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

Seldom do we think of the study of history as a journey of self-discovery. And if that claim has any truth, it's because we modern people tend to see ourselves as autonomous, independent, untethered, and unaffected by our biological and cultural genealogies. But there's a story in our DNA that didn't start with us. And Lisa Sharon Harper has been on a decades-long journey of self-discovery, piecing together her family's lineage from their arrival on America's shores—via slave boats, through the twists and turns of slavery and indentured servitude, through America's post-civil war attempt at Reconstruction, down into the shadowy valley of Jim Crow and twentieth-century Civil Rights struggle, all to her life in the present. Her book is Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World—and How to Repair It All. Evan Rosa recently spoke with Lisa at length about how race broke her world and how she traced her family line back beyond the founding of America. And in continued celebration of Juneteenth and the Black joy which has transcended centuries of oppression, the Black history that deserves to be named and known, and the Black freedom which is real and yet still not fully realized and repaired—thanks for listening today friends.

Does your approach to theology bring healing and reconciliation? Does it introduce Christianity as a way of life and peace, flourishing, justice, and shalom? Does your theology have space for diverse and difficult questions to occupy the same space? That kind of hospitable theology would indeed make a difference in our world. Today on the show, we're playing a conversation between Matt Croasmun and Amy Brown Hughes, Associate Professor of Theology at Gordon College and author of Christian Women in the Patristic World. Amy and Matt reflect on the promise and hope of a hospitable theology, grounded in a way of life, sensitive to the difference theology makes for the most pressing issues of our lives today.

The things you discuss in an ethics or theology course, if you took those ideas seriously, just might change the way you live. Today, in our series on the Future of Theology, Matt Croasmun hosts Eric Gregory, Professor of Religion at Princeton University and author of Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship. Eric reflects on what it's like to teach theology in a secular institution—the good, the bad, and the ugly of that exercise; the complications of making professors of humanities, ethics, and religion into moral or spiritual exemplars; the centrality of the good life in the purpose of higher education; and the importance of discerning and articulating the multifarious visions of the good life that are presumed by the institutional cultures in which we live, and move, and have our being.

Ryan McAnnally-Linz reflects on the May 24, 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

Miroslav Volf has said that every Christian is a theologian. This is important not so much because it demands of an individual Jesus-follower to exert the best of her cognitive abilities, but because it demands of theologians that theology take seriously the experience, perception, and lived realities of human life. As part of our Future of Theology series, Keri Day (Princeton Theological Seminary) joins Matt Croasmun to discuss the purpose and promise of theology today, honing in on this phenomena and the temptation to see theology as an abstract exercise cut off from the particularities of faith.

Jesus's teaching to be in but not of the world (John 17:14-15) has gone from a mode of prophetic witness that could lead to martyrdom, to bumper sticker ethics that either feeds the trolls or fuels the tribe. We're in a moment where the ways that Christianity's influence on culture—and vice versa—are writ large and undeniable. And yet, how are we to understand it? How are we to live in light of it? How does that relationship change from political moment to political moment? In this conversation, ethicist Luke Bretherton (Duke Divinity School) joins Matt Croasmun to reflect on the purpose of theology as a way of life committed to loving God and neighbor; the essential virtue of listening and its role in public theology; the interrelation between Church and World; the temptation to see the other as an enemy to be defeated rather than a neighbor to be loved; and how best to understand secularism and religiosity today.