue, and martyrdom
• “What lies beyond this world is available in part in this world and so good it's worth dying for.”
• Is Christian apologetics actually for Christians, rather than evangelism?
• “A person’s life can be an apologetic argument.”
• James K.A. Smith: “We don’t want to be brains on sticks.”
• “You’re just going to look bizarre.”
• “Come and see. … If you see something unique or uniquely powerful here, then stick around.”
• Saintliness and a cloud of witnesses
• Why do the saints matter?
• The protagonist of Augustine’s Confessions is actually St. Monica.
• “I want to be like Monica…”
• “For those of us who are drawn into church  history and church tradition and to reading theology,  there is very little as transformative as realizing that history is populated by women and men like us who tried to follow Christ in their own time and place and culture and circumstances,  some of whom succeeded. … Looking at the saints, they make me want to be a better Christian. They make me want to be a saint.”
• How to talk about holiness in a world that believes less and less in the reality of sin.
• Is holiness just connected to purity culture?
• Holiness is very difficult to describe.
• Hauerwas: “Humans aren’t holy. Only God is holy.”
• Holiness as being like God and being set apart and conformed to his likeness
• Holiness is, by rights, God’s alone.
• Appreciating the “everyday saints” among us
• Sanctification as an utterly passive act
• The final words of Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict), “Jesus, ich liebe dich!” (”Jesus, I love you.”)
• Peter and Judas
• Lucy Shaw poem, “Judas, Peter” (see below)
• “There is a way to fail as a Christian. It’s to  despair of the possibility of Christ forgiving you.”
• What it means to journey as a pilgrim towards holiness is, is not to get everything right.
• Shusaku Endo, Silence
• “What I say is we're all Kichichiro. We're all Peter and Judas. We're all bad Christians. There are no good Christians.”
• Kester Smith and returning to baptism
• “Sometimes it might be difficult for me to believe that God loves me.”

“Judas, Peter”

by Lucy Shaw

because we are all 
betrayers, taking 
silver and eating 
body and blood and asking 
(guilty) is it I and hearing 
him say yes 
it would be simple for us all 
to rush out and hang ourselves

but if we find grace 
to cry and wait 
after the voice of morning 
has crowed in our ears 
clearly enough 
to break out hearts 
he will be there 
to ask us each again 
do you love me?

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Brad East & Drew Collins
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Zoë Halaban, Alexa Rollow, Emily Brookfield, and Kacie Barrett
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.” (Henry David Thoreau, Walden)

In 1845, when he was 27 years old, Henry David Thoreau walked a ways from his home in Concord, MA and built a small house on a small lake—Walden Pond. He lived there for two years, two months, and two days, and he wrote about it. Walden has since become a classic. A treasure to naturalists and philosophers, historians and hipsters, conservationists and non-violent resistors. Something about abstaining from society and its affordances, reconnecting with the land, searching for something beyond the ordinary, living independently, self-reliantly, intentionally, deliberately.

Since then, Thoreau has risen to a kind of secular sainthood. Perhaps the first of now many spiritual but not religious, how should we understand Thoreau’s thought, writing, actions, and way of life?

In this episode, Evan Rosa welcomes Lawrence Buell (Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature Emeritus, Harvard University) for a conversation about how to read Thoreau. He is the author of many books on transcendentalism, ecology, and American literature. And his latest book is Henry David Thoreau: Thinking Disobediently, a brief philosophical biography and introduction to the thought of Thoreau through his two most classic works: “Walden” and “Civil Disobedience.”

In today’s episode Larry Buell and I discuss Thoreau’s geographical, historical, social, and intellectual contexts; his friendship with Ralph Waldo Emerson; why he went out to live on a pond for 2 years, 2 months, and 2 days and how it changed him; the difference between wildness and wilderness; why we’re drawn to the simplicity of wild natural landscapes and the ideals of moral perfection; the body, the senses, attunement and attention; the connection between solitude and contemplation; the importance of individual moral conscience and the concept of civil disobedience; Thoreau’s one night in jail and the legacy of his political witness; and ultimately, what it means to think disobediently.

About Lawrence Buell

Lawrence Buell is Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature Emeritus at Harvard University. Considered one of the founders of the ecocriticism movement, he has written and lectured worldwide on Transcendentalism, American studies, and the environmental humanities. He is the author of many books, including Literary Transcendentalism, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Invention of American Culture, Writing for an Endangered World, and Emerson. His latest book is Henry David Thoreau: Thinking Disobediently, a brief introduction to the thought of Thoreau to his two most classic works: Walden and “Civil Disobedience.”

