“The Good News is still good news.”

“I'm very pro-democracy, and yet democracy has never been the necessary prerequisite for the good news of Jesus Christ to flourish. …  The good news of Jesus Christ doesn’t win and doesn’t lose based on a political party winning or losing.”

(Walter Kim, from this episode)

How does evangelicalism relate to the dominant political powers of our world?

In this episode Mark Labberton welcomes Walter Kim to Conversing. As the president of the National Association of Evangelicals and host of the Difficult Conversations podcast, Walter holds on to deep Christian orthodoxy alongside the most vigorous and necessary intellectual, personal, ethical, and theological reflections, offering a vision of leadership and spiritual-moral imagination to bolster the future of evangelicalism.

Together they discuss:

Christianity, pluralism, and polarization

The fraught meaning of “evangelicalism” in America and what it means to be a “good news person” in this political moment

The human impulse to wield power and the temptation of evangelicals to join with empire

The Christian underpinnings of the American nation’s founding and the necessary ingredients for the rise of Christian nationalism

How evangelicals are retelling and recasting the story of the gospel in today’s political climate

About Walter Kim

Walter Kim serves as the president of the National Association of Evangelicals, a role he’s held since January of 2020. Previously, he was the pastor of Boston's historic Park Street Church, and has served other churches in Vancouver, British Columbia, and Charlottesville, Virginia, and as a campus chaplain at Yale University. He received a BA from Northwestern University, an MDiv from Regent College, and a PhD from Harvard University in Near Eastern languages and civilizations. He hosts the Difficult Conversations podcast.

Show Notes

• Long-term faithfulness to the gospel in the maelstrom of challenges and difficulties
• ”My experience has been one of extremes. … There is the lived reality of polarization, at which I find often myself right in the centre.”
• ”Sober self-assessment … one should always, as a Christian, be self-suspicious: Am I compromising? … Am I responding in faith or out of fear?”
• “Purveyor of the good news in action.”
• “Our labour in Christ is not in vain … ultimately Christ remains Lord and Savior of all.”
• The word “evangelical” and the state of US evangelicalism
• What does it mean to be a “good news person”?
• World Evangelical Alliance General Assembly
• Laussane and a gathering of five thousand evangelicals from around the world
• “It’s not a branding issue. It’s a substance issue.”
• “Global church with a polycentric distribution of leadership and resources”
• “Whatever our maelstrom and vortex may be in America, it pales in comparison to what brothers and sisters are experiencing throughout the world.”
• “I'm very pro-democracy, and yet democracy has never been the necessary prerequisite for the good news of Jesus Christ to flourish. …  The good news of Jesus Christ doesn’t win and doesn’t lose based on a political party winning or losing.”
• Religious community vs “the other”
• How does the church relate to dominant powers?
• Image of God is not just an abstract idea
• “The democratization of the image of God to all people—not just to the rulers—was a profoundly prophetic statement.”
• Tower of Babel: A story not just about hubris, but about hoarding power and the ways political imperialism can use religion for its own purposes.
• “This is not a uniquely American problem. … This is a problem of humanity.”
• Evangelicals who have given themselves to empire
• Marring God’s image and remaking God in our own image
• Pluralism and Christianity
• The capacity for self-reflection
• The Christian underpinnings of the American nation’s founding, and the rise of Christian nationalism
• “What’s different now is the pluralism.”
• The necessary ingredients for the rise of Christian nationalism
• Ingredient 1: The belief that America was founded as a Christian nation
• Ingredient 2: A sense or feeling of loss
• Ingredient 3: The answer to regaining what you lost is political
• Descriptive versus prescriptive: Was America founded as a Christian nation?
• Hope in the loving and just reign of God
• No national church: “living under their own vine and fig tree.”
• The reason we don’t privilege Christianity in the Constitution
• Lilly Endowment project
• “The Good News is still good news.”
• “Retelling and recasting the story … as a message of hope.”
• “ This initiative is an opportunity for us to tell the beautiful story of Jesus, while not neglecting the ways that story has been marred.”
• Luke 4: Jesus’s first public speech. “ The Spirit of the Lord is upon me. He has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor, freedom for the prisoner, sight for the blind, release for the oppressed. And to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Production Credits

Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment magazine and Fuller Seminary.

“An attentive, earnest ear.”

“We begin as listeners, that we begin as learners, that we begin as, as genuine, interested, empathetic people who are called to know and see and hear one another.”

“Entering the room listening gave me an  opportunity to realize that I could just behold someone. Behold them visually, behold them audially, to sit in the wonder, the awe, the mystery, the difference of their life from mine and just absorb it in a way that was such a delight. It was also humbling. It also reminded me frequently of how much I had yet to learn, how much I really often didn't understand. …  It stretched my heart, it stretched my mind, it gave me an anticipation of growing into greater knowledge of people who were like (and also very unlike) me. And that felt like an invitation to adventure.”

(Mark Labberton, from this episode)

In this Conversing Short, Mark Labberton offers a principle he learned from his parents: enter the room listening. He reflects on the purpose and usefulness of listening as a starting point; the character of Christian listening and what it means to be a “listening disciple” rather than a “speaking disciple”; what listening does for the speaker; some of the barriers to listening in our current cultural moment; and the observational, cognitive, and emotional benefits of this advice.

About Conversing Shorts

“In between my longer conversations with people who fascinate and inspire and challenge me, I share a short personal reflection, a focused episode that brings you the ideas, stories, questions, ponderings, and perspectives that animate Conversing and give voice to the purpose and heart of the show. Thanks for listening with me.”

About Mark Labberton

Mark Labberton is the Clifford L. Penner Presidential Chair Emeritus and Professor Emeritus of Preaching at Fuller Seminary. He served as Fuller’s fifth president from 2013 to 2022. He’s the host of Conversing.

Show Notes

• How Mark’s parents taught him from an early age to “enter the room listening.”
• Start by paying attention to others.
• The gift of listening and hospitality
• What listening does for the speaker
• “It gave the speaker permission to go on.”
• “We’re in a crisis of conversation in our culture.”
• “An attentive, earnest ear.”
• The purpose and usefulness of listening as a starting point
• The character of Christian listening and what it means to be a “listening disciple” rather than a “speaking disciple”
• “ When I became a Christian, I was stunned by the fact that Jesus had so much to say and that I had so little clue about what it was that He was describing.”
• “ I was called to be a listening disciple, not a speaking disciple.”
• “We begin as listeners, that we begin as learners, that we begin as, as genuine, interested, empathetic people who are called to know and see and hear one another.”
• “What I'm bringing into the room only occasionally should be the thing of first importance. Instead, I think what I realized was that the thing of first importance was what was already happening in the room and that I was getting to join and find a place in it.”
• Some of the barriers to listening in our current cultural moment
• The observational, cognitive, and emotional benefits of entering the room listening
• Emotional attunement and “reading the room”
• Enhanced experience of the speaker and their words
• “And  I was just aware that I was at a feast. And that I would want to share in all that the room had to offer.”
• “I learned a lot about my parents by watching how my parents would listen to their guests and how they would treat their guests.”
• “Entering the room listening gave me an  opportunity to realize that I could just behold someone. Behold them visually, behold them audially, to sit in the wonder, the awe, the mystery, the difference of their life from mine and just absorb it in a way that was such a delight. It was also humbling. It also reminded me frequently of how much I had yet to learn, how much I really often didn't understand. …  It stretched my heart, it stretched my mind, it gave me an anticipation of growing into greater knowledge of people who were like (and also very unlike) me. And that felt like an invitation to adventure.”

Production Credits

Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment Magazine and Fuller Seminary.

”And then finally, word comes over the telegraph that the Emancipation Proclamation is in effect. Jubilation!“

(Jemar Tisby, from the episode)

The African-American Christian tradition often celebrates an all-night Watch Night service on New Year’s Eve. But where does this beautiful liturgical practice come from? It dates all the way back to December 31, 1862, on the eve of the Emancipation Proclamation going into effect the following day.

In this episode of Conversing, Mark Labberton welcomes historian Jemar Tisby to reflect on the history of the New Year's Eve Watch Night service.

Jemar Tisby is the New York Times bestselling author of The Color of Compromise and How to Fight Racism. He is a public historian, speaker, and advocate, and is professor of history at Simmons College, a historically black college in Kentucky.

