What is the source of power in fantasy literature? Listen along as author Matthew Dickerson investigates the magical universes of C.S. Lewis, J.K. Rowling, and J.R.R. Tolkien, discussing how each author portrays magic as power, with inevitably severe implications regarding good and evil. In an uncanny reflection of the state of modern humanity, Dickerson unveils how he finds and holds onto hope in this amusing yet pointed lecture.

Can AI create art? And is that the question we ought to be asking? On this episode of Rewrite Radio, author and filmmaker Laleh Khadivi urges listeners to remember, in an age of increasing artistic blurriness, the necessity of the individual human being’s creativity. She links the creative process to prayer and asks, if AI is already creating and praying, must the human still too?

Theme music is Modern Attempt by TrackTribe and June 11 by Andrew Starr.

In this episode, Dr. Sabrina Lee sits down with acclaimed novelist Peter Ho Davies for a wide-ranging conversation about craft, identity, and the stories that shape us. Together they explore several of his books, diving into themes of shame, race, joke-telling, and what it means to write from the in-between spaces of a biracial identity. With characteristic insight and generosity, Davies reflects on how revision deepens his work and how he’s learned to inhabit the “hyphen” in his own life and fiction.

This week on Rewrite Radio, poet and essayist Christian Wiman explores what it means to stay spiritually alert in a world shadowed by loneliness and lit by sudden joy. Drawing on poems by Wallace Stevens, Anne Carson, and his own collections—including Zero at the Bone—Wiman reflects on beauty as a form of justice, on grief as grace, and on the mysterious ways poetry calls us to pay attention.

Christian Wiman was raised in West Texas and earned a BA at Washington and Lee University. A former Guggenheim fellow, Wiman served as the editor of Poetry magazine from 2003 to 2013. He received an honorary doctorate from North Central College.

Making use of—and at times gently disassembling—musical and metrical structures, Wiman often explores themes of spiritual faith and doubt in his spare, precise poems. Wiman is the author of numerous books of poetry, prose, and poetry in translation. Survival Is a Style (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020) is Wiman's most recent collection; the collection Every Riven Thing (2010) won the Commonwealth Prize from the English Speaking Union, was a finalist for the Kingsley-Tufts Poetry Award, and was named one of the New Yorker’s top 11 poetry books of 2010. His collection, Once in the West (2014) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award. His debut collection, The Long Home (1998), won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. Stolen Air (2012) contains Wiman’s translations of Osip Mandelstam’s poetry. With Don Share, Wiman coedited The Open Door: One Hundred Poems, One Hundred Years of Poetry Magazine (2012). Wiman’s essay collections include He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art (2018), My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer (2013) and Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet (2007).

Situating herself in the contexts of the Russia-Ukraine conflict and Ukrainian diaspora, Sonya Bilocerkowycz presents the roles and responsibilities of the reader, writer and artist in wartime. Bilocerkowycz emphasises the power writers have in influencing memory and narrative through their work in such times, and calls for the writer not only to prepare, learn, and inform, but to also use art to defend and save lives when the moment comes.

Sonya Bilocerkowycz is a Ukrainian-American writer and artist from the Black Hills of South Dakota. She is the author of On Our Way Home from the Revolution (Ohio State University Press/Mad Creek Books, 2019), selected by David Lazar and Patrick Madden as winner of the Gournay Prize for a debut essay collection. Sonya's work has appeared in Guernica, Ninth Letter, New York Review of Books, Lit Hub, Los Angeles Review of Books, Colorado Review, The Normal School, and in the anthology Sad Happens: A Celebration of Tears, edited by Brandon Stosuy (Simon & Schuster, 2023). Before completing her MFA at Ohio State, she served as a Fulbright Fellow in Belarus, an educational recruiter in the Republic of Georgia, and an instructor at Ukrainian Catholic University in L'viv. Currently, Sonya is the Director of Creative Writing at SUNY Geneseo in western New York. She has been named a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow and is at work on a second book. 

Both mothers of disabled children, authors Amy Julia Becker and Hilary Yancey discuss their experiences raising kids while navigating questions of identity and community.

Amy Julia Becker helps people reimagine the good life through her writing and speaking on disability, faith, and culture. She is the author of To Be Made Well, White Picket Fences, Small Talk, and A Good and Perfect Gift and the creator of the Reimagining Family Life with Disability workshop. She is a guest opinion writer for national publications and hosts two podcasts: Reimagining the Good Life and Take the Next Step. Becker is a graduate of Princeton University and Princeton Theological Seminary (MDiv). She lives with her husband and their three children in western Connecticut.

Hilary Yancey is a philosopher and writer living in Central Texas, parenting three young kids. She's fascinated by all kinds of questions, but especially those about disability, justice, and God. Her first book, Forgiving God: A Story of Faith (FaithWords, 2018) touched on all these things through the story of her son’s birth and their first year of life together.

What's next in our fight for racial justice? Interviewed by Craig Mattson, author and scholar Jemar Tisby (@jemartisby) discusses his helpful framework for justice efforts—the lenses of awareness, relationship, and commitment. He tackles how to apply these concepts to our day-to-day life with examples, humor, and most of all authenticity. A devout Christian, Tisby offers a valuable perspective on how the church is involved in these issues.

Jemar Tisby, PhD is the author of the bestselling book The Color of Compromise and founder of the The Witness, a Black Christian Collective. He is a professor of history at Simmons College of Kentucky and writes frequently on Substack (Footnotes by Jemar Tisby). His newest book, The Spirit of Justice, was released in September 2024.

This week on Rewrite Radio, author and scholar Karen Swallow Prior reflects on the power of imagination—not just as an individual gift, but as a force that shapes communities, cultures, and faith traditions. With insight, humor, and historical perspective, she invites us to notice the stories and symbols we live by and to consider how reimagining them might open the way toward a different future.

Karen Swallow Prior earned her Ph.D. in English at the State University of New York at Buffalo. She is a popular writer and speaker, as well as columnist for Religion News Service. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Vox, The Washington Post, Christianity Today, and many other places. Her most recent book is The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis (Brazos, 2023).

This talk was recorded live at the 2024 Festival of Faith & Writing.

What happens when old models of power no longer serve us? In this episode of Rewrite Radio, Rabbi Elan Babchuck draws from his book Picking Up the Pieces to explore “Mosaic leadership,” a vision rooted in humility, resilience, and community. Through stories of Moses, modern innovators, and even his own children, Babchuck invites us to move from pyramids of control to circles of belonging—and to imagine new horizons of leadership in uncertain times.

Rabbi Elan Babchuck is Executive Vice President at CLAL (The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership) and Founding Executive Director of Glean Network. Ordained in 2012, he also holds an MBA, and works at the intersection of entrepreneurship and faith, helping shape new models of spiritual leadership.

This talk was recorded live at the 2024 Festival of Faith & Writing.

In Episode 70 of Rewrite Radio, acclaimed author M.T. Anderson explores the sacred and the strange through riveting tales of stolen religious artifacts—from Nepal to Cambodia to the tomb of Saint Nicholas. With wit and insight, he examines the power of objects, cultural identity, and why returning sacred art matters.  

M. T. Anderson writes widely, for both children and adults, including the 2024 Newbery Honor Book, Elf Dog and Owl Head and The Pox Party, a Gothic novel of the American Revolution which won the National Book Award. His nonfiction book Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad was one of the Wall Street Journal’s Best Books of the Year. His most recent book, Nicked, is a historical heist story set in the eleventh century.  

This talk was recorded live in the 2024 Festival of Faith & Writing.