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For the Life of the World / Yale Center for Faith & Culture

By: Miroslav Volf Matthew Croasmun Ryan McAnnally-Linz Drew Collins Evan Rosa
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  • Summary

  • Seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. Theological insight, cultural analysis, and practical guidance for personal and communal flourishing. Brought to you by the Yale Center for Faith & Culture.
    2020-2025 Yale Center for Faith & Culture
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Episodes
  • Desire: How Avarice and Acquisition Distort Our Longing for the Sacred / Micheal O'Siadhail

    Desire: How Avarice and Acquisition Distort Our Longing for the Sacred / Micheal O'Siadhail
    Apr 17 2024

    "Having lost a sense of the sacred, the only thing we want is acquisitiveness—more of everything. How can we break this vicious cycle of avarice? It seems to me that the only way we can possibly reign this in on ourselves is some retrieval of the sense of the sacred, something beyond ourselves.

    And I think that relearning humility—realizing that a parasitic pathogen can spread across the globe and wreak havoc as it did—brings us to the question again of the sacred.

    Dare we speak of a God who is worthy of all our desire? That we as creatures might want with all of our heart, all of our mind, to contemplate. Should anything less deserve our desiring really? Clearly there's a hierarchy of desire, but what is our overarching desire? Can we gamble on reimagining the wonder of a capacious God of endless surprises?" (Micheal O'Siadhail, from the episode)

    About Micheal O'Siadhail

    Micheal O'Siadhail is an award-winning poet and author of many collections of poetry. His Collected Poems was published in 2013, One Crimson Thread in 2015 and The Five Quintets in 2018, which received Conference on Christianity and Literature Book of the Year 2018 and an Eric Hoffer Award in 2020. His latest works are Testament (2022) and Desire (2023). He holds honorary doctorates from the universities of Manitoba and Aberdeen. He lives in New York.

    Show Notes

    • Micheal O’Siadhail, Desire
    • Recitation: Epigraph
    • Using poetry as a means to record the COVID-19 Pandemic
    • Using words to process emotion
    • Human desire for more; greed
    • The internet as a driving force for consumption
    • Consumerism feeding climate change
    • Breaking the cycle by retrieving the sacred
    • “Bless” is not a word used easily in our culture
    • Recitation: Pest 12
    • Gratitude within anxiety
    • Recitation: Pest 20
    • Stewarding the earth
    • Recitation: Habitat 13
    • What is worthy of our desire?
    • The “stabilitas” of being where you are
    • Wanting acquisitiveness more than the sacred
    • Truly being known versus being famous
    • Recitation: Behind the Screen 17
    • Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation
    • Recitation: Behind the Screen 20
    • The temptation towards certainty
    • Recitation: Behind the Screen 1
    • Trusting the God of surprises
    • “Dare we speak of a God who is worthy of all our desire?”
    • Recitation: Desire 24 & 25
    • “On Earth as it is in Heaven” as a dream
    • Reordering and re-educating our desire
    • Unity and Denise Levertov’s concept of “One-ing”

    Production Notes

    • This podcast featured Micheal O’Siadhail
    • Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
    • Hosted by Evan Rosa
    • Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, and Tim Bergeland
    • A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
    • Support 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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    53 mins
  • How to Read Flannery O'Connor / Jessica Hooten Wilson