Recent Books by Jemar Tisby

The Spirit of Justice *Available now

I Am the Spirit of Justice *Picture book releasing January 7, 2025

*Stories of the Spirit of Justice Middle-grade children’s book releasing January 7, 2025

About Jemar Tisby

Jemar Tisby (PhD, University of Mississippi) is the author of the new book The Spirit of Justice, the New York Times bestselling The Color of Compromise, and the award-winning How to Fight Racism. He is a historian who studies race, religion, and social movements in the twentieth century and serves as a professor at Simmons College of Kentucky, a historically black college. Jemar is the founding co-host of the Pass the Mic podcast, and his writing has been featured in the Washington Post, The Atlantic, Time, and the New York Times, among others. He is also a frequent commentator on outlets such as NPR and CNN, speaking nationwide on the topics of racial justice, US history, and Christianity. You can follow his work through his Substack newsletter, Footnotes, and on social media at @JemarTisby.

Show Notes

• The Color of Compromise (available here)—the larger narrative of (Christian) America’s racist history
• Watch Night Services—spending all night at church on New Year’s Eve
• Black Christian tradition dating back to Emancipation Proclamation on December 31, 1862
• ”The time between when Lincoln announced the proclamation, and when it went into effect on January 1st, 1863, was a time of tense anticipation and uncertainty.”
• “ What people were concerned about was, would the Confederates come back and make a deal with Lincoln?”
• “What I like to encourage people to do is put yourself back in that moment as best you can. You have been part of a group of people that have been enslaved since your feet first hit the shores of North America, that generations of your family members, friends, church members have been enslaved, have been enslaved, prayed for freedom, have tried to escape to freedom, have been punished for trying to escape or organize for freedom. And finally, in this massive conflagration called the Civil War, you get the president of the United States saying that you will be free at this certain time. And all of those hopes, all of those prayers, all of those dreams, all of those longings are concentrated in the moments before midnight.”
• ”And then finally, word comes over the telegraph that the Emancipation Proclamation is in effect. Jubilation!“
• “It was in the context of a Christian religion. And so they were understanding this in the context of the Exodus and the Hebrews being freed from Pharaoh through God's intervention. And they're being freed from the pharaohs of the plantation to the promised land of freedom. And they sang spiritual songs and hymns. And ever since then, there's been a tradition of Black Christians gathering on New Year's Eve to have Watch Night service, to celebrate freedom, to anticipate the coming year and to ask for God's blessing.”
• “ May the joy of remembering the power of the Emancipation Proclamation help motivate us as we think about our work and our life in this coming year.”

Production Credits

Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment magazine and Fuller Seminary.

“Each Advent, I do something unusual; I reread King Lear. Revisiting Shakespeare’s dark exploration of the dissolution of family, friendship, personality, and nation has become part of my annual rhythm. That might seem odd, particularly during this most difficult of years: With short winter days, and so much national, international, and personal pain all around us, who needs more darkness? As a Christian, I do.”

(Mark Labberton, from this episode)

In this Conversing Short, Mark Labberton shares about his annual ritual of re-reading William Shakespeare’s King Lear, a practice to see darkness as well as see light. Mark reads from his December 23, 2020 essay in The Atlantic, and comments on King Lear’s dark exploration of the dissolution of family and friendship, personality, and nation.

Here Mark reflects on Advent as a season of waiting in the dark, before the light of Incarnation is known and beheld; the vulnerability and struggle of the human condition we all share—and King Lear’s ability to reveal it; the value of staring directly into the darkness; and importance of finding a way to look into the darkness without being overwhelmed by it.

About Conversing Shorts

“In between my longer conversations with people who fascinate and inspire and challenge me, I share a short personal reflection, a focused episode that brings you the ideas, stories, questions, ponderings, and perspectives that animate Conversing and give voice to the purpose and heart of the show. Thanks for listening with me.”

About Mark Labberton

Mark Labberton is the Clifford L. Penner Presidential Chair Emeritus and Professor Emeritus of Preaching at Fuller Seminary. He served as Fuller’s fifth president from 2013 to 2022. He’s the host of Conversing.

Show Notes

• “Why I Read King Lear Each Advent,” by Mark Labberton, The Atlantic, December 23, 2020
• “Each Advent, I do something unusual; I reread King Lear. Revisiting Shakespeare’s dark exploration of the dissolution of family, friendship, personality, and nation has become part of my annual rhythm. That might seem odd, particularly during this most difficult of years: With short winter days, and so much national, international, and personal pain all around us, who needs more darkness? As a Christian, I do.”
• “ Paying attention provokes and distills our humanity. But our distractibility is relentless, especially today, and it may be exceeded only by our capacity for denial.”
• The vulnerable pulse and impulse of being human
• “ My soul trembles as King Lear names and exposes human greediness for love, combustibly combined with the treacherousness of our own self interest. It all hits rather too closely to home, speaking not just to Shakespeare's time but to ours as well, speaking not just to Lear's struggles but to our own.”
• The shocking immediacy of King Lear, still felt 400 years later
• Hearkening back to the darkness of the COVID-19 pandemic
• “Resilient, sacrificing beauties of being human”
• Collective groaning, lament, and grief
• Seeing our troubles acutely, undistracted by hope
• ”The waiting and the darkness begin to give way to hope. And then Christmas is here.”
• “ We need to find a way to look into the darkness without being overwhelmed by it. To be able to stare in safety. Which brings me back to Lear. Being absorbed in the darkness of that story has taught me to breathe in the presence of darkness in our story. In other words, Lear helps me see, feel, and measure life differently.”

Production Credits

Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment Magazine and Fuller Seminary.

“I think my hope is that by this time next year, we would have survived this. … The hope is to survive. … It’s really hard to think beyond that.”

“We need to repent from apathy. We need to fight this normalization of a genocide.”

—Rev. Dr. Munther Issac, from the episode

In the long history of conflict in the Middle East, both Jews and Palestinians have felt and continue to feel the existential threat of genocide. There remains so much to be spoken and heard about the experience of each side of this conflict.

Today we’re exploring a Palestinian perspective.

Ministering in present-day Bethlehem, pastor, theologian, author, and advocate Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac joins Mark Labberton to reflect on the state of the conflict between Israel and Palestine, now a year following Isaac’s bracing and sobering Christmas sermon, which was graphically represented in a sculptural manger scene of “Christ in the Rubble”—a crèche depicting the newborn Jesus amid the debris of Palestinian concrete, wood, and rebar.

Together they discuss the experience, emotions, and response of Palestinians after fourteen months of war; the Christian responsibility to speak against injustice of all kinds as an act of faith; the contours of loving God, loving neighbours, and loving enemies in the Sermon on the Mount; what theology can bring comfort in the midst of suffering; just war theory versus the justice of God; the hope for survival; and the Advent hope that emerges from darkness.

A Message from Mark Labberton

Since October 7 of 2023, the world has been gripped by the affairs that have been unfolding in the Middle East between Israel and Palestine. And the world is eager, anxious, fearful, angry, and divided over these affairs. All of this is extremely complicated. And yet, as a friend said to me once about apartheid (I’m paraphrasing): It’s not just that it’s complicated (which it is), it’s actually also very simple: that we refuse to live as Christian people.

By that, he was not trying to form any sort of reductionism. He was simply trying to say, Are we willing to live our faith? Are we willing to live out the identity of the people of God in the context of places of great division and violence and evil? The Middle East is fraught historically with these debates, and certainly since the of the nation-state of Israel in 1947, there has been this ongoing anguish and understandable existential crisis that Jews have experienced both inside Israel and around the world because of the ongoing anti-Semitic hatred that seems to exist in so many places and over such a long, long period of time.

Today we have the privilege of hearing from one of the most outstanding Christian voices, a Palestinian Christian pastor, Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac, who is the pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem. He is also academic dean of the Bethlehem Bible College and a director of the highly acclaimed and influential conference called Christ at the Checkpoint.

Munther in this last year has been the voice of Christian pleading. Pleading for an end to the war, pleading for the end to violence, pleading for the end to all of the militarism that has decimated parts of Israel, but also, and even more profoundly, the decimation that has leveled approximately 70 percent of all Palestinian homes in Gaza.

This kind of devastation, the loss of forty-five thousand lives and more in Palestine, has riveted the world’s attention. And Munther has been a person who has consistently spoken out in places all around the United States and in various parts of the world, trying to call for an end to the war and for a practice of Christian identity that would seek to love our neighbours, as Jesus taught us in the Sermon on the Mount, including sometimes also loving our enemies.

