Episodes

  • How to Read Simone Weil, Part 3: The Existentialist / Deborah Casewell

    How to Read Simone Weil, Part 3: The Existentialist / Deborah Casewell
    Dec 26 2024
    “All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception.” … “It is necessary to uproot oneself. To cut down the tree and make of it a cross, and then to carry it every day.” … “I have to imitate God who infinitely loves finite things in that they are finite things.” … “To know that what is most precious is not rooted in existence—that is beautiful. Why? It projects the soul beyond time.”(Simone Weil, Gravity & Grace)“That's how the figure of Christ comes into this idea of the madness of love. It's that kind of mad, self emptying act completely. And it's the  one thing, she says, it's the only thing that means that you  are able to love properly. Because to love properly, and therefore to be just properly, you have to love like Christ does. Which is love to the extent that you, that you empty yourself and, you know, die on a cross.” (Deborah Casewell, from this episode)This is the third installment of a short series on How to Read Simone Weil—as the Mystic, the Activist, and the Existentialist.This week, Evan Rosa invites Deborah Casewell, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chester, author of Monotheism & Existentialism, and Co-Director of the Simone Weil Research Network in the U.K.—to explore how to read Simone Weil the Existentialist.Together they discuss how her life of extreme self-sacrifice importantly comes before her philosophy; how to understand her central, but often confusing concept of decreation; her approach to beauty as the essential human response for finding meaning in a world of force and necessity; the madness of Jesus Christ as the only way to engage in struggle for justice and how she connects that to the Greek tragedy of Antigone, which is the continuation of the Oedipus story; and, the connection between love, justice, and living a life of madness.About Simone WeilSimone Weil (1909–1943) was a French philosopher, mystic, and political activist. She’s the author of Gravity and Grace, The Need for Roots, and Waiting for God—among many other essays, letters, and notes.About Deborah CasewellDeborah Casewell is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chester, author of Monotheism & Existentialism, and is Co-Director of the Simone Weil Research Network in the U.K.Show NotesSimone Weil’s Gravity & Grace (1947) (Available Online)Deborah Casewell’s Monotheism & ExistentialismSimone de Beauvoir’s anecdote in Memories of a Beautiful Daughter: “Shouldn’t we also get people’s minds, not just their bodies? Weil: “You’ve never been hungry have you?”Leon Trotsky yells violently at WeilThe odd idolizing of Weil without paying attention to her writing”You get a kind of, as you say, a kind of odd idolization of her, or a sense in which  you can't then interact so critically   or systematically with her philosophy, because her figure stands in the way so much, and the kind of the respect that people have.”Anti-Semitism despite JewishnessSimone Weil’s relationship to food: an unhealthy role model“She’d reject anything that wasn’t perfect.”Extreme germophobeExpression of solidarity with the unfortunateHer life comes before her philosophy. Being, you might say, comes before thinking.Weil’s life of extreme self-sacrifice as “mad”—alienating, insane, strange to the outside world.“ I think an essential part of, to an essential part of understanding her is to understand that   world is kind of structured and  set up in such a way that it runs without God, without the supernatural, God's kind of abdicated through the act of creation. And as a result, the universe operates through necessity and through force. So left to its own devices, the universe, I think, tends towards crushing people.”Abandonment vs abdicationPeople possess power and ability and action—a tension between activity and passivityWeil’s Marxism and theory of labor and workActivity becomes sustained passivityConsent, power, and the social dynamics of force and necessityI think she sees the best human existence is to be in a state of obedience instead. And so what you have to do is relinquish power over people.The complexity of human relationships“She was a very individual person … a singular, individual life.”The Need for Roots“And this is what I do like about Simone Weil—is that she's always happy to let contradictions exist. And so when she describes human nature and the needs of the soul, they're contradictory. They all contradict each other. It's freedom and obedience.”Creating dualismsShe is a dualistSimone Weil on Beauty and Decreation”Decreation is essentially your way to exist in the world ruled by force and necessity without succumbing  to force and necessity, because in a way there's less  of you to succumb to force and necessity.”Platonic idea of MetaxuWeil on the human experience of beauty—” people ...
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    1 hr and 6 mins
  • How to Read Simone Weil, Part 2: The Activist / Cynthia Wallace