Show Notes

• Henry David Thoreau: Thinking Disobediently (Oxford 2023) by Lawrence Buell
• Read Walden and “Civil Disobedience” online (via Project Gutenberg)

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Lawrence Buell
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Zoë Halaban, Alexa Rollow, Emily Brookfield, and Kacie Barrett
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Has modern humanity lost its connection to the world outside our heads? And can our experience of art and poetry help train us for a more elevated resonance with the cosmos?

In today’s episode, theologian Miroslav Volf interviews philosopher Charles Taylor about his latest book, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment. In it he turns to poetry to help articulate the human experience of the cosmos we’re a part of.

Together they discuss the modern Enlightenment view of our relation to the world and its shortcomings; modern disenchantment and the prospects of reenchantment through art and poetry; Annie Dillard and the readiness to experience the world and what it’s always offering; how to hold the horrors of natural life with the transcendent joys; Charles recites some of William Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” and Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “The Windhover”; how to become fully arrested by beauty; and the value we find in human experience of the world.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Charles Taylor and Miroslav Volf
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Emily Brookfield, Alexa Rollow, Kacie Barrett, and Zoë Halaban
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

St. Teresa of Ávila (1515-1582) was a sixteenth-century Spanish nun and one of the most influential mystics in all of Church history, writing two spiritual classics still read today: The Way of Perfection and The Interior Castle. Her autobiography (more accurately, a confession to Spanish Inquisitors) is The Life of St. Teresa of Avila, detailing her spiritual experiences of the love of God.

In this episode, Evan Rosa welcomes Carlos Eire (T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University) for a discussion of how to read St. Teresa of Ávila, exploring the historical, cultural, philosophical, and theological aspects of her life and writing, and offering insights and close readings of several selections from her classic confession-slash-autobiography, known as La Vida, or The Life.

About Carlos Eire

Carlos Eire is T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University. All of his books are banned in Cuba, where he has been proclaimed an enemy of the state. He was awarded the 2024 Harwood F. Byrnes/Richard B. Sewall Teaching Prize by Yale College, received his PhD from Yale in 1979. He specializes in the social, intellectual, religious, and cultural history of late medieval and early modern Europe, with a focus on both the Protestant and Catholic Reformations; the history of popular piety; the history of the supernatural, and the history of death. Before joining the Yale faculty in 1996, he taught at St. John’s University in Minnesota and the University of Virginia, and was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is the author of War Against the Idols (1986); From Madrid to Purgatory (1995); A Very Brief History of Eternity (2010); Reformations: The Early Modern World (2016); The Life of Saint Teresa of Ávila: A Biography (2019); and They Flew: A History of the Impossible (2023). He is also co-author of Jews, Christians, Muslims: An Introduction to Monotheistic Religions (1997); and ventured into the twentieth century and the Cuban Revolution in the memoir Waiting for Snow in Havana (2003), which won the National Book Award in Nonfiction in the United States and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. His second memoir, Learning to Die in Miami (2010), explores the exile experience. A past president of the Society for Reformation Research, he is currently researching various topics in the history of the supernatural. His book Reformations won the R.R. Hawkins Prize for Best Book of the Year from the American Publishers Association, as well as the award for Best Book in the Humanities in 2017. It was also awarded the Jaroslav Pelikan Prize by Yale University Press.