The reason for the interview with Munther today is because of the one-year anniversary of Something that occurred in their church in Bethlehem, a crèche with a small baby lying in the Palestinian rubble. Seeing and understanding and looking at Christmas through the lens of that great collision between the bringer of peace, Jesus Christ, and the reality of war.

In the meantime, we have a great chance to welcome a brother in Christ ministering with many suffering people in the Middle East, Jew and Gentile, and certainly Palestinian Christians.

About Munther Isaac

Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac is a Palestinian Christian pastor and theologian. He now pastors the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem and the Lutheran Church in Beit Sahour. He is also the academic dean of Bethlehem Bible College, and is the director of the highly acclaimed and influential Christ at the Checkpoint conferences. Munther is passionate about issues related to Palestinian theology.

He speaks locally and internationally and has published numerous articles on issues related to the theology of the land, Palestinian Christians and Palestinian theology, holistic mission, and reconciliation.

His latest book, Christ in the Rubble: Faith, the Bible, and the Genocide in Gaza (get your copy via Amazon or Eerdmans), will appear in March 2025.

He is also the author of The Other Side of the Wall, From Land to Lands, from Eden to the Renewed Earth, An Introduction to Palestinian Theology (in Arabic), a commentary on the book of Daniel (in Arabic), and more recently he has published a book on women’s ordination in the church, also in Arabic. He is involved in many reconciliation and interfaith forums. He is also a Kairos Palestine board member.

Munther originally studied civil engineering in Birzeit University in Palestine. He then obtained a master in biblical studies from Westminster Theological Seminary and then a PhD from the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies.

Munther is married to Rudaina, an architect, and together they have two boys: Karam and Zaid.

Follow him on X @muntherisaac.

Show Notes

• The complexity of conflict in Palestine, Israel, and the Middle East
• “It’s very simple: We refuse to live as Christian people.”
• Get your copy of Christ in the Rubble: Faith, the Bible, and the Genocide in Gaza via Amazon or Eerdmans
• “Christ in the Rubble”—the one-year anniversary
• Munther Isaac’s Christmas sermon, “Christ Under the Rubble” Video
• A Letter from all churches in Bethlehem: “No war”
• “ I can't believe how used we got to the idea of children being killed.”
• “We need to repent from apathy. We need to fight this normalization of a genocide that’s taking place in front of the whole world to see.”
• Fourteen months of non-stop bombing
• “We’re still feeling the anger.”
• ”We’re still feeling the pain. We’re still feeling the anger. And in a strange way, even more fearful of what is to come, given that it seems that to the world, Palestinians are less human.”
• “We couldn’t go to church as normal.”
• “ It’s our calling to continue as people of faith. To call for a change, and to call for things to be different in our world, even to call for accountability. And of course, I feel that my message should be first to the church, because I’m a Christian minister.  I don’t like to lecture other religions about how they should respond. And I feel that the church could have done more.”
• Freedom to speak out: “You can’t say these things in public.”
• Anti-Semitism and hatred toward Jews
• “ This kind of hatred and prejudice toward the Jews, which led to the horrors of the Holocaust, to me, it stems from the idea of ‘we’re superior, we’re better, we’re entitled,’ and blaming someone else. It comes from a position of righteousness and lack of humility. And certainly Jews have always been the victim of such hatred and blame.”
• “ At the same time, we as Palestinians cannot but wonder why is it us that we’re paying the price for what happened on someone else’s land? We’re paying the price.”
• Loving God, loving neighbours, and loving enemies
• Jesus’s politically charged environment
• Violence, just wWar theory, and “the justice of God”
• Using children as human shields for militants
• “ We cannot again bypass what Jesus was challenging us to do, even if it's not easy at all. It was Jesus who confirmed that loving God and loving neighbour summarizes everything. It wasn’t like I came up with this novel thing, but I think we somehow found other ways to define what it means to be a Christian.”
• “What theology would bring comfort?”
• Matthew 25, judgment, and ministering to Jesus through “the least of these”
• “ ‘Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake.’ So he’s clearly talking about victims of unjust structures, those who are thirsty for justice, those who are hungry.”
• Hopes for peace
• “I’m going to be very real, Mark. I think my hope is that by this time next year, we would have survived this.”
• “They estimate that 70 percent of the homes of two million people are destroyed.”
• Violence and destruction connected to a biblical argument about the legitimacy of Palestinian genocide
• The vulnerability of Israel and the vulnerability of Palestine
• “ And it’s important to say these things. Because if we don’t say them, then we … leave the task of imagination to those who are radical—to the extremists and exclusivists.”
• Munther Isaac’s thoughts on the Zionist movement
• Advent reflections on the darkness at the centre, from which hope and life might emerge

Production Credits

Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment magazine and Fuller Seminary.

“We learn the most from those who came before us, not by gazing up at them uncritically or down on them condescendingly, but by looking them in the eye. And taking their true measure as human beings, not as gods.” (Daniel Gidick, quoting historian John Meacham)

“When does the revolution end? … It doesn’t.” (Daniel Gidick on Thomas Jefferson)

“This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper.” (Daniel Gidick, quoting Franklin D. Roosevelt)

Teaching high school history in our current social and political moment represents a formative transmission of the past to the present. Not to mention that a high school level US history course is often one of the final steps toward citizenship and public participation for young adults entering American society.

In this episode, Mark welcomes high school history teacher Daniel Gidick for a discussion of how the teaching of history and the education of young people influence human society.

Together they discuss the connection between history and contemporary society; the stories of conflict and human interest; the joy and challenge of secondary education; the politicalization of high school history; how students adopt a connection to the past; the importance of fact-based history teaching; how history affects American democratic citizenship; and the personal connection Daniel has with the study of United States history.

About Daniel Giddick

Daniel Gidick teaches US history and government at Albemarle High School in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Show Notes

• US history and the constant turmoil of the social landscape
• History as “stories of human conflict and human interest”
• Inspirational historical figures
• The depth and impact of high school teachers on young people
• “Battlefield breakfast”
• “The last teacher they’ll have before they take on the greatest title that you can have (other than parent), which is citizen.”
• “A parodied speech of Eisenhower’s D-Day speech” to motivate test takers
• Historical documents
• The politicization of high school history
• Jon Meacham: “We learn the most from those who came before us, not by gazing up at them uncritically or down on them condescendingly, but by looking them in the eye. And taking their true measure as human beings, not as gods.”
• American Civil War
• State versus national power
• “When in doubt, the answer of the division of history is: slavery.”
• The New Deal: “The pivot point of the twentieth century.”
• Immigration
• How do students feel about America?
• “Lincoln has to be dead by Christmas.”
• “When does the revolution end? … It doesn’t.”
• A connection to the past, finding relevance
• What is your theory of history?
• Fact-based historical teaching
• How history affects American democratic citizenship
• An inflection point in American history
• “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” (FDR)
• “This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper.” (FDR)
• “One of the points of reflecting on the past is to prepare us for action in the present.” (Jon Meacham)

Production Credits

Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment Magazine and Fuller Seminary.

“In October 1975, I was shot six times. And while I was on the hospital gurney, doctor told me I was going to die. I heard a very clear voice that spoke to me and said, you're not going to die. You're going to be a chaplain at San Quentin prison.” (Chaplain Earl Smith)

Chaplain Earl Smith believes that ministry to the incarcerated is about so much more than rehabilitation. It’s about regeneration. Using the power of his own story of transformation from gang member to pastor, Chaplain Smith has maintained a faithful presence and witness for many decades of pastoral service to the incarcerated at San Quentin Rehabilitation Center, and now to professional athletes (including the Golden State Warriors, San Francisco 49ers, and the San Francisco Giants).

Today on the show Mark Labberton and Chaplain Earl Smith discuss the moral and spiritual factors of prison chaplaincy and ministry for those on death row; the meaning of freedom and education; how he ministered to the leader of the Aryan Brotherhood; the difference that positive mentoring and coaching makes in young people’s lives; and the transformative power of the gospel to go beyond rehabilitation to regeneration.

About Earl Smith

Born and reared in Stockton, California, the cycle of events in Earl’s life came to a head in 1975 when he was shot 6 times while living the life of a minor gangster. Although expected to die, Earl’s father’s faith, prayers, and love seemed to bring him through. The words of his father have motivated him, since that event, “you are a rebel, but you are God’s rebel, and God is going to use you to His glory.”

In 1983, at the age of 27, Earl became the youngest person ever hired as a Protestant Chaplain by the California Department of Corrections.

