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

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

    Can Political Enemies Be Civic Friends? / Robert George (From the Archives)

    05/08/2026 | 15 min
    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-together

    Robert P. George’s website: https://robertpgeorge.com/

    Robert P. George on X: https://twitter.com/McCormickProf

    Seeking 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/9798888451700

    Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality, George’s best-known scholarly book: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/making-men-moral-9780198260240

    Election 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 people

    Fellow citizens recast as enemies to be defeated and destroyed

    Are elections as existential contests?—with the losing side expecting retaliation, the winning side claiming the norms

    Breakdown near the founding of the Republic

    The election of 1800, incumbent John Adams against Thomas Jefferson: https://www.monticello.org/encyclopedia/election-1800

    Federalists seeing Jeffersonians as carriers of the French Revolution; Jeffersonians seeing Federalists as would-be British monarchists

    Antebellum America: North and South unable to imagine sharing one republic

    Is our identity constructed around belief?

    Emotional investment in conviction as a good thing in itself

    Wrapping emotions too tightly, and the slide into dogmatism

    A practical posture of infallibility

    Disagreement recoded as moral defect, and friendship ruled out

    Intellectual humility as the missing virtue

    Being wrong about the most important things, not just the trivial ones

    Civility as more than politesse

    Listening with an openness to learning, not waiting for a turn to speak

    Honoring the other as a rational creature with something to teach

    Open-mindedness without paralysis

    A conservative and a democratic socialist as frequent interlocutors: https://www.cornelwest.com/about/

    Courage as a civic virtue

    Tribalism in formal institutions and informal friend circles alike

    Becoming a heretic by breaking ranks on a single issue

    Excommunication, suspicion, and the social cost of independent thought

    Two friends at opposite poles, both out of step in 2016

    Counsel to students and to his own children: humility, open-mindedness, courage

    #CivicFriendship #IntellectualHumility #Civility #Polarization #RobertPGeorge #CornelWest #FaithAndCulture #ForTheLifeOfTheWorld

    Production Notes

    This podcast featured Robert George

    Hosted and Produced by Evan Rosa

    Production assistance and editing by Noah Senthil

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

    How to Die Well / Lydia Dugdale (From the Archives)

    30/07/2026 | 11 min
    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-alone

    Lydia 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-dugdale

    Dying 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-ethics

    Columbia Center for Clinical Medical Ethics on X: https://x.com/columbia_ccme

    Ars moriendi, the medieval art of dying, at the Morgan Library and Museum: https://www.themorgan.org/blog/new-acquisition-ars-moriendi-blockbook

    Ars 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 medicine

    Why doctors avoid frank conversations about mortality

    Palliative care's arrival as a discipline, and what it made possible

    Real gains in symptom relief for the sick and the dying

    The unintended cost: death conversations outsourced to specialists

    Clinicians as intermediaries between life and death

    The priest's old place at the threshold, now the physician's

    Nurses at the bedside, doctors calling the shots on treatment

    Existential questions physicians have never worked through

    A colleague who would never tell a patient they were dying, out of her own fear of death

    Digging into how other times and places handled mortality

    Ars moriendi: the medieval genre on the preparation for death

    Illustrated editions made for people who could not read

    Fifteen years and two books spent reviving the art of dying

    Living well as the precondition of dying well

    Virtue as preparation: hope, patience, joy against bitterness and despair

    The role of community in dying well

    New York's unrepresented patients, dying alone

    A reader estranged from his adult children who committed to years of repair after the book

    Relationship as ongoing work: rupture, forgiveness, iron sharpening iron

    A long-hospitalized patient nobody wanted assigned to their team

    Modeling care for young doctors, and being verbally destroyed in front of them

    Loneliness of the neighbor, the colleague, the checkout person

    Practice as the only way to get better at it

    #ForTheLifeOfTheWorld #LydiaDugdale #TheLostArtOfDying #ArsMoriendi #MedicalEthics #DyingWell #Loneliness #EndOfLifeCare

    Production Notes

    This podcast featured Lydia Dugdale

    Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa

    Hosted by Evan Rosa

    Production Assistance by Noah Senthil

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

    You Must Change Your Life (From the Archive)

    22/07/2026 | 11 min
    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-nature