    How to Read Simone Weil, Part 2: The Activist / Cynthia Wallace
    Dec 18 2024
    “What are you going through?” This was one of the central animating questions in Simone Weil’s thought that pushed her beyond philosophy into action. Weil believed that genuinely asking this question of the other, particularly the afflicted other, then truly listening and prayerfully attending, would move us toward an enactment of justice and love.Simone Weil believed that any suffering that can be ameliorated, should be.In this episode, Part 2 of our short series on How to Read Simone Weil, Cynthia Wallace (Associate Professor of English at St. Thomas More College at the University of Saskatchewan), and author of The Literary Afterlives of Simone Weil: Feminism, Justice, and the Challenge of Religion and Evan Rosa discuss the risky self-giving way of Simone Weil; her incredible literary influence, particularly on late 20th century feminist writers; the possibility of redemptive suffering; the morally complicated territory of self-sacrificial care and the way that has traditionally fallen to women and minorities; what it means to make room and practicing hospitality for the afflicted other; hunger; the beauty of vulnerability; and that grounding question for Simone Weil political ethics, “What are you going through?”We’re in our second episode of a short series exploring How to Read Simone Weil. She’s the author of Gravity and Grace, The Need for Roots, and Waiting for God—among many other essays, letters, and notes—and a deep and lasting influence that continues today.In this series, we’re exploring Simone Weil the Mystic, Simone Weil the Activist, Simone Weil the Existentialist. And what we’ll see is that so much of her spiritual, political, and philosophical life, are deeply unified in her way of being and living and dying.And on that note, before we go any further, I need to issue a correction from our previous episode in which I erroneously stated that Weil died in France. And I want to thank subscriber and listener Michael for writing and correcting me.Actually she died in England in 1943, having ambivalently fled France in 1942 when it was already under Nazi occupation—first to New York, then to London to work with the Free French movement and be closer to her home.And as I went back to fix my research, I began to realize just how important her place of death was. She died in a nursing home outside London. In Kent, Ashford to be precise. She had become very sick, and in August 1943 was moved to the Grosvenor Sanitorium.The manner and location of her death matter because it’s arguable that her death by heart failure was not a self-starving suicide (as the coroner reported), but rather, her inability to eat was a complication rising from tuberculosis, combined with her practice of eating no more than the meager rations her fellow Frenchmen lived on under Nazi occupation.Her biographer Richard Rees wrote: "As for her death, whatever explanation one may give of it will amount in the end to saying that she died of love.In going back over the details of her death, I found a 1977 New York Times article by Elizabeth Hardwick, and I’ll quote at length, as it offers a very fitting entry into this week’s episode on her life of action, solidarity, and identification with and attention to the affliction of others.“Simone Weil, one of the most brilliant, and original minds of 20th century France, died at the age of 34 in a nursing home near London. The coroner issued a verdict of suicide, due to voluntary starvation—an action undertaken at least in part out of wish not to eat more than the rations given her compatriots in France under the German occupation. The year of her death was 1943.“The willed deprivation of her last period was not new; indeed refusal seems to have been a part of her character since infancy. What sets her apart from our current ascetics with their practice of transcendental meditation, diet, vegetarianism, ashram simplicities, yoga is that with them the deprivations and rigors‐are undergone for the pay‐off—for tranquility, for thinness, for the hope of a long life—or frequently, it seems, to fill the hole of emptiness so painful to the narcissist. With Simone Well it was entirely the opposite.“It was her wish, or her need, to undergo misery, affliction and deprivation because such had been the lot of mankind throughout history. Her wish was not to feel better, but to honor the sufferings of the lowest. Thus around 1935, when she was 25 years old, this woman of transcendent intellectual gifts and the widest learning, already very frail and suffering from severe headaches, was determined to undertake a year of work in a factory. The factories, the assembly lines, were then the modem equivalent of “slavery,” and she survived in her own words as “forever a slave.” What she went through at the factory “marked me in so lasting a manner that still today when any human being, whoever he may be and in whatever circumstances, speaks to me ...
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    1 hr and 11 mins
  • How to Read Simone Weil: The Mystic / Eric O. Springsted

