On June 3,2024, Jürgen Moltmann died. He was one of the greatest theologians of our time. He was 98 years old. In this episode, Miroslav Volf eulogizes and remembers his mentor and friend. We then share a previously released conversation between Miroslav Volf and Jürgen Moltmann. This episode first aired in April 2021—and it includes Moltmann’s conviction that “without living theologically, there can be no theology”; it explores the meaning of joy and its connection to anxiety, fear, wrath, hope, and love; and Professor Moltmann shares about the circumstances in which he came to faith—as a 16-year-old drafted into World War II by the German Army, enduring the bombardment of his hometown of Hamburg, and being held for 3 years in a Scottish prison camp, where he read with new eyes the cry of dereliction from Jesus in the Gospel of Mark, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

This cry would lay a foundation that led to his most influential book, The Crucified God. Moltmann explains the centrality of Christ, the human face of God, for not just his theological vision, but his personal faith—which is a lived theology.

Ryan McAnnally-Linz introduces the episode by celebrating Jürgen Moltmann's 95th birthday and reflecting on his lasting theological influence.

Show Notes

• Happy 95th Birthday, Jürgen Moltmann!
• Find the places of deepest human concern, and shine the light of the Gospel there.
• “Without living theologically, there can be no theology."
• Jürgen Moltmann’s Theology of Joy (1972)—“How can I sing the Lord’s song in an alien land?"
• Joy today: Singing the Lord’s song in the broad place of his presence
• "Hope is anticipated joy, as anxiety is anticipated terror."
• "How does one find the way to joy from within anxiety and terror?"
• Seeing the face of God as an awakened hope
• Jesus Christ as the human face of God: “Without Jesus Christ, I would not believe in God."
• God is present in the midst of suffering
• Discovering and being discovered by God
• Moltmann’s story of being drafted to the Germany army at 16 years old (1943)
• In a prison camp in Scotland, Moltmann read the Gospel of Mark and found hope when there was no expectation.
• The Crucified God, the cry of dereliction, and the cry of jubilation
• Contrasting joy with American optimism and the pursuit of happiness
• Christianity as a unique religion of joy, in virtue of the resurrection of Christ
• Joy versus fun—“You can experience joy only with your whole heart, your whole soul, and all your energies."
• "You cannot make yourself joyful… something unexpected must happen."
• Love and joy
• "The intention of love is the happiness of the beloved."
• "We are not loved because we are beautiful… we are beautiful because we are loved."
• Joy and gratitude
• Love comes as a gift and surprise, and therefore leads to joy.
• Blessed, therefore grateful—receiving the gift as gift
• “Anticipated joy is the best joy.”
• The Passion of God as the foundation of joy
• Passionate God of the Hebrew Bible or Absolute God of Greek Metaphysics?
• An apathetic God makes apathetic people; the compassion of God makes compassionate people
• A Feeling God or an Apathetic God? God’s participation in suffering and joy
• “God participates in the joy of his creation."
• Luke 15: “There is more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over 99 just…"
• Lost coin, lost sheep, prodigal son...
• The wrath of God is God’s wounded love
• “My wrath is only for a moment, and my grace is everlasting."
• "Joy, in the end, wins."

Watch a video of this interview here.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured theologians Jürgen Moltmann and Miroslav Volf
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa & Ryan McAnnally-Linz
• Production Assistance by Alexa Rollow & 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

How do you find hope when you can only see yourself and your future in light of your past mistakes? When you’re certain that everyone on the outside looking in is doing the same, punishing you, immobilizing you, invisibilizing you…?

Seems the only way out of that spiral is the “God Who Sees.”

Practical theologian Sarah Farmer joins Evan Rosa to discuss her recent book, Restorative Hope: Creating Pathways of Connection in Women’s Prisons. She describes the experience of prison—the ways it constrains movement, how it abridges and threatens agency, and how the constant surveillance leaves a person breathless. She illuminates the approach to theological education she and her colleagues put on offer for these women, these incarcerated theologians whose very lives were the texts to learn from. Sarah offers a contribution from Womanist Theology: Dolores Williams’ re-narration of Hagar—from the book of Genesis—the forgotten, quote, “invisibilized” Egyptian slave of Abraham and Sarah—Hagar, the woman who named God, “El Roi”… the God who sees. And she imagines a restorative hope built around self-respect and identity, connection, and resilience—a hope that shines even into the darkness of a women’s prison cell.

