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  • Homesick: Alienation, Belonging, and World Decay in a Technological Age / Ian Marcus Corbin

    Homesick: Alienation, Belonging, and World Decay in a Technological Age / Ian Marcus Corbin
    2026/10/07
    It took Odysseus ten years to sail home from Troy to Ithaca; we can fly the same distance in about an hour. But faster travel hasn't brought us any closer to home. We can know more, do more, and connect more than ever, and yet our ability to belong to our own reality seems to be shrinking. Philosopher Ian Marcus Corbin, who teaches at Harvard Medical School and directs Harvard's Public Culture Project, takes up that paradox in his new book, To Arrive Where We Started: Belonging in the Modern World. The title comes from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, and Corbin reads Eliot's lines as something like a mission statement for humanity: the point of the journey is not to escape reality or optimize our way around it, but to truly belong to it.In this episode with Evan Rosa, Corbin unpacks why so many of us feel, as Rilke put it, not really at home in our interpreted world, and why technology may leave us suffering too little to live out the old mythic lessons of departure and return. Together they discuss why coming home first requires a breaking, from the Lakota vision quest to Eliot's apophatic poetry, and what it means for a world to decay, leaving people with no past and no future, whether their culture has been devastated or they are being raised on ten-second clips. They also explore what Corbin calls “ownerism,” the high fences and heated pools we build when the world stops feeling like home, along with contempt for the world, collapsing birth rates, and the dream of escaping the planet, to Mars or into the metaverse. Along the way, Corbin draws on Simone Weil's wager that we could not be born at a better time than when we have lost everything, and on Father Zosima's call in Dostoevsky to love all of God's creation, every leaf and every ray of light, as a way back into belonging.Episode Highlights"For me, feeling like I belong in my world and I understand it and I fit it's never been a simple thing, and I've always had the sense that this is something I was questing towards.""That's either a world in decay or that's a world that hasn't had the chance to get fully formed in the first place. And I think that's an incredibly strange and dangerous place to be.""Maybe it takes you 10 years to get back to Ithaca or whatever. But… to be a young person striking out into the adult world with very little sense of what matters to you or who you are or where you come from, gosh… I wouldn't trade with them.""It looks to me honestly like a society hurtling. And I don't know what we're hurtling towards, but we're hurtling. And like with scant ability to look up and ask, 'Well, is that where we wanna go?'""The world is not a home to us, right? It is this empty, cruel thing. So the best I can do is throw up some really high fences, get a nice heated pool, right? Get a nice security system.""We can't just produce and promulgate whatever the consumer will click on because I am a weak man, and I will click on things, right, that aren't in the long run good for me.""Take a good teacher who cares a lot and take one really good book and 12 kids and put them in a room with no distractions and no telephones… and my goodness, you'll have the most transformative and beautiful experience of learning and community you could hope for.""Every good thing around you will die, as will you. And you have to be strong enough to stand there and take that punch, right?""Who's the crazy one here?… I sound woo-woo, but the system that I'm pushing back against is kinda suicidal."About Ian Marcus CorbinIan Marcus Corbin is a philosopher on the neurology faculty at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, director of Harvard's Public Culture Project, and an instructor at the HMS Center for Bioethics. His first book, "To Arrive Where We Started: Belonging in the Modern World," was published by Yale University Press in 2026. He studied politics, religion, and philosophy at Gordon College, Oxford, Yale, and Boston College, and has written for The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Plough. Before all that, he founded and ran a contemporary art gallery in Boston's South End.Helpful Links and ResourcesTo Arrive Where We Started: Belonging in the Modern World, by Ian Marcus Corbin: https://www.amazon.com/Arrive-Where-We-Started-Belonging/dp/0300263627Ian Marcus Corbin's website: https://www.ianmarcuscorbin.com/aboutIan Marcus Corbin on Substack: https://ianmarcuscorbin.substack.com/The Public Culture Project at Harvard: https://artsandhumanities.fas.harvard.edu/public-culture-projectRadical Hope Retrospective, an interview with Jonathan Lear: https://socialconcerns.nd.edu/virtues/magazine/radical-hope-retrospective-an-interview-with-jonathan-lear/Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot: https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/four-quartets-t-s-eliot/237356Show NotesFour Quartets and Duino ElegiesBelonging as a lifelong, never-finished questApophatic breaking: old certainties collapsing so something new can be seenLakota vision quest: fasting, ...
