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

For twenty years, Christian Wiman has lived with a rare, incurable cancer. In the fall of 2022, during a stretch when the illness was especially bad, he wrote to his friend and Yale colleague Miroslav Volf: “I don’t know what faith means anymore. I’m a 56-year-old with a pile of books behind me and an experimental bone marrow transplant ahead of me, and I don’t know what faith means.” That letter became the seed of an extended correspondence between the poet and the theologian, now published as Glimmerings: Letters on Faith between a Poet and a Theologian.

In this special collaboration with Arc Magazine, editor Mark Oppenheimer sits down with Volf and Wiman to unpack the letters that grew out of their long friendship and years of walking together through New Haven.

They discuss what it means to love God, why doubt and absence might be constitutive elements of faith and presence rather than its opposite, and how a terminal diagnosis changed what each of them was willing to say and how freely they said it. They also trace the thinkers who shaped their thinking along the way, from Simone Weil’s account of attention to Etty Hillesum’s wartime writing, to Abraham Joshua Heschel’s theology of the prophets, and they wrestle openly with where their understandings of Jesus Christ converge and diverge.

Along the way, Wiman reflects on writing from a hospital room at Massachusetts General, on discovering that his fear was never death itself but the fear of dying without God, and on why grief, not fear, is what remains even after that fear falls away.

Episode Highlights

I don’t know what faith means anymore. I’m a 56-year-old with a pile of books behind me and an experimental bone marrow transplant ahead of me, and I don’t know what faith means.

I sometimes find it hard to think what it means to love God. I don’t know how to love God.

Faith is what matters. Belief seems to me a matter of the institution and ascending to creeds and things like that.

I think most of my theological thinking is existentially motivated. It’s motivated by the kind of inner logic of the trust in which I’m involved.

Most of the books that I wrote, I’ve written for myself. I’m one of those writers who doesn’t have an audience.

There is grace in my life if I can just keep my eyes open enough to see it.

His mistake in some ways lets him see that the world is right, that there’s a rightness to the world.

What becomes clear is one’s longing for God. Everything is stripped away and very little else seems to matter.

What I want most in my life is the presence of God. And I fear dying without that. Just being alone at the moment of death.

I was worried that he won’t have God in that situation of need because attention might be lacking.

About Miroslav Volf and Christian Wiman

Miroslav Volf is the Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School and founding director of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. He is the author of Exclusion and Embrace, the NYT bestseller Life Worth Living (with Ryan McAnnally-Linz and Matt Croasmun), The Cost of Ambition, and more than twenty other books.

Christian Wiman is the Clement-Muehl Professor of Communication Arts at Yale Divinity School. He has written and edited numerous volumes of poetry. He has lived with a rare blood cancer, Waldenström macroglobulinemia, for more than twenty years, an experience he wrote about in his memoirs My Bright Abyss and Zero at the Bone.

Helpful Links and Resources

Glimmerings: Letters on Faith between a Poet and a Theologian, the book discussed in this episode: https://bookshop.org/p/books/glimmerings-letters-on-faith-between-a-poet-and-a-theologian-christian-wiman/1a13ad79a59080d1

Miroslav Volf, faculty bio at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/people/miroslav-volf

Christian Wiman, faculty bio at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/people/christian-wiman

Arc: Religion, Politics, Et Cetera, the magazine that co-produced this episode: https://arcmag.org/

John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis: https://rap.wustl.edu/

My Bright Abyss, Christian Wiman’s earlier memoir on faith and his cancer diagnosis: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374534370/mybrightabyss/

Miroslav Volf: Disagreeing With You Feels Like Disagreeing With Myself, a Christianity Today profile of the two friends (by Andrew Hendrixson): https://www.christianitytoday.com/2026/01/miroslav-volf-disagreeing-with-you-like-disagreeing-with-myself-christian-wiman/

Show Notes

Summer break announcement, past-episode recap

Special crossover episode with Arc Magazine

Mark Oppenheimer, Arc’s editor, hosts this conversation

Origin story: a brief email exchange in fall 2022

Wiman’s diagnosis, Waldenström macroglobulinemia, and a bone marrow transplant

Twenty years of friendship, marked by weekly walks in New Haven

The letter that started it: not knowing what faith means anymore

What does it mean to love God?

