This podcast is an edited version of our Online Conversation from November 2021. You can access the full conversation with transcript here.

Learn more about Diana Butler Bass.

Diana’s Substack, The Cottage is available here.

You can find Diana’s book Grateful and others here.

Grace and Gratitude: The Eucharistic Theology of John Calvin by Brian Gerrish

Mary Jo Leddy

Join the Trinity Forum Society

With Thanksgiving and the season of Advent approaching, The Trinity Forum is offering a new podcast series to help you think more deeply about ideas and practices related to gratitude, attention, anticipation, and what it means to behold beauty. We’ll talk with Diana Butler Bass about the meaning and practice of Gratitude Andrew Peterson will share his insights on how deeper attentiveness to the beauty around us can awaken us to wisdom and wonder. James K.A. Smith will help us explore the importance of being time-bound creates and how to best inhabit time Curt Thompson will consider the ways that beauty can emerge from the most difficult situations. Subscribe to Trinity Forum Conversations wherever you listen to podcasts to make sure you don't miss an episode. And thank you for allowing us to be part of your Thanksgiving and Advent season.

Our series on Reading & The Common Good concludes with this episode on the importance of reading poetry. Trinity Forum President, Cherie Harder speaks with internationally acclaimed poet and writer, Dana Gioia, who is a former California Poet laureate and Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.

As poetry often does, the conversation in this episode considers the personal as well as the universal, including how Dana became interested in poetry, and what can be done to interest a generation of readers to the habit of reading--and even memorizing--poetry.

Christians have been called a “people of the book,” yet how often do we spend time gathering together to read deeply? In a fast-paced technological world, taking time to read deeply and well, let alone alongside others, can feel like a daunting task. And while reading alone has extraordinary value (and, research shows, is intriguingly linked with spending more time with others), reading in community is a uniquely formative endeavor that shapes how we think, what we value, and our ability to have genuine and meaningful dialogue and relationship with others.

The Trinity Forum hosted an Online Conversation with Matthew Lee Anderson and Anika Prather to explore the importance of reading together and the impact that such small but meaningful interactions can have on ourselves, our communities, and our civic structures. 

Cherie Harder speaks with author and literature professor Karen Swallow Prior about her own history of reading as well as the challenges and possibilities for virtue formation that reading literature presents.

Visit ttf.org/bookclub to get everything you need to start your own bookclub.

Reading for Regeneration

In this episode, Jessica Hooten Wilson and Claude Atcho join Cherie Harder to discuss the countercultural practice of reading carefully and communally. This podcast is an edited version of an Online Conversation, which you can find with video and transcript, here.

If you're interested in reading old books in community, we encourage you to check out our newly announced Bookclub Box. The Bookclub Box is designed to make it easy for you to host your own reading group. Each quarter will release a new box with a trio of curated, thematically linked Trinity Forum Readings. You'll also get a discussion guide to spur conversation on each of the Readings, as well as some other great Trinity Forum items, including a tote bag, notepad, pen and bookmark.

Alan Jacobs joins Cherie Harder to discuss his book, Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Readers Guide to a More Tranquil Mind. This podcast is an edited version of the Online Conversation, which you can find with video and transcript, here.

We encourage you to put the ideas discussed in this episode into practice by starting your own reading group. The Trinity Forum Bookclub Box has everything you need to get started.

Reading & The Common Good is our new podcast series with Jessica Hooten Wilson, Karen Swallow Prior, Alan Jacobs, Dana Gioia, Anika Prather, and Matthew Lee Anderson. Few things in life are as enriching and humanizing as reading deeply and well. Yet the pace and technology of modern life make it hard for many of us to give books the time and attention they demand. Join us this season as we hear from guests who explain the value of reading in community, reading alone, reading old books, reading new books, and, above all, how reading serves as an antidote to the many problems of our time.

If you're interested in leading your own reading group, we encourage you to visit our website. There you'll find information about our newly announced Bookclub Box. The Bookclub Box is designed to make it easy for you to host your own reading group. Each quarter will release a new box with a trio of curated, thematically linked Trinity Forum Readings.

You'll also get a discussion guide to spur conversation on each of the Readings, as well as some other great Trinity Forum items, including a tote bag, notepad, pen and bookmark.

Neurobiology and the Soul
What is the connection between our mind and our soul? New discoveries in neuroscience reveal that love can literally change our minds — that our relationships and interactions with others help shape our brains – which in turn, shape our relationships and behaviors. The link between our habits and spiritual practices and the renewing of our mind may be far more direct than once supposed.

Friendship Shapes our Soul

On Friday, June 24th we hosted an Online Conversation with psychiatrist Curt Thompson and The King’s University philosophy professor Jeffrey Dudiak to discuss the convergence of what brain research and spiritual practices reveal about the formation and development of our mind, heart, and soul. These longtime friends shared how their relationship has been used by God to repair and shape their lives in fascinating and unexpected ways.

This Conversation is part of our Discovery and Doxology series in partnership with BioLogos and Church of the Advent bringing together leading scientists, theologians, and scholars to discuss the relationship between science and faith.

Learn more about Curt Thompson and Jeff Dudiak.

Authors and books mentioned in the conversation:

The Chronicles of Narnia, by C.S. Lewis 

John Wood

Makoto Fujimura

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Related Trinity Forum Readings:

Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

God's Grandeur: The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins

Babbet’s Feast, by Isak Dinesen

Related Conversations:
Faith in an Empirical World: an Online Conversation with Ard Louis and Tremper Longman
Suffering, Healing, and Meaning, with Philip Yancey and Julia Wattacheril
Understanding Transhumanism with Rosalind Picard and Richard Mouw 

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, visit ttf.org/join.

Special thanks to Ned Bustard for the artwork and Andrew Peterson for the music.

Science, Faith, and the Pursuit of Truth

What does it mean to pursue truth — and how do we know what we know? Science and religion have often been assumed to offer either contradictory or unrelated forms of knowledge, with any intersection between them presumed to be a conflict.

Such assumptions have grown more contentious in recent years in a world awash in misinformation and epistemic battles. How do science and faith relate in pursuing truth? What might each have to say to the other? And how might such a conversation enhance our understanding of knowledge itself?

On Friday, March 25 2022, The Trinity Forum hosted a conversation with Elaine Howard Ecklund and Ted Davis to show how science and Christianity intersect in constructive, even beautiful ways.

This conversation is a part of our Discovery and Doxology series, and hosted in partnership with Biologos and Church of the Advent and made possible through the support of Templeton Religion Trust. This series brings together leading scientists, philosophers, and theologians to discuss the relationship between science and faith.

Learn more about Elaine Howard Ecklund and Ted Davis.

Authors and books mentioned in the conversation:

Christian View of Science and Scripture, Bernard Ramm

Richard Dawkins

Philo Judaeus

John Philoponus

Augustine of Hippo

Galileo Galilei

Ptolemy

Galen

Euclid

Sam Harris

A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, Samuel Miller

Ken Ham

Francis Collins

Albert Einstein

Peter Medewar

Thomas Henry Huxley

Related Trinity Forum Readings:

Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

God's Grandeur: The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins 

Related Conversations:
Faith in an Empirical World: an Online Conversation with Ard Louis and Tremper Longman
Neurobiology and the Soul with Curt Thompson and Jeffrey Dudiak
Suffering, Healing, and Meaning, with Philip Yancey and Julia Wattacheril
Understanding Transhumanism with Rosalind Picard and Richard Mouw

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, visit ttf.org/join.

Special thanks to Ned Bustard for the artwork and Andrew Peterson for the music.