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

Theologian Miroslav Volf and philosopher John Hare (Noah Porter Professor of Philosophical Theology at Yale Divinity School) discuss Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s fundamental question behind reopening the economy from COVID-19 lockdown, “How much is a human life worth?” Why we should go to such great lengths, sacrificing so much, to save a single human life? What about humans gives us dignity? How should we approach the dilemmas posed by incommensurable values, where there’s no agreed upon standard for comparison? How can we better frame the question of the value of human life by observing the life of Jesus?“My conviction is that human life doesn't have a price. And I take this from the philosophy of Immanual Kant, who distinguishes between the dignity human life has, and price. And dignity is, he says, incommensurable worth.""Jesus came to be with us: Emmanuel. And that's what we have lost. We can't be with each other. … I think what we've learned through this is: A good human life is one that has physical contiguity with other humans.""I was for some years working on the staff of Congress, and public policy decisions often came down to this question of comparing goods. I think a Christian has has something to say about this, and it is, Miroslav, part of your work, that you've been thinking about what a good human life is like. One of the ways to look at that is to look at what the life of Jesus was like. And that gives us a sense of what's important, what matters. It doesn't answer all the questions, but it does give us a map as it were, of how we should think about what is more important and what is less."Gov. Andrew Cuomo (NY) May 5 Press Briefing “What is the Worth of a Human Life?”https://abc7ny.com/politics/cuomo-on-reopening-how-much-is-a-human-life-worth/6153317/"Dona Nobis Pacem” (“Grant Us Peace”) a movement from Johan Sebastian Bach’s Mass in B Minor, performed by the Bach Collegium Japan, conducted by Masaaki Suzuki. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffrsc3wdBt4Show Notes“Jesus came to be with us and that's what we’ve lost. We can't be with each other”Andrew Cuomo’s decision making about reopening“A human life is priceless” – John HareJohn Hare: God and Morality: A Philosophical HistoryJohn Hare: Why Bother Being Good? The Place of God in the Moral LifeJohn Hare: The Moral Gap, Kantian Ethics, Human Limits, and God's AssistanceJohn Hare: God's CommandThe financial cost of the ICU, can we put a price on human life? What about humans gives us dignity? Kant and dignity “We fail to see the fundamental distinction between price and dignity”“All things that have intrinsic value, they are all part of human life. They’re what gives human life dignity.”“And when we talk about the dignity of human life, we're not talking only about physical life or physical health. We're talking about the whole constellation of values that make humans human.”We can’t leave some humans out Human goodness and God’s creation “What we’re called toward is a union with God, and that’s a unique love” The call to love and its relationship to dignityLove and the Trinity Are there certain capacities specific to human beings? “My value has not diminished because of my age” What risks should we take when we talk about our physical life?What is the relationship between physicality and dignity?Sometimes it’s worth risking physical life and health for other goods Singing Bach: Hare knowing the base part of the B minor Mass by heartShould we stop signing in choirs? Can we justify the risk for the sake of music?“Singing Bach is what makes us human. It’s what the old theologians would have called perfection”Risk taking and individuality; Christ’s self sacrifice as the exampleBalance: “Often we speak as though we are balancing the human life against the 30 thousand dollars (of the ICU). But that implies that the two units are commensurable with each other. Dignity is incommensurable. A human life is not worth any amount of money”But do we rank goods as a society anyway?This physical life is a necessary condition for all the other human goods “The good human life is one that has physical contiguity with other humans, the body that He gave to us”“Each human life is worth His death, He died for each one of us. We know what value He placed on our lives”  

Show Notes“Perhaps, we just need to say it. This is not exactly a hopeful time”“But hope is for the no exit scenario. Hope is for the life teetering on the edge”Fear is more characteristic of our time than hope isOptimism in the late 60s gave way to increasing pessimism in 21st century Theologies of hopelessness are on the rise How Covid has shaped our fear Even before the pandemic, we feared more than we hoped Dystopian movies and literature: we fear the loss of our culture “Fear and hope seem like exclusive experiences, and that’s not entirely wrong, but it isn’t right either”Seneca writes: “Cease to hope and you will cease to fear…. Each alike belongs to a mind that is in suspense, a mind that is fretted by looking forward to the future”To give up on hope is to give up on any form of meaningful life How our humanity is tied to our hope “In fearing, we are still hoping”“The challenge is not to retain hope, but to conquer fear. Not all fear, but the kind of fear that