Faith versus belief: creeds compared to a personal relationship

Doubt as a constitutive element of trust, not its opposite

Absence and presence, sorrow and joy, held together

Theology as existentially motivated rather than academic exercise

Writing for an audience of one, and how that shapes honesty

Whether a book contract changes how freely you write

Simone Weil’s idea that attention is what makes God present

Disagreement over how central Jesus Christ is to each man’s sense of God

Volf’s Pentecostal upbringing, Wiman’s Southern Baptist roots

Volf’s sense of God as behind and underneath, not face to face

Wiman’s youthful epiphany and a memory of his grandmother’s death

A misread wildflower, a Richard Wilbur poem, grace found in error

Shai Held’s blurb and why Jewish thinkers rarely appear in Christian theology

Etty Hillesum, her wartime diaries, her postcard thrown from the train

Abraham Joshua Heschel’s influence through Sabbath and The Prophets

Heschel’s idea that faith is fidelity to the moments you once had it

A letter written from a hospital room at Massachusetts General

Miroslav’s fear that his letters carried condescension toward a friend in crisis

Whether a cancer diagnosis changes the fear of death itself

Grief, not fear, as what remains once the fear of dying is gone

How the two friends met: through Volf’s wife’s poetry class

Letter-writing as a lifelong practice for both men beyond this book

#Glimmerings #MiroslavVolf #ChristianWiman #Faith #Doubt #Theology #YaleDivinitySchool #ArcMagazine

Production Notes

This podcast featured Christian Wiman and Miroslav Volf with Mark Oppenheimer

Special thanks to David Sugarman and Arc Magazine

Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa

Hosted by Evan Rosa

Production Assistance by Noah Senthil

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

More than forty years after his twenty-five-year-old son Eric died in a climbing accident, philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff joins Miroslav Volf to revisit the grief behind his classic Lament for a Son and his recent Living with Grief.

“If he was worth loving when alive, he was worth grieving when dead.”

In this episode they reflect together on mourning loss, refusing both the consolations of theodicy and the pressure to move on. Together they discuss owning grief rather than disowning it, lament as a cry that transcends analysis, and the limits of explaining suffering through theodicy. They explore Augustine and Calvin on grief, Karl Barth's “nothingness,” universality hidden in particular sorrow, and the prison classroom where incarcerated men claimed their own grief redemptively.

Episode Highlights

"I could not, and would not, allow it simply to heal."

"If he was worth loving when alive, he was worth grieving when dead."

"In my story I always say: I am one who lost a son. That's part of who I am."

"Children should not die at twenty-five years of age. Nobody should die at twenty-five years of age."

"It was good that I loved Eric. It was worth it. So my grief is worthwhile. And, in this world, love and suffering come together."

About Nicholas Wolterstorff

Nicholas Wolterstorff is the Noah Porter Professor Emeritus of Philosophical Theology at Yale University and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. Born in 1932, he earned his PhD at Harvard and taught philosophy for thirty years at Calvin College before joining Yale in 1989. A leading Christian philosopher, he helped develop Reformed epistemology and co-founded the Society of Christian Philosophers. His books span aesthetics, epistemology, justice, and liturgy, including Lament for a Son (1987) and the memoir In This World of Wonders (2019). His son Eric died in a climbing accident in 1983.

Helpful Links and Resources

Lament for a Son, by Nicholas Wolterstorff https://www.eerdmans.com/9781467419239/lament-for-a-son/

Living with Grief, by Nicholas Wolterstorff https://wipfandstock.com/9798385201006/living-with-grief/

Calvin Prison Initiative https://calvin.edu/prison-initiative

Show Notes

Grief as an open wound

Two books, forty years apart: Lament for a Son and Living with Grief

Eric Wolterstorff's death at twenty-five in a climbing accident, Austria, 1983

Lament as a cry, not an analysis

"I could not, and would not, allow it simply to heal."

Grief-process books that failed: "inviting me to look away from Eric"

"If he was worth loving when alive, he was worth grieving when dead."

Owning grief versus disowning it; narrative identity

"I am one who lost a son"; grief as part of who you are

Augustine's moral disowning; shame over loving too much

Owning grief redemptively; good that couldn't have come otherwise

Calvin Prison Initiative, Handlon Correctional Facility, Ionia, MI

Prison classroom: "we were in grief but didn't know how to express it. You have given us the words."

