The Vicars' Crossing

n this episode we are excited to sit down with celebrated spiritual writer and sought-after speaker, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove. In his new book REVOLUTION OF VALUES  - Jonathan outlines how Christians have misused Scripture to consolidate power, stoke fears, and defend against enemies. A solution to this rest with people who have been hurt by the attacks of Christian nationalism. Jonathan shows us how their voices can help us rediscover God’s vision for faith in public life.

We discuss people on the frontlines of issues ranging from immigration policy and voting rights to women’s rights and much more. This is a conversation that certainly helps us focus on striving to respect the dignity of every human being. 

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove is a celebrated spiritual writer and sought-after speaker. A native of North Carolina, he is a graduate of Eastern University and Duke Divinity School.
In 2003, Jonathan and his wife Leah founded the Rutba House, a house of hospitality where the formerly homeless share community with the formerly housed. Jonathan directs the School for Conversion, a popular education center that works to make “surprising friendships possible.” He is also an Associate Minister at the historically black St. Johns Missionary Baptist Church.
Jonathan is a co-complier of the celebrated Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals, and the author of several books on Christian spirituality, including Reconstructing the Gospel, Strangers at My Door, The Awakening of Hope, The Wisdom of Stability, and The New Monasticism. He is also co-author, with Reverend Dr. William Barber II, of The Third Reconstruction: Moral Mondays, Fusion Politics, and the Rise of a New Justice Movement.
An evangelical Christian who connects with the broad spiritual tradition and its monastic witnesses, Jonathan is a leader in the Red Letter Christian movement and the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. He speaks often about emerging Christianity and faith in public life to churches and conferences across the denominational spectrum and has given lectures at dozens of universities and seminaries, including Calvin College, MIT, Bethel, Duke, Yale, Princeton, Jewish Theological, Perkins, Wake Forrest, St. John’s, DePaul, and Baylor.


https://jonathanwilsonhartgrove.com/

This podcast was recorded on October 19th, 2021.

After attending two universities in Britain as a young man, Michael returned to higher education in 2016, graduating from Trinity College, University of Toronto, three years later with a Master of Divinity (Honours) degree. He was ordained in the Anglican Church of Canada in October 2019 and is a Pastoral Associate at St. Christopher's in Burlington.

Michael has received several awards for his writing and broadcasting. In 2005 he won The Ed Murrow Award for Radio Broadcasting, in 2006 The RTNDA Radio Broadcasting Award, in 2007 the Communicator Award in Hollywood and in 2008 the Omni Award for his television show. In 2012 he was awarded the Queen’s Jubilee Medal for his services to media and in 2013 he was named North American Columnist of the Year at the Catholic Press Association awards.

Michael is an Anglican priest, an author and a columnist. He also hosted a nightly television and radio show for 15 years, for which he won numerous awards.
He’s a columnist for The Toronto Star, and a frequent contributor to the Globe and Mail, NOW magazine, TVOntario, Macleans, and several other Canadian and British publications.
He is the best-selling author of seventeen books, including biographies of G.K. Chesterton, H.G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, J.R.R. Tolkien, and C.S. Lewis. He has contributed to the Dictionary of National Biography and several other anthologies and is published in many countries and in more than a dozen languages.

https://michaelcoren.com/

This podcast was recorded on October 13th, 2021.

Peter Enns (Ph.D. Harvard University) is Abram S. Clemens professor of Biblical Studies at Eastern University (St. Davids, PA). He has taught undergraduate, seminary, and doctoral courses at numerous other schools, including Princeton Theological Seminary, Harvard Divinity School, and Temple University.  Enns speaks and writes regularly to diverse audiences about the intersection of the ancient setting of the Bible and contemporary Christian faith. He is also the host of the popular podcast The Bible for Normal People, blogs at peteenns.com, and has written, edited, and contributed to over 20 books, including The Sin of Certainty, The Bible Tells Me So, and most recently How the Bible Actually Works. Enns resides in suburban Philadelphia with his wife Susan.