    Bruce Herman’s website and painting archive: https://www.bruceherman.com

    Bruce Herman, artist bio and background: https://www.bruceherman.com/about

    Archaic Torso of Apollo by Rainer Maria Rilke (“You must change your life“), trans. Stephen Mitchell: https://poets.org/poem/archaic-torso-apollo

    Real Presences by George Steiner, on courtesy and hospitality in art: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/R/bo3684420.html

    Christian Wiman: https://poetryfoundation.org/poets/christian-wiman

    QU4RTETS, the collaborative project on T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: https://www.bruceherman.com/series

    Show Notes

    Made to make

    We are in relationship; identity begins there, not in isolation

    Makers by nature—letting the maker-impulse go tips us toward illness, moral, mental, and emotional

    Wholeness and health—the claim that not-making leaves us unwell, without idolizing health

    Consumer culture—the commercial aim to sell, and to keep us passive in front of screens

    Discerning buyers, or passive creatures? The illusion of control while being trained to take

    Screens and scrolling

    Political theater and infotainment—very little real journalism left, mostly consumer entertainment

    Neil Postman and amusing ourselves to death as the frame for the diagnosis

    Making as resistance—bake bread, carve a stick, do anything against the hypnotic pull

    Reception as submission—a word out of fashion, reclaimed away from enslavement

    Mutual submission—the erotic analogy, and desire’s corruption in the sexual sins

    To receive a poem you must risk being changed

    Rilke’s Grecian torso and the charge, you must change your life

    Subject to subject, not master and slave

    Walker Percy’s museum story—a painting that blazed into life, then went quiet

    Bringing a friend to re-enter the original encounter vicariously

    The workman through the skylight—catastrophe reopens what habit had closed

    Guardedness—why it can take suffering to break us open

    Christian Wiman—cancer, poetry, and being ripped open toward receptivity

    You might be changed, and it might not be what you wanted; the risk of real encounter

    Make from love, not fear

    Do away with the nonsense that you’re not an artist

    Everyday making—a loaf, a meal, a good cocktail, hospitality

    Hospitality as the ultimate art; George Steiner’s Real Presences and courtesia

    Beauty can be complex, not merely pretty

    Fear-mongers left and right—and why not to listen

    Daily kindnesses—the neighbor, the shoveled driveway, the half-decent casserole

    Welcome to the festival; let the festival begin

    #BruceHerman #MakersByNature #ForTheLifeOfTheWorld #FaithAndArt #TheologyOfMaking #ArtAndFaith #Creativity #Hospitality #MakeNotConsume #YaleFaithAndCulture
  • For the Life of the World / Yale Center for Faith & Culture

    I Don't Know What Faith Means Anymore: Terminal Illness, Poetic Faith, and Theological Doubt / Miroslav Volf and Christian Wiman

    08/07/2026 | 1 h 4 min
    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/1a13ad79a59080d1

    Miroslav Volf, faculty bio at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/people/miroslav-volf

    Christian Wiman, faculty bio at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/people/christian-wiman

    Arc: 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 recap

    Special crossover episode with Arc Magazine

    Mark Oppenheimer, Arc’s editor, hosts this conversation

    Origin story: a brief email exchange in fall 2022

    Wiman’s diagnosis, Waldenström macroglobulinemia, and a bone marrow transplant

    Twenty years of friendship, marked by weekly walks in New Haven

    The letter that started it: not knowing what faith means anymore

    What does it mean to love God?

    Faith versus belief: creeds compared to a personal relationship

    Doubt as a constitutive element of trust, not its opposite

    Absence and presence, sorrow and joy, held together

    Theology as existentially motivated rather than academic exercise

    Writing for an audience of one, and how that shapes honesty

    Whether a book contract changes how freely you write

    Simone Weil’s idea that attention is what makes God present

    Disagreement over how central Jesus Christ is to each man’s sense of God

    Volf’s Pentecostal upbringing, Wiman’s Southern Baptist roots

    Volf’s sense of God as behind and underneath, not face to face

    Wiman’s youthful epiphany and a memory of his grandmother’s death

    A misread wildflower, a Richard Wilbur poem, grace found in error

    Shai Held’s blurb and why Jewish thinkers rarely appear in Christian theology

    Etty Hillesum, her wartime diaries, her postcard thrown from the train

    Abraham Joshua Heschel’s influence through Sabbath and The Prophets

    Heschel’s idea that faith is fidelity to the moments you once had it

    A letter written from a hospital room at Massachusetts General

    Miroslav’s fear that his letters carried condescension toward a friend in crisis

    Whether a cancer diagnosis changes the fear of death itself

    Grief, not fear, as what remains once the fear of dying is gone

    How the two friends met: through Volf’s wife’s poetry class

    Letter-writing as a lifelong practice for both men beyond this book

    #Glimmerings #MiroslavVolf #ChristianWiman #Faith #Doubt #Theology #YaleDivinitySchool #ArcMagazine