Universality in particularity

The pallet of finished books: "What have I done?"

Grief brought on oneself: "not an assault, but we brought it onto ourselves"

Karl Barth's "nothingness"; evil God will defeat

"Children should not die at twenty-five years of age."

Love that knowingly risks grief: "love and suffering come together"

#NicholasWolterstorff #LamentForASon #LivingWithGrief #Grief #Lament #Theodicy #FaithAndGrief #MiroslavVolf #ForTheLifeOfTheWorld #YaleFaithAndCulture

Production Notes

This podcast featured Nicholas Wolterstorff with Miroslav Volf

Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa

Hosted by Evan Rosa

Production Assistance by Noah Senthil

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

We’re used to hostile online encounters with total strangers. It fuels the digital economy. But what if there were a way to experiment with radical emotional honesty with an anonymous other—much the same as you’d experience at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting? The anonymous founder of This Life, an audio-only app built on anonymity, joins For the Life of the World to argue that emotional and spiritual progress is still possible at scale.

"What's really kind is to care about somebody else. And then even more kind than that is to allow somebody else to care about you."

In this episode with Evan Rosa, Justin Smith (a pseudonym) reflects on what he learned in Alcoholics Anonymous, the genius of Bill Wilson, and why our voices carry so much emotional weight, and how sharing them—even (and perhaps especially) anonymously—can be a transformative experience of growth. Together they discuss anonymity as a path to honesty, the "spiritual hitchhiker," negative emotion as a force that wants to win, design as destiny, and becoming a neighbor. They also weigh technology's limits and whether spiritual and emotional progress can scale.

Episode Highlights

"What's really kind is to care about somebody else. And then even more kind than that is to allow somebody else to care about you."

"I believe we live in a society that has given up on the idea of emotional or spiritual progress at scale."

"Honesty with yourself is a skill."

"If you begin to look at unhelpful negative emotion as a force that wants to win, what you'll notice is that we're in a fight that we're not well equipped for."

"Meaningful spiritual development is impossible without honesty with other people."

About Justin Smith

"Justin Smith" is a pseudonym. The guest is the founder of This Life, an audio-only iOS app he describes as an experiment in emotional and spiritual progress, built around anonymity, self-reflection, and what he calls the "spiritual hitchhiker." A Christian shaped by his time in Alcoholics Anonymous and the writing of AA co-founder Bill Wilson, he draws on figures from Martin Luther King Jr. to E.O. Wilson and Fred Rogers to argue that honesty with others is the foundation of spiritual growth. By his request, and in keeping with the episode's premise, his real name, biography, and social accounts are withheld. Learn more about the This Life app on the iOS App Store.

Helpful Links and Resources

This Life: An Experiment (App Store) https://apps.apple.com/us/app/this-life-an-experiment/id6746807306

Alcoholics Anonymous (the "Big Book"), by Bill Wilson: https://www.aa.org/the-big-book

The Twelve Traditions of AA (Tradition Twelve, on anonymity): https://www.aa.org/the-twelve-traditions

"On Being a Good Neighbor," Martin Luther King Jr.: https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/draft-chapter-iii-being-good-neighbor

Show Notes

Anonymous guest, identity withheld

"Justin Smith"—not his real name

The neighbor can be anonymous

Startup founders and self-help gurus—equally annoying

How the app works: an audio-only experiment

Spoken note—talk to yourself, your God, or both

"Spiritual hitchhiker"—paired daily with a stranger

One rule: no politics

"A much more intimate and powerful sort of access to a human consciousness."

The voice as the best vehicle for the spiritual

Looks always color how we treat each other

Design is destiny

"We live in a Star Wars civilization with stone age emotions" (E.O. Wilson)

Bill Wilson refused Yale's honorary doctorate

"Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our traditions, ever reminding us to place principles before personalities." https://www.aa.org/the-twelve-traditions

Negative emotion as a force that wants to win

"Honesty with yourself is a skill."

Mandela, Mother Teresa, Mr. Rogers—all struggled

"Meaningful spiritual development is impossible without honesty with other people."

