For the Life of the World / Yale Center for Faith & Culture cover art

For the Life of the World / Yale Center for Faith & Culture

Written by: Miroslav Volf Matthew Croasmun Ryan McAnnally-Linz Drew Collins Evan Rosa
  • Summary

  • Seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. Theological insight, cultural analysis, and practical guidance for personal and communal flourishing. Brought to you by the Yale Center for Faith & Culture.
    2020-2025 Yale Center for Faith & Culture
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Episodes
  • You Are A Tree: Metaphor & the Poetry of Our Humanity / Joy Marie Clarkson
    Mar 28 2024
    Help us improve the podcast! Click here to take our listener survey—5 respondents will be randomly selected to receive a signed and personalized copy of Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most.We need the world to understand it. Human embodied experience and material life in the world has a profound effect on our thinking—not just poetry and pop music, but our intellectual reflections, philosophical theories and scientific observations, to the most mundane conversations.Take a closer look at human language and ideas, and we’ll find we are deeply embedded, grounded, and built on a foundation of metaphor. That last sentence, for instance, depends on the metaphor KNOWLEDGE is a BUILDING. But navigating this terrain can be treacherous and we can easily get lost (another metaphor: LIFE is a JOURNEY). But to be a tree planted by streams of water, bearing fruit, flourishing with vibrant leaves, we can allow our roots to sink down into this reality and bloom and reach upward (YOU are a TREE).Theologian Joy Marie Clarkson joins me and Macie Bridge today for a conversation about metaphor. It’s brimming and full of metaphor itself (that one’s KNOWLEDGE is a CONTAINER), but it’s not too meta.Joy is research associate in theology and literature at King’s College London. She’s the author of Aggressively Happy: A Realist’s Guide to Believing in the Goodness of Life, as well as her most recent You Are a Tree: And Other Metaphors to Nourish Life, Thought, and Prayer. Her writing has also appeared in The Tablet, Christianity Today, and Plough Quarterly. She is the Books and Culture Editor for Plough Quarterly and hosts a podcast called Speaking with Joy.Together we discuss: How we see ourselves as human: Are we trees? Are we machines? The beauty of language and the glory of poetry to reveal intangible or invisible wisdom and experience. Joy explains the hidden negation in metaphors and the dance between subjective convention and objective realities. We revel and play with language and its particularity. We discuss Julian of Norwich on Jesus as the source of motherhood. J.R.R. Tolkien on technology and redemption through trees and dark journeys. And we explore the many metaphors that seem to undergird Christian theological reflection on flourishing life.About Joy ClarksonJoy Marie Clarkson is research associate in theology and literature at King’s College London. She’s the author of Aggressively Happy: A Realist’s Guide to Believing in the Goodness of Life, as well as her most recent You Are a Tree: And Other Metaphors to Nourish Life, Thought, and Prayer. Her writing has also appeared in The Tablet, Christianity Today, and Plough Quarterly. She is the Books and Culture Editor for Plough Quarterly and hosts a podcast called Speaking with Joy. Check out her Substack here.Show NotesExplore the book: Joy Clarkson, You Are a Tree: And Other Metaphors to Nourish Life, Thought, and PrayerJoy Clarkson’s SubstackMetaphor embedded throughout thought and languageAre you a machine? Are you a tree?Hidden negation within metaphorsBill Collins poem, “Litany”: “You are the goblet and the wine.”Aristotle on metaphor: Carry over the properties of one thing to another.Whispering “not really though”Metaphors about God and internal or hidden negationComplexity of the worldPosture of humilityLiteral language is a kind of trick to think that “we actually have said the thing finally and completely.”Thomas Aquinas, medieval theologians and speaking about God by way of analogy“The words we can say about God kind of come from, the perfections we perceive and things in the world.”Medieval bestiaries“The true panther is Christ.”“The sweet breathed, multicolored Christ panther.”When language falls shortPseudo-Dionysus the AreopagiteUnspeakability of things and the radical particularity of languageJulian of Norwich, Jesus as the source of motherhood: “Jesus our true mother.”Bobby McFerrin’s “The 23rd Psalm”Metaphors about humanityHumanity as machines vs humanity as treesMechanical metaphors for humanity fall short and become dangerous when it implies that we are only as good as our productivityTrees are an older and more mysterious metaphor for human beings.Security and success—top dog vs underdogMetaphor: SUCCESS is UP and climbing the corporate ladder“We need each other.”The Giving Tree and Treebeard from J.R.R. Tolkein’s, The Lord of the Rings*The Two Towers—*Saruman vs the Ents and ecological and technological ethics that provide insight for our humanity and lived environmentThe Christian life as a metaphor“You are God’s poem. You are kind of this living, breathing poem that's drawing its imagery from the goodness of God.”Poesis and the imago DeiPhenomenological description of things in everyday life“Paying attention to those kind of very everyday experiences just filled me personally with a sense of how densely meaningful and poetic our everyday ...