paralyses us”How do we distinguish between hope and mere expectation? “Hope is the thing with feathers/ That perches in the soul/ And sings the tune without the words/ And never stops at all/ And sweetest in the Gale is heard/ And soar must be the storm/ That could abash the little bird/ That kept so many warm/ I've heard it in the chillest land/ And on the strangest sea/ And yet never an extremity,/ It asked a crumb of me” – Emily Dickenson“In hope, a future good, which isn't yet, somehow already is”Luther – "just as love transforms the lover into the beloved, so hope changes the one who hopes into what is hoped for."The present is pregnant with the futureBut hope does not come from what is happening in the present, it is something entirely newHope lives apart from reasonHope and God belong together “The God who creates out of nothing, the God who makes the dead alive, that God justifies hope that is otherwise unreasonable”  

Willie Jennings is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology, Africana Studies, and Religious Studies at Yale University; he is an ordained Baptist minister and is author of The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race and Acts: A Commentary, The Revolution of the Intimate.Show NotesWillie Jennings wrote in Acts: A Theological Commentary on the Bible: "The crowd is always susceptible to the fear that ... clothes the creature. The crowd is the creature exposed in its vulnerability. So nationalistic slogan, religious incantation, or enthusiastic cheering are used to conceal this vulnerability. The volume of a crowd is never an indication of the strength of their faith, but always their vulnerability and oftentimes their fear. The crowd needs faith. A crowd that gains faith shrinks in size and becomes a congregation.” (Page 189)Miroslav asks Willie to explain and elaborate on this passage on crowds and fear."Crowds show us, not so much strength, they show us the vulnerability of the multitude."A congregation is a crowd that has been disciplined, shrunk in size, by the reality of faith. … Of course you can have a congregation that still longs to be a crowd…"“The challenge for Christians is to remember that we are not to fear loss."The deep psychic shock that loss brings: “If anything, loss, for a moment, opens us to the nothingness out of which we’ve come."We should avoid theological or biblical slogans. But how do we speak in ways that align our sight with real hope?Faith as an ability to see and respond without being overcome.The need to be sensitive that at this moment people of faith have already been lifting a burdenWillie’s formation in the African American community of faith—lifting the weight while acknowledging the strain.David Ford on Christianity is inside many constellations of multiple “overwhelming”—being overwhelmed is a part of Christian faith.Christianity that seeks control is unhelpful in a moment like this.One of our greatest challenges with respect to crowds and fear is that "the nationalist imaginary” (h/t Charles Taylor)—playing off the economic well-being of the nation with the well-being of the human creature.Crowds and the formation of political and ideological tribes. Applying crowd thinking and fear mongering to the political landscape."Fear is used to sell almost everything. Risk management is fundamentally a modulation inside the deployment of fear. You cannot have the advertisement industry as it now exists without fear. So many ways of selling the good life for us begins by trafficking in fear. And this can’t be separated from the ways in which our political imaginations work. And this helps to drive the ways in which we imagine our friends and our enemies."People of faith are often the progenitors of fear.Miroslav’s background as a religious minority in the former Yugoslavia. “Christian faith was born in the fires of persecution, and now suddenly we’re all up in arms and twisting ourselves into pretzels because there might be some limitations on what we can do."Willie: “Being raised in the African American community, the worry about religious persecution was never a worry. We had other things to worry about than someone persecuting us for our faith. … We were afraid of them killing us, lynching us, shooting us, destroying us."Comparing white fear vs Black fear. Fear of liberal hegemony versus fear for one’s life.Economic inequality and COVID-19: The care of people must become the context within which you think the economy, as opposed to the care of the economy as the context in which you think about people. The impact of COVID-19 on the black community."When America gets a cold, the Black and Latino community gets the flu.” (Willie quoting Cornel West)"They have to dance daily with this virus."Toni Morrison: This is part of the absurdity that blackness must face.With social distancing in place, what does it look like today to act faithfully and do something concretely to address these disparities? Allow the communal dimensions of our faith to move through us bodily. We need to reach out and connect with each other. "The Christian must gestate communion—must always be moving toward communion.""We have to ask once again: How do we understand the good society? The very fibers of our existence are at stake."The structural, as opposed to behavioral, nature of inequalities.Even in the end, there is a beginning.