No longer "people in my way at the Starbucks line"—strangers with inner lives

Personal responsibility and the courage to become a neighbor

#Anonymity #SpiritualGrowth #AlcoholicsAnonymous #BillWilson #Loneliness #DigitalWellbeing #Neighbor #EmotionalHealth #ForTheLifeOfTheWorld #Honesty

Production Notes

This podcast featured Justin Smith (Pseudonym)

Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa

Hosted by Evan Rosa

Production Assistance by Noah Senthil

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

What does it take to put a fractured world back together? Philosopher and psychotherapist Mark Vernon joins Evan Rosa to explore William Blake as the great counter-Enlightenment guide for our anxious, divided age.

"The world comes to be seen as it truly is, which is infinite, and that can embrace distinction difference as much as similarity and sharing."

In this episode with Evan Rosa, Vernon explains how to read William Blake, and reflects on Blake as the most important post-Reformation Christian mystic—a poet, painter, and philosopher offering not just a diagnosis of modern division but the beginnings of an antidote. Together they discuss Newton's long shadow and the withdrawal of inner life; the fragmentation of humanity from itself, nature, and the divine; the marriage of heaven and hell; cleansing the doors of perception; imagination as abundance rather than scarcity; desire rightly ordered; and Blake's Christ, who acts from impulse rather than rule.

———

Episode Highlights

"I think he's the most important post-Reformation Christian mystic."

"We need these oppositions in order to create the dynamism of life and hence the Marriage of Heaven and Hell."

"The task is to align, align with the goods in the melee, and see how that which is seemingly different for you, might have something to offer you."

"The world comes to be seen as it truly is, which is infinite, and that can embrace distinction difference as much as similarity and sharing."

"The fullness of the love, the fullness of the goods, paradoxically, it can seem, is only revealed when it reaches out to that, which seems to be the opposite of it."

———

About Mark Vernon

Mark Vernon is a writer, broadcaster, and psychotherapist with a private practice in London, and a former Anglican priest. His studies began with a physics degree at Durham University, followed by two degrees in theology and a PhD in ancient Greek philosophy from the University of Warwick; he has also worked at the Maudsley Hospital. He contributes to the BBC, the Guardian, and Church Times, and podcasts frequently. His books range across friendship, wellbeing, ancient philosophy, Dante's Divine Comedy, and the Inkling Owen Barfield. His most recent book, Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination (Hurst, 2024), has drawn praise from Rowan Williams and others as among the finest recent studies of Blake. Learn more and follow at markvernon.com, his Substack A Golden String (markvernon942268.substack.com), and @platospodcasts on X.

———

Helpful Links and Resources

Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination, by Mark Vernon: https://www.markvernon.com/books/awake-william-blake-and-the-power-of-the-imagination

A Secret History of Christianity: Jesus, the Last Inkling and the Evolution of Consciousness, by Mark Vernon: https://www.markvernon.com/books/a-secret-history-of-christianity-book

Dante's Divine Comedy: A Guide for the Spiritual Journey, by Mark Vernon: https://www.markvernon.com/books/dantes-divine-comedy-book

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, by William Blake (The William Blake Archive): https://www.blakearchive.org/work/mhh

Mark Vernon's website: https://www.markvernon.com

A Golden String (Substack): https://markvernon942268.substack.com

———

Show Notes

Underappreciated, often typecast visionary

1827—approaching the 200th anniversary of Blake's death approaching

Tumultuous age: Seven Years' War, American and French Revolutions, Napoleonic Wars

London quadruples in size; Hindu, Islamic, and global ideas arrive

"I think he's the most important post reformation Christian, mystic"

Polymath—poet, painter, philosopher, didact

Counter-Enlightenment response to rationalism

Isaac Newton's influence "can't be overstated"

One law binds falling apple and orbiting moon

Locke, Bentham, utilitarianism, calculation as the moral measure

"withdrawing the inner life of human beings"—the objective as gold standard

Fragmentation: dividing humanity from itself, nature, the gods

Reading Blake now offers "the beginnings of an antidote too"

Feeling and imagination complement reason; imagination as the shape of energy

Marvel superheroes analogy—one superpower detached goes wrong

Bacon's dream: tools to restore Eden, and its tragedy

Magnet's two poles—the marriage of heaven and hell

Angels grow complacent, devils too dastardly; tension creates beauty and exuberance

Cleansing the doors of perception; a world in a grain of sand

"align, align with the goods in the melee"

Division never purifies society—"it just leads to a mess"

"embrace distinction difference as much as similarity and sharing"