• The Life of Saint Teresa of Ávila by Carlos Eire (https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691164939/the-life-of-saint-teresa-of-avila )
• The Book of My Life by Teresa of Ávila (https://www.icspublications.org/products/the-collected-works-of-st-teresa-of-avila-vol-1 or https://www.shambhala.com/teresa-of-avila-1518.html )
• A long confession to the Inquisition which had placed her under investigation and read by those who were curious and believed her mysticism might be a fraud
• The Spanish Inquisition in the 16th Century
• Autobiography v. Auto-hagiography
• The chief virtue of sainthood was humility
• Medieval mysticism in the asceticism of monastic communities
• The Reformation’s rejection of monastic communities and their practices
• “You can fast as much as you want, and you can punish yourself as much as you want. That's not going to, uh, make God love you any more than he already does. And it's not going to wipe out your sins. Christ has wiped out your sins. So, all of this, uh, Oh, self obsession and posturing, uh, the very concept of holiness is redefined.”
• Direct experience of the divine in mysticism: purgation (cleansing), feedback from God (illumination), and union with the divine.
• On Loving God by Bernard of Clairvaux (https://litpress.org/Products/CF013B/On-Loving-God)
• Surrendering of the self in order to find oneself, and in turn God
• Interior Castle by Teresa of Ávila (https://www.icspublications.org/products/st-teresa-of-avila-the-interior-castle-study-edition)
• Recogimiento - a prayer in which one lets go of their senses; a form a prayer in which you are just in a chat with a friend
• The Cloud of Unknowing by Anonymous (https://paracletepress.com/products/the-cloud-of-unknowing )
• Meaning that is found without words - recollection and recogimiento
• Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros, Archbishop of Toledo - translation of Rhineland mysticism into Spanish
• Staged approach and a development of spirituality
• “You're doing some transforming of your own, of course, by, you know, being engaged in this, but it's, it's really a gift from God progress and progress. Uh, progress and progress, or, uh, pretty much like an athlete whose skills become better and better and better. Or any artist whose skills improve and improve and improve and improve.Except in this case, there's someone else involved. You're not just working out or rehearsing. It's the other party involved in, in this, uh, phenomenon of prayer.”
• The Four Waters as an image for the progression of prayer
• The irony of Teresa’s writing and her nods to the inquisition found within her writings
• The experience of mysticism and God cannot be understood - it is beyond language
• Repetition in prayer and meditation
• Edith Stein was inspired by Teresa of Ávila
• Monastic life was very isolated and was filled with hard work
• The doubt of her confessors that her visions of Jesus were real
• Responding to the devil with crudeness
• Mystical marriage with Christ
• The Life of Catherine of Siena by Raymond of Capua ( https://tanbooks.com/products/books/the-life-of-saint-catherine-of-siena-the-classic-on-her-life-and-accomplishments-as-recorded-by-her-spiritual-director/ )
• Physical visions and intellectual visions
• Her visions were beyond her control
• Transverberation - a vision of an angel with a spear that she is struck with; pain and bliss simultaneously in the wounding
• God as a very clear diamond
• Teresa of Ávila and the Rhetoric of Femininity by Alison Weber (https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691027449/teresa-of-avila-and-the-rhetoric-of-femininity) - Constant self-humbling of Teresa
• Devotion to heart imagery in mysticism, Catholicism, and Teresa’s spirituality
• They Flew: A History of the Impossible by Carlos Eire (https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300280074/they-flew/)
• The bodily effects and physical nature of Teresa’s mysticism
• mysticism for the masses and books for the laity
• Mysticism is a double edged sword - this is also what makes Jesus threatening in the gospels
• Steven Ozment (Mysticism and Dissent: Religious Ideology and Social Protest in the Sixteenth Century?) https://archive.org/details/mysticismdissent0000ozme/page/n295/mode/2up
• Human nature and our potential
• Great detail and charming in her writing

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Carlos Eire
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Alexa Rollow, Emily Brookfield, Kacie Barrett, & Zoë Halaban
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

History reveals a lot of things about human nature: our innate drive towards progress, discovery, relationship, community. Often motivated by a drive to feel safe and flourish. But despite this instinct, history also shows that we’re prone to inflicting and being complicit to grave and violent injustices. We fail, regularly, at living well with our neighbors.

In his new book, The Spirit of Justice, Jemar Tisby opens the centuries long history of resistance to racism in the United States through the mode of story, and with the lens of the Spirit moving for justice. He asks, what manner of people are those who courageously confront racism? Presenting the lives and witness of over 50 individuals, Tisby examines the way faith threads the life work of these advocates together: not only inspiring their resistance in the first place, but continuing to move through the weariness that so often arises in this work.

In this episode, Jemar Tisby joins Macie Bridge on the podcast to discuss the manifestations of the Spirit of Justice in figures such as H. Ford Douglas, Sister Thea Bowman, David Walker, Myrlie Evers-Williams, and many more; the problem of historical appropriation with figures such as Martin Luther King Jr.; the women whose stories too often fall into the shadow of their husbands’ legacies, like Anna Murray Douglas or Coretta Scott King; and the ever-present question of why we might look to history as we determine our own ways forward.

Jemar Tisby is the New York Times bestselling author of The Color of Compromise and How to Fight Racism. He is a public historian, speaker, and advocate, and is Professor of History at Simmons College, an HBCU in Kentucky.

Photo Credits: Fannie Lou Hamer, Phyllis Wheatley, Charles Morgan Jr., Anna Murray Douglass, David Walker, Sister Thea Bowman, Myrlie & Darrell Evers.

Where to Find Jemar Tisby's Books

The Spirit of Justice *Available now

I Am the Spirit of Justice *Picture book releasing January 7, 2025

Stories of the Spirit of Justice *Middle-grade children’s book releasing January 7, 2025

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Jemar Tisby
• Hosted by Macie Bridge
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Alexa Rollow, Emily Brookfield, Kacie Barrett, & Zoë Halaban
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

In our American quest for a more perfect union, we often mistake unity for sameness. We mistake unity for conformity. But the functional unity of a system—seems to actually require diversity, distinction, and difference.