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    1 時間 12 分
  • Scandalous Witness: Christians Reckoning with History and Values / Lee C. Camp

    Scandalous Witness: Christians Reckoning with History and Values / Lee C. Camp
    2026/09/30
    Everything is “maxxed” right now, and the news cycle in particular seems to be historymaxxing, insisting that things have never been worse than they are now. And the threats are real, from AI and global warming to election integrity—foreign affairs gone wrong, and violence abroad, in our homes, and in our schools. But the news maxxes us on fear, and so do politicians and corporations, because they want us to do something. If theologian Lee C. Camp is right, history was already maxed at the incarnation, and it came through a subversive way of life: humble, compassionate, at times angry, but radical and scandalous all the same. Camp, author of Scandalous Witness: A Little Political Manifesto for Christians and founder and host of the nationally syndicated podcast and radio show No Small Endeavor, argues that the idolatry of the nation state, and even the effort to legislate Christian morality and values into a political movement, is a subversion of Christianity.“I think people will better understand Christianity. They stop thinking about it as a religion and think of it more as an interpretation of human history.”In this episode with Evan Rosa, Camp revisits the newly released edition of the book, with a new preface, and makes the case that stories and history, far more than rational argument, are what change how we see the world. Together they discuss what it means to be formed by history and by story, the early twentieth-century Protestant roots of Christian nationalism, Christian values as a parody of Christianity, and the difference between bearing witness and wielding power. They also take up the gravedigger dilemma, the irony of fearful people bringing about the very decline they dread, and what it means to be a neighbor across ideological difference, with stops along the way at a firebombed bus in Camp's native Alabama, a row of Confederate gravestones in his hometown cemetery, and Eboo Patel's account of rival fire departments in Mostar.Episode Highlights"as conservatives increasingly get swept up into the American political moment, there's this new kind of idolatry, I think, of the nation state.""I generally find the whole Christian values movement destructive to Christianity … when you talk about you're wanting to prioritize certain so-called values and then by hook or by crook, you do whatever you need to to try to get those propagated. You've subverted Christianity.""I think people will better understand Christianity. They stop thinking about it as a religion and think of it more as an interpretation of human history.""we believe that death has been overcome by life. That hostility has been overcome by love. That the way even of love of enemies has trounced upon all of the handmaidens of death.""those who are insisting, no, we wanna bring Christianity back to the public square. By and large may be doing much, much more damage than the secularists ever were able to do to Christianity.""When you show up with curiosity in a public space it's remarkable what kinds of beautiful moments can occur.""that one story, you know, opened up a huge vista to me of like, what have I been blind to? What's been going on that I've not paid any attention to?""We can act as if we are not shaped by historical time, place, location, historical contingency, but that just makes us blind to it because we are, and that's just what it means to be human.""a lot of those are seen as scandalous because we've forgotten what Christianity is … we're screwing up right and left because we have refused to take seriously the basics of scripture and the basics of the Christian story.""you are my neighbor. Regardless of what you claim about the identity of Jesus or the identity of, of Muhammad, you are my neighbor. And I owe to you love and I owe to you respect and I owe to you hospitality."About Lee C. CampLee C. Camp is the creator and host of No Small Endeavor, a podcast and radio show exploring what it means to live a good life. For 27 years he taught theology and ethics at Lipscomb University in Nashville, concluding his tenure as a Distinguished Faculty Fellow. He is the author of "Mere Discipleship," "Who Is My Enemy?," and "Scandalous Witness: A Little Political Manifesto for Christians," now in paperback with a new preface. An Alabamian with a PhD in moral theology from Notre Dame, he shares life with his wife, Laura, three adult sons, and a havapoo named Otis.Helpful Links and ResourcesScandalous Witness: A Little Political Manifesto for Christians, by Lee C. Camp: https://www.eerdmans.com/9780802877352/scandalous-witness/Mere Discipleship: Radical Christianity in a Rebellious World, by Lee C. Camp: https://bakerpublishinggroup.com/books/mere-discipleship-2nd-edition/229392Lee C. Camp's site, featuring the Scandalous Witness online course: https://www.leeccamp.com/scandalousNo Small Endeavor, Lee C. Camp's podcast and public radio show: https://www.nosmallendeavor.com/No Small Endeavor on Instagram: https://...