For the Life of the World is produced by the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. For more info, visit faith.yale.eduDr. Lydia Dugdale, MD is a New York City internal medicine primary care doctor and medical ethicist. She is Associate Professor of Medicine and Director of the Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at Columbia University. Prior to her 2019 move to Columbia, she was the Associate Director of the Program for Biomedical Ethics and founding Co-Director of the Program for Medicine, Spirituality, and Religion at Yale School of Medicine. She edited Dying in the Twenty-First Century, a volume that articulates a bioethical framework for a contemporary art of dying, and is author of The Lost Art of Dying: Reviving Forgotten Wisdom (forthcoming from HarperCollins Summer 2020), a book about a mostly forgotten ethical tradition and text that emerged in response to the Black Plague in the late middle ages: Ars Moriendi, “the art of dying.”-1:10 Drew Collins: introduction to the episode. -1:15 Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night by Dylan Thomas; hear it read by the author here. -2:05 Drew’s introduction of Dr. Lydia Dugdale. -3:18 Beginning of their conversation. -4:00 Lydia’s experience of the current pandemic:  "Every face is a new face ... we’re starting from scratch with everyone... What’s different right now, is that we’re managing sick people without the opportunity to get to know them or their families … we are largely monitoring by computer screens, so we’re really missing out on the human connection.” -5:35 The impact of the lack of human connection on healthcare providers: the situation is dehumanizing for patients and the doctor-patient relationship.-7:34 The meaning of moral injury and the impact of COVID-19 on doctors and healthcare workers’ mental health: comparing military front lines to healthcare front lines. -8:05 Lydia: “But what we’ve experienced in New York is actually far less than what we anticipated.” -8:32 “When you are working really hard to save people’s lives but they aren’t really human in the way that we usually think of doctor’s relating to patients. And I don’t want to suggest that the doctors are dehumanizing the patients but the situation is so dehumanizing.”-9:45 Explication of the term “moral injury”. -13:10 The unsung heroism of essential workers in NYC, already living at the brink of economic peril. -14:20 Lydia describes her own personal fears:-15:05 The non-stop nature of the pandemic impact in NYC. Never-ending ambulance sirens, refrigerated mobile morgues around the city; lack of attention on public school children and the educational impact and the importance of public schools. "We have children who are going hungry because they are dependent on school to eat”; shuttering small businesses, because closing doors for a month is impossible.-17:20 Lydia on the macro-picture of the health-effects of the economic downturn; human flourishing. -18:19 Lydia shares an unpopular, but important view: How the current moment of covid-19 could change the conversation about human finitude, acceptance of our mortality, and the need to prepare for our deaths. -21:25 Ars Moriendi—the art of dying, which has been lost in modern America. -22:26 Lydia explains how her interests in Ars Moriendi were sparked--Lydia’s grandfather’s brushes with death, her family’s frank conversations about the reality of death, and her experiences of other people dying while completing her medical residency. -25:39 “What struck me about the Ars Moriendi (art of dying) is that it was developed in the aftermath of the Bubonic plague outbreak that struck western Europe in the mid-1300s. And was a pastoral response, if you will, to the concerns of the laity--the laypeople--who said ‘look our priests are dying or they’re skipping town; there’s no one to perform burials or last rites; for all we know, this can be damning to our souls; we need some help preparing for death.’” - 27:30 The Ars Moriendi was given to all of the community, including children. It grew out of the pre-Reformation Catholic Church, but eventually was adopted much more broadly, and ended up not being tied to a particular denomination or religion. -29:11 "In order to die well, you’ve got to live well.” Understanding our finitude and working out questions of death in a community. -29:27 In her book she makes the case that, of course, the art of dying is broad, but it should include the constant acknowledgement of one’s finitude that is carried out in a community that helps the person figure out these questions. -31:09 Fear of death, grief, and tapping into the wisdom on ultimate questions about the art of dying.-31:40 See Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss-33:00 "There is a way in which the thought of death or threat of death brings into relief that which we most value."-33:31 A view to our death helps us to answer very important questions about human life and flourishing.-34:01 Practical and personal aspects to the reality of sickness and death during a pandemic, and its implications for personal family life.-37:01 “It took at the very beginning [of the pandemic] an acknowledgement of our finitude. We had to be willing to having those tricky conversations with little kids from the beginning."-37:50 The importance of community for dying well; "Right now, dying from covid-19 in the hospital means dying apart from family...the relational piece is really being challenged..." -38:35 Some doctors have to call patients before they come to inform them of the sad reality that if they pass, they would likely be alone. -39:50 Lydia: “Dying alone is not the same as lonely dying.”-41:34 “The challenges of dying well during covid-19 are surmountable if we are "attended to the tasks of preparing to die well over the course of a lifetime."-42:00 Conclusion. 