THE BIBLE FOR NORMAL PEOPLE:
https://open.spotify.com/show/2991KOQDSOZK59jopj5jjv?si=btDSYW3uQ8W3Obh21fUdaQ&dl_branch=1

this podcast was recorded on October 12th, 2021

AnnaLise Trudell is a gender-equity consultant and the manager of Education, Training & Research at Anova, the women’s shelter and sexual assault centre in London Ontario. She brings extensive analysis of the causes and impacts of gender-based violence and of prevention programming through her doctoral and postdoctoral research at Western University. As Manager at Anova for over a decade, she has overseen the facilitation, curriculum development and evaluation of youth anti-violence programming and professional training. She is a seasoned public educator and facilitator with over 500 lectures and presentations engaging youth, professionals & post-secondary students through public education.

Peace by Piece:
http://www.anovafuture.org/podcast/ 

This podcast was recorded on October 5th, 2021

Growing up in a strict, fundamentalist church in the southern USA, a young Philip Yancey tended to view God as “a scowling Supercop, searching for anyone who might be having a good time—in order to squash them.” Yancey jokes today about being “in recovery” from a toxic church. “Of course, there were good qualities too. If a neighbour’s house burned down, the congregation would rally around and show charity—if, that is, the house belonged to a white person. I grew up confused by the contradictions. We heard about love and grace, but I didn’t experience much. And we were taught that God answers prayers, miraculously, but my father died of polio just after my first birthday, despite many prayers for his healing.”
For Yancey, reading offered a window to a different world. So, he devoured books that opened his mind, challenged his upbringing, and went against what he had been taught. A sense of betrayal engulfed him. “I felt I had been lied to. For instance, what I learned from a book like To Kill a Mockingbird or Black Like Me contradicted the racism I encountered in church. I went through a period of reacting against everything I was taught and even discarding my faith. I began my journey back mainly by encountering a world very different than I had been taught, an expansive world of beauty and goodness. Along the way, I realized that God had been misrepresented to me. Cautiously, warily, I returned, circling around the faith to see if it might be true.”
Ever since, Yancey has explored the most basic questions and deepest mysteries of the Christian faith, taking millions of readers with him. Early on he crafted best-selling books such as Disappointment with God and Where is God When it Hurts? while also editing The Student Bible. He co-authored three books with the renowned surgeon Dr. Paul Brand. “No one has influenced me more,” he says. “We had quite a trade: I gave words to his faith, and in the process, he gave faith to my words.” More recently, he has felt the freedom to explore central issues of the Christian faith, penning award-winning titles such as The Jesus I Never Knew, What’s So Amazing About Grace? and Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference? His books have garnered 13 Gold Medallion Awards from Christian publishers and booksellers. He currently has more than 15 million books in print, published in over 50 languages worldwide.
Yancey worked as a journalist in Chicago for some twenty years, editing the youth magazine Campus Life while also writing for a wide variety of magazines including Reader’s Digest, Saturday Evening Post, National Wildlife, and Christianity Today. In the process, he interviewed diverse people enriched by their personal faith, such as President Jimmy Carter, Habitat for Humanity founder Millard Fuller, and Dame Cicely Saunders, founder of the modern hospice movement. In 1992 he and his wife Janet, a social worker and hospice chaplain, moved to the foothills of Colorado. His writing took a more personal, introspective turn even as his activities turned outward. “Writing is such an introspective act that I found myself looking for ways to connect with the planet bodily. My interests include skiing, climbing mountains, mountain-biking, golf, international travel, jogging, nature, theology (in small doses), politics, literature, and classical music.”


This podcast was recorded on September 28th, 2021.

Dr. Josh McNall has taught at OKWU since 2009. He holds a Ph.D. in Theology from the University of Manchester (UK), an MA in theology from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and a BA in Pastoral Ministry from OKWU. Josh also preaches regularly around the country and serves as the Ambassador of Church Relations for OKWU—a role that allows him to serve local Wesleyan Churches. 

He blogs regularly at www.joshuamcnall.com and hosts the Outpost Theology podcast, sponsored by OKWU. Josh and his wife Brianna are both graduates of OKWU, and they have four children: Lucy, Penelope, Ewan, and Teddy.

This podcast was recorded on September 28th, 2021.