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    40 分
  • How and Why We Grow: Relational Spirituality and Practicing Unto Virtue / Liz Hall and Todd Hall

    How and Why We Grow: Relational Spirituality and Practicing Unto Virtue / Liz Hall and Todd Hall
    2026/09/23
    Human growth can seem to just happen—genes, care, and nurture set each of us on a trajectory across the lifespan. But how do people actually grow toward wholeness, and is virtue even the point?Psychologists Liz Hall and Todd Hall of Biola University’s Rosemead School of Psychology, coauthors of Relational Spirituality, bring psychological science and Christian theology together to answer. The conversation grows out of the Martin Institute’s Practice Unto Virtue project, which gathered theologians, psychologists, philosophers, and biblical scholars at Westmont College in spring 2026 to ask how Christian practices like prayer, fasting, and service form Christlike virtue.In this episode, Liz and Todd Hall explain a relational account of human transformation: We are formed in relationship, grow through relationship, and relationship is where growth is headed. Their answer to the workshop’s question is direct—virtue alone is not the telos of spiritual growth. The goal is intimacy with God, union with Christ, and practices and virtues matter because they grow out of that union, support it, and make more room for it.They discuss implicit, gut-level relational knowledge, attachment filters and relational contrast experiences, and why willpower, spiritual highs, intellectualizing, and spiritual bypass so often leave the deepest layer of the self untouched. They also take up whether suffering can lead to growth or whether we grow in spite of it, drawing on Crystal Park’s meaning-making model, Liz’s own cancer diagnosis, the practice of lament, Eleonore Stump on sin as inner fragmentation, and Gordon Smith’s picture of human agency nested within God’s love.With special thanks to Steve Porter and the Martin Institute for Christianity and Culture at Westmont College, and to the Templeton World Charity Foundation, which helped fund the Practice Unto Virtue workshop.Episode Highlights”What we’re aiming for is not a self-improvement project of little aspects of ourself that we’re building up like a tower of Legos or something.” (Liz Hall)”I wanna be very careful here not to say that suffering is what changes people … because that’s making something that’s intrinsically bad into maybe something good. We don’t wanna go there. But suffering provides an opportunity.” (Liz Hall)”Because of how intrinsically relational we are, the pathways to change are also relational. So the goal is relational. The pathways are relational.” (Liz Hall)”It’s not suffering per se that causes growth. It’s the processing of suffering in a particular way in the context of relationship.” (Todd Hall)”Our agency operates completely inside the circle of God’s love and action and is a response to it and a participation in the life and love of the Trinitarian God.” (Todd Hall)”It’s not just to become a better person for the sake of being a better person, which often reduces down to oh, that’s gonna promote my own happiness … No, it’s for the goal of deeper intimacy with Christ and union with Christ.” (Todd Hall)”They have limitations and sometimes I don’t like what comes out of their mouth … but all of that is grist for the mill, isn’t it?” (Liz Hall)About Liz Hall and Todd HallLiz Hall and Todd Hall are professors of psychology at Biola University’s Rosemead School of Psychology and coauthors of Relational Spirituality: A Psychological-Theological Paradigm for Transformation. Liz, a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, researches suffering, meaning-making, and lament; her newest book, with Kelly Kapic and Jason McMartin, is ”When the Journey Hurts.” Todd, a faculty affiliate of the Harvard Human Flourishing Program, is the author of The Connected Life and founder of the Relational Spirituality Academy, which trains Christian leaders in relational approaches to formation. They live in Southern California and have two adult sons.Helpful Links and ResourcesWhen the Journey Hurts, Kelly M. Kapic, Liz Hall, and Jason McMartin: https://ivpress.com/when-the-journey-hurtsRelational Spirituality, Todd W. Hall with M. Elizabeth Lewis Hall: https://ivpress.com/relational-spiritualityThe Connected Life, Todd W. Hall: https://www.ivpress.com/the-connected-lifeDr. Liz Hall, website and resources on lament and meaning-making: https://www.drlizhall.comRelational Spirituality Academy, Todd Hall’s training site: https://www.relationalspirituality.co/Practice Unto Virtue, Martin Institute Christian Formation Workshop 2026 sessions (Conversatio Divina): https://conversatio.org/collections/christian-formation-workshop-2026-practice-unto-virtue-the-role-of-christian-practices-in-virtue-formation/Crystal L. Park, ”Meaning Making Following Trauma” (Frontiers in Psychology): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8984472Eleonore Stump, Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Suffering: https://academic.oup.com/book/12824Gordon T. Smith, Called to Be Saints: ...