In this episode, Christy Vines (Founder/ CEO, Ideos Institute) reflects on the problem of division today; how we increasingly invest our identity in politics instead of faith or spirituality; humility and privilege; the definition of unity and the assumption of diversity in it; the centrality of empathy; and how to cultivate an empathic wisdom grounded in the life and witness of Christ.

The Ideos Institute is currently sponsoring 31 days of Unity leading up to the 2024 election. Visit thereunionproject.us or ideosinstitute.org/31-days-of-unity to learn how to participate.

About Christy Vines

Christy Vines is the founder, President and CEO of Ideos Institute where she leads the organization’s research on the burgeoning field of Empathic Intelligence and its application to the fields of conflict transformation, social cohesion, and social renewal.

Prior to founding Ideos Institute, she was the Senior Vice President for Global Initiatives and Strategy at the Institute for Global Engagement (IGE) where she served as the managing and coordinating lead for the development of strategic institutional partnerships and global initiatives in support of the IGE mission to encourage flourishing societies and stable states, and promote sustainable religious freedom, human rights and the rule of law globally. During her tenure at IGE she helped expand the organization’s Center for Women, Faith & Leadership which supports, equips and convenes religious women peacemakers around the globe.

Christy has held senior roles with the RAND Corporation, where she worked with the RAND Centers for Middle East Public Policy, Asia Pacific Public Policy, Global Risk and Security, and the Center for Justice, Infrastructure, and Environment, finally transitioning to interim project manager for the RAND African First Ladies Initiative (now located at the Bush Presidential Center). Christy also held the role of senior fellow at The American Security Project and served as an advisor to the Carter’s Center’s inaugural Forum on Women, Religion, Violence and Power.

Christy is a published writer, speaker, and the executive producer of the 2022 documentary film, "Dialogue Lab: America," a moving take on the current state of division and polarization in the U.S. She has appeared on podcasts like Comment Magazine’s “**Whole Person Revolution Podcast”, “**How Do We Fix It” and Bob Goff's “Dream Big Podcast”. She has published numerous articles and op-eds with news outlets and publications, including the **Washington Post, Christianity Today,** and Capital Commentary.

Christy received her Master's Degree in Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy School. She attended both Stanford University and the University of CA, Riverside where she received her B.A. in Sociology and Qualitative Analysis. She currently resides in Pasadena, CA.

Show Notes

• Howard Thurman on Unity, Meditations of the Heart (Beacon Press: 1981), 120–121
• “Plotinus [205–270 CE] wrote, “If we are in unity with the Spirit, we are in unity with each other, and so we are all one.” (Plotinus, Enneads, VI.5.7.)
• Sign up for 31 Days of Unity https://www.ideosinstitute.org/31-days-of-unity
• (Re)Union Project and Ideos Institute
• Christy Vines’s experience with diversity and unity in her family: differences in faith, race, gender, sexuality, and religion
• How Christy Vines came to faith
• The problem of division
• How neuroscience illuminates scripture and offers insight into empathic wisdom
• “There are so many ways to love God.” (David Dark)
• How we invest our identity in politics instead of religion
• Moral absolutism vs moral relativism
• Abdicating our faith identity for a political identity
• Technology and relationships
• “Loving God differently”
• “In the cosmic Christ, you have all of the space you need for the kind of diversity in unity that you're talking about.”
• “It's the expectation that in order to work together, we really do have to look exactly the same, that we have to think the same things. That's the only way to collaborate. So until we can get past those of disagreements, there's just no way to work across the aisle. And that is disastrous to the concept of a democracy and the concept of the church.“
• “There’s so many ways to be an American. There’s so many ways to be human.”
• Humility and privilege
• “There is something about desperation and need that brings, that illuminates God's beauty, majesty, and importance in such a powerful way that I think so many of us that are born into plenty will never experience until the other side of heaven.”
• The definition of unity: grounded in empathy
• “Unity is about finding ways to be the body of Christ with all of our diversity and difference and saying that with humility, Here is my perspective. Here's how I understand God. Here's how I live out my faith. Here's what that might mean culturally or politically and all of the other ways we express our faith. And to be unified means maybe we can all be moving in the same direction on different paths, coming at it from different directions, but recognizing we're all trying to reach the same goal. And that maybe in that shared experience, And that rubbing against one another is, our pastor used to say, heavenly sandpaper, refining one another. We may never be on the exact same path, But over time, you find that we get closer and closer together as we share our lives with one another and we influence each other from a position of trust and care. And that can only be done when we actually show up recognizing with humility that we can learn and benefit from others.”
• Empathy and how to build it
• Empathic Intelligence Dr. Rosalind Arnold (University of Tasmania)
• Empathic intelligence (empathic wisdom) is the lived experience of Jesus
• Jesus’s empathy
• “Most of the time we take our own understanding of Jesus and try to impose that on somebody without ever knowing their story.”
• “What is it like to be you?”
• “Why is this so hard to do?”
• Jesus and the woman at the well
• Asking questions and listening
• Empathy is contagious
• Vulnerability, openness, and a space of relational trust
• (Re)Union Project for Churches—Building unity in the church across lines of difference
• thereunionproject.us
• ideosinstitute.org

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Christy Vines
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Alexa Rollow, Emily Brookfield, Kacie Barrett, and Zoë Halaban
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

To true fans, baseball is so much more than a sport. Some call it the perfect game. Some see it as a field of dreams. A portal to another dimension. Some see it as a road to God. Others—”heathen” we might call them—find the game unutterably boring. Too confusing, too long, too nit-picky about rules.

