Episodes

  • Desire: How Avarice and Acquisition Distort Our Longing for the Sacred / Micheal O'Siadhail

    Desire: How Avarice and Acquisition Distort Our Longing for the Sacred / Micheal O'Siadhail
    Apr 17 2024

    "Having lost a sense of the sacred, the only thing we want is acquisitiveness—more of everything. How can we break this vicious cycle of avarice? It seems to me that the only way we can possibly reign this in on ourselves is some retrieval of the sense of the sacred, something beyond ourselves.

    And I think that relearning humility—realizing that a parasitic pathogen can spread across the globe and wreak havoc as it did—brings us to the question again of the sacred.

    Dare we speak of a God who is worthy of all our desire? That we as creatures might want with all of our heart, all of our mind, to contemplate. Should anything less deserve our desiring really? Clearly there's a hierarchy of desire, but what is our overarching desire? Can we gamble on reimagining the wonder of a capacious God of endless surprises?" (Micheal O'Siadhail, from the episode)

    About Micheal O'Siadhail

    Micheal O'Siadhail is an award-winning poet and author of many collections of poetry. His Collected Poems was published in 2013, One Crimson Thread in 2015 and The Five Quintets in 2018, which received Conference on Christianity and Literature Book of the Year 2018 and an Eric Hoffer Award in 2020. His latest works are Testament (2022) and Desire (2023). He holds honorary doctorates from the universities of Manitoba and Aberdeen. He lives in New York.

    Show Notes

    • Micheal O’Siadhail, Desire
    • Recitation: Epigraph
    • Using poetry as a means to record the COVID-19 Pandemic
    • Using words to process emotion
    • Human desire for more; greed
    • The internet as a driving force for consumption
    • Consumerism feeding climate change
    • Breaking the cycle by retrieving the sacred
    • “Bless” is not a word used easily in our culture
    • Recitation: Pest 12
    • Gratitude within anxiety
    • Recitation: Pest 20
    • Stewarding the earth
    • Recitation: Habitat 13
    • What is worthy of our desire?
    • The “stabilitas” of being where you are
    • Wanting acquisitiveness more than the sacred
    • Truly being known versus being famous
    • Recitation: Behind the Screen 17
    • Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation
    • Recitation: Behind the Screen 20
    • The temptation towards certainty
    • Recitation: Behind the Screen 1
    • Trusting the God of surprises
    • “Dare we speak of a God who is worthy of all our desire?”
    • Recitation: Desire 24 & 25
    • “On Earth as it is in Heaven” as a dream
    • Reordering and re-educating our desire
    • Unity and Denise Levertov’s concept of “One-ing”

    Production Notes

    • This podcast featured Micheal O’Siadhail
    • Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
    • Hosted by Evan Rosa
    • Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, and Tim Bergeland
    • A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
    • Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
    Show more Show less
    53 mins
  • How to Read Flannery O'Connor / Jessica Hooten Wilson

