Our Summer 2025 series, Beside Still Waters, focuses on the places where creativity brings life into a world fatigued by brokenness and division. From jazz to Jane Austen and in between, this season we’ll focus on the ways literature and the arts can refresh and challenge our inner lives—and connect us with the Creator of the good, the true, and the beautiful.

How should we live faithfully within a world created to be good and beautiful, and yet everywhere marred by ugliness and injustice?

Jazz vocalist and composer Ruth Naomi Floyd will guide us in bringing together music, creativity, and justice, and help us think about our roles in repairing, re-envisioning, and creating new places of beauty and flourishing:

We hope you are encouraged by Ruth’s artistic journey, as she helps us to find beauty in the midst of suffering, and to express love through creativity.

This podcast is an edited version of an online conversation recorded in 2021. Watch the full video of the conversation here, and learn more about Ruth Naomi Floyd.

Authors and books mentioned in the conversation:
The Frederick Douglass Jazz Works
It Was Good, Making Music to the Glory of God, by Ruth Naomi Floyd
The Problem of Good, by Ruth Naomi Floyd
Dr. John Nunez
Toni Morrison
Martin Luther King Jr.
Vincent van Gogh
Hans Christian Andersen
Miles Davis
Francis Schaeffer
Joshua Stamper

Related Trinity Forum Readings:
A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Letters from Vincent van Gogh
Letter from Birmingham Jail, by Martin Luther King Jr.
Revelation, by Flannery O’Connor
Bulletins from Immortality, by Emily Dickinson

Related Conversations:
A New Year With The Word with Malcolm Guite

To listen to this or any of our episodes in full, visit ttf.org/podcast and to join the Trinity Forum Society and help make content like this possible, join the Trinity Forum Society

In this episode we’re joined by theologian and bestselling author Miroslav Volf of Yale Divinity School. His latest book is The Cost of Ambition: How Striving to Be Better Than Others is Making Us Worse.

The question he explores is one that relates to all of us: how can we find a way to strive for excellence, rather than for superiority over those around us?

Finding new insights in familiar Biblical passages and the Christian tradition, he’ll help us to defy our culture of merciless ambition:

This episode is drawn from an online conversation held in 2025. It’ll give you a sense of what the Trinity Forum is about: a community of people working to keep the Christian intellectual tradition alive, and to nurture new growth in it in our time, for the renewal of our culture.

If that resonates with you, please join the Trinity Forum as a member at ttf.org. We hope you enjoy the conversation.

This conversation is on the practical wisdom the Christian tradition offers for something that affects all of us: matters of life and death. Dr. Lydia Dugdale will be our guide.

Lydia has applied practices from this faith tradition in her daily work with patients and families as a physician, professor and medical ethicist in New York City. She draws deeply from it in her book The Lost Art of Dying: Reviving Forgotten Wisdom – which she wrote for her patients, and those who love them:

We hope this conversation helps paint a picture of what it means to live as a Christian on the road of life, where death is not the end, but a stop along the way to eternity.

This podcast was recorded with a live audience at a Trinity Forum evening conversation in Nashville in 2025. It’ll give you a good sense of what the Trinity Forum is about: a community of people working to keep the Christian intellectual tradition alive, to nurture new growth in it for society’s renewal, and to make it available to all.

Related Conversations:

Being, Living, and Dying Well, an Online Conversation with Lydia Dugdale

Faith, Health, and Healing, an Evening Conversation with Farr Curlin and Daniel Sulmasy

Suffering and Flourishing: Perseverance and Faith in the Midst of Pain, an Evening Conversation with Dr. Ray Barfield and Rev. Michael Walrond

In this conversation, author Ross Douthat draws from the tradition to tackle a foundational question: Why believe?

Amid evidence that America’s long trend of secularization has leveled off, a perception of the limits of a strictly materialist worldview, and growing dissatisfaction with “do it yourself” approaches to spirituality, what does traditional faith uniquely offer those seeking truth in our time?

New York Times columnist and author Ross Douthat joins us for this conversation, making the case for Christianity and rejecting atheism, all through the lens of reason:

We hope this conversation provides a look at faith from a fresh angle, and encourages you in practicing traditional faith as an answer to the search for truth in our time.

This podcast is an edited version of an online conversation recorded in February 2025. Watch the recording here.

Authors and books mentioned in the conversation:

Ross Douthat for The New York Times

Matter of Opinion Podcast

The Deep Places: A memoir of Illness and Discovery

The Decadent Society to Change the Church

To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism

Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics

Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious

Bethel McGrew, on left vs. right brain of Christianity

Related Trinity Forum Readings:

The Wager; Blaise Pascal

The Strangest Story in the World; G.K. Chesterton

A Practical View of Real Christianity; William Wilberforce

God’s Grandeur: Gerard Manley Hopkins selection of poems; Gerard Manley Hopkins

Related Conversations:

A World Transformed with Tom Holland

The Strangest Story in the World: G.K. Chesterton and the Incarnation with Dale Ahlquist

Truth and Trust with Francis Collins

Faith in an Empirical World with Ard Louis and Tremper Longman

US foreign aid is unexpectedly in the news in 2025 as never before. What do Christians need to know, to help us be part of the dialogue?