    How to Read Simone Weil: The Mystic / Eric O. Springsted
    Dec 12 2024
    This episode is the first of a short series exploring How to Read Simone Weil. The author of Gravity and Grace, The Need for Roots, and Waiting for God—among many other essays, letters, and notes, Weil has been an inspiration to philosophers, poets, priests, and politicians for the last century—almost all of it after her untimely death. She understood, perhaps more than many other armchair philosophers from the same period, the risk of philosophy—the demands it made on a human life.In this series, we’ll feature three guests who look at this magnificent and mysterious thinker in interesting and refreshing, and theologically and morally challenging ways.We’ll look at Simone Weil the Mystic, Simone Weil the Activist, Simone Weil the Existentialist.First we’ll be hearing from Eric Springsted, a co-founder of the American Weil Society and its long-time president—who wrote Simone Weil: Late Philosophical Writings and Simone Weil for the Twenty-First Century.In this conversation, Eric O. Springsted and Evan Rosa discuss Simone Weil’s personal biography, intellectual life, and the nature of her spiritual and religious and moral ideas; pursuing philosophy as a way of life; her encounter with Christ, affliction, and mystery; her views on attention and prayer; her concept of the void, and the call to self-emptying; and much more.About Simone WeilSimone Weil (1909–1943) was a French philosopher, mystic, and political activist. She’s the author of Gravity and Grace, The Need for Roots, and Waiting for God—among many other essays, letters, and notes.About Eric O. SpringstedEric O. Springsted is the co-founder of the American Weil Society and served as its president for thirty-three years. After a career as a teacher, scholar, and pastor, he is retired and lives in Santa Fe, NM. He is the author and editor of a dozen previous books, including Simone Weil: Late Philosophical Writings and Simone Weil for the Twenty-First Century.Show NotesEric O. Springsted’s Simone Weil for the Twenty-First CenturyHow to get hooked on Simone Weil“All poets are exiles.”Andre WeilEmile ChartierTaking ideas seriously enough to impact your lifeWeil’s critique of Marxism: “Reflections on the Cause of Liberty and Social Oppression”:  ”an attempt to try and figure out how there can be freedom and dignity in human labor and action”“Unfortunately she found affliction.”Ludwig Wittgenstein: “Philosophy is a matter of working on yourself.”Philosophy “isn’t simply objective. It’s a matter of personal morality as well.””Not only is the unexamined life not worth living, but virtue and intellect go hand in hand. Yeah. You don't have one without the other.”An experiment in how work and labor is doneThe demeaning and inherently degrading nature of factory workChristianity as “the religion of slaves.”Christianity can’t take away suffering; but it can take away the meaninglessness.George Herbert: “Love bade me welcome / But my soul drew back guilty of dust and sin”Weil’s vision/visit of Christ during Holy Week in Solemn, France: “It was like the smile on a beloved face.”The role of mysteryWeil’s definition of mystery:  ”What she felt mystery was, and she gets a definition of it, it's when two necessary lines of thought cross and are irreconcilable, yet if you suppress one of them, somehow light is lost.”Her point is that whatever good comes out of this personal contact with Christ, does not erase the evil of the suffering.What is “involvement in contradiction”“She thought contradiction was an inescapable mark of truth.”Contradictions that shed light on life.Why mysticism is important for Weil: “The universe cannot be put into a box with techniques or tricks or our own scientific methods or philosophical methods. … Mystery instills humility and it takes the question of the knowing ego out of the picture. … And it challenges modern society to resist the idea that faith could be reduced to a dogmatic system.”“Faith is not a matter of the intellect.”“Intellect is not the highest faculty. Love is.”“The Right Use of School Studies”“Muscular effort of attention”She wanted to convert her Dominican priest friend into the universality of grace—that Plato was a pre-Chrisitan.” (e.g., her essay, “ Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks”)“Grace is universal.”How school studies contribute to the love of GodPrayer as attentionWeil on Attention: “Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object. It means holding in our minds within the reach of this thought, but on the lower level and not in contact with it. The diverse knowledge we have acquired. Which we are forced to make use of. Above all our thought should be empty waiting, not seeking anything but ready to receive in its naked truth. The object that is to penetrate it.”Not “detached,” but “...
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    59 mins
  • Open the Gates: Immigration & the Book of Revelation / Yii-Jan Lin