    How to Read Flannery O'Connor / Jessica Hooten Wilson
    Apr 10 2024
    Flannery O’Connor is known for her short stories in which “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” But it’s often those ugly, mean, disgusting, scandalizing, violent, weird, or downright hateful characters in Flannery O’Connor stories that become the vessels of grace delivered.So, how should we read Flannery O’Connor?Jessica Hooten Wilson (Pepperdine University) joins Evan Rosa to open up about Flannery O’Connor’s life, her unique perspective as a writer, the theological and moral principles operative in her work, all as an immense invitation to read O’Connor and find the beauty of God’s grace that emerges amidst the most horrendous evils. Includes a discussion of Flannery O’Connor’s short story, “Greenleaf.”Show NotesCheck out Jessica Hooten Wilson’s presentation of Flannery O’Connor’s final, unfinished novel: Flannery O’Connor’s Why Do the Heathen Rage?Click here for an online copy of “Greenleaf” to follow along with our analysisSpiritual formation through the works of Flannery O’ConnorHow to read for a flourishing life“Greenleaf” by Flannery O’ConnorFlannery O’Connor’s reading grounded in tradition of early church mothers and fathers.Paying attention to every individual word.First word: Mrs. Mays looses her agency.Europa & the Bull, Ovid’s MetamorphosisMrs. May’s blinds as hiding pieces of reality, shutting out GodThe spiritual truth of the story is concealed when not read attentively and intentionallyFlannery’s writings defying instant gratification“The wrong kind of horror”The development of American consumerismShowing versus enjoying violenceSacramental readingThe Holy FoolThe Violent Bear It Away as a hymn to the eucharistO’Connor requires spiritual reading.A summary of “Greenleaf”Pierced by the bull, a violent union of Savior and sinnerO’Connor’s Christian characters; “A Good Man is Hard to Find”Characters changing and choosing faith before death.The final paragraph of “Greenleaf”Mrs. Greenleaf as the opposite of Ivan Karamazov, in The Brothers KaramazovOpening to the world with the knowledge of GodPentecostalism and zeal in “Greenleaf”Stabbed in the heart, medieval mysticism“Lord, help us dig down under things and find where you are”About Jessica Hooten WilsonJessica Hooten Wilson is the Fletcher Jones Endowed Chair of Great Books at Pepperdine University (’23) and previously served as the Seaver College Scholar of Liberal Arts at Pepperdine University (’22-’23). She co-hosts a podcast called The Scandal of Reading: Pursuing Holy Wisdom with Christ & Pop Culture, where she discusses with fellow authors, professors, and theologians with Claude Atcho and Austin Carty. She is the author of Flannery O’Connor’s Why Do the Heathen Rage?: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at a Work in Progres*s (Brazos Press, January 23, 2024); Reading for the Love of God: How to Read as a Spiritual Practice (Brazos Press, 2023);* Scandal of Holiness: Renewing Your Imagination in the Company of Literary Saints (Brazos Press, 2022) which received a Christianity Today 2023 Award of Merit (Culture & the Arts) and a Midwest Book Review* 2023 Silver Book Award (Nonfiction – Religion/Philosophy); co-author with Dr. Jacob Stratman of Learning the Good Life: Wisdom from the Great Hearts and Minds that Came Before (Zondervan Academic, 2022); Giving the Devil his Due: Demonic Authority in the Fiction of Flannery O’Connor and Fyodor Dostoevsky* (February 28, 2017), which received a 2018 Christianity Today Book of the Year Award in the Culture & the Arts; as well as two books on Walker Percy: *The Search for Influence: Walker Percy and Fyodor Dostoevsky* (Ohio State University Press, 2017) and Reading Walker Percy’s Novels (Louisiana State University Press, 2018); most recently she co-edited Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: *The Russian Soul in the West* (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020).She has received numerous fellowships, grants, and awards, including a Fulbright Fellowship to the Czech Republic, an NEH grant to study Dante in Florence in 2014, and the Biola Center for Christian Thought sabbatical fellowship. In 2018 she received the Emerging Public Intellectual Award given by a coalition of North American think tanks in collaboration with the Centre for Christian Scholarship at Redeemer University College, and in 2019 she received the Hiett Prize in Humanities from The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture.Production NotesThis podcast featured Jessica Hooten WilsonEdited and Produced by Evan RosaHosted by Evan RosaProduction Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, 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
    Show more Show less
    57 mins
  • A World Out of Joint: Pilgrimage and the Possibilities of Homemaking / Ryan McAnnally-Linz

    A World Out of Joint: Pilgrimage and the Possibilities of Homemaking / Ryan McAnnally-Linz
    Apr 4 2024

    This conversation is based on a free downloadable resource available at faith.yale.edu. Click here to get your copy today.

    “We may heed the call of Jesus to follow me and find him leading us right into the home we already have.” (Ryan McAnnally-Linz)

    What are the possibilities of homemaking in a world out of joint? What does it mean for Christians to be on a pilgrimage? To be sojourners in the world?

