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

“Every dinner party is an act of hope.”

Journalist and critic Alissa Wilkinson (Senior Culture Correspondent, Vox Media) and Evan Rosa talk about eating, drinking, and being merry—but also being human. Wilkinson’s book Salty: Lessons on Eating, Drinking, and Living from Revolutionary Women, offers an opportunity to join Hannah Arendt at a cocktail party to discuss views on friendship, love, evil, and difference. We all get really hungry while thinking through the Southern food writer Edna Lewis who brought farm-to-table to New York way before it was cool. And a discussion of the gorgeous film Babette’s Feast offers an imaginative and experiential education in the place of joy and pleasure in a flourishing spiritual life.

This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information, visit tyndale.foundation.

There's a truism that "there are only two types of people in the world: those who are disabled and those who will become disabled." But how does our thinking about normalcy, capacity, independence, and autonomy make us miss what disability can show us about human flourishing?

In this episode, Evan Rosa invites Calli Micale (PhD, Yale) to discuss the theological and moral dimensions of disability through stories of her care and service with the physically and intellectually disabled, including reflections on agency and the feeling of personal power, the suffering of chronic pain, maintaining a sense of hope and possibility amidst lost, and the role that spirituality plays in a person integrating a disabling experience; the biblical and theological stories that create and critique our narratives of disability; and finally an examination of the conditions of possibility not just for flourishing, but for making life work at all.

This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information, visit tyndale.foundation.

Where does boredom come from? Have humans always experienced boredom, or has it only come on in the entertainment age, having more time than we know what to do with? Kevin Gary (Valparaiso University) is author of Why Boredom Matters: Education, Leisure, and the Quest for a Meaningful Life. He joins Drew Collins & Evan Rosa to reflect on the discontent and disconnection that boredom constantly threatens. They discuss the phenomena of boredom, the childhood experience of it, whether its good or bad, the definition of boredom, its connection to entertainment and education, and finally the role of attention and leisure in cultivating a healthy understanding and response to being totally bored out of our minds.

This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information, visit tyndale.foundation.

The final installment of our 5-part book club series on Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most, produced and hosted by Kelly Corrigan, and featuring Claire Danes & Kate Bowler. Special thanks to the Warren Smoot Carter III and Meagan Carter Charitable Fund for making this series possible.

Part 4 of a 5-part book club series produced and hosted by Kelly Corrigan Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most. Featuring Kate Bowler and Claire Danes. The three discuss the morality of buying and consumption, responsibility, failure, changing your mind, the meaning of an apology, and beauty of forgiveness.

Kelly Corrigan convenes a podcast book-club to read Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most, with two really cool friends: Kate Bowler—host of the Everything Happens podcast and Associate Professor of American Religious History at Duke Divinity School—and celebrated actress Claire Danes, who starred in the Showtime series Homeland and the 90s MTV hit series My So-Called Life.