Trinity Forum Conversations

Alan Noble, an English professor and author exploring faith, technology, culture, and literature, discusses how to live meaningfully amid cultural confusion. He examines seven virtues: prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance, faith, hope, and love. The conversation explores belonging, courage, community, disillusionment, rooted identity, discipleship, and pursuing the common good through ordinary local practices.

The relationship of Christian believers to government has long been fraught, from Jesus’ time to today. The command to love God, our neighbor, even our enemies can flatly contradict the world’s exaltation of power and domination, and the obligations that attend citizenship in the kingdom of God are often in tension with those of the kingdom of man. Reconciling Paul’s reminder to the Philippians that our citizenship is in heaven with his admonition in Romans 13 to respect governing authorities is often less than clear cut. What are our obligations as citizens in a fallen world?Trinity Forum Senior Fellow Russell Moore joins us to delve into these hard questions. You may find his timely piece in Christianity Today, “Christians, Let’s Stop Abusing Romans 13,” a helpful read to accompany this conversation.This podcast episode is drawn from an Online Conversation in 2026. You can view the transcript and other resources here. Also! Renovaré is hosting its annual Book Club — four books read in community from October to May, guided by scholars and authors, with weekly podcast conversations and discussion groups. This season's lineup and registration: https://renovare.org/bookclubGo deeper into the issues discussed in this episode with these Trinity Forum Readings:• Letter From Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King, Jr.• Who Stands Fast? by Dietrich Bonhoeffer• City of God by St. Augustine• Politics, Morality, & Civility by Václav Havel

Barry Rowan, business leader and author of The Spiritual Art of Business with Harvard Business School experience, shares a life-shaped view of work. He discusses bringing meaning to work from the inside out. He explores prayer, journaling, stewardship, surrendered leadership, AI’s effects, avoiding burnout, mentorship, and redeeming conflict.

Mia Chung, concert pianist and leader of MIT’s Octet Collaborative, explores music, beauty, and how imagination reshapes moral perception. Malcolm Guite, Anglican priest and poet steeped in Arthurian and literary tradition, reflects on poetry, incarnation, and imagination as a truth-bearing faculty. They discuss music’s temporal power, the moral force of beauty, and how imagination incarnates meaning.

Curt Thompson, psychiatrist focused on relational neurobiology and spiritual formation, and David French, columnist and attorney who writes on law and civic life, discuss hope as an antidote to confusion, cynicism, and nihilism. They explore how loneliness fuels radicalization, the power of unconditional friendship, embodied in-person encounters, the harms of polarized media, and practical practices like modeling decency and repairable relationships.

Haejin Shim Fujimura, a lawyer and anti-trafficking advocate who weaves healing and restoration into justice work, and Makoto Fujimura, a visual artist blending Christian themes with East Asian aesthetics, explore how beauty and repair belong together. They discuss kintsugi as sacred repair, making institutions beautiful, cultivating sanctified imagination, and art and advocacy converging in generational restoration.

Tish Harrison Warren, Anglican priest and author of What Grows in Weary Lands, reflects on spiritual weariness and the practices that root faith. She explores dryness as apprenticeship, resisting distraction and constant reinvention, the value of embodied habits like prayer and Sabbath, and why communal stability rather than rugged individualism builds lasting resilience.

Ben Sasse, former U.S. senator and university president facing terminal cancer, reflects on faith, mortality, family, and civic formation. He discusses treatment updates and why speaking about dying matters. He explores small-town formation, the value of deep friendship, production over consumption, formation of men and boys, and family rituals that ground a flourishing life.

In March, we welcomed Malcolm Guite for an in-person event to celebrate his new book, Galahad and the Grail, which is the first in his Merlin’s Isle trilogy published through Rabbit Room Press. While he was with us, Malcolm sat for this podcast interview in which he described his vision in creating this epic ballad, along with offering a deep exploration of what brought him to poetry in the first place. Since the book’s release, Galahad and the Grail has topped bestselling charts and received numerous accolades, demonstrating that its ancient stories find renewal in our modern era. You can watch the video of the full conversation on our Youtube Channel hereRecommended Trinity Forum Readings: God’s Grandeur: The Poems of Gerard Manley HopkinsFour Quartets, by T.S. Eliot with an introduction by Makoto FujimuraThe Pardoner’s Tale, by Geoffrey Chaucer

We live in an unforgiving age. Even as we know that Jesus commanded forgiveness, extending it can seem impossible, impractical, self-harming, even unjust. In these times of outrage and fear, what can help us become forgiving people?Author Amy Orr-Ewing joined us for a recent online conversation, where we explored these questions for a live audience:"The church needs to recapture the vision of forgiveness as an actuality. This is something real rooted in the sacrifice of Jesus at the cross. And it's that that has actually been the animating force of the Christian faith throughout history."This episode is drawn from an Online Conversation in 2026. You can view the transcript and other resources here.Recommended Trinity Forum Readings: Confessions; AugustineWrestling With God; Simone WeilPurchase of a Soul; Victor HugoRevelations of Divine Love; Julian of Norwich