    Ryan McAnnally-Linz joins Evan Rosa to discuss what it means for Christian life to be a journey not from here to there, but from here to … here. Together they discuss what it means for the world to be the home of God; the task of resisting the “dysoikos” (or the parodic sinful distortion of home); the meaning of Christian life as a pilgrimage; and three faithful ways to approach the work of homemaking that anticipates how the world is becoming the home of God—Ryan introduces examples from Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement, Julian of Norwich, and a modern-day farming family.
    Show more Show less
    48 mins
  • You Are A Tree: Metaphor & the Poetry of Our Humanity / Joy Marie Clarkson

    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 ...
    Show more Show less
    48 mins
  • Chinese Political Theology: Protests in Blood Letters, Freedom, and Religion in China Today / Peng Yin

    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
    Show more Show less
    38 mins
  • The Transforming Fire of Theological Education: Learning to See the World / Mark Jordan

    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
    Show more Show less
    52 mins
  • The Heart of Theology: Emotions, Christian Experience, & the Holy Spirit / Simeon Zahl

    The Heart of Theology: Emotions, Christian Experience, & the Holy Spirit / Simeon Zahl
    Mar 6 2024
    Can you spare 3 minutes to take our listener survey? After the survey closes, we'll randomly select 5 respondents to receive a free, signed, and personalized copy of Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most. Click here to take the survey! Thank you for your honest feedback and support!“For theology to be worth anything, it must traffic in real life, and that real life begins in the heart.”Theologian Simeon Zahl (University of Cambridge) joins Evan Rosa to discuss his book, The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience, reflecting on emotion and affect; the livability of Christian faith; the origins of religious ideas; the data of human desire for theological reflection; the grace of God as the ultimate context for playfulness and freedom; and the role of the Holy Spirit in holding this all together.About Simeon ZahlSimeon Zahl is Professor of Christian Theology in the Faculty of Divinity. He is an historical and constructive theologian whose research interests span the period from 1500 to the present. His most recent monograph is The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience, which proposes a new account of the work of the Spirit in salvation through the lens of affect and embodiment. Professor Zahl received his first degree in German History and Literature from Harvard, and his doctorate in Theology from Cambridge. Following his doctorate, he held a post-doc in Cambridge followed by a research fellowship at St John’s College, Oxford. Prior to his return to Cambridge he was Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Nottingham.Show NotesExplore Simeon Zahl’s The Holy Spirit & Christian Experience“For theology to be worth anything, it must traffic in real life, and that real life begins in the heart.”Theology becoming abstracted from day to day life“There is a tendency that we have as human beings, as theologians to do theology that gets abstracted in some way from the concerns of day to day life that we get caught up in our sort of conceptual kind of towers and structures or committed to certain kinds of ideas in ways that get free of the life that Christians actually seem to lead.”“Real life begins in the heart.”God is concerned with the heart.Emotion, desire, and feelingsWhere does love come in?Martin Luther and Philip MelanchthonPhilip Melanchthon’s 1521 Loci Communes: Defining human nature through the “affective power”Affect versus rationality at the center of Christian lifeCredibility, plausibility, and livability of ChristianityAuthenticity and the disparity between values and beliefs and real lives.Doctrine of GraceEnabling a hopeful honesty“What Christianity says and what it feels need to be closer together.”Evangelical conversion in George Elliot’s novella, Janet’s Repentance“Ideas are often poor ghosts; our sun−filled eyes cannot discern them; they pass athwart us in thin vapour, and cannot make themselves felt. But sometimes they are made flesh; they breathe upon us with warm breath, they touch us with soft responsive hands, they look at us with sad sincere eyes, and speak to us in appealing tones; they are clothed in a living human soul, with all its conflicts, its faith, and its love. Then their presence is a power, then they shake us like a passion, and we are drawn after them with gentle compulsion, as flame is drawn to flame.” (George Eliot)Art’s ability to speak to desire.T.S. Eliot: “Poetry operates at the frontiers of consciousness.”Exhausted by religious languageHow the aesthetic impacts the acceptance of ideasDurable conceptsWhere theological doctrine comes fromSimeon Zahl: “In what ways are theological doctrines themselves developed from and sourced by the living concerns and experiences of Christians and of human beings more broadly? Doctrines do not develop in a vacuum or fall from the sky, fully formed. Human reasonings, including theological reasonings, are never fully extricable in a given moment from our feelings, our moods, our predispositions, and the personal histories we carry with us. furthermore, as we shall see in the book, doctrines have often come to expression in the history of Christianity, not least through an ongoing engagement with what have been understood to be concrete experiences of God's spirit and history.”“People were worshipping Christ before they understood who he was.”“Speaking about human experience just is speaking about the doctrine of the Holy Spirit.”Desire and emotion as pneumatological experienceSourcing emotional and experiential data for theological reflectionErnst Troelsch: “Every metaphysic must find its test in practical life.”“The half-light of understanding”Nietzsche: “The hereditary sin of the philosopher is a lack of historical sense.”Augustine’s transformation of desireEmotional experience as inadequate tool on its ownNoticing our own emotional experiences“If you want to pay attention to the Holy Spirit in theology, that means you have to pay ...
    Show more Show less
    57 mins
  • A Voice Crying Out: Brown Church & Critical Race Theory / Robert Chao Romero

