Our Summer 2025 series, Beside Still Waters, focuses on the places where creativity brings life into a world fatigued by brokenness and division. From jazz to Jane Austen and in between, this season we’ll focus on the ways literature and the arts can refresh and challenge our inner lives—and connect us with the Creator of the good, the true, and the beautiful.

How should we live faithfully within a world created to be good and beautiful, and yet everywhere marred by ugliness and injustice? 

Jazz vocalist and composer Ruth Naomi Floyd will guide us in bringing together music, creativity, and justice, and help us think about our roles in repairing, re-envisioning, and creating new places of beauty and flourishing:

We hope you are encouraged by Ruth’s artistic journey, as she helps us to find beauty in the midst of suffering, and to express love through creativity.

This podcast is an edited version of an online conversation recorded in 2021. Watch the full video of the conversation here, and learn more about Ruth Naomi Floyd.

Authors and books mentioned in the conversation:
The Frederick Douglass Jazz Works
It Was Good, Making Music to the Glory of God, by Ruth Naomi Floyd
The Problem of Good, by Ruth Naomi Floyd
Dr. John Nunez
Toni Morrison
Martin Luther King Jr.
Vincent van Gogh
Hans Christian Andersen
Miles Davis
Francis Schaeffer
Joshua Stamper

Related Trinity Forum Readings:
A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Letters from Vincent van Gogh
Letter from Birmingham Jail, by Martin Luther King Jr.
Revelation, by Flannery O’Connor
Bulletins from Immortality, by Emily Dickinson

Related Conversations:
A New Year With The Word with Malcolm Guite

To listen to this or any of our episodes in full, visit ttf.org/podcast and to join the Trinity Forum Society and help make content like this possible, join the Trinity Forum Society