He is author of Death Row Chaplain: Unbelievable True Stories from America's Most Notorious Prison.

Chaplain Smith currently serves as the Chief Executive Officer for Franklin Home, a Transition Living/Reentry Home for men and is the Team Pastor for the San Francisco 49ers’ and the Golden State Warriors. From 1998 to 2006 Chaplain Smith was the Chapel Leader for the San Francisco Giants. Chaplain Smith has ministered to teams playing in NFL Super Bowls, MLB World Series and NBA Championships. In 2000, Chaplain Smith was recognized as the National Correctional Chaplain of the Year.

Chaplain Smith has appeared on numerous broadcasts, including HBO, CNN, The 700 Club, Trinity Broadcasting Network and The History Channel. Earl has been featured in Christianity Today, Ebony, Guidepost, Ministry Today, Newsweek, People’s Weekly, The African Americans and Time.

Show Notes

• Get your copy of Death Row Chaplain: Unbelievable True Stories from America's Most Notorious Prison
• How Mark and Chaplain Smith met
• The value of education
• “I had to stop my education because of the execution schedule at San Quentin.”
• How Earl Smith got into prison chaplaincy
• “In October 1975, I was shot six times. And while I was on the hospital gurney, doctor told me I was going to die. I heard a very clear voice that spoke to me and said, you're not going to die. You're going to be a chaplain at San Quentin prison.”
• What San Quentin prison is like
• “We used to call San Quentin the Bastille by the Bay. The thing that really stood out for me was the fact that for 13 of the first 16 months I was there, the prison was locked down. The day I interviewed, two people were killed, so they stopped my interview twice. So I understood where I was. I understood the context of confinement. What I also went in there understanding was. It was not about rehabilitation. It was about regeneration.”
• “I believe that that's part of chaplaincy is not to allow the confines of the wall to dictate who you are.”
• A sense of liberty
• Fear and reality
• Earl Smith’s ministry to the leader of the Aryan Brotherhood
• How faith shaped a capacity to be free from fear for the sake of love
• Mass incarceration and the new Jim Crow
• The drug epidemic and its impact on mass incarceration
• “How can you help us prepare these guys to come home?”
• “Whether you're on condemned role, if you have a life without the possibility of parole, or life sentence, or whatever it is, my job is still to share the same gospel message.”
• “Present your body as a living sacrifice.”
• Pastoral care in the prison system
• Calling prisoners by their first names instead of their numbers
• “When you've done it onto the least of these, you've done it to me, so there's a value in your presence.”
• Chaplaincy to professional athletes
• “The states that have the largest prison systems are also the states that send the most professional athletes in the pro sports.”
• Golden State Warriors and San Francisco 49ers
• The difference that positive mentoring and coaching makes in young people’s lives
• “Every man wants someone to acknowledge there's something positive in what you're doing.”
• “They May Know Your Number, But God Knows Your Name” (Clifton Jansky, country western singer)
• God’s way of paying attention to us; “how vested God is in our pursuit of being fully human” (reference to Marilynne Robinson)
• Performance and identity (reference to Ben Houltberg)
• Jerry Rice, #80 and “who wore the number before you?”
• Fellowship of Christian Athletes and Athletes in Action
• “God is a relational God. … Sports is relational.”
• When did chaplaincy in sports become a thing?
• Pat Ritchie’s chaplaincy
• Understanding the value and difference chaplaincy makes
• Documentary and Film Adaptation: Death Row Chaplain
• “A story not of rehabilitation but regeneration”
• “That's really what the story is about. Some of my yesterday, some of my today. And what I believe to be my tomorrow.”

Production Credits

Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment Magazine and Fuller Seminary.

“Things had radically changed. … They had not only changed my mindset, but they had saved my life.”

In this Conversing Short, Mark Labberton opens up about a period of darkness and despair, when as a younger man he considered ending his life. But when he was invited to share Thanksgiving dinner with a local couple, his eyes were opened to a concrete hope, friendship, and joy—all embodied in the simple feast of a community potluck.

Every year since, Mark calls these friends on Thanksgiving Day, in gratitude for and celebration of the hospitality, generosity, beauty, friendship, and hope he encountered that day.

Here Mark reflects on the emotional and psychological difficulties he was going through, the meaning and beauty of friendship, how every dish of a Thanksgiving dinner is an act of hope and community, and how hospitality and generosity can uplift every member of a community.

If you or anyone you know is struggling with depression or considering suicide, there is help available now. Simply call or text 988 to speak with someone right away, share what you’re going through, and get the support you need.

About Conversing Shorts

“In between my longer conversations with people who fascinate and inspire and challenge me, I share a short personal reflection, a focused episode that brings you the ideas, stories, questions, ponderings, and perspectives that animate Conversing and give voice to the purpose and heart of the show. Thanks for listening with me.”

About Mark Labberton

Mark Labberton is the Clifford L. Penner Presidential Chair Emeritus and Professor Emeritus of Preaching at Fuller Seminary. He served as Fuller’s fifth president from 2013 to 2022. He’s the host of Conversing.

Show Notes

• A story about Thanksgiving Day many years ago, during Mark Labberton’s master of divinity degree at Fuller Seminary
• “… not just overwhelmed, but really undone”
• “ … the possibility of ending my life …”
• Every Thanksgiving dish as an act of hope and community
• Beauty of friendship
• A magnificent extravaganza
• Sharing not just food but hope
• “Things had radically changed. And that in fact they had, they had not only changed my mindset, but they had saved my life.”
• “For me, Thanksgiving Day holds this deep and pensive awareness that Thanksgiving doesn't always come easy, that often it's a difficult act, that it involves things that are sometimes impossible for certain people to carry. And at the same time, it's possible for other people to carry them in our place, which is what these friends did for me that day.”
• If you’re feeling despair, seek professional help. Call or text 988 for an immediate response with a counsellor.
• Seek community.
• “Whether you're in darkness or in light, whether your heart feels full of gratitude or whether it may not, I just hope that you'll be aware that God is with you, that you are not alone, that there are people that want to support you and help you, and that there are people that know you who would welcome you into a circle of celebration and gratitude today.”

Production Credits

Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment magazine and Fuller Seminary.

“We’ve just created a hereditary aristocracy in this society, and it has created a populist backlash.” (David Brooks, from the episode)

There’s a growing chasm that divides the affluent and non-affluent in American society, and it’s perhaps most pronounced in higher education. The elite meritocracy suggests that we should reward individual ability, ambition, and accomplishment. But what is “merit” anyway? What is “ability”? And how do they factor in our idea of “a successful life”?

In this episode Mark Labberton welcomes David Brooks (columnist, New York Times) for a conversation about elite meritocracy in higher education.

Together they discuss the meaning of merit, ability, success, and their roles in a good human life; hereditary aristocracy and the populist backlash; power and overemphasis on intelligence; the importance of curiosity for growing and becoming a better person; the value of cognitive ability over character and other skills; the centrality of desire in human life; moral formation and the gospel according to Ted Lasso; ambition versus aspiration; and the impact of meritocracy on the political life and policy.

About David Brooks

David Brooks is an op-ed columnist for the New York Times. His latest book is How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen. He is also the author of The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement, and founder of Weave: The Social Fabric Project.