    Open the Gates: Immigration & the Book of Revelation / Yii-Jan Lin
    Dec 4 2024
    Why do we have countries? Why do we mark this land and these people as distinct from that land and those people? What are countries for? Yii-Jan Lin (Associate Professor of New Testament, Yale Divinity School) joins Matt Croasmun to discuss her new book, Immigration and Apocalypse, which traces the development of distinctly American ideas about the meaning of a country, its borders, and crossing those borders through immigration—exploring how the biblical book of Revelation has influenced our modern geopolitical map.Together they discuss the eschatological vision of Christopher Columbus; the Puritanical founding of New Haven, Connecticut to be the New Jerusalem; Ronald Reagan’s America as “City on a Hill”; the politics of COVID; the experience of Asian American immigrants in the 19th century; and how scripture shapes the American imagination in surprising and sometimes troubling ways.About Yii-Jan LinYii-Jan Lin is Associate Professor of New Testament at Yale Divinity School. She specializes in immigration, textual criticism, the Revelation of John, critical race theory, and gender and sexuality. Her book *Immigration and Apocalypse: How the Book of Revelation Shaped American Immigration* (Yale University Press 2024), focuses on the use of Revelation in political discourse surrounding American immigration—in conceptions of America as the New Jerusalem and of unwanted immigrants as the filthy, idolatrous horde outside the city walls.Her book The Erotic Life of Manuscripts (Oxford 2016), examines how metaphors of race, family, evolution, and genetic inheritance have shaped the goals and assumptions of New Testament textual criticism from the eighteenth century to the present.Professor Lin has been published in journals such as the Journal of Biblical Literature, Early Christianity, and TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism. She is co-chair of the Minoritized Criticism and Biblical Interpretation section of the Society of Biblical Literature, on the steering committee for the Ethnic Chinese Biblical Colloquium, and on the steering committees for the New Testament Textual Criticism and the Bible in America sections of SBL. She also serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Biblical Literature. Professor Lin is a member of the Society of Asian Biblical Studies, the European Association of Biblical Studies, and an elected member of Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas.Show NotesGet your copy of *Immigration and Apocalypse: How the Book of Revelation Shaped American Immigration, by* Yii-Jan LinIllustration: “John of Patmos watches the descent of New Jerusalem from God in a 14th-century tapestry”—modified and collaged by Evan RosaChristopher Columbus’s eschatological visionThe Book of Revelation and the heavenly cityThe meaning of “apocalypse”New Haven as New JerusalemJohn Davenport (April 9, 1597 – May 30, 1670) was an English Puritan clergyman and co-founder of the American colony of New Haven.Ronald Reagan and America as a “shining city on a hill”America as God’s cityRevelation 21, The New Jerusalem“A door that’s always open”1983 as the “Year of the Bible”Exclusion, open gates, and America’s immigration policyHospitalityOutside the gates“For some reason, the seer doesn't see just an open  landscape. He sees these definite walls and definite  gates, even though they're open.”The book of deeds and the book of lifeBureaucracy, and entry and exclusion into heavenThe Good PlaceWhat was immigration like in the Greco-Roman world?Citizenship lists, registrations, and ways of keeping people out“If Heaven Has a Gate, a Wall, and Extreme Vetting, Why Can't America?“Steve King's tweet in  2019, “Heaven Has a Wall, a Gate, and Strict Immigration Policy, Hell Has Open Borders.”Disease and exclusion (COVID-19)Disease came from colonizers“Disease as a divine act to clear the land”Chinese exclusion from AmericaMexican exclusion from AmericaICE was created to enforce laws explicitly excluding Chinese immigrantsFilm: An American Tail“The British Invasion”China, Enemy of the West, and the Dragon of Revelation 12Buddha and the dragon vs the whore of Babylon riding a beast“Do American political ideas about immigration start to frame American theological imaginations about the world to come?”God’s kingdom and “Empire”Fears that feed from theological to political registers“What should a Christian posture towards contemporary questions of immigration be?”Xenophobia and fear of the strangerFinality and satisfactionThe theological error of identifying America with the New JerusalemProduction NotesThis podcast featured Yii-Jan LinEdited and Produced by Evan RosaHosted by Evan RosaProduction Assistance by Alexa Rollow, Emily Brookfield, Zoë Halaban, and Kacie BarrettA Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/aboutSupport For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale ...
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    43 mins
  • Letters to a Future Saint / Brad East & Drew Collins