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    56 分
  • Technology, Wonder, and Attention / Aaron Cline Hanbury

    Technology, Wonder, and Attention / Aaron Cline Hanbury
    2026/09/16
    Technology, Aaron Cline Hanbury suggests, is never a purely neutral tool. But the history of ethical thinking about technology shows that as long as there's been technology, there's been anxiety about it. Or perhaps more accurately, anxiety about what we might do with it. And increasingly, what it might do to us.A journalist, founding editor of Common Good magazine, and author of Wired for Wonder, Hanbury came of age as the internet entered the home and has spent his career reporting from the places where technology, faith, and everyday life collide. Rather than offering another list of screen-time tips, he asks a deeper question: How do we relate to the things we make?In this conversation with Evan Rosa, Hanbury wrestles with what it means to be human when the machines we’ve made can do more and more. He criticizes the seduction that we should embrace technology simply because it is inevitable. He explores how connection, efficiency, and unrestrained technological freedom quietly became unquestioned goods, why our powers of attention are eroding in real time, and wonders what it might take—personally, communally, and structurally—to reclaim our humanity through presence, and the rough ground of embodied life.About Aaron Cline HanburyAaron Cline Hanbury is a writer and editor whose essays and profiles have appeared in The Atlantic and elsewhere. He is the founding editor of the award-winning magazine Common Good and a past editor of RELEVANT. He writes about the places where technology, faith, and ordinary life meet. His book, Wired for Wonder: Dispatches on Technology, Culture, God, and Self, breaks open the tired binary between tech optimists and Luddites in the context of memoir, ethics, journalism, and theology.Helpful Links and ResourcesWired for Wonder: Dispatches on Technology, Culture, God, and Self, by Aaron Cline Hanbury: https://www.broadleafbooks.com/store/product/9798889833451/Wired-for-WonderAaron Cline Hanbury's website: https://aaronclinehanbury.com/Aaron Cline Hanbury's Substack: https://aaronclinehanbury.substack.comAaron Cline Hanbury on X: https://x.com/achanburyCommon Good magazine: https://commongoodmag.com/author/aaron-cline-hanbury/Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, Albert Borgmann: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/T/bo23186480.htmlThe Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt: https://www.anxiousgeneration.com/bookHannah Coulter, Wendell Berry's novel: https://www.counterpointpress.com/books/hannah-coulter/Show NotesAnxiety and technologyPatient zero for life online—coming of age as the internet entered the homeLow-church tradition, quick to adopt and ask questions laterJournalism as a front-row seat to three decades of changeEarly adopter or Luddite? Rejecting the spectrum's false endsThe device paradigm—technology as pattern, not neutral toolA hammer's telos, and why misuse cuts against a tool's designMade things have a maker—intentions baked into what we buildThe inevitability argument—get on board or get run overResistance is futile? The Borg, Cannes, and defeatismProgress as reversion—tobacco bans, ocean dumping, processed-food rollbacksFamily Guy, satire, and pulling tech ethics out of the esotericThe class and income divide the internet promised to eraseOnline radicalization vs the promise of mass educationChildren as the guinea pigs of early adoptionChromebooks, daycares, and offloading discomfort onto kidsTesting tech on the vulnerable—Jonathan Haidt on teen mental healthSocial media vs attention media—commodifying human focusThe plug-in drug—parents, screens, and pacified kidsFocused attention and the feeling of being fully aliveConnection, efficiency, freedom—goods we stopped questioningDunbar's number and the real limits of friendshipOnline ties without public accountability, and bad formationEmbodiment, particularity, and getting back to the rough groundWendell Berry's Hannah Coulter and attention that lasts: https://www.counterpointpress.com/books/hannah-coulter/Skepticism of individual fixes—structure, policy, and churchElementary-school parenting and “the bevy of required apps”#WiredForWonder #AaronClineHanbury #ForTheLifeOfTheWorld #TechnologyAndFaith #AttentionMedia #DigitalMinimalism #ChristianEthics #AIandHumanity #DeviceParadigmProduction NotesThis podcast featured Aaron Cline HanburyEdited and Produced by Evan RosaProduction Assistance by Noah SenthilA 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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    44 分
  • Can Political Enemies Be Civic Friends? / Robert George (From the Archives)

    Can Political Enemies Be Civic Friends? / Robert George (From the Archives)