Show Notes

• “How the Ivy League Broke America” (via The Atlantic)
• “The meritocracy isn’t working. We need something new.”
• Money and the elite meritocracy
• “Every nation has a social ideal. And for the first half of the twentieth century, and the last half of the nineteenth century, our social ideal was the well-bred man.” (e.g., Theodore Roosevelt to Franklin Roosevelt to George H.W. Bush)
• “Rich people rigged the system.”
• “Now, if you come from a family in the top 1 percent, your odds of going to an Ivy League school are seventy-seven times higher than if you come from a poor family. And a lot of schools around the country have more students in the top 1 percent than the bottom 60 percent.”
• “We now have this chasm between the children of the affluent and the children of the non-affluent.”
• Shocking stats: “By eighth grade, children of the affluent are four grade levels higher than children of the non-affluent. People who grew up in college-educated homes live eight years longer than people in high-school-educated homes, they’re five times less likely to die of opioid addiction, they’re twenty-two times less likely to have children out of wedlock, they’re two and a half times less likely to say they have no close friends.”
• “We’ve just created a hereditary aristocracy in this society, and it has created a populist backlash.”
• Too much power
• What is “merit”? How do you define “merit”? Who has “ability”?
• IQ is not a good indicator of merit.
• “Our meritocracy measures people by how well they do in school. The definition of intelligence is academic ability.”
• “What’s the correlation between getting good grades in school and doing well in life? The correlation is basically zero.”
• “We measure people by how they do in one setting, which is the classroom. And then we use that to declare how prepared they are for another setting, which is the workplace.”
• “Augustine said, we're primarily not thinking creatures, we're primarily desiring creatures.”
• Leon Kass (University of Chicago): “What defines a person is the ruling passion of their soul.”
• “We become what we love.”
• Predominant emotion of fear
• Curiosity, the love of learning, and getting better every day
• “You’re plenty smart. You’re just not curious.”
• Tina Turner’s memoir, discovering her voice and self-respect.
• “What matters is being a grower, the ability to keep growing.”
• “Getting old takes guts.” (David Brooks’s eighty-nine-year-old father)
• A sense of purpose
• The drive for the future, to be bold
• Henry Delacroix and the genius of America to drive for boldness, hard work, growth, and energy
• Moral materialism
• Vincent van Gogh said, “I’m in it with all my heart.”
• Paul Cézanne and Émile Zola, L’Oeuvre
• Yo-Yo Ma, cello, elite performance, and passionate humanity: “I’m a people person.”
• “Look at these creatures. They’re amazing!”
• Ordinary people in ordinary circumstances
• “Social intelligence” is not really intelligence—it’s an emotional capacity.
• Individuals and teams
• “What makes a good team? It’s not the IQ of the individuals. It’s the ability to take turns while talking. It's the ability to volley ideas and to feed into a common funnel of thought.”
• Project Based Learning
• Most Likely to Succeed (documentary, High Tech High)
• The Hour Between Dog and Wolf John Coates
• Self-awareness and adeptness reading your own body
• Emotional agility
• “The mind is built for motion. That what we do in life, we don’t solve problems, we navigate complex terrains.”
• “We’re all pilgrims. And we’re all searching for the journey that will transform us. And so it’s, the mind is not this computer designed to solve problems. The mind has helped us navigate through a space. And if we do it well, then we become transformed.”
• Applying meritocracy to the 2024 election
• “If you segregate your society on IQ, You're inherently segregating on elitist grounds.”
• “The rebellion that is Donald Trump.”
• Jesus’s form of selection—“When Jesus was selecting his twelve, he didn’t give them all a bunch of standardized tests. … He saw that each person was made in the image of God.”
• “And to me, what (frankly) the Christian world offers us is a re centring of the human person.”
• Controlling the passions of your heart
• Christian humanism
• Ecce Homo
• Rene Girard and mimetic desire
• Ambition vs. Aspiration
• The gospel of Ted Lasso and David Brooks’s favorite definition of moral formation: “My goal is to make these fellas better versions of themselves on and off the field.”
• *Still Evangelical* (essay by Mark Labberton)
• “Am I yet evangelical?”

Production Credits

Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment magazine and Fuller Seminary.

Our increasingly reactionary political environment doesn’t lend itself to nuanced, patient understanding of events like the 2024 re-election of Donald Trump. What historical and philosophical resources can help us gain insight and wisdom? How can we successfully know and encounter each other in such a divided society?

In this episode, Mark Labberton welcomes David Brooks (columnist, New York Times) for reflections about the 2024 General Election, the state of American politics, and how we got here.

Together they discuss the multi-generational class divide; sources of alienation and distrust; how loss of faith and meaning influences political life; intellectual virtues of courage, firmness, humility, and flexibility; what it means to be a Republican in exile; the capacity for self-awareness and self-critique; and much more.

About David Brooks

David Brooks is an op-ed columnist for the New York Times. His latest book is How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen (Random House, 2023). He is also the author of The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement, and founder of Weave: The Social Fabric Project.

Show Notes

• A spiritual or emotional crisis we’re working out in American politics
• Should we blame inflation and economic factors? (Biden’s Covid-19 overstimulation)
• Class divide is a generational thing
• High-school-educated voters are increasingly alienated from the Democratic Party
• Alienation and distrust is a multi-decade process
• Loss of Faith, Loss of Meaning, and the “Death of God”
• An exiled Republican
• “Confessions of a Republican Exile” (via The Atlantic): ”A longtime conservative, alienated by Trumpism, tries to come to terms with life on the moderate edge of the Democratic Party.”
• “I’m a Whig.” (”Abraham Lincoln was a Whig.”)
• Edmund Burke and epistemological modesty—”don’t revolutionize something you don’t understand.”
• You should operate on society in the way you operate on your father, with care.
• Alexander Hamilton
• Whig tradition is unrepresented in contemporary American politics
• How David Brooks waffles between Democrat and Republican
• Isaiah Berlin: “At the rightward edge of the leftward tendency.”
• “The capacity for self-critique
• Matt Yglesias
• Humble, introspective, and “how did we get so out of touch?”
• Racism and sexism are not what’s driving Trump voters
• “In my opinion, Donald Trump is wrong answer to the right question.”
• Mark Noll and America’s use of the Bible: un-self-aware and un-self-critical
• Why is there more capacity for self-critique on the Democratic
• Jonathan Rauch and “Epistemic Regime”: includes media, universities, scientific research, review process, etc.
• “There’s still a core of people who believe ‘if the evidence says x, you should say y.’”
• “The greatest victory in the history of the world.”
• Intellectual Virtues: Courage, Firmness, Flexibility
• “Reality is constantly going to surprise you.”
• 1980s Republicanism was more intellectually sophisticated
• Conservative book publishing
• *Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Change* by Jonah Goldberg
• How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen by David Brooks
• “The Stacking Stereotype”
• “A redistribution of respect” (away from large swaths of America and to elites)
• “The flow of status and respect in this country has gone to people with elite credentials.”
• “… almost no Trump supporters.”
• “If you tell 51% of the country ‘Your voices don’t matter,’ people are going to get upset.”
• America changing beneath us
• High level of spiritual and moral authority and low level of intellectual confidence
• The moral teaching of the New Testament
• “People are unitary wholes.”
• “I became a Christian around 2013.”
• “Jesus was more a badass revolutionary than an Oxford don.”
• C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Christianity
• “What it’s like to be in the claustrophobic mind of a narcissist.”
• Aggression: a joyless way to see the faith
• What is needed?
• “I was a 50-year-old atheist.”
• Chris Wiman (My Bright Abyss: Meditations of a Modern Believer): materialistic categories couldn’t explain the world
• “If they made me pope of the evangelicals, which is a job that makes me shudder…”
• “Be not afraid.”
• “The world just loves a human being that’s trying to act like Jesus.”
• David Brooks’s teaching at Yale
• The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist by Dorothy Day

Production Credits

Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment magazine and Fuller Seminary.

How should we respond to the anxiety, fear, and catastrophizing of Election Day? Is there an alternative to fight, flight, or freeze? Can people of Christian conviction stand firm, grounded in faith, leaning into the storm?

In this special Election Day episode of Conversing, Mark Labberton welcomes Peter Wehner (columnist, the New York Times, The Atlantic) and David Goatley (president, Fuller Seminary) to make sense of the moral, emotional, and spiritual factors operating in the 2024 US general election.

Together they discuss the emotional response to political media; faithful alternatives to the overabundance of fear, anxiety, and catastrophizing; how the threat of affective polarization divides families and friendships; biblical attitudes toward troubling or frightening political and cultural events; how to respond to vitriol, anger, cynicism, hate, and manipulative language; and how the church can help restore trust and be a faithful witness, standing firm through the political storm.

About Peter Wehner

Peter Wehner, an American essayist, is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, a contributing writer for The Atlantic, and senior fellow at the Trinity Forum. He writes on politics and political ideas, on faith and culture, on foreign policy, sports, and friendships.

Wehner served in three presidential administrations, including as deputy director of presidential speechwriting for President George W. Bush. Later, he served as the director of the Office of Strategic Initiatives.

Wehner, a graduate of the University of Washington, is editor or author of six books, including The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump, which the New York Times called “a model of conscientious political engagements.” Married and the father of three, he lives in McLean, Virginia.

About David Goatley

David Emmanuel Goatley is president of Fuller Seminary. Prior to his appointment in January 2023, he served as the associate dean for academic and vocational formation, Ruth W. and A. Morris Williams Jr. Research Professor of Theology and Christian Ministry, and director of the Office of Black Church Studies at Duke Divinity School. Ordained in the National Baptist Convention, USA, he served as pastor of the First Baptist Church of Campbellsville, Kentucky, for nine years (1986–1995).