Heaven and hell as states of mind; participative epistemology

Education that teaches students to divide themselves from learning

Imagination as abundance, not scarcity

Desire rightly ordered—"less than all cannot satisfy man"

Blake's Christ acts from impulse, not rule

Fountains of living water; the closing lines of Jerusalem

———

#WilliamBlake #MarkVernon #ForTheLifeoftheWorld #Imagination #MarriageOfHeavenAndHell #CounterEnlightenment #ChristianMysticism #Theology #Poetry #DoorsOfPerception

What sustains faith when prayer feels flat and God seems distant—and there's no clear tragedy to explain it? Anglican priest and former New York Times columnist Tish Harrison Warren joins Macie Bridge to talk about weariness, burnout, and the quiet middle stretches of a long spiritual life. Drawing on her new book What Grows in Weary Lands, she turns to the Desert Fathers and Mothers for a resilience that resists both flaming out and numbing out.

"It felt like the call had dropped, like the line had gone dead."

In this episode with Macie Bridge, Warren reflects on her own season of spiritual aridity and the ancient counsel to stay in your cell rather than escape.

Together they discuss the difference between burnout and weariness, acedia and the noonday demon, perseverance, silence as countercultural practice, and the world as a womb. They explore why escape rarely heals and what it means to trust the slow work of God.

Episode Highlights

"It felt like the call had dropped, like the line had gone dead." "I do not think vitamin D will solve what I'm talking about." "We're not having to hold our life together in the midst of weariness with will power and duct tape." "We kind of bring Times Square with us wherever we go now." "God doesn't need me to be impressive or achieving."

About Tish Harrison Warren

Tish Harrison Warren is a writer and an Anglican priest. She is the author of Liturgy of the Ordinary, named Christianity Today's 2018 Book of the Year, and Prayer in the Night, which won both Christianity Today's 2022 Book of the Year and the 2022 ECPA Christian Book of the Year. She formerly wrote a weekly newsletter for The New York Times on faith in public and private life and was a columnist for Christianity Today; her essays have appeared in Comment, The Point, and Religion News Service. She currently serves as the C. S. Lewis Theological Writer-in-Residence at Baylor's Truett Seminary, is a senior fellow with The Trinity Forum, and an assisting priest at Immanuel Anglican Church. (Source: tishharrisonwarren.com) Learn more and follow at tishharrisonwarren.com, Instagram @tishharrisonwarren, and X @Tish_H_Warren.

Helpful Links and Resources

What Grows in Weary Lands (newest book): https://tishharrisonwarren.com/whatgrowsinwearylands

Liturgy of the Ordinary (most popular book): https://tishharrisonwarren.com/liturgy-of-the-ordinary

Curt Thompson, referenced on the brain and community: https://curtthompsonmd.com/books/

Show Notes

Writing from the middle of the process

Weariness vs. burnout—bigger than the occupational

"It felt like the call had dropped, like the line had gone dead."

Two years at The New York Times—top of a career, bone-tired

Spiritually tinged exhaustion, distinct from depression

Comprehensive difficulty—work, marriage, church, politics, drama

Post-COVID burnout talk; why the church rarely names this

Craving emotional highs in contemporary Christian faith

We lack stories of long, steady faith

"I do not think vitamin D will solve what I'm talking about."

Discovering the Desert Fathers and Mothers

Acedia, the noonday demon—sloth, boredom, irritation, doubt

Flame out, numb out, or go deep

The cell as guiding metaphor—a rhythm of prayer and work

"Stay in your cell"—counsel of St. Moses and Arsenius

Resisting the lie that escape elsewhere brings contentment

"The cell is actually this transformative place."

Curt Thompson: the brain isn't made to do hard things alone

A desert mother's maternal metaphor—the world as a womb

"What is happening right now matters"—hope without escapism

Grace: "we're not having to hold our life together... with will power and duct tape."

"Part of our weariness is it is too noisy. The world is too noisy."

"God doesn't need me to be impressive or achieving."

Trusting the slow work of God

#TishHarrisonWarren #WhatGrowsInWearyLands #ChristianResilience #Burnout #DesertFathers #SpiritualFormation #Weariness #Acedia #Hope #ForTheLifeOfTheWorld

Production Notes

This podcast featured Tish Harrison Warren

Interview by Macie Bridge

Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa

Hosted by Evan Rosa

Production Assistance by Noah Senthil

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