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

Miroslav Volf presents a previously unreleased clip of his conversation with Yale philosopher John Hare, focusing on the treatment of essential workers, the meaning of dignity and respect, and the incommensurable value of human life. Miroslav offers extended commentary on capitalism, Christianity, and economic values in the midst of pandemic.Reference: David Brooks, "America Is Facing 5 Epic Crises All at Once" New York Times, June 25, 2020.Reference: What Is a Human Life Worth? / John Hare & Miroslav VolfShow NotesA conversation with John Hare in light of the multiple national crises of 2020.What’s our responsibility as a society towards people who we require to take risks, such as medical staff during the pandemic?Valuing a person before versus after a crisis, and the respect dignity requires.Organizing our economic lives.Start with a person and their values, and then construct an economy.Making our neighbors ends our own ends.Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of CapitalismA morally responsible economic system.Jesus Christ is the Lord of the Sabbath, and our every life and everyday work.

"Religion is most dangerous when it is superficial—when it serves to mark my identity as belonging to a different group than you. And when it's a tool in a politician's hands to legitimize their power. Then they just use religion to mark and to validate what they want to do in any case. And that ends up being really a kind of desacralization of faith. That which is holy has been completely turned to a means of a secular, profane end that bears no relation to the content of that which is holy." Lauren Green, Chief Religion Correspondent at Fox News, interviews Miroslav Volf for her podcast, Lighthouse Faith. They discuss his his book Exclusion & Embrace, his views on sin, racism, identity, religion and power, forgiveness, and the will to embrace. This episode contains an interview, reproduced in its entirety, between Lauren Green and Miroslav Volf, which originally appeared at here. Used with permission from Fox News Radio.Show NotesLauren Green, Lighthouse FaithMiroslav Volf, Exclusion and EmbraceCreating subhuman terms leads to justified oppression.Christianity is a law of love.The spirit of exclusionResponding as a Christian to violence around us.Exclusion and Embrace is born out of this attempt to respond Christianly to the world around us.Ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia.Two prodigal sons.Contemporary America through the lens of exclusion.Sin as transpersonal and personal.Exclusion as domination.Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's Letter from a Birmingham JailReligion is most dangerous when it is superficial.The will to embrace.Opening oneself up to experience something that might seem scary and unacceptable, but is a journey full of hope.The importance of forgiveness.Discover what is beautiful within someone who is different than you.

Matthew Croasmun interviews Pastor Josh Williams (Elm City Vineyard, New Haven, CT) about being a black pastor of a multi-ethnic church in New Haven. In this conversation, Williams provides a window into the incarnational theology that truly makes a difference in the world; he reflects on how increased attention to police involved violence against black life has impacted his life and vocation; he focuses on lament as the first step toward action and justice, but talks about joy and spiritual discipline in the act of protest, and finally, reflects on the fundamentally challenging question everyone is wrestling with right now: What does it mean to love our whole city?Show NotesJosh Williams, Elm City Vineyard ChurchA pastor’s perspective on increased national attention to police-involved shootings since 2014.Leading community through following Jesus in the face of racial violenceThe difficulties of multi-ethnic community in these times.The assumption that police are good and trying to do right.An expectation that the nation is just.A practice of lamentThe “Night of Joy”Joy is critical because his existence as a black person in American is a protest.Bittersweet joy versus vibrant joyJoy helps us remember the truth of the fight.Living for the sake of the Black and Brown community in New Haven.Christian responsibility to the ethics of justice.Hopes for the work of understanding from the police.Hopes and demands.

Theologian Keri Day shares her experience as a black woman and a theologian, not only of the past week, but the long history of racism in America, stemming from the racially inflected roots of America’s founding and emerging even from history that has been erased. She and Miroslav Volf discuss her whole vision of individual and social justice through the lens of Christian faith and practice. Keri also provides a gripping example of redeeming dangerous memories in the form of the 1921 Tulsa Black Wall Street Massacre.Show NotesKeri Day, Unfinished Business: Black Women, the Black Church, and the Struggle to Thrive in America, and Religious Resistance to Neoliberalism: Womanist and Black feminist Perspectives.Watching the events of June 2020 in the U.S. as a black woman.This moment stands within a long history.A theology of protest, Jesus is confronting powers.Christian motivation for embracing difference.We are called to be the hands and feet of Christ.How the gospels have been read by different communities.Breonna Taylor as an example of the diversity of those who are vulnerable to police brutality.The shift in women’s incarceration.The importance of interior transformation.A marriage of Marx and KierkegaardResistance begins in the interior space.Confronting the fear of doing things wrong socially or theologically.Retrieving and redeeming dangerous memories.The Tulsa Riot of 1921 and erased history.The Gospel mandate and racial justice.