In addition to his articles, essays, and book chapters, Goatley is the author of Were You There? Godforsakenness in Slave Religion and A Divine Assignment: The Missiology of Wendell Clay Somerville, as well as the editor of Black Religion, Black Theology: Collected Essays of J. Deotis Roberts. His current research focuses on flourishing in ministry and thriving congregations, most recently working on projects funded by the Lilly Endowment and the Duke Endowment.

Show Notes

• Anxiety, Uncertainty, and Worst-Case Scenarios
• The regular appeal to “the most important election of our lifetimes”
• Assuming the worst about others
• “We are at a fork in the road for a certain kind of vision of who we want to be.”
• “As an African American, many of us always live in the crosswinds.”
• Living with fragility, vulnerability, and uncertainty
• Hymn: “On Christ the Solid Rock I Stand”
• Anger, Antipathy, and Fear
• Passions and beliefs—and an electoral system built to amplify those
• “They’re more amplified than in the past.”
• Families and friendships that divide over politics.
• Feeling like we “share a continent but not a country”
• Affective polarization—”There’s a sense of the other side being an enemy.”
• Catastrophizing
• Recalibrate, reset, and rethink
• Hoping that calmer heads prevail
• Church splintering and aligning with partisan politics
• “God will use all things—not that God intends all things.”
• The political balance wheel
• “Fear is not a Christian state of mind.”
• “Hope is based on something real.”
• “The long game for believers is to hearken back to the early church and remember that Jesus is Lord, and the emperor is not.”
• Political toxicity that infects the household of faith
• “We have to do all that we can to live with peacefully with each other.”
• Vitriol, hubris
• “It’s important to name things. … If you don’t name them—if you try to hide them—then you can’t begin the process of healing.”
• “Faith is subordinate to other factors that they’re not aware of.”
• The Era of Fear: What informs our fears? What can we do about our fears?
• Fear of the Lord that sets us free
• Firmness as an alternative to fighting or fleeing
• “Valuing the vibrant diversity of God”
• “Expand your reading.”
• Breaking out of conformity and homogeneity
• “Meeting the moment”: Inflection points in a human life or a society’s life—a moment for leaders to rise up, speak, and shape
• Example: Winston Churchill and Great Britain pre–World War II (from pariah to prime minister)
• Example: Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation and the agenda to make schools phone-free
• These aren’t the conditions for human flourishing
• “We’ve got to be faithful. We may not be successful.”
• Cultivating a political garden to prepare the soil for shared core values of decency, respect, fairness
• “… what we have loved, / Others will love, and we will teach them how” (William Wordsworth, “The Prelude”)
• Loving the right things
• Voting
• “Complicating my view of the world.”
• “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
• Before voting: “A prayer to submit myself to the will of God.”
• “Tell me how you came to believe what you believe … over time it can create a feeling of trust”
• “What don’t I see? What about my own blindspots?”
• Stunned by the profundity and sobering word that “God will not be mocked”
• Expressing convictions through voting

Production Credits

Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment magazine and Fuller Seminary.

The history of racism has a parallel history of resistance. Courageous women and men have responded to injustice with lives of faith, hope, and love—bearing witness to the spirit of justice. They have inspiring stories we can learn from today. But who is willing to tell those stories? And who is willing to hear them?

In this episode Mark Labberton welcomes historian Jemar Tisby to discuss his new book, The Spirit of Justice—a summoning of over fifty courageous individuals who resisted racism throughout US history. The book is a beautiful quilt of stories and profiles, stitched together through Tisby’s contemporary cultural analysis.

Jemar Tisby is the New York Times bestselling author of The Color of Compromise and How to Fight Racism. He is a public historian, speaker, and advocate, and is professor of history at Simmons College, a historically black college in Kentucky.

Recent Books by Jemar Tisby

The Spirit of Justice *Available now

I Am the Spirit of Justice *Picture book releasing January 7, 2025

*Stories of the Spirit of Justice Middle-grade children’s book releasing January 7, 2025

About Jemar Tisby

Jemar Tisby (PhD, University of Mississippi) is the author of new book The Spirit of Justice, New York Times bestselling The Color of Compromise, and the award-winning How to Fight Racism. He is a historian who studies race, religion, and social movements in the twentieth century and serves as a professor at Simmons College of Kentucky, a historically black college. Jemar is the founding co-host of the Pass the Mic podcast, and his writing has been featured in the Washington Post, The Atlantic, Time, and the New York Times, among others. He is also a frequent commentator on outlets such as NPR and CNN, speaking nationwide on the topics of racial justice, US history, and Christianity. You can follow his work through his Substack newsletter, Footnotes, and on social media at @JemarTisby.

Show Notes

• The Color of Compromise (available here)*—*the larger narrative of (Christian) America’s racist history
• Myrlie Evers Williams on her husband Medgar Evers’s death
• Myrlie Evers Williams: “I see something today that I hoped I would never see again. That is prejudice, hatred, negativism that comes from the highest points across America. She told us then with the candor that comes with old age, she said, and I found myself asking Medgar in the conversations that I have with him. Is this really what's happening again in this country? And asking for guidance because I don't mind admitting this to the press, I'm a little weary at this point.”
• Fighting for justice
• “Black people are born into a situation in which we are forced to defend, assert, and constantly so, our humanity. And that is in the midst of constant attacks on our humanity, big and small, whether it is the vicarious suffering that we see when there's another cell phone video of a black person being brutalized by law enforcement, whether it is, you know, We all have memories of the first time we were called the N word, uh, whether it is going into the workplace and wondering if you didn't get that raise or you were passed over for that promotion, if it had anything to do with the color of your skin, even subconsciously. And so we are born into a situation in which resistance is a daily reality.”
• Sister Thea Bowman, Black Catholic Mississippian Nun
• “Her holiness leaps off the page.”
• Simmons College, Louisville, KY
• Jim Crow Era: “How do you tell the story of the Jim Crow era without centering the white supremacy, the violence, the segregation—How do you center black people in that era?”
• William J. Simmons, Men of the Mark
• The history of Simmons College as an HBCU
• Ida B. Wells
• Harriet Tubman (Araminta Ross) and the Underground Railroad
• Nursing, training, service, and freeing the slaves
• Combahee River Raid (led by Harriet Tubman)—she received a full military burial
• “We need the spirit of justice because injustice is present.”
• Fight, flight, freeze, or fawn
• “And in all kinds of ways, black people chose to fight their oppression.”
• Romans 5: Suffering produces perseverance. Perseverance produces character. Character produces hope and hope does not put us to shame.
• “Hope is a decision.” (Archbishop Desmond Tutu)
• “They chose hope.”
• William Pannell, Fuller Theological Seminary—My Friend the Enemy (1968)
• Rodney King and “the coming race war”
• William Pannell’s impact on Mark Labberton
• Film: The Gospel According to Bill Pannell
• “When you see what's really motivating people, what's really stirring up fear and hatred, which can lead also to violence. It's still around race.”
• Racial anxiety and politics: “This is no longer a white man’s America.”
• The Holy Spirit
• “I’m getting so Pentecostal in these days.”
• Psalm 11:7: “God is a God of righteousness. God loves justice.”
• “When I think about what exactly the spirit of justice is, I think it's the fingerprint of God on every human being made in God's image that says I'm worthy of dignity, respect, and the freedom to flourish. And when that is taken away from me because of oppression and injustice, I have this spirit within me to resist.”
• “The spirit of justice gives us that resilience, that strength to become determined all over again. This is not a power that we find within ourselves to get back up again every time the backlash pushes us back. It is a power. the supernatural power, the same power that raised Jesus from the dead, that also empowers us for the work of justice.”
• How to make a difference
• The variety of black experiences
• Jemar Tisby’s first picture book and young reader’s edition

Production Credits

Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment magazine and Fuller Seminary.

“Sometimes I’m not sure even believers understand the power that exists in their sheer humanity. That there really is something that God has placed on the inside of us that when we come to some form of collected agreement—not uniformity, but just some kind of collective unity around something—that really wonderful, great, powerful things can happen.” (Rev. Dr. Jacqueline A. Thompson)

Growing up in Oakland, California, Jackie Thompson didn’t know that sociologists were referring to her neighbourhood as “The Killing Zone”—a part of the city with the highest concentration of homicides. Now, as senior pastor of Allen Temple Baptist Church, the Rev. Dr. Jacqueline A. Thompson continues to serve the Oakland community throughout its ups and downs, offering a Jesus-centred vision of justice and hope, present to the pain and suffering of the city.