Warning: Hello friends, during a part of this episode on the complicated nature of home during a pandemic, the topic of domestic violence comes up. This is a serious and sensitive matter. If you or someone you know is suffering from abuse, call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233, or if you’re unable to speak safely, you can log onto thehotline.org or text LOVEIS to 22522.For more information about the Yale Center for Faith & Culture, visit faith.yale.edu.Follow Miroslav Volf on Twitter: @MiroslavVolfFollow Ryan McAnnally-Linz on Twitter @RJMLinz-0:00 Introduction and teaser.-1:17 Introductory summary of the podcast.-2:14 Ryan McAnnally-Linz begins.-3:10  Ryan: “The world outside ourselves and our most immediate environs has been fundamentally altered by quarantine, by staying at home, by social distancing. It makes everything seem distant and mediated. But the really surprising thing to me is that even home feels less real; it’s less home-like. And you’d think that spending so much time at home would make it feel like it’s the realest thing right now. It should feel especially like home, but, for me at least, it doesn’t. And I wonder why that is.”-3:50 Introduction of the topic of the ambivalence of home--how the meaning of home is often fraught with complexities and dualities. -4:00 Similarly, how covid-19 reveals with greater clarity many of the inequalities that have always been, revealing especially through the lens of the home.-6:10 Supporting resources for sufferers and perpetrators of abuse.-7:40 Miroslav joins the conversation. -8:20 Home, the role of tending, and disarray. -12:00 Miroslav on the growing number of artists who are making their private spaces public. -12:47 Miroslav: “To me it is so interesting that objects of beauty have become important for us; we want to nurture the space to be beautiful in a way with which we can resonate....”-13:39 “... and home is supposed to be this place in which we resonate, resonate with things that are at home--they are our things; they speak to us; they have spoken to us over time.-14:05 “And yet, under a crisis situation, they start to not resonate.” -14:20 Home and dissonance in former Yugoslavia between refugees and hosts in the time of war. -15:20 Miroslav: “I live in a home which has a yard which has this typical New England stone fence, and there are a lot of portions of the fence that are falling apart a little bit. I find myself going out every day when I am spending time with my daughter and mending that fence. I want to set it right. Why do I spend so much time wanting to make this fence nice, when I don’t specifically spend much time in my garden?” -17:57 Ryan: “It’s getting harder for me to imagine other people’s experiences as I stay located in one place and the world seems to shrink a bit. I’m reading way too much news-- I think that’s relatively common these days--but it feels more distant than usual. Because things that aren’t happening in this space aren’t a part of my physical engagement in the world.” -18:30 Miroslav on the porousness of home. “The home is a breathing organism, with open doors and open windows--and sometimes open people come in.” -20:04 Miroslav: “I remember when I bought my house, my dad was chuckling as I was so proudly telling him about how I was an owner of this house. And he told me ‘a house needs a servant, not a master.” I think the other way of putting it was, ‘you think you own this place, but really this place owns you.’”-21:30 Ryan on how covid-19 has revealed inequities that were already going on and, at the same time, has concealed those same inequities. -22:45 Miroslav against those celebrities who call the virus “the great equalizer”. -25:00 Miroslav on the beauty that can come in homes. -26:15 Miroslav on the violence that can come in homes. -26:26 Miroslav: “At one point when I was talking about violence in the world, I have said that the violence that happens in battlefields is nothing compared to the amount of violence that happens, and even the ferocity of the violence, that takes place in homes.” -29:10 Ryan on literal contagion that separates home from “others”, and how he is troubled that that will possibly inform analogies of otherness from now on. -31:20 The ambivalence of home in the Garden of Eden. -32:20 The ambivalence of home in the Parable of the Prodigal Son. -32:30 Miroslav’s interpretation of the parable as the “un-homing of the home.” See Exclusion and Embrace, Chapter III: Embrace.-35:23 Miroslav: “Home has to be a living and breathing and reality--relationships are dynamic. And I think that is the challenge before which we face. That’s why home’s are undeniably beautiful, because there’s this dynamism and possibility of the intimacy of following the changes and shifts and lives of people; participating with them can be fresh and dynamic and extraordinary.” -37:15 Closing notes.