    Production Notes

    This podcast featured Christian Wiman and Miroslav Volf with Mark Oppenheimer

    Special thanks to David Sugarman and Arc Magazine

    Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa

    Hosted by Evan Rosa

    Production Assistance by Noah Senthil

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

    Owning Grief Redemptively: The Wound of Loss, the Failure of Theodicy, and the Cry of Suffering Love / Nicholas Wolterstorff

    24/06/2026 | 43 min
    More than forty years after his twenty-five-year-old son Eric died in a climbing accident, philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff joins Miroslav Volf to revisit the grief behind his classic Lament for a Son and his recent Living with Grief.

    “If he was worth loving when alive, he was worth grieving when dead.”

    In this episode they reflect together on mourning loss, refusing both the consolations of theodicy and the pressure to move on. Together they discuss owning grief rather than disowning it, lament as a cry that transcends analysis, and the limits of explaining suffering through theodicy. They explore Augustine and Calvin on grief, Karl Barth's “nothingness,” universality hidden in particular sorrow, and the prison classroom where incarcerated men claimed their own grief redemptively.

    Episode Highlights

    "I could not, and would not, allow it simply to heal."

    "If he was worth loving when alive, he was worth grieving when dead."

    "In my story I always say: I am one who lost a son. That's part of who I am."

    "Children should not die at twenty-five years of age. Nobody should die at twenty-five years of age."

    "It was good that I loved Eric. It was worth it. So my grief is worthwhile. And, in this world, love and suffering come together."

    About Nicholas Wolterstorff

    Nicholas Wolterstorff is the Noah Porter Professor Emeritus of Philosophical Theology at Yale University and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. Born in 1932, he earned his PhD at Harvard and taught philosophy for thirty years at Calvin College before joining Yale in 1989. A leading Christian philosopher, he helped develop Reformed epistemology and co-founded the Society of Christian Philosophers. His books span aesthetics, epistemology, justice, and liturgy, including Lament for a Son (1987) and the memoir In This World of Wonders (2019). His son Eric died in a climbing accident in 1983.

    Helpful Links and Resources

    Lament for a Son, by Nicholas Wolterstorff https://www.eerdmans.com/9781467419239/lament-for-a-son/

    Living with Grief, by Nicholas Wolterstorff https://wipfandstock.com/9798385201006/living-with-grief/

    Calvin Prison Initiative https://calvin.edu/prison-initiative

    Show Notes

    Grief as an open wound

    Two books, forty years apart: Lament for a Son and Living with Grief

    Eric Wolterstorff's death at twenty-five in a climbing accident, Austria, 1983

    Lament as a cry, not an analysis

    "I could not, and would not, allow it simply to heal."

    Grief-process books that failed: "inviting me to look away from Eric"

    "If he was worth loving when alive, he was worth grieving when dead."

    Owning grief versus disowning it; narrative identity

    "I am one who lost a son"; grief as part of who you are

    Augustine's moral disowning; shame over loving too much

    Owning grief redemptively; good that couldn't have come otherwise

    Calvin Prison Initiative, Handlon Correctional Facility, Ionia, MI

    Prison classroom: "we were in grief but didn't know how to express it. You have given us the words."

    Universality in particularity

    The pallet of finished books: "What have I done?"

    Grief brought on oneself: "not an assault, but we brought it onto ourselves"

    Karl Barth's "nothingness"; evil God will defeat

    "Children should not die at twenty-five years of age."

    Love that knowingly risks grief: "love and suffering come together"

    #NicholasWolterstorff #LamentForASon #LivingWithGrief #Grief #Lament #Theodicy #FaithAndGrief #MiroslavVolf #ForTheLifeOfTheWorld #YaleFaithAndCulture

    Production Notes

    This podcast featured Nicholas Wolterstorff with Miroslav Volf

    Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa

    Hosted by Evan Rosa

    Production Assistance by Noah Senthil

    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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