    2026/08/05
    Civic friendship is not a nicety. For self-governing people, it is a necessity. What happens to a democracy when citizens stop seeing each other as citizens at all? Robert P. George is Princeton’s McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions (and known for his enduring friendship with Cornel West) argues that “the collapse of civic friendship is a catastrophic threat to public life.” In this bonus segment from his November 2020 conversation with Evan Rosa, Robert George presents the difference between civility and mere ‘politesse; the habit of wrapping our emotions so tightly around our convictions that we assume a posture of infallibility; and the intellectual humility it takes to consider that a political enemy might have something to teach us as a civic friend. They also discuss the courage required to break ranks—George recounts how he and West, from opposite political poles, each found themselves treated as heretics in 2016 for declining to back their respective party’s nominee—and why he urges his students and his own children to cultivate humility, open-mindedness, and courage, knowing exactly what it can cost to stand by a conscientious belief. Episode Highlights ”Civic friendship is actually important for all sorts of policies, but for a self-governing people, for a democratic people, civic friendship is really critically important.””But if we do, as we are prone to do, wrap our emotions too tightly around our convictions, then we become dogmatists. Then we become unwilling to consider the possibility that we might be wrong and that a critic might be right.””This is hard, but it takes humility to recognize that I might be wrong, not merely about the less important superficial and more trivial things of life, but I might be wrong even about the most important things.””Civic friendship, civility is not just politesse … Civility is something deeper. It is genuinely listening to the guy who disagrees with you … listening with an openness to learning, considering whether in fact he might be right.””You can’t have an open mind unless you have intellectual humility.””You can become a heretic very fast by breaking ranks, even on a single issue, if the issue was even moderately important.””So I really encourage my young people … to try to develop the virtues of intellectual humility, open-mindedness, and courage, because sometimes courage is going to be needed.” About Robert P. George Robert P. George is the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. A legal philosopher and public intellectual, he has chaired the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and served on the President’s Council on Bioethics and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. His books include ”Making Men Moral,” ”In Defense of Natural Law,” and ”Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth,” and, with Cornel West, ”Truth Matters,” a dialogue on fruitful disagreement. A West Virginia native, he plays bluegrass banjo and guitar. Helpful Links and Resources Civic Friendship, Courageous Humility, and Seeking Truth Together, Episode 38 and the full interview for this clip: https://faith.yale.edu/media/civic-friendship-courageous-humility-and-seeking-truth-togetherRobert P. George’s website: https://robertpgeorge.com/Robert P. George on X: https://twitter.com/McCormickProfSeeking Truth and Speaking Truth: Law and Morality in Our Cultural Moment, George’s most recent book: https://www.encounterbooks.com/books/seeking-truth-speaking-truth/Truth Matters: A Dialogue on Fruitful Disagreement in an Age of Division, by Robert P. George and Cornel West: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Truth-Matters/Robert-P-George/9798888451700Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality, George’s best-known scholarly book: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/making-men-moral-9780198260240Election of 1800, from the Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia at Monticello: https://www.monticello.org/encyclopedia/election-1800 Show Notes Civic friendship: indispensable and necessary for a self-governing peopleFellow citizens recast as enemies to be defeated and destroyedAre elections as existential contests?—with the losing side expecting retaliation, the winning side claiming the normsBreakdown near the founding of the RepublicThe election of 1800, incumbent John Adams against Thomas Jefferson: https://www.monticello.org/encyclopedia/election-1800Federalists seeing Jeffersonians as carriers of the French Revolution; Jeffersonians seeing Federalists as would-be British monarchistsAntebellum America: North and South unable to imagine sharing one republicIs our identity constructed around belief?Emotional investment in conviction as a good thing in itselfWrapping emotions too tightly, and the slide into dogmatismA practical ...