For the Life of the World is produced by the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. For more info, visit faith.yale.eduFollow Miroslav Volf on Twitter: @MiroslavVolf-1:37  Introductory summary of the Podcast-3:35 A diagnosis of the role of fear in our culture today and how we should respond to it--pulling from an earlier podcast.-5:50 Miroslav reflects on how Christians should respond to fear. -6:15 Jesus’ injunction “fear not!” and how we are to properly contextualize that phrase: “It is not a call to disregard or minimize potential danger… to  fear not means to see danger clearly and yet not to be overwhelmed by it’s prospect.” -7:05 Paul on courage in the midst of fear: “We are afflicted but not crushed, perplexed but not driven to despair.” 2 Corinthians 4:8.-7:26 Aristotle’s definition of fear: “Fear is a pain or disturbance due to a mental picture of some destructive or painful evil in the future.” Rhetoric. -8:05 Miroslav reflects on his experience of being constantly interrogated as a young man when he moved back to the former Yugoslavia. He explores this in greater depth in his book, The End of Memory.-8:45 “If I am gripped by fear, when I hear someone telling me not to fear, I am likely to feel even more inadequate and fearful than I already am; I will feel diminished and that will do exact opposite from giving me strength to overcome fear! That’s why in the Bible the injunctions not to fear are tied to (1) assurance that we are cared for—ultimately that God cares for us—and (2) promises that, though we may suffer, we will, ultimately, emerge as conquerors."-9:30 “That’s why in the New Testament all the injunctions to not fear except one come from the mouth of Jesus or angels, which is to say from those who are in fact capable of rescuing us from danger or imparting to us strength to face it.” -10:00 One of Jesus’ most famous teachings on fear: “Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” Luke 12:32. -12:25 Major section of Luke 12 show that the call to not fear was always joined by a call to trust in God--moving through the themes of persecution, the insecurity of wealth, the pointlessness of worry, and worthy objects of our striving. -15:07 Years after Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, Peter offers these thoughts on fear: “But even if you suffer for doing what is right, you are blessed. Do not fear what they fear, and do not be intimidated, but in your heart sanctify Christ as Lord.” 1 Peter 3:13-15. -16:45 Jesus’ first cure to human fear is the fear of God. The second cure is trust in the God who cares for the disciples, including their physical well-being.-17:00 “Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies?” Luke 12:6-7-19:28 “The whole point of this fear not teaching is this: God, the master of the universe and the Lord of history, has promised to give the disciples of Jesus that most important treasure, which is the Kingdom of God itself.” -21:00 Jesus’ fear in the Garden of Gethsemane. “Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet, not what I want, but what you want."  Mark 14:36.  -21:50 Luke on the disciples, who slept because of grief. Luke 22:39-46.-23:34 “But his victory over fear in Gethsemane was a little resurrection before the crucifixion—it made him able to walk into suffering and death with the dignity of the one who was ‘afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair.’”-24:29 Jurgen Moltmann:  “We are released from our fear through Christ’s fear; we are released from our suffering through Christ’s suffering. Paradoxically, these wounds of ours are healed by another's wounds as Isaiah 53 promises of the servant of God.” paraphrase, Experiences of God,  42-43. -26:20 Ryan McAnnally-Linz  joins in discussing the similarities and dissimilarities of the situation of the persecution of the early church and the modern experience of covid-19.  -29:30 An image of the altarpiece for the monastery of the Order of St. Anthony at Isenheim that was painted by Matthias Grünewald can be found here.-32:00 Drew Collins raises a few questions regarding the role of  prayer in conquering fear.  -32:45 Miroslav: “I think for me it’s important  not to interpret this victory over fear as an elimination of fear. Like now Jesus was standing there as a completely fearless, heroic figure. I think this willingness to face danger notwithstanding the fear is what needs to be done.”-35:17 Closing. 

