Call and Character

Professors Kevin Gary and Julien Smith interview James KA Smith in this episode focusing on Smith's most recent book, How To Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now.

Our guest today, Fr. Gregory Boyle, is the founder of Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles, the largest gang-intervention, rehabilitation, and re-entry program in the world.

A native of Los Angeles and a Jesuit priest, Father Boyle served as pastor of Dolores Mission Church in Boyle Heights, then the poorest Catholic parish in Los Angeles, which also had the highest concentration of gang activity in the city.

Father Boyle witnessed the devastating impact of gang violence on his community during the so-called “decade of death” that began in the late 1980s and peaked at 1000 gang-related killings in 1992. In the face of law enforcement tactics and criminal justice policies of suppression and mass incarceration as the means to end gang violence, he and parish- and community members adopted what was a radical approach at the time: treat gang members as human beings.

Fr. Boyle is the author of the 2010 New York Times-bestseller Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion. And his new book, The Whole Language: The Power of Extravagant Tenderness, was published by Avid Reader Press in 2021.

The marginalization of death—its hiddenness—is strange and of course ultimately a fool’s errand. This past year and a half, living through a pandemic, has forced us to confront realities that many of us have spent years avoiding. Death is our neighbor. And yet many of us aren’t equipped to talk or think about its presence.

Our guest today, Lydia Dugdale, has written a bracing yet beautiful book, The Lost Art of Dying: Reviving Forgotten Wisdom. She is an 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 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.

In many churches and faith communities, “faith” as a theological concept is a private matter—n practical attitude of belief or trust in God that stands independent of the pursuit of justice in society. In fact, the very idea of social justice is sometimes viewed with suspicion. Conservative churches worry that calls to social action are replacements for theological reflection or serious personal faith commitments. And progressive churches worry that those who are suspicious of “social justice” are simply content with the unjust status quo, and unwilling to put their faith into action.

Our guest today, Alexia Salvatierra, complicates this divide, and argues that grounded, serious theological reflection goes hand in hand with the pursuit of justice in the world. 

Today's episode is a conversation with Dr. Andrew Whitehead, a professor of sociology at IUPUI. We’ll be discussing a recurring topic here on the podcast—Christian nationalism in the United States. Like our previous conversations with Jemar Tisby and Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Whitehead asks us to consider the substance and motivations for Christian nationalism in recent years, and whether there is a healthier way to think about living well together in a pluralistic society.

We’ve reached the end of our second season of Call & Character, and to wrap things up, we brought back two former guests—Justin Ariel Bailey and Jessica Hooten Wilson—to discuss the novels of Marilynne Robinson. We hope you enjoy what turned out to be a lively back and forth. 

If you enjoy our conversation today, check out Jessica’s article on Robinson in Notre Dame’s Church Life Journal (https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/oconnor-or-robinson-the-gargoyle-and-the-cathedral/).

(Our guest today is an upcoming speaker in Valparaiso University’s Pathways to Purpose lecture series.) Ekemini Uwan is a public theologian who received her Master of Divinity degree in 2016 from Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, PA. She is the co-host of Truth's Table podcast alongside Michelle Higgins and Dr. Christina Edmondson. In 2018, Christianity Today named her among "10 New or Lesser-Known Female Theologians Worth Knowing.” And in 2021, she earned the IMPACT Award from The Institute for the Study of the Black Christian Experience for work on Truth’s Table. Learn more at: www.sistamatictheology.com, and follow her on Twitter: @sista_theology.

If human flourishing really is the purpose of our time on earth, if want to enjoy the delight and peace and completion of what it means to be truly human, what then? Where can we turn to find a better picture of the good life? Our guest today, Dr. Julien Smith, suggests that we might learn more about human flourishing from a somewhat surprising source: the apostle Paul.

Last fall, I was teaching on Confucius and ancient Chinese approaches to the good life. When we started reading about burial practices and the years of grieving rites that attended the death of a loved one, my students were taken aback. The attitudes—the seriousness, the enduring presence—of death was unfamiliar to them. I asked them how many of them had ever seen a dead body, even at a funeral, and only a couple hands went up. 

The marginalization of death—its hiddenness—is strange and of course ultimately a fool’s errand. This past year, living through a pandemic has forced us to confront realities that many of us have spent years avoiding. Death is our neighbor now. And yet many of us aren’t equipped to talk or think about its presence.

Our guest today, Todd Billings, has written a bracing yet beautiful book, The End of the Christian Life: How Embracing Our Mortality Frees Us to Truly Live, published by Brazos last year. It is itself a sort of follow up to his 2015 book Rejoicing in Lament, which he wrote following his diagnosis with an incurable cancer. 