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    16 分
  • How to Die Well / Lydia Dugdale (From the Archives)

    How to Die Well / Lydia Dugdale (From the Archives)
    2026/07/30
    Why don’t more doctors talk about death? Dr. Lydia Dugdale has been asking this question since she was a medical student. She is the Silberberg Professor of Medicine and directs the Center for Clinical Medical Ethics, and two books on how we die, including "The Lost Art of Dying." "Most medical professionals today are very unpracticed at talking to patients about their mortality," she says. Not only unpracticed, but even themselves afraid. In this bonus clip from Episode 232 with Macie Bridge, Dugdale traces the path from that early perplexity on the wards to the ars moriendi, the medieval art of dying, grounded in the idea that dying is part of living, so if you want to die well you have to live well. Lydia comments on the emergence of palliative care and the way it let physicians hand conversations about death to specialists; the doctor who inherited the priest's old place at the threshold between life and death; the death anxiety clinicians carry without examining; virtue as preparation for dying, and community as the other half of living well; the unrepresented patients of New York City who die alone; and a grumpy old man, hospitalized for 20 years, who wept when she read aloud what she had written about him. Episode Highlights “Most medical professionals today are very unpracticed at talking to patients about their mortality.”“we are really the intermediaries between life and death, I'm not saying we're priests, but that used to be the role of the priest. And so it is now the role of the physician.“If you want to die well, you have to live well.”We have to be all in or we end up like all of these patients here in New York City who have no one that I can reach out to as they're dying.“He started weeping and he said, someone finally saw me. Someone finally saw me. I've been in this hospital for 20 years and I didn't think anyone ever saw me.” About Lydia Dugdale Lydia Dugdale is a physician and medical ethicist who has spent fifteen years asking why medicine finds death so hard to talk about. She is the Silberberg Professor of Medicine at Columbia, directs the Columbia Center for Clinical Medical Ethics, and co-directs clinical ethics at NewYork-Presbyterian Milstein Hospital, where she still sees patients. She edited "Dying in the Twenty-First Century" and wrote "The Lost Art of Dying," a modern ars moriendi. She trained at the University of Chicago and Yale-New Haven Hospital, holds a master's in ethics from Yale Divinity School, and in 2025 founded the nonprofit Heal the Nation. Helpful Links and Resources “Dying Alone,” the full Episode 232 with Lydia Dugdale and Macie Bridge: https://faith.yale.edu/media/dying-aloneLydia Dugdale's website: https://lydiadugdale.com/The Lost Art of Dying: Reviving Forgotten Wisdom, Lydia Dugdale's book: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-lost-art-of-dying-ls-dugdaleDying in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Lydia Dugdale: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262534598/dying-in-the-twenty-first-century/Columbia Center for Clinical Medical Ethics, which Dugdale directs: https://www.vagelos.columbia.edu/departments-centers/columbia-center-clinical-medical-ethicsColumbia Center for Clinical Medical Ethics on X: https://x.com/columbia_ccmeArs moriendi, the medieval art of dying, at the Morgan Library and Museum: https://www.themorgan.org/blog/new-acquisition-ars-moriendi-blockbookArs moriendi block book, 1475, at the Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov/item/2021666798/Lydia Dugdale at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/people/lydia-dugdale-md Show Notes Death anxiety in medicineWhy doctors avoid frank conversations about mortalityPalliative care's arrival as a discipline, and what it made possibleReal gains in symptom relief for the sick and the dyingThe unintended cost: death conversations outsourced to specialistsClinicians as intermediaries between life and deathThe priest's old place at the threshold, now the physician'sNurses at the bedside, doctors calling the shots on treatmentExistential questions physicians have never worked throughA colleague who would never tell a patient they were dying, out of her own fear of deathDigging into how other times and places handled mortalityArs moriendi: the medieval genre on the preparation for deathIllustrated editions made for people who could not readFifteen years and two books spent reviving the art of dyingLiving well as the precondition of dying wellVirtue as preparation: hope, patience, joy against bitterness and despairThe role of community in dying wellNew York's unrepresented patients, dying aloneA reader estranged from his adult children who committed to years of repair after the bookRelationship as ongoing work: rupture, forgiveness, iron sharpening ironA long-hospitalized patient nobody wanted assigned to their teamModeling care for young doctors, and being verbally destroyed in front of themLoneliness of the neighbor, the colleague, the checkout ...