Show NotesFor more information about the Yale Center for Faith & Culture, visit faith.yale.edu.Follow Ryan McAnnally-Linz on Twitter @RJMLinz-0:35 Introduction to the podcast topic and speaker. -1:40 Beginning of Ryan’s reflection on human vulnerability, the response of Stoicism, and the call to Christian love.-1:45 In his book, Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari suggests that, once basic human survival is secured by overcoming famine, war, and pandemics, the natural progression of the human species will be to seek a god-like existence of immortal happiness. -3:55 Stoicism’s vision of the good life: virtue and rejection of attachments to the world. -5:45 “Following the Stoics, we might find ourselves responding to COVID-19 by training ourselves not to be internally affected by the turmoil around us. This training could look like denying the severity of the crisis or teaching ourselves to see it as overblown political theater. It could look like withdrawing our emotional investment in relationships with others, or like focused breathing and meditating the stress away. At its most extreme, it could look like the Stoic practice of memento mori, reflecting on the eventuality of our own deaths to dull the fear of their arrival.”-6:12 A Christian response to Stoicism: love of world and community. -6:30 Romans 12:5-6:45 State of nature or “Bellum omnium contra omnes” Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan-7:19 “Vulnerability per se is neither good nor bad. It is simply a fact of our lives as finite creatures. We depend on other creatures, large ones like the sun in the sky and small ones like the bacteria in our guts, for our very lives, and therefore we are vulnerable to harm. But that does not mean that it’s good to be subject to harm, much less to actually be harmed. It’s not. There are, therefore, forms of vulnerability that we ought to seek to mitigate, for our neighbors, but also for ourselves. The social distancing we’re currently practicing aims at doing just that.”-9:05 “The good that vulnerability points us to is love, caring communion, and intimate connection. The situation with COVID-19 is strangely different, and yet the fundamental good at stake is the same. Health-care workers are, indeed, drawing near to the afflicted, at much risk to themselves. But the vast vulnerability to this virus asks something different from the rest of us. It asks that we keep our distance. Self-isolation is precisely the mode that communion takes under the conditions of this pandemic.”- 9:45 The Parable of the Good Samaritan as a model for Christian love. - 10:53 Closing.

For the Life of the World is produced by the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. For more info, visit faith.yale.eduFollow Miroslav Volf on Twitter: @MiroslavVolfShow Notes-0:12 Introductory Teaser-0:57 Summary and introduction to the topic of this podcast—fear. -3:35 Miroslav begins. -3:40 Thoughts from Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety-4:15 “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” Proverbs 9:10 -4:50 The two questions we should have toward fear: 1. What do we fear for? 2. What are we afraid of? -6:21 Miroslav Volf: “... we are not just afraid of the virus, we are afraid potentially of everyone and almost everything. A carrier of the virus and, therefore source of danger, is everyone and  everything. Between us and much of what we see and touch there is something like an invisible aura of danger and therefore also an invisible source of fear.”-7:15 Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety-7:28 “Fugitives and wanderers” Paraphrase, Genesis 4:14-8:10 Miroslav: “And, of course, the more we fear, the more we are focused on ourselves and the less we are capable of caring for others. Fear diminishes our other-directedness; fear diminishes our civic mindedness, which is precisely what we need in pandemics.”-9:10 New section: fear of infecting others, Miroslav joined by Matt Croasmun.-9:22 Volf and Croasmun, For the Life of the World: Theology that Makes a Difference -11:27 Matt Croasmun: “...I’ve found myself thinking about to what extent Christian ethics are good at thinking about moral actions that you can only ever evaluate in terms of the statistical likelihoods of causing harm. It’s one thing to think ethically about I take an action and I see that someone is harmed and here it is I am taking an action, and I don’t know if someone is harmed and the best I could do would only ever get me to a probabilistic estimation of harms that I could be causing people that I’ll never see. That somehow runs around some of the psychology of the Christian ethic of love of neighbor—a neighbor that I can see.”