Darkness, whether literal or metaphor, leaves you exposed and diminished. Spiritual darkness, the topic of our guest’s new book, can put believers into an overburdened psychological state—our sense of God impaired, with reality moving as if in slow-motion. What do we do when confronted by the absence of God? How is prayer possible when your heart is hollowed out? Is there grace to be found in debilitating weakness? Is it foolish to hope to add to the litany of gospel beatitudes: Blessed are the vulnerable, the depressed, the godforsaken? Our guest today, Tish Harrison Warren, is the author of *Prayer in the Night*, which begins autobiographically with events that took place in 2017, when she went through her own period of bone-weary, heart-breaking loss and lament. 

On January 6, white nationalists stormed the US Capitol—many of them carrying banners with phrases like “Jesus Saves” and “Make America Godly Again.” Various symbols and icons could be seen in the swarming crowds, including a ten-foot crucifix that rioters placed in the middle of a prayer circle and a large gallows and noose, that evoked (intentionally or not) the horrendous history of racial lynchings during the Jim Crow era.  The images that started to appear were jarring and revolting, but also reminders that the legacy of ethnic supremacy and nationalism has been part of the American story from its inception. The cross and the lynching tree, the hymns and racist chants, the religious piety and the white nationalism--this is America. It takes an especially adept historian, cultural critic, and public scholar to extract the historical, moral, and theological lessons from these dark, complicated images.  The day before the storming of the Capitol, Zondervan Books released a new volume from our guest, historian Jemar Tisby, How To Fight Racism: Courageous Christianity and the Journey Toward Racial Justice. This new work is a constructive follow up to his first book, The Color of Compromise, a historical analysis of the American church’s complicity in racial injustice. 

The British poet Edward Thomas once wrote an exquisite little poem in which he described a simple, towering plume of smoke rising from a train as “so fair it touched the roar with silence.” In my own encounters with the art of Makoto Fujimura, our guest today, I’ve been overwhelmed, too, by a silence so deep, it roars and arrests the gaze of anyone who pays it attention.   But this is what beauty does. It holds a fragile power to generate meaning and recognition. It resists commodification and crass pragmatism, and invites those who behold it to stop and linger a while. Reading Fujimura’s new book, I was reminded often of the story in the gospels about the woman who came to Jesus with an alabaster jar and poured expensive perfume on his feet, to the displeasure of the disciples. What the woman at Bethany did made no economic or earthly sense. It was an excessive act with no instrumental value. But she saw Jesus as her beloved and knew that he was worth the offering. She took the perfume, itself a finite good, and made it something of infinite value. As the art and writing of Fujimura suggests, these sorts of acts ought to arrest our attention, so that we can model their beauty in our own lives and callings.

Media culture is messier than it ever was. Print journalism has been facing financial pressures for decades, but it’s now subject to partisan politics in increasingly complicated ways. In Christian media, in particular, the polarized politics of the audience and readership can pose challenges for editors and journalists trying to maintain some semblance of objectivity in their reporting. Today, we have a guest, Daniel Silliman, news editor at Christianity Today, who has both studied Christian media culture for years, and is now part of that media culture as well. 

Even for those of us who love to read, literature can seem a luxury at times. The pace of modern life presents a hundred challenges each day that make it simpler to reach for our smartphone, or crash after a long day’s work, or wrestling small children through the bedtime routine—rather than immerse ourselves in a good book. But the imaginative world of literature gives us something other than an easy escape. Our guest today, Jessica Hooten Wilson, suggests that literature—at its best—reminds us that the world is saturated with beauty, meaning, and divine presence, even in the most tedious, challenging, or unlovely parts of life.

If human beings are fundamentally social, needing companionship and community to flourish, this year’s pandemic put many of us to the test. Forced inside for months, separated from friends and family, becoming competent at virtual meetings and webinars—our new normal, ordinary lives would’ve been unrecognizable to ourselves just months prior.  And in the midst of all this uncertainty, questions about mental health and wellbeing rose to the surface. Our guest today, Amanda Zelechoski, along with a friend and collaborator, began drawing on her research on trauma psychology to start conversations about the ways that this year has been odd, challenging, surreal, and in some very tragic cases, unhealthy or even lethal to vulnerable members of society.

In past episodes, we’ve discussed some of the challenges facing the world of higher education, as well as some of the reasons why it’s difficult to address questions of ultimate concern—what makes for a life worth living—when you’re operating in survival mode. How can we get the mental energy think about moral formation when so many social pressures entice us toward pragmatism? How can we be bothered to inquire after truth when false reports and partisan agendas are such an oppressive presence in our digital and personal lives?  Our guest today, Dr. Joseph Clair, draws on the theological and moral legacy of Augustine, the late antique Christian theologian, to think through these issues. 