Show Notes

Get your copy of Restorative Hope: Creating Pathways of Connection in Women’s Prisons

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Sarah Farmer
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Alexa Rollow
• 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

Protests dominate the news. And while we’re familiar with freedom of speech, free exercise of religion, and freedom of the press—what about the freedom of assembly? The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution—also contains “the right of the people peaceably to assemble.”

But what exactly does that secure? How does this foundational, but often forgotten, right impact the shape of democracy, undergirding and making possible a flourishing public life? And are we prepared to defend the full application of these rights to our political rivals? Those we disagree with?

Legal scholar John Inazu (Washington University, St. Louis) joins Evan Rosa for a discussion of the freedom of assembly—its history, meaning, interpretation, and application—as well as how it impacts the ability for citizens to gather to demonstrate and protest.

Show Notes

• Read the Constitution of the United States of America (1787)
• Learning to
• Get your copy of Liberty’s Refuge: The Forgotten Freedom of Assembly
• Click here to download a free version of Liberty’s Refuge.
• The First Amendment
• Introducing peaceable assembly.
• “I was working for a federal judge and working on a First Amendment case, looked down at the text of the First Amendment and saw the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and I thought to myself, I've had three years of law school and four years of legal practice, and I've never thought about the Assembly Clause.”
• Ecclesia as a counter political entity
• “I can’t assemble alone.”
• “Know Your Rights” by The Clash
• Three historical points about interpreting the assembly clause
• The grammar of the assembly clause
• Assembly and Petition are two distinct rights
• The right of association
• The right of privacy
• Assembly is the right of association
• Where are the limits of a protest? Under assembly? Or under the free speech clause.
• “we ought to care about the values that drive different parts of the Constitution.”
• The groupness—the idea of collective expression
• Understanding the “peaceable” side of assembly
• “The best law enforcement understand that there has to be some breathing space.”
• Reform mode vs revolution mode
• Policing assembly as more of an art than a science
• Peaceable assembly and collective belonging
• “Civil liberties are for losers.”
• Practical steps to upholding peaceable assembly as a right and civil liberty
• Exercise your rights
• Defend the rights of everyone

About John Inazu

John Inazu is the Sally D. Danforth Distinguished Professor of Law and Religion at Washington University in St. Louis. He teaches criminal law, law and religion, and various First Amendment courses. He writes and speaks frequently about pluralism, assembly, free speech, religious freedom, and other issues. John has written three books—including Learning to Disagree: The Surprising Path to Navigating Differences with Empathy and Respect (Zondervan, 2024) and Liberty’s Refuge: The Forgotten Freedom of Assembly (Yale, 2012)—and has published opinion pieces in the Washington Post, Atlantic, Chicago Tribune, LA Times, USA Today, Newsweek, and CNN. He is also the founder of the Carver Project and the Legal Vocation Fellowship and is a senior fellow with Interfaith America.

Image Citation

Original caption: “Demonstrators sit, with their feet in the Reflecting Pool, during the March on Washington, 1963] / WKL."

Original black and white negative by Warren K. Leffler. Taken August 28th, 1963, Washington D.C, United States (@libraryofcongress).

Colorized by Jordan J. Lloyd.

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA https://www.loc.gov/item/2011648314/

Production Notes

• This podcast featured John Inazu
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, and Tim Bergeland
• 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

"Having lost a sense of the sacred, the only thing we want is acquisitiveness—more of everything. How can we break this vicious cycle of avarice? It seems to me that the only way we can possibly reign this in on ourselves is some retrieval of the sense of the sacred, something beyond ourselves. 

And I think that relearning humility—realizing that a parasitic pathogen can spread across the globe and wreak havoc as it did—brings us to the question again of the sacred.

Dare we speak of a God who is worthy of all our desire? That we as creatures might want with all of our heart, all of our mind, to contemplate. Should anything less deserve our desiring really? Clearly there's a hierarchy of desire, but what is our overarching desire? Can we gamble on reimagining the wonder of a capacious God of endless surprises?" (Micheal O'Siadhail, from the episode)

About Micheal O'Siadhail

Micheal O'Siadhail is an award-winning poet and author of many collections of poetry. His Collected Poems was published in 2013, One Crimson Thread in 2015 and The Five Quintets in 2018, which received Conference on Christianity and Literature Book of the Year 2018 and an Eric Hoffer Award in 2020. His latest works are Testament (2022) and Desire (2023). He holds honorary doctorates from the universities of Manitoba and Aberdeen. He lives in New York.