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    11 分
  • You Must Change Your Life (From the Archive)

    You Must Change Your Life (From the Archive)
    2026/07/22
    We were made by a Maker to be makers. Bruce Herman joins Evan Rosa to diagnose the quiet illness of a passive consumer culture that trains us to sit in front of screens and scroll and take, rather than make. “When we’re not making something, we’re not whole. We’re not healthy.“ His cure is stubbornly ordinary: go make a loaf of bread, grab a stick and start carving, make a good meal or a good cocktail for the person visiting you—anything is resistance to this hypnotic, passive culture. From episode 216 of the podcast, in this segment, Herman traces what it means to receive art not as a consumer but through submission—not master and slave, but subject to subject, that vulnerable openness that lets a poem or a painting change your life. He reflects on making as human wholeness, the difference between art and info-tainment, why suffering can rip us open to beauty (from Walker Percy’s writing to Christian Wiman’s poetry), Rilke’s charge that “you must change your life,“ hospitality as the ultimate act of art, and Herman’s closing counsel to make out of love, not fear. Episode Highlights We are in relationship, and we were made by a Maker to be makers. If we let that go somehow and we become mere consumers, I think we begin to enter into some kind of illness of one sort or another.When we’re not making something, we’re not whole. We’re not healthy. And I don’t want to make an idol out of health either, but I do think our culture is unhealthy right now.We think of it as, we’re discerning buyers. But the fact is we’re being turned into very passive creatures.One of the best things you can do is go make a loaf of bread. Go out and grab a stick and start carving it. Anything is resistance to this sort of hypnotic passive culture.If you want to really receive what a poem is communicating, you have to submit to it. You have to let yourself go and enter into what might feel like a bad risk of being changed.Not submit in a sense that I’m a master and you’re my slave. It’s more like you’re a subject and I’m a subject. Mutual submission.We’re so guarded so much of the time that it takes something catastrophic to open us up again.Do away with the nonsense that you’re not an artist. You can’t help it. You were made by a Maker to be a maker. End of story.The ultimate act of art is hospitality, where you’re welcoming someone in, to make something beautiful for them.Challenge the bad news with a recognition that daily kindnesses are being poured out everywhere, on every street. Don’t give in to fear, because it’s not a basis for anything good. About Bruce Herman Bruce Herman is a painter, writer, and educator whose work has been shown in more than 150 exhibitions across the United States and internationally, and held in collections including the Vatican Museums in Rome, the Cincinnati Museum of Fine Arts, and the Grunewald Print Collection of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. He taught at Gordon College for nearly four decades, where he founded the art department and held the Lothlórien Distinguished Chair in Fine Arts. His books include “Through Your Eyes“ and “Ordinary Saints,“ and he was a collaborator on the touring “QU4RTETS“ project with Makoto Fujimura, Christopher Theofanidis, and Jeremy Begbie. His most recent book, “Makers by Nature: Letters from a Master Painter on Faith, Hope, and Art,“ was published by IVP Academic in 2025. Helpful Links and Resources Makers by Nature, Bruce Herman’s 2025 book from IVP Academic: https://www.ivpress.com/makers-by-natureBruce Herman’s website and painting archive: https://www.bruceherman.comBruce Herman, artist bio and background: https://www.bruceherman.com/aboutArchaic Torso of Apollo by Rainer Maria Rilke (“You must change your life“), trans. Stephen Mitchell: https://poets.org/poem/archaic-torso-apolloReal Presences by George Steiner, on courtesy and hospitality in art: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/R/bo3684420.htmlChristian Wiman: https://poetryfoundation.org/poets/christian-wimanQU4RTETS, the collaborative project on T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: https://www.bruceherman.com/series Show Notes Made to makeWe are in relationship; identity begins there, not in isolationMakers by nature—letting the maker-impulse go tips us toward illness, moral, mental, and emotionalWholeness and health—the claim that not-making leaves us unwell, without idolizing healthConsumer culture—the commercial aim to sell, and to keep us passive in front of screensDiscerning buyers, or passive creatures? The illusion of control while being trained to takeScreens and scrollingPolitical theater and infotainment—very little real journalism left, mostly consumer entertainmentNeil Postman and amusing ourselves to death as the frame for the diagnosisMaking as resistance—bake bread, carve a stick, do anything against the hypnotic pullReception as submission—a word out of fashion, reclaimed ...