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    48 mins
  • Chinese Political Theology: Protests in Blood Letters, Freedom, and Religion in China Today / Peng Yin
    Mar 20 2024
    Help us improve the podcast! Click here to take our listener survey—5 respondents will be randomly selected to receive a signed and personalized copy of Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most."There were a lot of people with moral courage to resist, to protest the communist revolutions, but few of them had the spiritual resource to question the system as a whole. Many intellectuals really protested the policies of Mao himself, but not the deprivation of freedom, the systematic persecution, the systematic suppression of religion and freedom as a whole—the entire communist system. So I think that's due to Lin Zhao's religious education. It's very helpful to have both moral courage and spiritual theological resource to make certain social diagnosis, which, I think, was available for Lin Zhao. So I would think of her as this exceptional instance of what Christianity can do—both the moral courage and the spiritual resource to resist totalitarianism." (Peng Yin on politically dissident Lin Zhao)What are the theological assumptions that charge foreign policy? How does theology impact public life abroad? In this episode, theologian Peng Yin (Boston University School of Theology) joins Ryan McAnnally-Linz to discuss the role of theology and religion in Chinese public life—looking at contemporary foreign policy pitting Atheistic Communist China against Democratic Christian America; the moving story of Christian communist political dissident Lin Zhao; and the broader religious, philosophical, and theological influences on Chinese politics.Show NotesReligion’s role in Chinese political thought.Thinking beyond Communist Authoritarianism and Christian Nationalism.American foreign policy framed as “good, democratic” US versus “authoritarian, atheistic” China.Chinese Communist party borrowing from Christian UtopianismSole-salvific figure: Not Christ, but the PartyChinese Communism is a belief, not something that is open to verification. It’s not falsifiable.Did the communist party borrow from Christian missionaries?Communist party claiming collective cultivation over Confucianism’s self cultivation.History of religious influence in Chinese political thoughtReligion’s contemporary influence in Chinese public lifeLin Zhao, Christian protestor.Lin Zhao as “exceptional instance of what Christianity can do: both the moral courage and the spiritual resource to resist totalitarianism.”“New Cold War Discourse”Chinese immigration influx after 1989 Tiananmen Movement.Inhabiting a space between two empires.“God's desire for human happiness is not simply embodied in one particular nation in an ambiguous term.”The nexus of democracy, equality, and theological principlesHistorical impacts of religion in Chinese public life—particularly in Confucianism and Buddhism and eventually ChristianityPeng reflects on his own moral sources of hope and inspiration—which arise not from the State, but from a communion of saints.About Peng YinPeng Yin is a scholar of comparative ethics, Chinese theology, and religion and sexuality. He Assistant Professor of Ethics at Boston University’s School of Theology. He is completing a manuscript tentatively entitled Persisting in the Good: Thomas Aquinas and Early Chinese Ethics. The volume explores the intelligibility of moral language across religious traditions and rethinks Christian teaching on human nature, sacrament, and eschatology. Yin’s research has been supported by the Louisville Institute, Political Theology Network, Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History, and Yale’s Fund for Gay and Lesbian Studies.A recipient of Harvard’s Derek Bok Certificate of Distinction in Teaching, Yin teaches “Comparative Religious Ethics,” “Social Justice,” “Mysticism and Ethical Formation,” “Christian Ethics,” “Queer Theology,” and “Sexual Ethics” at STH. At the University, Yin serves as a Core Faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program, and as an Affiliated Faculty in Department of Classical Studies and Center for the Study of Asia. In 2023, Yin will deliver the Bartlett Lecture at Yale Divinity School and the McDonald Agape Lecture at the University of Hong Kong.Production NotesThis podcast featured Peng Yin & Ryan McAnnally-LinzEdited and Produced by Evan RosaHosted by Evan RosaProduction Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, & Tim BergelandA Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/aboutSupport For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