    Letters to a Future Saint / Brad East & Drew Collins
    Nov 21 2024
    “For those of us who are drawn into church  history and church tradition and to reading theology,  there is very little as transformative as realizing that history is populated by women and men like us who tried to follow Christ in their own time and place and culture and circumstances,  some of whom succeeded. … Looking at the saints, they make me want to be a better Christian. They make me want to be a saint.” (Brad East, from the episode)In his recent book, Letters to a Future Saint: Foundations of Faith for the Spiritually Hungry, theologian Brad East addresses future generations of the Church, offering a transmission of Christian faith from society today to society tomorrow. Written as a fellow pilgrim and looking into the lives of saints in the past, he’s writing to that post-literate, post-Christian society, where the highest recommendation of faith is in the transformed life.Today, Drew Collins welcomes Brad East to the show, and together they discuss: the importance of being passed and passing on Christian faith—its transmission; the post-literacy of digital natives (Gen Z and Gen Alpha) and the role of literacy in the acquisition and development of faith; the significance of community in a vibrant Christian faith; the question of apologetics and its effectiveness as a mode of Christian discourse; the need for beauty and love, not just truth, in Christian witness; how to talk about holiness in a world that believes less and less in the reality of sin; the difference between Judas and Peter; and what it means to study the saints and to be a saint.About Brad EastBrad East (PhD, Yale University) is an associate professor of theology in the College of Biblical Studies at Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas. In addition to editing Robert Jenson’s The Triune Story: Collected Essays on Scripture (Oxford University Press, 2019), he is the author of four books: The Doctrine of Scripture (Cascade, 2021), The Church’s Book: Theology of Scripture in Ecclesial Context (Eerdmans, 2022), The Church: A Guide to the People of God (Lexham, 2024), and Letters to a Future Saint: Foundations of Faith for the Spiritually Hungry (Eerdmans, 2024).His articles have been published in Modern Theology, International Journal of Systematic Theology, Scottish Journal of Theology, Journal of Theological Interpretation, Anglican Theological Review, Pro Ecclesia, Political Theology, Religions, Restoration Quarterly, and The Other Journal; his essays and reviews have appeared in The Christian Century, Christianity Today, Comment, Commonweal, First Things, Front Porch Republic, The Hedgehog Review, Living Church, Los Angeles Review of Books, Marginalia Review of Books, Mere Orthodoxy, The New Atlantis, Plough, and The Point. You can found out more, including links to his writing, podcast appearances, and blog, on his personal website: https://www.bradeast.org/.Show NotesLetters to a Future Saint: Foundations of Faith for the Spiritually Hungry by Brad EastThe importance of being passed and passing on Christian faith—its transmissionSpencer Bogle, the reason Brad East is a theologianThe post-literacy of Gen Z and Gen Alpha and the role of literacy in the acquisition and development of faithThe question of apologetics and its effectiveness as a mode of Christian discourseThe need for beauty and love, not just truth, in Christian witnessChristianity pre-exists you, and pre-existed literate society. So it can survive post-literacyTik-Tok and getting off it“We have to have a much broader vision of the Christian life.”The Doctrine of Scripture, by Brad East, Foreword by Katherine SondereggerCartesian Christianity: me alone in a room, maybe with a flashlight and a bibleSpiritual but not religious (H/T Tara Isabella Burton)We’re not saved individuallyAlice in Wonderland and “believing 17 absurd things every day”Is Christian apologetics sub-intellectual and effective?Gavin Ortlund, taking seriously spiritual and moral questions with pastoral warmth and intellectual integrity—”a ministry of Q&A”Bishop Robert Barron and William Lane Craig“People are not going to  be won to the faith through argument. They're going to be won by beauty.”Beauty of lives well-lived, integrity, virtue, and martyrdom“What lies beyond this world is available in part in this world and so good it's worth dying for.”Is Christian apologetics actually for Christians, rather than evangelism?“A person’s life can be an apologetic argument.”James K.A. Smith: “We don’t want to be brains on sticks.”“You’re just going to look bizarre.”“Come and see. … If you see something unique or uniquely powerful here, then stick around.”Saintliness and a cloud of witnessesWhy do the saints matter?The protagonist of Augustine’s Confessions is actually St. Monica.“I want to be like Monica…”“For those of us who are drawn into church  history and church tradition and to reading theology,  there...
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    54 mins
  • How to Read Henry David Thoreau / Lawrence Buell