    How to Read Flannery O'Connor / Jessica Hooten Wilson
    Apr 10 2024
    Flannery O’Connor is known for her short stories in which “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” But it’s often those ugly, mean, disgusting, scandalizing, violent, weird, or downright hateful characters in Flannery O’Connor stories that become the vessels of grace delivered.So, how should we read Flannery O’Connor?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. Includes a discussion of Flannery O’Connor’s short story, “Greenleaf.”Show NotesCheck out Jessica Hooten Wilson’s presentation of Flannery O’Connor’s final, unfinished novel: Flannery O’Connor’s Why Do the Heathen Rage?Click here for an online copy of “Greenleaf” to follow along with our analysisSpiritual formation through the works of Flannery O’ConnorHow to read for a flourishing life“Greenleaf” by Flannery O’ConnorFlannery O’Connor’s reading grounded in tradition of early church mothers and fathers.Paying attention to every individual word.First word: Mrs. Mays looses her agency.Europa & the Bull, Ovid’s MetamorphosisMrs. May’s blinds as hiding pieces of reality, shutting out GodThe spiritual truth of the story is concealed when not read attentively and intentionallyFlannery’s writings defying instant gratification“The wrong kind of horror”The development of American consumerismShowing versus enjoying violenceSacramental readingThe Holy FoolThe Violent Bear It Away as a hymn to the eucharistO’Connor requires spiritual reading.A summary of “Greenleaf”Pierced by the bull, a violent union of Savior and sinnerO’Connor’s Christian characters; “A Good Man is Hard to Find”Characters changing and choosing faith before death.The final paragraph of “Greenleaf”Mrs. Greenleaf as the opposite of Ivan Karamazov, in The Brothers KaramazovOpening to the world with the knowledge of GodPentecostalism and zeal in “Greenleaf”Stabbed in the heart, medieval mysticism“Lord, help us dig down under things and find where you are”About Jessica Hooten WilsonJessica Hooten Wilson is the Fletcher Jones Endowed Chair of Great Books at Pepperdine University (’23) and previously served as the Seaver College Scholar of Liberal Arts at Pepperdine University (’22-’23). She co-hosts a podcast called The Scandal of Reading: Pursuing Holy Wisdom with Christ & Pop Culture, where she discusses with fellow authors, professors, and theologians with Claude Atcho and Austin Carty. She is the author of Flannery O’Connor’s Why Do the Heathen Rage?: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at a Work in Progres*s (Brazos Press, January 23, 2024); Reading for the Love of God: How to Read as a Spiritual Practice (Brazos Press, 2023);* Scandal of Holiness: Renewing Your Imagination in the Company of Literary Saints (Brazos Press, 2022) which received a Christianity Today 2023 Award of Merit (Culture & the Arts) and a Midwest Book Review* 2023 Silver Book Award (Nonfiction – Religion/Philosophy); co-author with Dr. Jacob Stratman of Learning the Good Life: Wisdom from the Great Hearts and Minds that Came Before (Zondervan Academic, 2022); Giving the Devil his Due: Demonic Authority in the Fiction of Flannery O’Connor and Fyodor Dostoevsky* (February 28, 2017), which received a 2018 Christianity Today Book of the Year Award in the Culture & the Arts; as well as two books on Walker Percy: *The Search for Influence: Walker Percy and Fyodor Dostoevsky* (Ohio State University Press, 2017) and Reading Walker Percy’s Novels (Louisiana State University Press, 2018); most recently she co-edited Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: *The Russian Soul in the West* (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020).She has received numerous fellowships, grants, and awards, including a Fulbright Fellowship to the Czech Republic, an NEH grant to study Dante in Florence in 2014, and the Biola Center for Christian Thought sabbatical fellowship. In 2018 she received the Emerging Public Intellectual Award given by a coalition of North American think tanks in collaboration with the Centre for Christian Scholarship at Redeemer University College, and in 2019 she received the Hiett Prize in Humanities from The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture.Production NotesThis podcast featured Jessica Hooten WilsonEdited and Produced by Evan RosaHosted by Evan RosaProduction Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, and Tim BergelandA 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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    57 mins
  • A World Out of Joint: Pilgrimage and the Possibilities of Homemaking / Ryan McAnnally-Linz

    A World Out of Joint: Pilgrimage and the Possibilities of Homemaking / Ryan McAnnally-Linz
    Apr 4 2024

    This conversation is based on a free downloadable resource available at faith.yale.edu. Click here to get your copy today.

    “We may heed the call of Jesus to follow me and find him leading us right into the home we already have.” (Ryan McAnnally-Linz)

    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. Together they discuss what it means for the world to be the home of God; the task of resisting the “dysoikos” (or the parodic sinful distortion of home); the meaning of Christian life as a pilgrimage; and three faithful ways to approach the work of homemaking that anticipates how the world is becoming the home of God—Ryan introduces examples from Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement, Julian of Norwich, and a modern-day farming family.
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    48 mins
Philosophy Social Sciences Christianity Spirituality
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