Show Notes

• Micheal O’Siadhail, Desire
• Recitation: Epigraph
• Using poetry as a means to record the COVID-19 Pandemic
• Using words to process emotion
• Human desire for more; greed
• The internet as a driving force for consumption
• Consumerism feeding climate change
• Breaking the cycle by retrieving the sacred
• “Bless” is not a word used easily in our culture
• Recitation: Pest 12
• Gratitude within anxiety
• Recitation: Pest 20
• Stewarding the earth
• Recitation: Habitat 13
• What is worthy of our desire?
• The “stabilitas” of being where you are
• Wanting acquisitiveness more than the sacred
• Truly being known versus being famous
• Recitation: Behind the Screen 17
• Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation
• Recitation: Behind the Screen 20
• The temptation towards certainty
• Recitation: Behind the Screen 1
• Trusting the God of surprises
• “Dare we speak of a God who is worthy of all our desire?”
• Recitation: Desire 24 & 25
• “On Earth as it is in Heaven” as a dream
• Reordering and re-educating our desire
• Unity and Denise Levertov’s concept of “One-ing”

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Micheal O’Siadhail
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, and Tim Bergeland
• 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

Flannery O’Connor is known for her short stories in which “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” But it’s often those ugly, mean, disgusting, scandalizing, violent, weird, or downright hateful characters in Flannery O’Connor stories that become the vessels of grace delivered.

So, how should we read Flannery O’Connor?

Jessica Hooten Wilson (Pepperdine University) joins Evan Rosa to open up about Flannery O’Connor’s life, her unique perspective as a writer, the theological and moral principles operative in her work, all as an immense invitation to read O’Connor and find the beauty of God’s grace that emerges amidst the most horrendous evils. Includes a discussion of Flannery O’Connor’s short story, “Greenleaf.”

Show Notes

• Check out Jessica Hooten Wilson’s presentation of Flannery O’Connor’s final, unfinished novel: Flannery O’Connor’s Why Do the Heathen Rage?
• Click here for an online copy of “Greenleaf” to follow along with our analysis
• Spiritual formation through the works of Flannery O’Connor
• How to read for a flourishing life
• “Greenleaf” by Flannery O’Connor
• Flannery O’Connor’s reading grounded in tradition of early church mothers and fathers.
• Paying attention to every individual word.
• First word: Mrs. Mays looses her agency.
• Europa & the Bull, Ovid’s Metamorphosis
• Mrs. May’s blinds as hiding pieces of reality, shutting out God
• The spiritual truth of the story is concealed when not read attentively and intentionally
• Flannery’s writings defying instant gratification
• “The wrong kind of horror”
• The development of American consumerism
• Showing versus enjoying violence
• Sacramental reading
• The Holy Fool
• The Violent Bear It Away as a hymn to the eucharist
• O’Connor requires spiritual reading.
• A summary of “Greenleaf”
• Pierced by the bull, a violent union of Savior and sinner
• O’Connor’s Christian characters; “A Good Man is Hard to Find”
• Characters changing and choosing faith before death.
• The final paragraph of “Greenleaf”
• Mrs. Greenleaf as the opposite of Ivan Karamazov, in The Brothers Karamazov
• Opening to the world with the knowledge of God
• Pentecostalism and zeal in “Greenleaf”
• Stabbed in the heart, medieval mysticism
• “Lord, help us dig down under things and find where you are”

About Jessica Hooten Wilson

Jessica Hooten Wilson is the Fletcher Jones Endowed Chair of Great Books at Pepperdine University (’23) and previously served as the Seaver College Scholar of Liberal Arts at Pepperdine University (’22-’23). She co-hosts a podcast called The Scandal of Reading: Pursuing Holy Wisdom with Christ & Pop Culture, where she discusses with fellow authors, professors, and theologians with Claude Atcho and Austin Carty. She is the author of Flannery O’Connor’s Why Do the Heathen Rage?: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at a Work in Progres*s (Brazos Press, January 23, 2024); Reading for the Love of God: How to Read as a Spiritual Practice (Brazos Press, 2023);* Scandal of Holiness: Renewing Your Imagination in the Company of Literary Saints (Brazos Press, 2022) which received a Christianity Today 2023 Award of Merit (Culture & the Arts) and a Midwest Book Review* 2023 Silver Book Award (Nonfiction – Religion/Philosophy); co-author with Dr. Jacob Stratman of Learning the Good Life: Wisdom from the Great Hearts and Minds that Came Before (Zondervan Academic, 2022); Giving the Devil his Due: Demonic Authority in the Fiction of Flannery O’Connor and Fyodor Dostoevsky* (February 28, 2017), which received a 2018 Christianity Today Book of the Year Award in the Culture & the Arts; as well as two books on Walker Percy: *The Search for Influence: Walker Percy and Fyodor Dostoevsky* (Ohio State University Press, 2017) and Reading Walker Percy’s Novels (Louisiana State University Press, 2018); most recently she co-edited Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: *The Russian Soul in the West* (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020).