In this episode, Yankee fan John Sexton (President Emeritus of New York University and Benjamin F. Butler Professor of Law) joins Red Sox fan Evan Rosa to discuss the philosophical and spiritual aspects of baseball. John is the author of the 2013 bestselling book Baseball as a Road to God, which is based on a course he has taught at NYU for over twenty years.

Image Credit: “The American National Game of Base Ball: Grand Match for the Championship at the Elysian Fields, Hoboken, N. J.” Published by Currier & Ives, 1866

About John Sexton

John Sexton hasn’t always been a Yankee fan. He once was a proud acolyte of Jackie Robinson and the Brooklyn Dodgers. A legal scholar by training, he served as president of New York University from 2001 through 2015. He is now NYU’s Benjamin F. Butler Professor of Law and dean emeritus of the Law School, having served as dean from 1988 through 2002.

He is author of Standing for Reason: The University in a Dogmatic Age (Yale University Press, 2019) and Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game (Gotham Books, 2013) (with Thomas Oliphant and Peter J. Schwartz), among other books in legal studies.

A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a recipient of 24 honorary degrees, President Emeritus Sexton is past chair of the American Council on Education, the Independent Colleges of NY, the New York Academy of Science, and the Federal Reserve Board of NY.

In 2016, Commonweal Magazine honored Sexton as the Catholic in the Public Square. The previous year, the Arab-American League awarded him its Khalil Gibran Spirit of Humanity Award; and the Open University of Israel gave him it’s Alon Prize for “inspired leadership in the field of education.” In 2013, Citizens Union designated him as “an outstanding leader who enhances the value of New York City.”

He received a BA in history and a PhD in the history of American religion from Fordham University, and a JD magna cum laude from Harvard Law School. Before coming to NYU in 1981, he clerked for Judges Harold Leventhal and David Bazelon of the DC Circuit and Chief Justice Warren Burger.

He married Lisa Goldberg in 1976. Their two children are Jed and Katie Sexton. And their grandchildren are Julia, Ava, and Natalie.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured John Sexton
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Alexa Rollow, Emily Brookfield, Kacie Barrett, and Zoë Halaban
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

There’s a common misconception that Judaism is a religion of law and Christianity is a religion of love. But the very love commandments at the heart of Jesus’s teaching are direct quotes from Deuteronomy 6. Jesus, after all, was Jewish.

Joining Miroslav Volf in this episode is one of the most important Jewish thinkers alive today: Rabbi Shai Held—theologian, educator, author—is President, Dean, and Chair in Jewish Thought at the Hadar Institute in New York City. He is the author of Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Call of Transcendence and The Heart of Torah, a collection of essays on the Torah in two volumes. His latest book is Judaism is about Love: Recovering the Heart of Jewish Life.

Image Credit: “Vienna Genesis”, 6th century, Manuscript (Codex Vindobonensis theol. graec. 31), 333 x 270 mm, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna

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About Shai Held

Rabbi Shai Held—theologian, educator, author—is President, Dean, and Chair in Jewish Thought at the Hadar Institute in New York City. He is the author of Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Call of Transcendence and The Heart of Torah, a collection of essays on the Torah in two volumes. His most recent book is Judaism Is About Love: Recovering the Heart of Jewish Life.