Guest contributor Willie Jennings (Yale) offers a response to the death of George Floyd and the black experience of racism and police brutality. In order to practice the discipline of hope, he suggests that we must take hold of a shared anger, hate what God hates, reshape communities with attention to the violence of segregation, and rethink the formation of police officers and our understanding of criminality.faith.yale.eduShow NotesDr. Willie Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of RaceJenning’s first time being pulled over by a white police officer, at age 14.A first experience of helplessnessHelplessness forms a person for a lifelong fight against hopelessness.Hope is a discipline, not a sentiment.Living the discipline of hope in the USA requires anger.Anger connected to the righteous indignation of God.This connection is dependent on two characteristics: the destruction of life, and that it is shareable.The righteous indignation of God is meant to be shared.God invites us into shared fury.Jesus keeps anger from touching hatred.Everything built in the US is built on the sinking sand of race and class and greed and is under the control of financial capitalism.Hope, turn to communities, and rethink the formation of police officers.How might hope be shared through the sharing  of anger, which is bound to God.

"Before speaking about victims and to victims I need to listen. We all who are not victims need to listen." In a follow-up to his May 30 response to the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd, Miroslav Volf speaks frankly about the necessity of listening to black perspectives about racism, police brutality, and the history and continuous experience of black suffering.faith.yale.eduShow NotesPolice brutality and the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery and George FloydMiroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of IdentityExclusion’s specific expression in racism in this countryThe book is from the perspective of the victimsEmbarking on the difficult journey of embraceEven when every fiber of their bodies and all the steerings of their souls want to counter violence with violence and exclusion with exclusion”Miroslav’s home town in Croatia was under siege:“I wrote the entire book primarily for myself. It's many pages are one lengthy attempt to discern what the integrity of the Christian response looks like when a third of your country gets occupied and thousands of its inhabitants get ethnically cleansed”Anger and doing what needs to be done“What I still believe needed to be done was to make a costly journey into what Martin Luther King called the beloved community”The European colonial project and the inheritance of whiteness“My whiteness is my privilege”“Before speaking about victims, I need to listen…We all who are not victims need to listen”“If I think that I already understand the other and their behavior, I have intellectually closed myself to them”Betrayal and solidarityViolent protests spreading across the country in response to the death of George Floyd“We also failed to speak the name of Briana Taylor. A black woman who was killed by police in her Louisville, Kentucky home in March. These realities require faithful and courageous Christian response much needed exercise in public theology”Willie Jennings, a professor at Yale and a leading theological voice in this country, will return to the podcast to offer his own commentary on our situationHe will be joined by Carrie Day, a professor of constructive theology and African-American religion at Princeton Theological Seminary“I invite you to take time, to listen and open yourself up for what they have to say”

Miroslav Volf responds to the recent killing of unarmed black men, Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd. Exclusion takes many forms, but  is marked by both a pursuit of false purity and a failure to see the other as fully human. Visit faith.yale.edu for more information.Show NotesA brief response to the recent killings of unarmed black men, Ahmad Arbery and George Floyd.Exclusion’s many forms are all a pursuit of false purity and failure to see another’s humanity.Ahmad Aubrey and George Floyd’s deaths embody what happens when we close ourselves off to others.Community & porous identities.A metaphor of embraceIf we only insist on our own identities, rights, and goods, violence will follow.Creating a new cultural milieu.Exclusion operating as dehumanizationA Christian responseSeeing others with the eyes of Christ

Miroslav Volf investigates the darker side of hope, explaining what it means to “hope against hope” (Romans 4:18) and “hope in what we do not see” (Romans 8:25). He concludes with hope’s connection to patient endurance. This is the second of a two-part series on hope.For comments, questions, suggested topics, or just to say hello, email faith@yale.edu.Visit faith.yale.edu for more information.Show Notes“Genuine hope remains alive when there is no good reason to expect something positive in the future."“We hope in what we do not see.” (Romans 8:25)Martin Luther on “hope not seen""For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.” (Romans 8:24-27)Hope transfers a person “into the unknown, the hidden, and the dark shadow, so that he does not even know what he hopes for.” Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, 25:364"Hope is open to the difference between how we imagined fulfillment and how it arrived, openness even to recognize in the actual fulfillment what we in fact have wanted all along.""We are most in need of hope in threatening situations which we cannot control; but it is in those same situations that it is most difficult for us not to lose hope. That is where patience and endurance come in.""Hope needs endurance and endurance needs hope. Or: Genuine endurance is marked by hope; and genuine hope is marked by endurance."Jürgen Moltmann, from “On Patience”: “In my youth, I learned to know ‘the God of hope’ and loved the beginnings of a new life with new ideas. But in my old age I am learning to know ‘the God of patience’ and stay in my place in life. … Without endurance, hope turns superficial and evaporates when it meets first resistances. In hope we start something new, but only endurance helps us persevere. Only tenacious endurance makes hope sustainable.  We learn endurance only with the help of hope. On the other hand, when hope gets lost, endurance turns into passivity.  Hope turns endurance into active passivity. In hope we affirm the pain that comes with endurance, and learn to tolerate it.” (Jürgen Moltmann, Über Geduld, Barmherzikeit und Solidarität (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2018)Hope is for no-exit situations.

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”