    A Voice Crying Out: Brown Church & Critical Race Theory / Robert Chao Romero
    Feb 29 2024

    There’s a 500-year history of social justice activism that emerged from Christianity in the Americas, and it comes to us through the Brown Church. Rev. Dr. Robert Chao Romero (Associate Professor of Latina/o Studies at UCLA) joins Evan Rosa to discuss the history of Christian racial justice efforts in the Americas, as well as a constructive and faithful exploration of Christianity & Critical Race Theory. He is a historian, legal scholar, author, a pastor, and an organizer who wants to bring the history of Christian social justice around race to bear on the systems and structures of racism we see in the world today. He is an Asian-Latino who straddles the worlds of Chinese and Mexican heritage; Latin American history and Law; scholarship and a pastoral ministry; and a contemplative and an activist. He’s author of Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology, and Identity—and is co-author (with Jeff M. Liou) of Christianity and Critical Race Theory: A Faithful & Constructive Conversation.

    About Robert Chao Romero

    Rev. Dr. Robert Chao Romero is "Asian-Latino," and has been a professor of Chicana/o Studies and Asian American Studies at UCLA since 2005. He received his Ph.D. from UCLA in Latin American History and his Juris Doctor from U.C. Berkeley. Romero has published more than 30 academic books and articles on issues of race, immigration, history, education, and religion, and received the Latina/o Studies book award from the international Latin American Studies Association. He is author of Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology, and Identity, which received the InterVarsity Press Readers’ Choice Award for best academic title; as well as his most recent book, Christianity and Critical Race Theory: A Faithful & Constructive Conversation, co-authored with Jeff M. Liou. Romero is a former Ford Foundation and U.C. President's Postdoctoral Fellow, as well as a recipient of the Louisville Institute's Sabbatical Grant for Researchers. Robert is also an ordained minister and community organizer.

    Show Notes

    • Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology, and Identity
    • Christianity and Critical Race Theory: A Faithful and Constructive Conversation
    • About Robert Chao Romero
    • Asian-Latino Heritage
    • Spiritual Borderlands and liminality
    • The 500-year history of the Brown Church
    • Fr. Antonio de Montesinos and the first racial justice sermon in the Americas
    • Bartolome De Las Casas and concientización (repentance, metanoia)
    • Mision Integral
    • Christianity & Critical Race Theory
    • The four basic tenets of Critical Race Theory and how Christians can understand them in light of the Gospel
    • Hope and eschatological vision for justice and unity
    • The imago Dei

    Production Notes

    • This podcast featured Robert Chao Romero
    • Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
    • Hosted by Evan Rosa
    • Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, and Tim Bergeland
    • A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
    • Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
    Show more Show less
    53 mins