    How to Read Henry David Thoreau / Lawrence Buell
    Nov 13 2024

    "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.” (Henry David Thoreau, Walden)

    In 1845, when he was 27 years old, Henry David Thoreau walked a ways from his home in Concord, MA and built a small house on a small lake—Walden Pond. He lived there for two years, two months, and two days, and he wrote about it. Walden has since become a classic. A treasure to naturalists and philosophers, historians and hipsters, conservationists and non-violent resistors. Something about abstaining from society and its affordances, reconnecting with the land, searching for something beyond the ordinary, living independently, self-reliantly, intentionally, deliberately.

    Since then, Thoreau has risen to a kind of secular sainthood. Perhaps the first of now many spiritual but not religious, how should we understand Thoreau’s thought, writing, actions, and way of life?

    In this episode, Evan Rosa welcomes Lawrence Buell (Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature Emeritus, Harvard University) for a conversation about how to read Thoreau. He is the author of many books on transcendentalism, ecology, and American literature. And his latest book is Henry David Thoreau: Thinking Disobediently, a brief philosophical biography and introduction to the thought of Thoreau through his two most classic works: “Walden” and “Civil Disobedience.”

    In today’s episode Larry Buell and I discuss Thoreau’s geographical, historical, social, and intellectual contexts; his friendship with Ralph Waldo Emerson; why he went out to live on a pond for 2 years, 2 months, and 2 days and how it changed him; the difference between wildness and wilderness; why we’re drawn to the simplicity of wild natural landscapes and the ideals of moral perfection; the body, the senses, attunement and attention; the connection between solitude and contemplation; the importance of individual moral conscience and the concept of civil disobedience; Thoreau’s one night in jail and the legacy of his political witness; and ultimately, what it means to think disobediently.

    About Lawrence Buell

    Lawrence Buell is Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature Emeritus at Harvard University. Considered one of the founders of the ecocriticism movement, he has written and lectured worldwide on Transcendentalism, American studies, and the environmental humanities. He is the author of many books, including Literary Transcendentalism, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Invention of American Culture, Writing for an Endangered World, and Emerson. His latest book is Henry David Thoreau: Thinking Disobediently, a brief introduction to the thought of Thoreau to his two most classic works: Walden and “Civil Disobedience.”

    Show Notes

    • Henry David Thoreau: Thinking Disobediently (Oxford 2023) by Lawrence Buell
    • Read Walden and “Civil Disobedience” online (via Project Gutenberg)

    Production Notes

    • This podcast featured Lawrence Buell
    • Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
    • Hosted by Evan Rosa
    • Production Assistance by Zoë Halaban, Alexa Rollow, Emily Brookfield, and Kacie Barrett
    • 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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    1 hr
  • Cosmic Connections: Resonating with the World / Charles Taylor & Miroslav Volf

    Cosmic Connections: Resonating with the World / Charles Taylor & Miroslav Volf
    Nov 6 2024

    Has modern humanity lost its connection to the world outside our heads? And can our experience of art and poetry help train us for a more elevated resonance with the cosmos?

    In today’s episode, theologian Miroslav Volf interviews philosopher Charles Taylor about his latest book, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment. In it he turns to poetry to help articulate the human experience of the cosmos we’re a part of.

    Together they discuss the modern Enlightenment view of our relation to the world and its shortcomings; modern disenchantment and the prospects of reenchantment through art and poetry; Annie Dillard and the readiness to experience the world and what it’s always offering; how to hold the horrors of natural life with the transcendent joys; Charles recites some of William Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” and Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “The Windhover”; how to become fully arrested by beauty; and the value we find in human experience of the world.