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    12 分
  • I Don't Know What Faith Means Anymore: Terminal Illness, Poetic Faith, and Theological Doubt / Miroslav Volf and Christian Wiman

    I Don't Know What Faith Means Anymore: Terminal Illness, Poetic Faith, and Theological Doubt / Miroslav Volf and Christian Wiman
    2026/07/08
    For twenty years, Christian Wiman has lived with a rare, incurable cancer. In the fall of 2022, during a stretch when the illness was especially bad, he wrote to his friend and Yale colleague Miroslav Volf: “I don’t know what faith means anymore. I’m a 56-year-old with a pile of books behind me and an experimental bone marrow transplant ahead of me, and I don’t know what faith means.” That letter became the seed of an extended correspondence between the poet and the theologian, now published as Glimmerings: Letters on Faith between a Poet and a Theologian. In this special collaboration with Arc Magazine, editor Mark Oppenheimer sits down with Volf and Wiman to unpack the letters that grew out of their long friendship and years of walking together through New Haven. They discuss what it means to love God, why doubt and absence might be constitutive elements of faith and presence rather than its opposite, and how a terminal diagnosis changed what each of them was willing to say and how freely they said it. They also trace the thinkers who shaped their thinking along the way, from Simone Weil’s account of attention to Etty Hillesum’s wartime writing, to Abraham Joshua Heschel’s theology of the prophets, and they wrestle openly with where their understandings of Jesus Christ converge and diverge. Along the way, Wiman reflects on writing from a hospital room at Massachusetts General, on discovering that his fear was never death itself but the fear of dying without God, and on why grief, not fear, is what remains even after that fear falls away. Episode Highlights I don’t know what faith means anymore. I’m a 56-year-old with a pile of books behind me and an experimental bone marrow transplant ahead of me, and I don’t know what faith means.I sometimes find it hard to think what it means to love God. I don’t know how to love God.Faith is what matters. Belief seems to me a matter of the institution and ascending to creeds and things like that.I think most of my theological thinking is existentially motivated. It’s motivated by the kind of inner logic of the trust in which I’m involved.Most of the books that I wrote, I’ve written for myself. I’m one of those writers who doesn’t have an audience.There is grace in my life if I can just keep my eyes open enough to see it.His mistake in some ways lets him see that the world is right, that there’s a rightness to the world.What becomes clear is one’s longing for God. Everything is stripped away and very little else seems to matter.What I want most in my life is the presence of God. And I fear dying without that. Just being alone at the moment of death.I was worried that he won’t have God in that situation of need because attention might be lacking. About Miroslav Volf and Christian Wiman Miroslav Volf is the Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School and founding director of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. He is the author of Exclusion and Embrace, the NYT bestseller Life Worth Living (with Ryan McAnnally-Linz and Matt Croasmun), The Cost of Ambition, and more than twenty other books. Christian Wiman is the Clement-Muehl Professor of Communication Arts at Yale Divinity School. He has written and edited numerous volumes of poetry. He has lived with a rare blood cancer, Waldenström macroglobulinemia, for more than twenty years, an experience he wrote about in his memoirs My Bright Abyss and Zero at the Bone. Helpful Links and Resources Glimmerings: Letters on Faith between a Poet and a Theologian, the book discussed in this episode: https://bookshop.org/p/books/glimmerings-letters-on-faith-between-a-poet-and-a-theologian-christian-wiman/1a13ad79a59080d1Miroslav Volf, faculty bio at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/people/miroslav-volfChristian Wiman, faculty bio at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/people/christian-wimanArc: Religion, Politics, Et Cetera, the magazine that co-produced this episode: https://arcmag.org/John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis: https://rap.wustl.edu/My Bright Abyss, Christian Wiman’s earlier memoir on faith and his cancer diagnosis: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374534370/mybrightabyss/Miroslav Volf: Disagreeing With You Feels Like Disagreeing With Myself, a Christianity Today profile of the two friends (by Andrew Hendrixson): https://www.christianitytoday.com/2026/01/miroslav-volf-disagreeing-with-you-like-disagreeing-with-myself-christian-wiman/ Show Notes Summer break announcement, past-episode recapSpecial crossover episode with Arc MagazineMark Oppenheimer, Arc’s editor, hosts this conversationOrigin story: a brief email exchange in fall 2022Wiman’s diagnosis, Waldenström macroglobulinemia, and a bone marrow transplantTwenty years of friendship, marked by weekly walks in New HavenThe letter that started it: not knowing what faith means anymoreWhat does it ...
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    1 時間 4 分