-14:23 New section: Miroslav on living in a culture of fear. -14:45 Frank Furedi, Culture of Fear: Risk-Taking and the Morality of Low Expectation and How Fear Works: Culture of Fear in the Twenty-First Century-16:13 “Like people, saying, ‘peace, peace,’ when there is no peace” (Ezekiel 13:10)-16:30 “Unnecessary products that promise protection from imagined or exaggerated harms” Bader/Baker/Day/Gordon, Fear Itself-17:20 Reference to Psalm 137:4-18:28 “The Black Death” [1346-53], which killed 75-200 million, or the “Spanish Flu Pandemic”        [1918], which killed 20-50 million.-20:05  Risk Societies by Ulrich Beck -21:00 Miroslav: “When a bacterial or a viral pandemic like COVID-19 breaks out, the social pandemic of fear is not far behind.That’s partly because when we see others fearing, we catch the malady of fear ourselves; fear is infectious; that’s partly also because the culture of fear has weakened our immunity to fear.”-22:20 New Section: Miroslav and Drew Collins on the location of God in the midst of fear. -23:21 Drew Collins: “When I think about the contagiousness of fear, we could also describe it as coercive—there’s a way in which our fears are foisted upon other people. Even when in more and more spots, misperceptions of potential dangers and in some ways, making those invented dangers real and making people grapple with them as well.”-24:30 1 Kings 19-25:30 Drew: “And what I take from that is we often expect of ourselves to respond to fear with action. We expect God, we pray to God to alleviate our fears by acting, changing something. But what if the passage suggests that God’s promise in the midst of fear—real, genuine fear—is first and foremost not some grand gesture or grand action or even a response. But just the promise of God’s presence. A promise and trust that God is real and present in a direct way but hidden.” -26:20 Endnotes.

For the Life of the World is produced by the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. For more info, visit faith.yale.eduFollow Miroslav Volf on Twitter: @MiroslavVolf-0:45 Introduction to the podcast (Evan Rosa)-2:22 Beginning of Miroslav’s thoughts. -3:30 What responding to the pandemic looks like for those professions that directly engage with tangible issues. -4:20 What responding to the pandemic looks like for theologians and non-working Christians. -6:00 “The question for all of us is how do we live with this disruption? How do we live with this menacing cloud that is over us? And the Christian faith—and I think theology as well—has something very important to say to that very question...The central question of the Christian faith is what kind of life is worthy of our humanity?-7:30 “The Christmas story, as you will recall, describes the coming of Christ into the world as ‘light shining into darkness’ [John 1:5]—darkness of imperial oppression, darkness of widespread destitution, darkness of incurable diseases, darkness of hunger, darkness of vulnerability, darkness of precarity of our fragile lives. And what better underscores the fragility of our lives than the pandemic that we are experiencing right now!”-8:23  “The question about the true, flourishing life for Christians is always a question of how to live that kind of a life as we are surrounded by the forces that push us to make our lives and the living of our lives false, to stifle the flourishing of our lives, to the make us languish—or to express it with the Psalmist, who was writing during the Israelite exile in Babylon; "how can we sing the Lord’s song in the strange land?" [Psalm 137:4] The current pandemic is just such strange land. We are now in many ways in exile; We’re now in the strange land; we’re now in the strange land in our very homes. Can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”-10:00 Is it possible that isolation can mean more than empty time—Netflix and snacking? -11:00 fundamental questions going forward: “How can we live so as not to betray our own humanity, the humanity of our loved ones, and the humanity of our neighbors? How can we do so as we live under oppressive conditions of the pandemic? The key question for us is to consider in this series of conversations we are about to introduce is What does it mean to say at this time that the God of Jesus Christ, the healer of the sick, the critic of powers, and the crucified and resurrected Savior... what does it mean to say that this God is our God?”-12:20 Closing.