Kate Bowler, PhD is a New York Times bestselling author, podcast host, and professor at Duke University. She studies the cultural stories we tell ourselves about success, suffering, and whether (or not) we’re capable of change. In her twenties, she became obsessed with writing the first history of the movement called the “prosperity gospel”—which promises that God will reward you with health and wealth if you have the right kind of faith. She researched and travelled across Canada and the United States interviewing megachurch leaders and televangelists and everyday believers about how they make spiritual meaning out of the good and bad in their lives. The result was the book, Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel, which received widespread media attention and a lot of puns about being #blessed. 
At age 35, she was unexpectedly diagnosed with Stage IV cancer, causing her to think in different terms about the research and beliefs she had been studying. She penned the New York Times bestselling memoir, Everything Happens for a Reason (and Other Lies I’ve Loved), which tells the story of her struggle to understand the personal and intellectual dimensions of the American belief that all tragedies are tests of character.

WEBSITE:
https://katebowler.com/

this podcast was recorded on September 23rd, 2021.

A prize-winning historian and Emmy Award nominee, Randall Balmer earned the Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1985 and taught as Professor of American Religious History at Columbia University for twenty-seven years before becoming the Mandel Family Professor in the Arts & Sciences at Dartmouth College in 2012; two years later, he was named Dartmouth Professor in the Arts & Sciences, and in 2015 he was named to the John Phillips Chair in Religion, the oldest endowed professorship at Dartmouth. In 2014, he was named the inaugural director of the Society of Fellows at Dartmouth. He has been a visiting professor at Princeton, Yale, Northwestern, and Emory universities and in the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He was a visiting professor at Yale Divinity School from 2004 to 2008.

Dr. Balmer has published widely in both scholarly journals and in the popular press. His op-ed articles have appeared in newspapers across the country, including the Los Angeles Times, the Des Moines Register, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Dallas Morning News, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Hartford Courant, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, the Anchorage Daily News, and the New York Times. His work has also appeared in the New Republic, the New York Times Book Review, Christian Century, the Nation, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Washington Post Book World. Dr. Balmer is regularly asked to comment on religion in American life, and he has appeared frequently on network television, on NPR, and on both the Colbert Report and the Daily Show, with Jon Stewart. He has been an expert witness in several First Amendment cases, including Snyder v. Phelps and Glassroth v. Moore, the so-called Alabama Ten Commandments case.

Dr. Balmer has published more than a dozen books, including Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter and The Making of Evangelicalism: From Revivalism to Politics and Beyond. His second book, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America, now in its fifth edition, was made into an award-winning, three-part documentary for PBS. Dr. Balmer wrote and hosted that series as well as a two-part series on creationism and a documentary on Billy Graham. He has lectured around the country in such venues as the Commonwealth Club of California and the Chautauqua Institution and, under the auspices of the State Department, in Austria and Lebanon.

This podcast was recorded on September 21st, 2021.

Daniel Bowman Jr. is the author of A Plum Tree in Leatherstocking Country and On the Spectrum: Autism, Faith, & the Gifts of Neurodiversity.
His work has appeared in several anthologies and in The Adirondack Review, American Poetry Journal, Art House America, Books & Culture, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, The Cresset, Christianity Today, Image Journal’s Good Letters, The Midwest Quarterly, The Northern Agrarian, The Other Journal, Pyrta, Rio Grande Review, Saint Katherine Review, Seneca Review, Volume 1 Brooklyn, and many other journals.
A New York native, he lives in Hartford City, Indiana, where he is Associate Professor of English at Taylor University, Editor-in-Chief of Relief: A Journal of Art & Faith, and faculty advisor to Students for Education on Neurodiversity (SEND).

This Podcast was recorded on September 14th, 2021.

Drew E. Jackson is a poet who came late to writing poetry, although he would say that his love for the art form began with hip-hop, learning to put words together from Nas’ Illmatic. He writes at the intersection of justice, peace, and contemplation, having a passion to contribute toward a more just and whole world. 
Born in Williamstown, NJ, Drew currently calls New York City home. He holds a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Chicago and an M.A. in Theology from Fuller Theological Seminary. While he’s not traversing the world of poetry, Drew spends his time pastoring Hope East Village, a church that he planted in March of 2018. Drew also serves as the President of Pax, an organization focused on promoting the peace of Jesus in the 21st century.
Drew is blessed to share life with his wife Genay, and their twin daughters Zora and Suhaila.

This podcast was recorded on September 7th, 2021