She has received numerous fellowships, grants, and awards, including a Fulbright Fellowship to the Czech Republic, an NEH grant to study Dante in Florence in 2014, and the Biola Center for Christian Thought sabbatical fellowship. In 2018 she received the Emerging Public Intellectual Award given by a coalition of North American think tanks in collaboration with the Centre for Christian Scholarship at Redeemer University College, and in 2019 she received the Hiett Prize in Humanities from The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Jessica Hooten Wilson
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, and Tim Bergeland
• 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

This conversation is based on a free downloadable resource available at faith.yale.edu. Click here to get your copy today.

“We may heed the call of Jesus to follow me and find him leading us right into the home we already have.” (Ryan McAnnally-Linz)

What are the possibilities of homemaking in a world out of joint? What does it mean for Christians to be on a pilgrimage? To be sojourners in the world?

Ryan McAnnally-Linz joins Evan Rosa to discuss what it means for Christian life to be a journey not from here to there, but from here to … here. Together they discuss what it means for the world to be the home of God; the task of resisting the “dysoikos” (or the parodic sinful distortion of home); the meaning of Christian life as a pilgrimage; and three faithful ways to approach the work of homemaking that anticipates how the world is becoming the home of God—Ryan introduces examples from Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement, Julian of Norwich, and a modern-day farming family.

Help us improve the podcast! Click here to take our listener survey—5 respondents will be randomly selected to receive a signed and personalized copy of Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most.

We need the world to understand it. Human embodied experience and material life in the world has a profound effect on our thinking—not just poetry and pop music, but our intellectual reflections, philosophical theories and scientific observations, to the most mundane conversations.

Take a closer look at human language and ideas, and we’ll find we are deeply embedded, grounded, and built on a foundation of metaphor. That last sentence, for instance, depends on the metaphor KNOWLEDGE is a BUILDING. But navigating this terrain can be treacherous and we can easily get lost (another metaphor: LIFE is a JOURNEY). But to be a tree planted by streams of water, bearing fruit, flourishing with vibrant leaves, we can allow our roots to sink down into this reality and bloom and reach upward (YOU are a TREE).

Theologian Joy Marie Clarkson joins me and Macie Bridge today for a conversation about metaphor. It’s brimming and full of metaphor itself (that one’s KNOWLEDGE is a CONTAINER), but it’s not too meta.

Together we discuss: How we see ourselves as human: Are we trees? Are we machines? The beauty of language and the glory of poetry to reveal intangible or invisible wisdom and experience. Joy explains the hidden negation in metaphors and the dance between subjective convention and objective realities. We revel and play with language and its particularity. We discuss Julian of Norwich on Jesus as the source of motherhood. J.R.R. Tolkien on technology and redemption through trees and dark journeys. And we explore the many metaphors that seem to undergird Christian theological reflection on flourishing life.

About Joy Clarkson

Joy Marie Clarkson is research associate in theology and literature at King’s College London. She’s the author of Aggressively Happy: A Realist’s Guide to Believing in the Goodness of Life, as well as her most recent You Are a Tree: And Other Metaphors to Nourish Life, Thought, and Prayer. Her writing has also appeared in The Tablet, Christianity Today, and Plough Quarterly. She is the Books and Culture Editor for Plough Quarterly and hosts a podcast called Speaking with Joy. Check out her Substack here.