Show Notes

• Get your copy of Judaism Is About Love: Recovering the Heart of Jewish Life
• Two stories that set the course for Judaism Is About Love
• Deuteronomy 6 and the Love Commands
• Is Judaism really a “loveless religion”?
• Christian students who don’t realize what wells Jesus drank from
• “The very inclination to dichotomize between love and law leads almost, I think, ineluctably to a misunderstanding of traditional Jewish spirituality, for which law is never an alternative to love,  but a manifestation of love.”
• “The deed is an expression of a posture of love. The deed cannot replace the posture. It has to express it.”
• “A majority culture telling a minority  culture that it is inferior and loveless.”
• Interpreting both Judaism and Christianity through a moral or ethical lens, rather than the mystical, affective, and spiritual dimensions of both
• Unconditionality of God’s love
• Obedience to law vs unconditionality of love
• “My argument is that divine love, biblically speaking, comes without conditions, but with expectations. God does not say, do this or I will stop loving you. God says, I love you and I want you to do this.”
• Analogy to parental love for children
• “God believes in the centrality and urgency of human agency.”
• Eliezer Berkovits: embrace of human agency in Judaism
• Zero sum games and God’s will and human agency
• Performance-oriented society, and “measuring up”
• Competition and being better than others
• Not earning, but striving to live up to
• Grace
• What objectives exist for us to
• John Levinson
• Choseness
• Moshe Weinfeld: “you were not chosen because you were wonderful.”
• Election isn’t earned, but don’t let grace become capricious.
• Abraham’s blessing and God’s love for Israel
• Rabbi Akiva: “Every human being on the face of the earth is loved simply by being created in the divine image.”
• Centering theology around creation
• Noah’s flood and a universal covenant with humanity as a whole
• God and Moses’s chutzpah to ask for forgiveness because Israel is so stubborn
• Grace is a Jewish idea, not invented by Christianity or the New Testament
• “Culture stripped of grace”
• Arbitrariness of election
• Exodus 34
• Psalm 145:9 God is good to  all. God's mercies are upon all of God's  creations.
• Mercy on everything that God has made, including animals and all sentient beings
• “Very good” and God’s assessment of creation
• Love for stranger and love for the enemy
• Judaism and expanding circles of concern
• “The temptation  to dehumanize is one that must always and everywhere be resisted. … every human being on the face of the earth is infinitely valuable without exception.”
• John Levinson’s “universal horizon of biblical particularism”
• Just War Theory
• “At the end of the If the Middle East and the land of Israel are ever to become less blood soaked,  what will be required is two  peoples engaging in profoundly empathic listening to one another's stories. There is no other way.”
• Moshe Una and the Religious Zionist Peace Movement
• “Jews dreamed of this place for thousands of years, and that this is a unique place where God's commandments can be fulfilled, and this is a place of religious yearning, religious aspiration, historical connection. And the second is, we have to teach our children that there is another people who feels the same way.”
• “So much of the protest of this war has, it seemed to me, really lacked empathy and actually perpetuated really destructive ways of thinking about this conflict.”
• What is Rabbi Shai Held’s vision of a life worth living?
• Medieval Mishnah on Genesis 1:27: “The human being  is created in God's image, but whether we become God's likeness is a function of the choices we make.”

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Shai Held
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Alexa Rollow, Kacie Barrett, and Zoë Halaban
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Problem-solving the crises of the modern world is often characterized by an economy and architecture of exploitation and instrumentalization, viewing relationships as transactional, efficient, and calculative. But this sort of thinking leaves a remainder of emptiness.

Finding hope in a time of crises requires a more human work of covenant and commitment. Based in agrarian principles of stability, place, connection, dependence, interwoven relatedness, and a rooted economy, we can find hope in “Love’s Braided Dance” of telling the truth, keeping our promises, showing mercy, and bearing with one another.

In this episode, Evan Rosa welcomes Norman Wirzba, the Gilbert T. Rowe Distinguished Professor of Christian Theology at Duke Divinity School, to discuss his recent book Love’s Braided Dance: Hope in a Time of Crisis.

Together they discuss love and hope through the agrarian principles that acknowledge our physiology and materiality; how the crises of the moment boil down to one factor: whether young people want to have kids of their own; God’s love as erotic and how that impacts our sense of self-worth; the “sympathetic attunement” that comes from being loved by a community, a place, and a land; transactional versus covenantal relationships; the meaning of giving and receiving forgiveness in an economy of mercy; and finally the difficult truth that transformation or moral perfection can never replace reconciliation.

About Norman Wirzba

Norman Wirzba is the Gilbert T. Rowe Distinguished Professor of Christian Theology at Duke Divinity School, as well as director of research at Duke University’s Office of Climate and Sustainability. His books include Love’s Braided Dance: Hope in a Time of Crisis, Agrarian Spirit: Cultivating Faith, Community, and the Land;This Sacred Life: Humanity’s Place in a Wounded World; and Food & Faith.