This past summer forced many of us to rethink what matters most—both personally and professionally. A pandemic that sent many of us home for months, sometimes jobless or furloughed. Emerging social protest movements that drew our attention to systemic injustices and political divisions that threaten the order of things. In anxious times, we might want to ask: what really matters? What sort of person should I be, in order to do justice to my neighbor? What sorts of loves should I cultivate, even when everything seems unstable? What am I called to do, personally and professionally, when things beyond my control have placed a giant question mark on so many things that used to be assumed?  

Thankfully, we have centuries of wisdom to draw on, from Plato and Confucius to Aquinas and Luther, to Mary Wollstonecraft and Frederick Douglass. And our guest today, Dr. Mark Schwehn, has spent decades cultivating this wisdom in the classroom and through his writing. I’m eager to share this conversation with him, and with you, the listeners.

It seems every political community has a Golden Age—an era (real or imagined) when leaders were all virtuous, the people were all happy, and national prominence was obvious to the watching world. In the American context, the idea that our political order is somehow exceptional—the best there ever was—has fascinating history. America, in its origins, was supposed to have a distinctive calling and purpose that set it apart. It was, to borrow the words of Jesus and the Puritan John Winthrop, a City on a Hill, to whom the eyes of all nations turned.  Our guest today, Abram Van Engen, investigates the history of the idea of American exceptionalism, looking at its cultural and even theological origins, as well as the ways in which the idea has been picked up and transformed in contemporary politics. He also raises questions about the ways that the underside of the American experiment (the displacement of indigenous peoples and the enslavement of African men and women) is forgotten in many tellings of the national myth. 

Ideological battle lines are often drawn between those who take the authority of their religious scriptures and traditions seriously, on one side, and those who advocate for social justice and prophetic political witness, on the other. Is this divide real? Do the faithful have to choose between a scriptural tradition and social justice? Or is this a false—even pernicious—dilemma?  Our guest today, Esau McCaulley, argues that the Black church tradition, with its particular historical ways of reading scripture, offers resources to connect the Christian faith with urgent contemporary political concerns. Reading the Bible through the prism of the black American experience offers us a way to rethink theological discussions of race, gender, political resistance, policing, and slavery.

If you were in a classroom and overheard a conversation about things like beauty, playfulness, truth, justice, and love, you might assume you were eavesdropping on a class in philosophy, religion, or perhaps literature. But our guest today, Dr. Francis Su, suggests that these basic concepts are fundamental to the discipline of mathematics. He argues that various practices, habits, and virtues obtained through the study of mathematics can help students flourish as human beings—to enjoy the happiness, peace, or shalom that ancient philosophers in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions described as the ultimate goal of human life.

The theologian Sarah Coakley once asked in a poignant essay on belief in God: “What are you seeking? Because if these arguments simply add up to a range of arid, abstract possibilities, then they are not grabbing you existentially in the way that they would if you were prepared to put your life on the line...”  Coakley’s question frames the conclusion of the new book *Reimaginging Apologetics: The Beauty of Faith in a Secular Age* by our guest today, Dr. Justin Bailey. Justin is assistant professor of theology at Dordt University, and works at the intersection of theology, culture, and ministry. And his wonderful new book asks his readers to rethink Christian witness, not as a defensive, overly intellectual project, but as an attempt to reveal the beauty of an imaginative faith. Or, to use Coakley’s words, is there anything beautiful enough about religious faith that you’d be prepared to stake your life on it?

In his classic book *The Four Loves* C.S. Lewis claimed that friendship is unnecessary: “Like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create),” he writes, “it has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.” In other words, friendship is a good that has no price tag; it is something to be enjoyed for its own sake. As Lewis himself points out, discussions of friendship are as ubiquitous in ancient and medieval philosophy as they are neglected in modern philosophy. Ancient wisdom promises us the beauty and delight of union with the beloved friend. Modern critiques often highlight the ways that human frailty, alienation, and distractibility often yield only the faintest shadow of true friendship. Our guest, Gilbert Meilaender, has written beautifully on the nature and ends of friendship, and joins us today to reflect on the challenges of friendship in modern times.

Almost four years ago, the vast majority of white evangelicals turned out to support the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump. This surprised quite a few cultural critics, who assumed that Trump’s record would not be attractive to pious Christian voters. Our guest today has a new book that argues that evangelical support of Donald Trump is no surprise, but actually historically rooted in evangelical ideas about gender, masculinity, power, and leadership.