Show Notes

• Explore the book: Joy Clarkson, You Are a Tree: And Other Metaphors to Nourish Life, Thought, and Prayer
• Joy Clarkson’s Substack
• Metaphor embedded throughout thought and language
• Are you a machine? Are you a tree?
• Hidden negation within metaphors
• Bill Collins poem, “Litany”: “You are the goblet and the wine.”
• Aristotle on metaphor: Carry over the properties of one thing to another.
• Whispering “not really though”
• Metaphors about God and internal or hidden negation
• Complexity of the world
• Posture of humility
• Literal language is a kind of trick to think that “we actually have said the thing finally and completely.”
• Thomas Aquinas, medieval theologians and speaking about God by way of analogy
• “The words we can say about God kind of come from, the perfections we perceive and things in the world.”
• Medieval bestiaries
• “The true panther is Christ.”
• “The sweet breathed, multicolored Christ panther.”
• When language falls short
• Pseudo-Dionysus the Areopagite
• Unspeakability of things and the radical particularity of language
• Julian of Norwich, Jesus as the source of motherhood: “Jesus our true mother.”
• Bobby McFerrin’s “The 23rd Psalm”
• Metaphors about humanity
• Humanity as machines vs humanity as trees
• Mechanical metaphors for humanity fall short and become dangerous when it implies that we are only as good as our productivity
• Trees are an older and more mysterious metaphor for human beings.
• Security and success—top dog vs underdog
• Metaphor: SUCCESS is UP and climbing the corporate ladder
• “We need each other.”
• The Giving Tree and Treebeard from J.R.R. Tolkein’s, The Lord of the Rings
• *The Two Towers—*Saruman vs the Ents and ecological and technological ethics that provide insight for our humanity and lived environment
• The Christian life as a metaphor
• “You are God’s poem. You are kind of this living, breathing poem that's drawing its imagery from the goodness of God.”
• Poesis and the imago Dei
• Phenomenological description of things in everyday life
• “Paying attention to those kind of very everyday experiences just filled me personally with a sense of how densely meaningful and poetic our everyday lives are.”

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Joy Marie Clarkson
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, & Tim Bergeland
• 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

Help us improve the podcast! Click here to take our listener survey—5 respondents will be randomly selected to receive a signed and personalized copy of Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most.

"There were a lot of people with moral courage to resist, to protest the communist revolutions, but few of them had the spiritual resource to question the system as a whole. Many intellectuals really protested the policies of Mao himself, but not the deprivation of freedom, the systematic persecution, the systematic suppression of religion and freedom as a whole—the entire communist system. So I think that's due to Lin Zhao's religious education. It's very helpful to have both moral courage and spiritual theological resource to make certain social diagnosis, which, I think, was available for Lin Zhao. So I would think of her as this exceptional instance of what Christianity can do—both the moral courage and the spiritual resource to resist totalitarianism." (Peng Yin on politically dissident Lin Zhao)

What are the theological assumptions that charge foreign policy? How does theology impact public life abroad? In this episode, theologian Peng Yin (Boston University School of Theology) joins Ryan McAnnally-Linz to discuss the role of theology and religion in Chinese public life—looking at contemporary foreign policy pitting Atheistic Communist China against Democratic Christian America; the moving story of Christian communist political dissident Lin Zhao; and the broader religious, philosophical, and theological influences on Chinese politics.

Show Notes

• Religion’s role in Chinese political thought.
• Thinking beyond Communist Authoritarianism and Christian Nationalism.
• American foreign policy framed as “good, democratic” US versus “authoritarian, atheistic” China.
• Chinese Communist party borrowing from Christian Utopianism
• Sole-salvific figure: Not Christ, but the Party
• Chinese Communism is a belief, not something that is open to verification. It’s not falsifiable.
• Did the communist party borrow from Christian missionaries?
• Communist party claiming collective cultivation over Confucianism’s self cultivation.
• History of religious influence in Chinese political thought
• Religion’s contemporary influence in Chinese public life
• Lin Zhao, Christian protestor.
• Lin Zhao as “exceptional instance of what Christianity can do: both the moral courage and the spiritual resource to resist totalitarianism.”
• “New Cold War Discourse”
• Chinese immigration influx after 1989 Tiananmen Movement.
• Inhabiting a space between two empires.
• “God's desire for human happiness is not simply embodied in one particular nation in an ambiguous term.”
• The nexus of democracy, equality, and theological principles
• Historical impacts of religion in Chinese public life—particularly in Confucianism and Buddhism and eventually Christianity
• Peng reflects on his own moral sources of hope and inspiration—which arise not from the State, but from a communion of saints.