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    38 mins
  • The Transforming Fire of Theological Education: Learning to See the World / Mark Jordan
    Mar 14 2024
    Help us improve the podcast! Click here to take our listener survey—5 respondents will be randomly selected to receive a signed and personalized copy of Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most.What are the goals of education? Are we shaping young minds or corrupting the youth? Theologian Mark Jordan joins Matt Croasmun for a conversation about the meaning of theological education today. Mark is the R. R. Niebuhr Research Professor at Harvard Divinity School, and is the author of ten books, including Telling Truths in Church: Scandal, Flesh, and Christian Speech. He came on the show to discuss his 2021 book, Transforming Fire: Imagining Christian Teaching—along the way, he reflects on Christian pedagogical principles; the question of the teacher’s power and the potential to enact an abusive pedagogy; he looks at the enigmatic, provoking, and sometimes deliberately elusive teaching strategy of Jesus through his parables; the role of desire in learning—and a shared love for the divine between teacher and student; he acknowledges the expansiveness of theological education that occurs outside a classroom setting; and he questions the very purpose of Christian theological education.Mark D. Jordan is the R. R. Niebuhr Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School. He is the author of ten books, including Telling Truths in Church: Scandal, Flesh, and Christian Speech. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright- Hays Fellowship, and a Luce Fellowship in Theology.Show NotesCheck out Mark Jordan's book Transforming Fire: Imagining Christian Teaching.Louis Agassiz's story of the fish exemplifies a strong pedagogy.Teaching should center on the text itself, not the teacher: “In the space between the text and the student, I need to just step aside as far as possible and put the fish on the table.”The parables of Jesus are themselves a pedagogy. They are “enigmatic, provoking, sometimes deliberately elusive” in order to “stop the hearer in his tracks or her tracks.”The shift of theological education primarily from monastic schools to universities suggests the site of divine revelation is also primarily confined to the university classroom.The shift of theological education to universities also requires theological education to follow the schedule of a university which limits the time some texts require to be read properly.The texts being taught intend to transform students' lives with the lessons they hold.Teachers of Christian theology can invite transformation, but ultimately divine action is beyond teachers' control: “Faith is a divine gift.”Teachers often communicate to their students in bodily and affective ways in addition to the actual words they use: “Bodies learn best from bodies.”Mark Jordan's thoughts on teaching are especially true of theological education, but they can be true of other subjects as well.“Education depends on desire.” That is, it depends on the student and teacher's shared love for the divine, for other people, and for the world.Using the model of Jesus, who gently corrected his students' misguided expectations of him, teachers can also gently correct a student who “is beginning to mistake [the teacher] for the actual point of the course.”Theological education can and is taking place everywhere, not just in the classroom setting.“The question is not, will there will be a future of theology? It's where will there be a future of theology?”In many universities and seminaries, the time and expense of formal theological education prevent potential students from undergoing academic training. How can we reimagine theological education to allow for greater accessibility, even to those not interested in professional formation as a church leader?Production NotesThis podcast featured Mark Jordan and Matt CroasmunEdited and Produced by Evan RosaHosted by Evan RosaProduction Assistance by Alexa Rollow, Macie Bridge, and Tim BergelandA Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/aboutSupport For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
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    52 mins

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