Listen to Norman Wirzba on Food & Faith in Episode 49: "God's Love Made Delicious"

Show Notes

• Norman Wirzba, Love’s Braided Dance: Hope in a Time of Crisis
• How the crises of the moment boil down to one expression: whether young people want to have kids of their own.
• How Norman Wirzba became friends with Wendell Berry
• Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America
• “Love’s Braided Dance” from “In Rain”, a poem by Wendell Berry
• “You shouldn’t forget the land, and you shouldn’t forget your grandfather.”
• Return to agricultural practices
• Sacred gifts
• “An agricultural life can afford doesn't guarantee, I think, but it affords the opportunity for you to really handle the fundamentals of life, air, water, soil, plant, tactile  connection that has to, at the same time, be  a practical connection, which means you have to to bring into your handling of things the attempt to understand what you're handling.”
• Anonymity
• Norman Wirzba reads Wendell Berry’s “In Rain”
• Hyperconnectivity and the meaning of being “braided together”
• Love as Erotic Hope—”the first of God’s love is an erotic love, which is an outbound love that wants  something other than God to be and to  flourish. And that outbound movement is generated by God's desire for For others to be beautiful, to be good, and I think that's the basis of our lives, right?”
• Audre Lorde and patriarchy
• Affirming the goodness of ourselves and the world as created and loved by God
• How the pornographic gaze distorts the meaning of erotic love
• Dancing as a metaphor for God’s erotic love
• Deep sympathy and anticipation, and the improvisational movement of dance
• Woodworking: taking time and negotiation
• “Sympathetic attunement” and improvisation
• Managing the unpredictable nature of our world
• Revelation of who you are and who the other is—it’s hard to reveal ourselves to each other
• Honesty and depth that is missing from relationships
• Learning the skill of self-revealing
• Belonging and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s sense that a people could be “loved by the land”
• Physiological, material reality of our dependence on each other, from womb to tomb
• “The illusion that we could ever be alone or stand alone or survive alone is so dishonest about our living.”
• Denying our needs, acknowledging our needs, and inhabiting trust to work through struggle together
• “It’s not about solutions.”
• “Some of the needs  are profound and deep and they take time and they are  never fully resolved. But it's this experience of knowing that you're not alone, that you're in a context where you are going to be cared for, you'll be nurtured, and you'll be forgiven when you make mistakes means that you can carry on together. And that's often enough.”
• Transactional vs covenantal approach to relationships
• Granting forgiveness and receiving forgiveness
• Transformation is not a replacement for reconciliation
• Rather than denying wrongdoing or seeking to eliminate it, focusing on a renewed effort to be merciful with each other.
• Economy and architecture
• “So how is the land supposed to love you back if it has in fact been turned into a toxic dumping zone?”
• “Think about how much fear is in our architecture.”
• Building was vernacular—people were involved in the development of physical structures
• J. R. R. Tolkein, The Lord of the Rings, The Two Towers: Ents vs Saruman, natural agrarianism vs technological domination
• Joy Clarkson, You Are a Tree
• Rooted economy
• “Is anything worthy of our care?”
• When a parent chooses a phone and loses a moment of presence with children
• “Go to some one and tell them, ‘I want to try to be better at being in the presence of those around me.’”
• Be deliberate

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Norman Wirzba
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Alexa Rollow, Kacie Barrett, Emily Brookfield, and Zoë Halaban
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Can music teach us how to live? In this interview Evan Rosa invites Daniel Chua—a musicologist, composer at heart, and Professor of Music at the University of Hong Kong—to discuss his latest book, Music & Joy: Lessons on the Good Life.

Together they discuss the vastly different ancient and modern approaches to music; the problem with seeing music for consumption and entertainment; the ways different cultures conceive of music and wisdom: from Jewish to Greek to Christian; seeing the disciplined spontaneity of jazz improvisation fitting with both a Confucian perspective on virtue, and Christian newness of incarnation; and finally St. Augustine, the worshipful jubilance of singing in the midst of one’s work to find rhythm and joy that is beyond suffering; and a final benediction and blessing for every music lover.

Throughout the interview, we’ll offer a few segments of the music Daniel discusses, including Beethoven’s Opus 132 and the Ode to Joy from Beethoven’s 9th symphony, and John Cage’s controversial 4’33”—which Daniel recommends we listen to every single day, and which we’re going to play during this episode toward the end.