In this episode Thompson joins Mark Labberton for a discussion of her local pastoral ministry in Oakland, California. Together they discuss Jackie’s life and experience as a one of the first women to be appointed senior pastor in a black Baptist church; her college experience at UC Berkeley; what it means to respond to the call of social justice and biblical faith; the blessings and challenges of pastoring a large black church in Oakland; how to centre local ministry on the pain and suffering of a community; the temptation of power; the political season and candidacy of Kamala Harris; and how to “fight for a vision of the kingdom of God where there is enough for everybody.”

About Rev. Dr. Jacqueline A. Thompson

Described as a transformational preacher, dynamic leader and ministry trailblazer, Rev. Dr. Jacqueline A. Thompson is an inspiring example of what God can do with a life committed to the call. She currently serves as the beloved senior pastor of the Allen Temple Baptist Church in her native Oakland, California. Her 2019 election made history nationwide as the first woman called to serve as senior pastor of this historic African American Baptist Church founded in 1919. Before being called in this capacity, Thompson served as the assistant pastor at Allen Temple and as youth minister at Shiloh Baptist Church of Washington, DC, the first woman to serve in both capacities.

Committed to excellence in scholarship, Thompson received her bachelor of arts in political economics from the University of California, Berkeley, and a master of divinity from Howard University School of Divinity in Washington, DC. While at Howard, she received the Nannie Helen Burroughs Award for Academic Excellence and the Henry G. Maynard Award for Excellence in Preaching and Ministry. Believing in the importance of both orthodoxy and orthopraxy, Thompson continued her studies at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, where she was awarded the doctor of ministry degree in African American church leadership.

She is a member of the NAACP and Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated. Her activism and leadership have been recognized by various chapters honouring her with the Community Excellence Award and as Distinguished Woman of the Year. Among other honours, Thompson has been inducted into the distinguished Morehouse College Martin Luther King Jr. Board of Preachers.

Thompson is a gifted preacher, administrator, and published author travelling and ministering extensively nationally and internationally, often in arenas previously unchartered by women. In addition, she has been called on by local and national print and electronic media as an opinion leader to offer perspective and hope amid the pressing issues of the day. She is currently on the teaching staff of the Berkeley School of Theology in the area of public theology and preaching.

Her mission is to see transformation in the lives of others and is humbled by every opportunity to serve.

Show Notes

• Learn more about Allen Temple Baptist Church: https://www.allen-temple.org/
• Growing up in “The Killing Zone” in Oakland, CA
• “There was a really big difference in how we look at something and describe it and how the people who experienced it describe it themselves.”
• “At twelve years old, we started visiting all kinds of churches in Oakland, right? So I've been to every church just about storefront, larger church, every one.”
• The experience of Allen Temple Baptist Church in Oakland
• Matthew 28:18–20
• Dr. J. Alfred Smith—one of the most beloved heralded African American pastors in the United States
• Restlessness
• Youth ministry in Oakland
• Social justice and biblical faith
• The power of a pastor: “I miss your voice in the choir!”
• Choir for young adults
• The ministry of Dr. J. Alfred Smith—”God was absolutely central and primary, and the point of action that held everything together. And then you had this galaxy of every kind of life experience that was being represented, talked about, honoured, celebrated from children to all, all generations and ages, but also women.”
• “Pastoring was never something I wanted to do. … But what happened was life.”
• “She’s a very dignified, prideful black mom. … And she said, ‘I don’t recognize you before.’”
• Trailblazing as the first female assistant pastor of a major black baptist church
• An imaginative tour of Oakland
• Oakland is a tale of two cities—the hills and the flatlands
• Shifting the narrative about Oakland, violence, justice, and power.
• “I believe part of our responsibility, particularly at Allen Temple, but not just Allen Temple, as people of faith, as people who say that we are followers of the way and that we believe in Jesus—that we call power structures to account.”
• “Fight for a vision of the kingdom of God where there is enough for everybody.”
• Walter Brueggemann: “The numbness that can come with royal consciousness”
• Remaining connected to the epicentre of people’s pain
• Joshua crossing the Jordan: twelve stones to build a memorial
• Good Samaritan on the Jericho road
• The history of Oakland’s ups and downs
• Washington, DC, and the power centre of the world
• “There are no permanent friends. There are no permanent enemies. They’re just permanent interests. … What that taught me is that the players around the table will change. As long as the interest in the centre of the table stays the same, it does not matter how the players change.”
• Oakland as microcosm for other urban cities
• “The temptation is always power.”
• “I try and keep the centre of the cross with the vertical and the horizontal meet before the eyes of the people in a way that they can see it, that they can grab hold to it, and they can decide how that, that’s how will they, they centre and position themselves in there for the cause of the kingdom.”
• “What is the burden that you feel like you're primarily carrying?”
• “Sometimes I’m not sure even believers understand the power that exists in their sheer humanity. That there really is something that God has placed on the inside of us that when we come to some form of collected agreement—not uniformity, but just some kind of collective unity around something—that really wonderful, great, powerful things can happen.”
• Comparing Obama’s nomination to Kamala’s nomination
• Focusing on the needs of the people
• Thompson’s preaching as centring the pain on a deeper centre of Jesus Christ

Production Credits

Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment magazine and Fuller Seminary.

When it comes to voting, how should we balance character and policy?

“If I'm voting for a politician,” journalist David French suggests, “I have a test. One is: Do they have the character necessary for the job? And the higher the position they’re seeking, the more character that is necessary. And number two: Do they broadly agree with me on the most important policies?”

In this episode, Mark Labberton welcomes journalist David French (opinion columnist for the New York Times; formerly The Atlantic, The Dispatch, and National Review) for a discussion of character, policy, and principles for faithful, virtuous engagement in polarized American politics.

French’s commitment to Christian faith, moral character, and reasoned policy has emerged from his experience as a former commercial lawyer, military lawyer, and former president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. A political conservative, French has throughout his career been an advocate for First Amendment rights, pro-life individuals and organizations, and the ideals of democracy. He describes himself as “an evangelical conservative who believes strongly in a classical liberal, pluralistic vision of American democracy.”

Together, Mark and David discuss his Christian upbringing; his personal partisan commitments; the importance of character in party politics; the importance of nuanced and reasoned policy; why he’s voting for Kamala Harris in order to save conservative politics; two Bible verses for this election season; how to respond to our culture of fear; and how to secure a more courageous, loving, and humble politics.

About David French

David French is an opinion columnist for the New York Times, and previously wrote for The Atlantic, The Dispatch, and National Review. He is a New York Times bestselling author of Divided We Fall: America's Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.

He describes himself as “an evangelical conservative who believes strongly in a classical liberal, pluralistic vision of American democracy.”

He is a graduate of Harvard Law School, the past president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and a former lecturer at Cornell Law School. He has served as a senior counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice and the Alliance Defending Freedom. David is a former major in the United States Army Reserve. In 2007, he deployed to Iraq, serving in Diyala Province as Squadron Judge Advocate for the 2nd Squadron, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, where he was awarded the Bronze Star.

