In a culture shaped by distraction, anxiety, and constant noise, how do we focus on what matters most?

In this special episode, we're sharing a conversation from a recent Trinity Forum event featuring Ben Sasse—former U.S. Senator, university president, husband, and father. Following a terminal cancer diagnosis, Ben has embraced a new vocation: helping us think more clearly about the questions that matter most, and the things that endure.

In this conversation with Cherie Harder, our Trinity Forum president who’s known him since their undergrad days at Harvard, Ben joins a room full of family, friends, and colleagues to reflect on mortality, friendship, family, faith, and the kind of attention required for a flourishing life.

What follows is a lightly edited version of that conversation. If you'd like to watch the full video of the interview, you can find a link to the YouTube livestream here.

Recommended Trinity Forum Readings

• Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville (with an introduction by Ben Sasse)
• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley 
• The Federalist Papers
• The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt

Here are Cherie and Ben from the live recording at National Community Church in Washington, DC: 

In March, we welcomed Malcolm Guite for an in-person event to celebrate his new book, Galahad and the Grail, which is the first in his Merlin’s Isle trilogy published through Rabbit Room Press. 

While he was with us, Malcolm sat for this podcast interview in which he described his vision in creating this epic ballad, along with offering a deep exploration of what brought him to poetry in the first place. 

Since the book’s release, Galahad and the Grail has topped bestselling charts and received numerous accolades, demonstrating that its ancient stories find renewal in our modern era. 

You can watch the video of the full conversation on our Youtube Channel here

Recommended Trinity Forum Readings: 

• God’s Grandeur: The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins
• Four Quartets, by T.S. Eliot with an introduction by Makoto Fujimura
• The Pardoner’s Tale, by Geoffrey Chaucer

We live in an unforgiving age. Even as we know that Jesus commanded forgiveness, extending it can seem impossible, impractical, self-harming, even unjust. 

In these times of outrage and fear, what can help us become forgiving people?

Author Amy Orr-Ewing joined us for a recent online conversation, where we explored these questions for a live audience:

This episode is drawn from an Online Conversation in 2026. You can view the transcript and other resources here.

Recommended Trinity Forum Readings: 

• Confessions; Augustine
• Wrestling With God; Simone Weil
• Purchase of a Soul; Victor Hugo
• Revelations of Divine Love; Julian of Norwich

We are a culture well acquainted with anxiety. Recent years have shown it rising dramatically, particularly among Generation Z and Millennials, but affecting all of us. In the Sermon on the Mount, however, Jesus urges us not to be anxious. We wonder: is that actually possible today?

Author Alan Fadling joined us for a recent online conversation, where we explored these questions for a live audience:

This episode is from a conversation from February 2026. You can view the transcript and other resources here.

Recommended Trinity Forum Readings: 

• Confessions; Augustine
• Brave New World; Aldous Huxley
• The Long Loneliness; Dorothy Day
• Wrestling With God; Simone Weil

In a culture shaped by speed, outrage, and constant distraction, many find it difficult to cultivate a resilient Christian faith. Is slowing down a key to renewing our love of God and neighbor, and sustaining a more durable, authentic faith in a restless age? And how, in practical terms, can we tune out the noise and hear the “still, small voice”?

Drawing on the themes of his book Slow Theology, its co-author, theologian Nijay Gupta, joined us for an online conversation in 2026, where we explored these questions for a live audience: 

This episode is from a conversation from March 2026. You can view the transcript and other resources here.

We hope you’ll consider becoming a member of our community, the Trinity Forum Society. Join us in exploring timeless Christian wisdom together, so you gain clarity and courage for your own life, and help cultivate a renewed culture of hope.

Related Trinity Forum Readings:

• Confessions; Augustine
• Wrestling With God; Simone Weil
• Man's Search for Meaning; Viktor Frankl
• Who Stands Fast? Dietrich Bonhoeffer
• Why God Became Man; Anselm of Canterbury

What makes a good life? In the fragmented and harried age we inhabit, what habits of attention, reflection, and action orient us toward what is good, true, and beautiful? 

The season of Lent is a good time for us to tackle such “big questions.” Drawing on his popular course at Yale, theologian and author Miroslav Volf joined us for an online conversation in 2024, where we explored these questions for a live audience.

Miroslav Volf is the Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School and founding director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture in New Haven, Connecticut. He has written or edited more than two dozen books, including the New York Times bestseller Life Worth Living, A Public Faith, Public Faith in Action, and Exclusion and Embrace (winner of the Grawemeyer Award in Religion and selected as among the 100 best religious books of the twentieth century by Christianity Today). Educated in his native Croatia, the United States, and Germany, Volf regularly lectures around the world.

Related Trinity Forum Readings:

Man's Search for Meaning; Viktor Frankl
On Happiness; Thomas Aquinas
Brave New World; Aldous Huxley
How Much Land Does a Man Need? Leo Tolstoy
Wrestling with God; Simone Weil

As we continue our journey through the season of Lent, we’re offering a series to help each of us prepare the way of the Lord. As we go deeper in our spiritual practices during these days, our guide today is the author and psychiatrist Dr. Curt Thompson. 

In this conversation, Curt talks about the virtue, and discipline, of pursuing hope, even amid the darkness of a broken world:

This episode is drawn from an online conversation recorded in 2023. View the transcript and other resources there.

Related Trinity Forum Readings:
Confessions; St Augustine
God's Grandeur; Gerard Manley Hopkins
Bulletins from Immortality; Emily Dickinson
On Friendship; Cicero
On Happiness; Aquinas
Man's Search for Meaning; Viktor Frankl

Welcome to the Trinity Forum Conversations podcast. 

As we move through the season of Lent, we’re offering a series to help each of us prepare the way of the Lord. It’s a good time to take stock of our spiritual practices, and our guide today is the author and professor Alan Noble. 

In his book, On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden & Gift of Living, Alan contends that simply deciding to engage with the world each day constitutes a declaration of the goodness of God:

This episode is drawn from an Online Conversation recorded in 2023. We hope you enjoy the conversation.

As we move into the season of Lent, we’re offering a series to help each of us prepare the way of the Lord. It’s a good time to take stock of our spiritual practices, and today’s guide is the author John Mark Comer. 

In his book Practicing the Way, John Mark explores the practical realities of what it means to be an apprentice of Jesus:

This episode is drawn from an online conversation recorded in 2024. 

Many of us have been grieved by the polarization we see rending so many churches. What role has this played in America’s growing secularization and what our guest has called “the great dechurching”? And is that dechurching now actually in reverse? Fundamentally, what can we do to pursue the flourishing of both the church and the nation?

In this episode, our guide is Ryan Burge, an ordained minister, best-selling author and professor of practice at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University. 

His book The Vanishing Church draws upon his scholarship as a data scientist, and his experience as a pastor, to explore how the church has been harmed by, and can offer healing from, the excesses of political combat and division:

This episode is drawn from an online conversation recorded in 2026. Please subscribe to this podcast - it helps people find us.

And we hope you’ll consider becoming a member of our community, the Trinity Forum Society. Join us in exploring timeless Christian wisdom together, so you gain clarity and courage for your own life, and help cultivate a renewed culture of hope. You can do this at our website, ttf.org.