    Production Notes

    • This podcast featured Charles Taylor and Miroslav Volf
    • Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
    • Hosted by Evan Rosa
    • Production Assistance by Emily Brookfield, Alexa Rollow, Kacie Barrett, and Zoë Halaban
    • 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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    55 mins
  • How to Read Teresa of Ávila / Carlos Eire

    How to Read Teresa of Ávila / Carlos Eire
    Oct 30 2024
    St. Teresa of Ávila (1515-1582) was a sixteenth-century Spanish nun and one of the most influential mystics in all of Church history, writing two spiritual classics still read today: The Way of Perfection and The Interior Castle. Her autobiography (more accurately, a confession to Spanish Inquisitors) is The Life of St. Teresa of Avila, detailing her spiritual experiences of the love of God.In this episode, Evan Rosa welcomes Carlos Eire (T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University) for a discussion of how to read St. Teresa of Ávila, exploring the historical, cultural, philosophical, and theological aspects of her life and writing, and offering insights and close readings of several selections from her classic confession-slash-autobiography, known as La Vida, or The Life.About Carlos EireCarlos Eire is T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University. All of his books are banned in Cuba, where he has been proclaimed an enemy of the state. He was awarded the 2024 Harwood F. Byrnes/Richard B. Sewall Teaching Prize by Yale College, received his PhD from Yale in 1979. He specializes in the social, intellectual, religious, and cultural history of late medieval and early modern Europe, with a focus on both the Protestant and Catholic Reformations; the history of popular piety; the history of the supernatural, and the history of death. Before joining the Yale faculty in 1996, he taught at St. John’s University in Minnesota and the University of Virginia, and was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is the author of War Against the Idols (1986); From Madrid to Purgatory (1995); A Very Brief History of Eternity (2010); Reformations: The Early Modern World (2016); The Life of Saint Teresa of Ávila: A Biography (2019); and They Flew: A History of the Impossible (2023). He is also co-author of Jews, Christians, Muslims: An Introduction to Monotheistic Religions (1997); and ventured into the twentieth century and the Cuban Revolution in the memoir Waiting for Snow in Havana (2003), which won the National Book Award in Nonfiction in the United States and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. His second memoir, Learning to Die in Miami (2010), explores the exile experience. A past president of the Society for Reformation Research, he is currently researching various topics in the history of the supernatural. His book Reformations won the R.R. Hawkins Prize for Best Book of the Year from the American Publishers Association, as well as the award for Best Book in the Humanities in 2017. It was also awarded the Jaroslav Pelikan Prize by Yale University Press. The Life of Saint Teresa of Ávila by Carlos Eire (https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691164939/the-life-of-saint-teresa-of-avila )The Book of My Life by Teresa of Ávila (https://www.icspublications.org/products/the-collected-works-of-st-teresa-of-avila-vol-1 or https://www.shambhala.com/teresa-of-avila-1518.html )A long confession to the Inquisition which had placed her under investigation and read by those who were curious and believed her mysticism might be a fraudThe Spanish Inquisition in the 16th CenturyAutobiography v. Auto-hagiographyThe chief virtue of sainthood was humilityMedieval mysticism in the asceticism of monastic communitiesThe Reformation’s rejection of monastic communities and their practices“You can fast as much as you want, and you can punish yourself as much as you want. That's not going to, uh, make God love you any more than he already does. And it's not going to wipe out your sins. Christ has wiped out your sins. So, all of this, uh, Oh, self obsession and posturing, uh, the very concept of holiness is redefined.”Direct experience of the divine in mysticism: purgation (cleansing), feedback from God (illumination), and union with the divine.On Loving God by Bernard of Clairvaux (https://litpress.org/Products/CF013B/On-Loving-God)Surrendering of the self in order to find oneself, and in turn GodInterior Castle by Teresa of Ávila (https://www.icspublications.org/products/st-teresa-of-avila-the-interior-castle-study-edition)Recogimiento - a prayer in which one lets go of their senses; a form a prayer in which you are just in a chat with a friendThe Cloud of Unknowing by Anonymous (https://paracletepress.com/products/the-cloud-of-unknowing )Meaning that is found without words - recollection and recogimientoFrancisco Jiménez de Cisneros, Archbishop of Toledo - translation of Rhineland mysticism into SpanishStaged approach and a development of spirituality“You're doing some transforming of your own, of course, by, you know, being engaged in this, but it's, it's really a gift from God progress and progress. Uh, progress and progress, or, uh, pretty much like an athlete whose skills become better and better and better. Or any artist whose skills improve and improve and improve and improve.Except in this case, ...
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    53 mins