About Peng Yin

Peng Yin is a scholar of comparative ethics, Chinese theology, and religion and sexuality. He Assistant Professor of Ethics at Boston University’s School of Theology. He is completing a manuscript tentatively entitled Persisting in the Good: Thomas Aquinas and Early Chinese Ethics. The volume explores the intelligibility of moral language across religious traditions and rethinks Christian teaching on human nature, sacrament, and eschatology. Yin’s research has been supported by the Louisville Institute, Political Theology Network, Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History, and Yale’s Fund for Gay and Lesbian Studies.

A recipient of Harvard’s Derek Bok Certificate of Distinction in Teaching, Yin teaches “Comparative Religious Ethics,” “Social Justice,” “Mysticism and Ethical Formation,” “Christian Ethics,” “Queer Theology,” and “Sexual Ethics” at STH. At the University, Yin serves as a Core Faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program, and as an Affiliated Faculty in Department of Classical Studies and Center for the Study of Asia. In 2023, Yin will deliver the Bartlett Lecture at Yale Divinity School and the McDonald Agape Lecture at the University of Hong Kong.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Peng Yin & Ryan McAnnally-Linz
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, & Tim Bergeland
• 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

Help us improve the podcast! Click here to take our listener survey—5 respondents will be randomly selected to receive a signed and personalized copy of Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most.

What are the goals of education? Are we shaping young minds or corrupting the youth? Theologian Mark Jordan joins Matt Croasmun for a conversation about the meaning of theological education today. Mark is the R. R. Niebuhr Research Professor at Harvard Divinity School, and is the author of ten books, including Telling Truths in Church: Scandal, Flesh, and Christian Speech. He came on the show to discuss his 2021 book, Transforming Fire: Imagining Christian Teaching—along the way, he reflects on Christian pedagogical principles; the question of the teacher’s power and the potential to enact an abusive pedagogy; he looks at the enigmatic, provoking, and sometimes deliberately elusive teaching strategy of Jesus through his parables; the role of desire in learning—and a shared love for the divine between teacher and student; he acknowledges the expansiveness of theological education that occurs outside a classroom setting; and he questions the very purpose of Christian theological education.

Mark D. Jordan is the R. R. Niebuhr Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School. He is the author of ten books, including Telling Truths in Church: Scandal, Flesh, and Christian Speech. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright- Hays Fellowship, and a Luce Fellowship in Theology.

Show Notes

• Check out Mark Jordan's book Transforming Fire: Imagining Christian Teaching.
• Louis Agassiz's story of the fish exemplifies a strong pedagogy.
• Teaching should center on the text itself, not the teacher: “In the space between the text and the student, I need to just step aside as far as possible and put the fish on the table.”
• The parables of Jesus are themselves a pedagogy. They are “enigmatic, provoking, sometimes deliberately elusive” in order to “stop the hearer in his tracks or her tracks.”
• The shift of theological education primarily from monastic schools to universities suggests the site of divine revelation is also primarily confined to the university classroom.
• The shift of theological education to universities also requires theological education to follow the schedule of a university which limits the time some texts require to be read properly.
• The texts being taught intend to transform students' lives with the lessons they hold.
• Teachers of Christian theology can invite transformation, but ultimately divine action is beyond teachers' control: “Faith is a divine gift.”
• Teachers often communicate to their students in bodily and affective ways in addition to the actual words they use: “Bodies learn best from bodies.”
• Mark Jordan's thoughts on teaching are especially true of theological education, but they can be true of other subjects as well.
• “Education depends on desire.” That is, it depends on the student and teacher's shared love for the divine, for other people, and for the world.
• Using the model of Jesus, who gently corrected his students' misguided expectations of him, teachers can also gently correct a student who “is beginning to mistake [the teacher] for the actual point of the course.”
• Theological education can and is taking place everywhere, not just in the classroom setting.
• “The question is not, will there will be a future of theology? It's where will there be a future of theology?”
• In many universities and seminaries, the time and expense of formal theological education prevent potential students from undergoing academic training. How can we reimagine theological education to allow for greater accessibility, even to those not interested in professional formation as a church leader?

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Mark Jordan and Matt Croasmun
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Alexa Rollow, Macie Bridge, and Tim Bergeland
• 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

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“For theology to be worth anything, it must traffic in real life, and that real life begins in the heart.”

