For the Life of the World / Yale Center for Faith & Culture Miroslav Volf, Matthew Croasmun, Ryan McAnnally-Linz, Drew Collins, Evan Rosa

How do you find hope when you can only see yourself and your future in light of your past mistakes? Practical theologian Sarah Farmer joins Evan Rosa to discuss women's prisons, agency, connection, and theological education for incarcerated women—all featured in her recent book, Restorative Hope: Creating Pathways of Connection in Women’s Prisons.

Protests dominate the news. But what is the freedom of assembly? What the First Amendment calls “the right of the people peaceably to assemble”? Legal scholar John Inazu (Washington University, St. Louis) joins Evan Rosa for a discussion of the freedom of assembly—its history, meaning, interpretation, and application—as well as how it impacts the ability for citizens to gather to demonstrate and protest.

Poet Micheal O'Siadhail discusses his latest collection of poetry, Desire—reading several poems and commenting on how he dealt with the pandemic and sought to understand it through verse. With Evan Rosa, he discusses his poetry as a living and synthetic record of human history, the nature of human greed and avarice and how it has marred the earth, and the calling to reshape our desires toward what's truly worth desiring: a desire for the sacred, for the transcendent, and ultimately, a desire of God for God's own sake.

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.

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. This conversation is based on a free download resource available at faith.yale.edu. Click the link in the show notes to download your copy today.

Theologian Joy Marie Clarkson (King's College London) discusses her most recent book, You Are a Tree: And Other Metaphors to Nourish Life, Thought, and Prayer. 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. And we explore the many metaphors that seem to undergird Christian theological reflection on flourishing life.