Show Notes

• Music and Joy: Lessons on the Good Life by Daniel Chua (https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300264210/music-and-joy/)
• Can music teach us how to live?
• The emotional relationship we have with music
• Everyone identifies with music
• How did you come to love music and write on it?
• Musicologist
• The Sound of Music soundtrack (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeSQLYs2U8X0nTi15MHjMAWim3PxIyEqI)
• Listening to music at a young age
• Love of Beethoven as a child
• What about Beethoven in particular spoke to you? Do you have memories of what feeling or challenges or thoughts or kind of ambitions were there?
• Beethoven as harder to listen to and sit through as it is quite disruptive and intellectual in style
• Beethoven and Freedom by Daniel Chua (https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/beethoven-freedom-daniel-k-l-chua/1126575597)
• What pieces in particular, or what about Beethoven’s composition was particularly moving to you?
• Beethoven’s final string quartets (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qaq881bwRI)
• “It’s very strange. It’s like the most complex and the most simple music. And somehow they speak very deeply to my soul and my heart. And you just want to listen to them all the time.”
• A Minor String Quartet, Opus 132 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUob2dcQTWA)
• A piece of thanksgiving to God
• Messages sent by music as a young person about how things come together
• Music interacts with us
• Playing to understand how it is that a piece works
• How do we replicate what music communicates in our daily lives?
• Beethoven’s Ode to Joy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0EjVVjJraA)
• Stephen Pinker - music is auditory cheesecake
• “If music is joy, then what is it? What kind of joy is it?”
• Consuming music is not the same as joy; music is not simply entertainment
• The fanfare of terror in Ode to Joy
• “Humans are strange. We are very sinful creatures so we tend to weaponize whatever we have to weaponize and we weaponize music too.”
• “Whatever we do with music as humans, there is something more in music that speaks beyond out puny human point of view of music.”
• Our view of music and joy today are too human; music is cosmic
• We tune ourselves, our virtues, our wisdom to the rhythm of the universe.
• Joy as something we obey, we listen to.
• “Music isn’t human. Music is actually creation.”
• Music, the Logos, and Wisdom
• Music as something that teaches us how to live.
• Wisdom taking delight, joy, in the universe.
• Music is deeply beautiful; there is profound goodness to it
• A lesson in flourishing found in music, in the tuning of ourselves
• Music is truthful; Christ as an instrument and salvation as being in tune
• Sheet music v performance as an analogy for incarnation
• Music as an event that is happening
• Harmony and coming together - finding one’s place within the turn; Taoist and Confucian traditions
• “Jazz offers this fantastic expression of a different kind of wisdom born through suffering and grief.”
• Improvisation in jazz; an exuberance - the weird and the spontaneous alongside the ordered
• Music as an opportunity for emotion and a way to communicate and understand; spirituals and slave hymns
• “The order of the cosmos is basically tragic. It’s a bad, bad world. And music is a kind of consolation in that.”
• “Music can’t help but be meaningful.”
• 4'33" by John Cage (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWVUp12XPpU)
• Whatever we are, music is there.
• Using music to make sense of things; really attend to the world and its music.
• Augustine’s Book of Music “De Musica” (https://archive.org/details/augustine-on-music-de-musica/page/159/mode/2up)
• The spontaneous music of the world
• Defiant joy in the music of slave hymns; a joy that will not be crushed
• A robust understanding of joy
• Music tells us something about the world, the cosmos, of creation - Music reflects the heart of God.

About Daniel Chua

Daniel K. L. Chua is the Chair Professor of Music at the University of Hong Kong. Before joining Hong Kong University to head the School of Humanities, he was a Fellow and the Director of Studies at St John’s College, Cambridge, and later Professor of Music Theory and Analysis at King’s College London. He is the recipient of the 2004 Royal Musical Association’s Dent Medal, an Honorary Fellow of the American Musicological Society, and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. He served as the President of the International Musicological Society 2017-2022. He has written widely on music, from Monteverdi to Stravinsky, but is particularly known for his work on Beethoven, the history of absolute music, and the intersection between music, philosophy and theology. His publications include The ‘Galitzin’ Quartets of Beethoven (Princeton, 1994), Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge, 1999), Beethoven and Freedom (Oxford, 2017), Alien Listening: Voyager’s Golden Record and Music From Earth (Zone Books, 2021), Music and Joy: Lessons on the Good Life (Yale 2024), ‘Rioting With Stravinsky: A Particular Analysis of the Rite of Spring’ (2007), and ‘Listening to the Self: The Shawshank Redemption and the Technology of Music’ (2011).

• Image Credit: “Beethoven with the Manuscript of the Missa Solemnis”, Joseph Karl Stieler, 1820, oil on canvas, Beethoven-Haus, Bonn (Public Domain, Wikimedia Link)
• Ludwig van Beethoven, String Quartet No. 15 in A minor, Op. 132: iii. “Heilige Dankgesang eines Genesenden an die Gottheit” (”Holy song of thanks of a convalescent to the Divinity”), Amadeus Quartet, 1962 (via Internet Archive)
• Ludwig van Beethoven, The Symphony No 9 in D minor, Op 125 "Choral" (1824), Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Otto Klemperer, Live Performance, 17 May 1956 (via Internet Archive)
• Traditional Chinese Music, Instrument: Ehru, “Yearning for Love” Remembering of The Xiao on The Phoenix Platform (via Internet Archive)
• John Coltrane, “The Inch Worm”, Live in Paris, 1962 (via Internet Archive)
• 4’33”, John Cage, 1960tr
• The McIntosh County Shouters perform “Gullah-Geechee Ring Shout” (Library of Congress)