Life of Faith
What comes after clergy self-care?
I didn’t need more candles or journaling. I needed solidarity with others.
A Refugee’s Feast: the story of Maria Skobtsova with Amy Frykholm (S3:E8)
“Love is a very dangerous thing.”
Ministry and other difficult jobs
Pastors face intense challenges—though not necessarily unique ones.
The wisdom of not knowing
The information age feels like an all-you-can-eat buffet. I’m stuffed.
Love and desolation: The story of Matushka Olga Michael with Meagan Saliashvili (S3:E7)
“Blessed Olga said, ‘God can create great beauty out of complete desolation.’”
Naps against capitalism
How can rest be a political act? Poet-theologian Tricia Hersey returns to this question often.
Our unseen companions
“Angels, saints, and ancestors are real presences that are not visible to us in our linear, rational mind,” says Abbey of the Arts founder Christine Valters Paintner.
The story never meant to be told: The suppressed history of African American religious women with Shannen Dee Williams (S3:E6)
“When confronted with the silenced past, the greatest responsibility of the historian—and the most radical thing any person can do—is to tell the story that was never meant to be told.”
My evangelical feminist friend Letha
There is no greater evidence of how much Letha Dawson Scanzoni valued relationships than her letters.
Who wrote the Bible?: Enslaved people and the New Testament with Candida Moss (S3:E5)
“Once we accept biblical collaboration as fact and recognize its participants as oppressed human beings who nevertheless had agency, we are forced to confront a truth that can be unsettling to some readers of scripture: that the meaning of the Bible is fluid.”
Reading scripture through the experience of disability
Julia Watts Belser sees in the Torah a God who is in love with the creative possibilities of difference.
Days of wanting
My family didn’t want to go to America at all; we left Vietnam on pain of death.
Intelligence moved by love: Thecla as philosopher with Dawn LaValle Norman (S3:E4)
“Thecla shows us how women could be important models, not only insofar as they overcame their femininity, but in their femininity, as models for men and women.”
De-commodifying time
Jenny Odell argues that we need to get back in touch with our preindustrial sense of time.
Showing up for church when I don’t want to
When I show up, God shows up—although not always in the sermon.
Christian life in The School of Athens
My upbringing made me a Platonist. Motherhood made me an Aristotelian. I never left either behind.
Speaking of death
Christians have an opportunity to eschew euphemisms and talk honestly about mortality.
Pentecostals laboring in the field
Lloyd Barba shows how Mexican farmworkers established a viable life in the face of California’s industrial agriculture machine.