Theologian Simeon Zahl (University of Cambridge) joins Evan Rosa to discuss his book, The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience, reflecting on emotion and affect; the livability of Christian faith; the origins of religious ideas; the data of human desire for theological reflection; the grace of God as the ultimate context for playfulness and freedom; and the role of the Holy Spirit in holding this all together.

About Simeon Zahl

Simeon Zahl is Professor of Christian Theology in the Faculty of Divinity. He is an historical and constructive theologian whose research interests span the period from 1500 to the present. His most recent monograph is The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience, which proposes a new account of the work of the Spirit in salvation through the lens of affect and embodiment. Professor Zahl received his first degree in German History and Literature from Harvard, and his doctorate in Theology from Cambridge. Following his doctorate, he held a post-doc in Cambridge followed by a research fellowship at St John’s College, Oxford. Prior to his return to Cambridge he was Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Nottingham.

Show Notes

• Explore Simeon Zahl’s The Holy Spirit & Christian Experience
• “For theology to be worth anything, it must traffic in real life, and that real life begins in the heart.”
• Theology becoming abstracted from day to day life
• “There is a tendency that we have as human beings, as theologians to do theology that gets abstracted in some way from the concerns of day to day life that we get caught up in our sort of conceptual kind of towers and structures or committed to certain kinds of ideas in ways that get free of the life that Christians actually seem to lead.”
• “Real life begins in the heart.”
• God is concerned with the heart.
• Emotion, desire, and feelings
• Where does love come in?
• Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon
• Philip Melanchthon’s 1521 Loci Communes: Defining human nature through the “affective power”
• Affect versus rationality at the center of Christian life
• Credibility, plausibility, and livability of Christianity
• Authenticity and the disparity between values and beliefs and real lives.
• Doctrine of Grace
• Enabling a hopeful honesty
• “What Christianity says and what it feels need to be closer together.”
• Evangelical conversion in George Elliot’s novella, Janet’s Repentance
• “Ideas are often poor ghosts; our sun−filled eyes cannot discern them; they pass athwart us in thin vapour, and cannot make themselves felt. But sometimes they are made flesh; they breathe upon us with warm breath, they touch us with soft responsive hands, they look at us with sad sincere eyes, and speak to us in appealing tones; they are clothed in a living human soul, with all its conflicts, its faith, and its love. Then their presence is a power, then they shake us like a passion, and we are drawn after them with gentle compulsion, as flame is drawn to flame.” (George Eliot)
• Art’s ability to speak to desire.
• T.S. Eliot: “Poetry operates at the frontiers of consciousness.”
• Exhausted by religious language
• How the aesthetic impacts the acceptance of ideas
• Durable concepts
• Where theological doctrine comes from
• Simeon Zahl: “In what ways are theological doctrines themselves developed from and sourced by the living concerns and experiences of Christians and of human beings more broadly? Doctrines do not develop in a vacuum or fall from the sky, fully formed. Human reasonings, including theological reasonings, are never fully extricable in a given moment from our feelings, our moods, our predispositions, and the personal histories we carry with us. furthermore, as we shall see in the book, doctrines have often come to expression in the history of Christianity, not least through an ongoing engagement with what have been understood to be concrete experiences of God's spirit and history.”
• “People were worshipping Christ before they understood who he was.”
• “Speaking about human experience just is speaking about the doctrine of the Holy Spirit.”
• Desire and emotion as pneumatological experience
• Sourcing emotional and experiential data for theological reflection
• Ernst Troelsch: “Every metaphysic must find its test in practical life.”
• “The half-light of understanding”
• Nietzsche: “The hereditary sin of the philosopher is a lack of historical sense.”
• Augustine’s transformation of desire
• Emotional experience as inadequate tool on its own
• Noticing our own emotional experiences
• “If you want to pay attention to the Holy Spirit in theology, that means you have to pay attention to embodied experiential realities.”
• Worshipping of God as Trinity before identifying the doctrine of the Trinity
• Karen Kilby’s “apathetic trinitarianism”
• Pentecostalism, affect, and play
• Establishing a spiritual connection between you and God
• Touch, sweat, and movement
• Nemi Waraboko’s The Pentecostal Principle: Ethical Methodology in New Spirit
• Openness to new things, dynamism
• Play and grace
• An embarrassment of play, in the best way possible
• The freedom of the Spirit: free to get it wrong in a “relaxed field”
• Grace as the ultimate “relaxed field”

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Simeon Zahl
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, & Tim Bergeland
• 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