America's history of foreign aid dates back at least to the Marshall Plan that followed World War II. Many Christians have been involved. How have these believers thought about the appropriate roles of government and of faith-based institutions? What has the US been doing, with what impact? And what is the situation on the ground now?

Three believers knowledgeable about this work join us for this episode to illustrate the scope of how faith-based foreign aid has impacted regions worldwide, share their perspectives on what a Christ-like spirit looks like in this field, and discuss where they see aid is most needed—now more than ever.

• Ambassador Mark Lagon has served as the US Ambassador to combat human trafficking, and is now focused on the fight against malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDS.
• Nicole Bibbins Sedaca has held leadership roles in the government, academic and NGO sectors working and teaching on democracy, human rights and religious freedom.
• Myal Greene leads World Relief, the development arm of the National Association of Evangelicals; while serving in Rwanda, he developed its church-based programming model.

This podcast is an edited version of our Online Conversation from April 2025. You can access the full conversation with transcript here.

Related Trinity Forum Readings:

• A Man Who Changed His Times; William Wilberforce
• This Child Will Be Great; Ellen Sirleaf Johnson
• Out of My Life and Thought; Albert Schweitzer
• Cry, the Beloved Country; Alan Paton
• Sphere Sovereignty; Abraham Kuyper
• Politics, Morality, and Civility; Václav Havel

Related Conversations:

Abraham Kuyper’s Sphere Sovereignty with Vincent Bacote

To listen to this or any of our episodes in full, visit ttf.org/podcast and to join the Trinity Forum Society and help make content like this possible, join the Trinity Forum Society.

As we emerge from the Lenten season, freshly renewed by the triumph of the Resurrection, beauty and wonder are particularly present for Christians. In this episode, author and songwriter Andrew Peterson shares his insights about the importance of location and living responsibly and attentively in whatever specific place you inhabit. He discusses how deeper attentiveness to the beauty around us can awaken us to wisdom and wonder.

This podcast is an edited version of our Online Conversation from December 2021. You can access the full conversation with transcript here.

Learn more about Andrew Peterson.

Authors and books mentioned in the conversation:

The God of the Garden, by Andrew Peterson

Tim Mackey, The Bible Project’s Tree of Life podcast series

Jaber Crow, by Wendell Berry

William Wordsworth

The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs

The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape, by James Howard Kunstler

Sidewalks in the Kingdom: New Urbanism and the Christian Faith, Eric O. Jacobsen

Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson

Rich Mullins

10 Resolutions for Mental Health, Clyde Kilby

Related Trinity Forum Readings:

Bright Evening Star, Madeleine L’Engle

A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens

Babette’s Feast, by Isak Dinesen

Related Conversations:

Practicing Gratitude with Diana Butler Bass

To listen to this or any of our episodes in full, visit ttf.org/podcast and to join the Trinity Forum Society and help make content like this possible, join the Trinity Forum Society.

Throughout Lent, we've been releasing weekly episodes focused on spiritual practices.

In the final episode of the series, this Holy Week we're considering the discipline of waiting: how we can prepare ourselves to receive good news.

Our guide today is N.T. Wright, the Anglican Bishop and New Testament scholar. He describes how Jesus invited his hearers into a new way of understanding Israel’s ancient story of waiting, the cosmic significance of its sudden fulfillment, and its meaning for us in this in-between time of preparation to receive good news:

We hope that this conversation will help you as you wait and prepare to receive this good news.

The podcast is drawn from an evening conversation we hosted back in 2016. You can find our shownotes and much more at ttf.org.

Thank you for journeying with us through Lent.

Learn more about N.T. Wright.

Watch The Good News and the Good Life, with N.T. Wright and Richard Hayes.

Authors and books mentioned in the conversation:

Who is this Man? by John Ortberg

Related Trinity Forum Readings:

Devotions by John Donne and paraphrased by Philip Yancey

The Confessions of St. Augustine by Augustine of Hippo, Introduced by James K.A. Smith

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard

Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan

God’s Grandeur: The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins

A Spiritual Pilgrimage by Malcolm Muggeridge

Related Conversations:

Liturgy of the Ordinary in Extraordinary Times with Tish Harrison Warren

Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies with Marilyn McEntyre

Invitation to Solitude and Silence with Ruth Haley Barton

On the Road with Saint Augustine with James K.A. Smith and Elizabeth Bruenig

The Habit Podcast, Episode 26: Tish Harrison Warren with Doug McKelvey

The Spiritual Practice of Remembering with Margaret Bendroth

To listen to this or any of our episodes in full, visit ttf.org, and to join the Trinity Forum Society and help make content like this possible, visit ttf.org/join.