Show Notes

• Divided We Fall: America's Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation
• “I was a First Amendment litigator with a writing hobby.”
• Background in the Acapella Churches of Christ: a Restoration Movement from the early-19th century
• “It turned into something kind of separatist, sectarian, and ferociously legalistic.”
• “I grew up with a real grounding. grounding and reading the Bible, which actually, ironically enough, was the seed of me leaving the church of Christ.”
• “I was a Cold War conservative and a conservative Christian. And they were related, but not, but they weren't inextricably tied together. So for me, my, you know, ideology was downstream of my faith, but I didn't think that my ideology was the inevitable result of my faith.”
• Pro-Life Activism
• Representing pro-life individuals
• Existential clash: the confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States
• Why David French is voting for Kamala Harris in order to save conservative politics
• “My party loyalty has always been related to two things. One is the ideology of the party and the other one is the character of the party. And the party leaders and the people that I vote for, I've always had a character test and an ideological test.”
• Bad character and bad policy—”why would I be attached to that? There’s no claim on my loyalty there.”
• The importance of character
• “If the conservative perspective that I have wants to have any purchase in American politics, MAGA has to lose. Donald Trump has to lose.”
• Federalism: a practical understanding that smaller government is better.
• Republican Party increasingly embracing a pro-choice platform
• “If you're going to have a healthy two party system, the distinctions should be around good people of high character approaching policy solutions from different perspectives.”
• “One of these parties has sort of left the norms of American. political engagement.”
• “I voted for Mitt Romney more than Mitt Romney's probably voted for Mitt Romney.”
• “If I'm voting for a politician, I have a test. One is: Do they have the character necessary for the job? And the higher the position they're seeking, the more character that is necessary. And number two: Do they broadly agree with me on the most important policies?”
• “I have very little patience for those people who say I'm somehow not a Christian for voting for a pro-choice candidate. When they're voting for a pro-choice candidate who's been adjudicated a sex abuser, that is difficult for me to discern how that is a more Christian stance.”
• Clear, independent thinker
• Logical reasoning and courageous statements
• A living faith by which we think through ideas
• “There's a fine line between stubbornness and courage.”
• “In these last 10 years, I've really had to ask myself: Who are you really?”
• David French’s parents’ example of faith and virtue
• Learning from World War I and World War II history
• “Some of the worst things that have happened in American history have happened because people didn't want to do hard things.”
• “I think the sanctification process, though, is difficult. It means that you're being exposed to constantly your own sin is being exposed to yourself.”
• Mark asks: “What do you want Christian people, thoughtful, committed, curious, uncertain, tenuous Christian people to, to do between now and the election?”
• 2 Timothy 1:7—“God did not give us a spirit of fear, but of power, of love, and of sound mind.”
• Micah 6:8—”What does the Lord require of you, O man? What is good? To act justly, to love kindness, and to walk humbly before the Lord your God.”
• Ideological diversity: be curious, seek disagreement
• “If you just show affection for people and curiosity towards their views, anger tends to drain out of a room.”
• “College students are full of anxiety about conflict.”
• “Fear not.”
• The A Team—arming up for battle
• “And they find out that a lot of these folks that they were taught were going to be their enemies are actually just super kind, normal folks.”
• “They're equipping them to fight, not to love their neighbor, fight their neighbor, not love their neighbor.”
• Mark asks: “What handles would you give people in living in a fear dominated moment in American history?”
• “In receiving anger and fear, do not try to build up a bulletproof thick skin. … Because you know what that does? It often walls you off from legitimate criticism.”
• Thick skin, soft heart.
• “An enormous amount of fear is rooted in a sense—a feeling—of non-belonging and loneliness. Isolation and loneliness.”
• “People who are more isolated and alone are drawn to these authoritarian movements.”
• “Ease the loneliness, build the connection. … Lean into relationship and presence.”
• “It was just stunning to me that, against all evidence of scripture, Christians were consigning people to eternal damnation over a vote in a presidential election.”
• Miles Law: “Where we stand is based on where we sit.”
• Kindness, humility, not living a fear-based angry life
• “If you're in a community where the fruit of the spirit dominate, you can withstand a lot of disagreement.”

Production Credits

Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment Magazine and Fuller Seminary.

“It’s sort of strange to think about beauty and horrible circumstances together. But I try, probably clumsily at times, to bring beauty to a thing that's really horrible. … But in terms of covering executions, there is just a void there. The main character always dies.” (Elizabeth Bruenig, from the episode)

Despite sin, there remains an inherent beauty and goodness throughout creation … including humanity.

And even in the most divisive circumstances, when we appeal to the beauty and horror in our shared human condition, we might be able to find common ground for mutual understanding and collaboration. And sometimes, in the best circumstances, we might even find a beautiful and life-giving encounter with the other.

In this episode, celebrated journalist and self-described “avid partisan of humankind” Elizabeth Bruenig (staff writer for The Atlantic, and formerly the New York Times, Washington Post, and The New Republic) joins Mark Labberton to talk about journalism, her journey toward Catholicism, the complex moral and emotional lives of human beings, capital punishment and violence, and the prospects for introducing beauty into polarized politics and horrifying evil.

About Elizabeth Bruenig

Elizabeth Bruenig is a staff writer at The Atlantic. She was previously an opinion writer for the New York Times and the Washington Post, where she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. She has also been a staff writer at The New Republic and a contributor to the Left, Right & Center radio show. She currently hosts a podcast, The Bruenigs, with her husband, Matt Bruenig. Elizabeth holds a master of philosophy in Christian theology from the University of Cambridge. At The Atlantic, she writes about theology and politics.

Show Notes

• Elizabeth Bruenig shares about her religious and philosophical background
• Bruenig shares about her journey toward Roman Catholicism
• The Eucharist and embodied experience of God
• The real presence of Christ in the Eucharist
• “I don't need to be studying and getting degrees, I need to just be living my life radically as a Christian.”
• Journalism, paying attention, and compassionate
• “I'm very interested in people and people's moral lives. Things like honor and shame, guilt—you know, very complex emotions—interest me a lot, and I think everyone has them all the time. People have these spiritual, ethical, moral struggles going on inside them. And so everybody is a little universe unto themselves.”
• What it means to be a Staff Writer
• Journalism with narrative, story, opinions, and arguments
• “I have found that to be a very successful way of garnering stories. It's just to listen to people.”
• “The first execution I ever witnessed, I witnessed for the New York Times, it was during Trump's spree of federal executions. I think they executed something like 13 people in six months, really unprecedented. I wanted to report on that.”
• Media witnesses as
• The Executions of Alfred Bourgeois, David Neal Cox, James Barber, Kenny Smith, and Alan Miller
• “I have had the opportunity to speak with men who were about to die.”
• “The Man I Saw Them Kill”
• “The idea of execution promises catharsis. The reality of it delivers the opposite, a nauseating sense of shame and regret. Alfred Bourgeois was going to die behind bars one way or another, and the only meaning in hastening it, as far as I could tell, was inflicting the terror and the torment of knowing that the end was coming early. I felt defiled by witnessing that particular bit of pageantry, all of that brutality cloaked in sterile procedure. So much time and effort goes into making executions seem like exercises of justice, not just power. Extreme measures are taken at each juncture to convince the public, and perhaps the executioners themselves, that the process is a fair, dispassionate, rational one. It isn't. There was no sense in it, and I can't make any out of it. Nothing was restored, nothing was gained. There isn't any justice in it, nor satisfaction, nor reason. There was nothing, nothing there.”
• Faith, the void of execution
• “I find that reading great essays summons language in me.”
• On Beauty and Being Just by Elaine Scarry
• “Beauty inspires reproduction”
• “It's sort of strange to think about beauty and horrible circumstances together. But I try, probably clumsily at times, to bring beauty to a thing that's really horrible. … But in terms of covering executions, there is just a void there. The main character always dies.”
• “I had a religious conviction going into the first execution that I was at that executions were wrong and it wasn't really based on anything that I could point to. I just had the, you know, very simple notion that killing people is wrong and that it's wrong in, in all cases, even if the person is a very bad person.”
• Two executions in the New Testament: the one Jesus halts, and the one that kills Jesus
• Execution as a subhuman act
• The logic of criminal justice system and capital punishment
• The difficulty of introducing beauty into polarized politics
• “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” (Romans 8)
• Groaning beauty
• “All of creation groans under the weight of sin.”
• “The holiness of creation, the goodness of it, is so strong that it can't be, I don't think, entirely blotted out by sin. I just don't think that humans have the power to rob of beauty that which was made beautiful.”
• Finding beauty in visual culture, pop culture, museums, essay writing, and art
• On Beauty, Eula Biss— “… her prose, you know, glitters to me. I think it's fantastic. Not too melodramatic, restrained. And elegant.”
• Marilynne Robinson, imagination and beauty
• The political landscape
• Fears
• “I think when what's up for debate is like the rule of law, then I'm going to go with the candidate who whatever other faults is actually in favor of the rule of law. I think that's very important.”
• Assisted Suicide and Physician Assisted Suicide
• “I don't think I can write without bringing in theology, because it's so much a part of what I consider to be true. And so to give readers an honest view into what I'm thinking I have to provide the theological Issues that I'm thinking through.”

Production Credits

Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment Magazine and Fuller Seminary.

“We have to go back to the very basic thing of understanding our shared humanity. And we’ve departed a long way from that—even the best of us, I’m afraid. It is just stunning. I mean, we are such a danger to everything we value.” (Marilynne Robinson, from the episode)

Today on the show, Mark Labberton welcomes the celebrated novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson to discuss her most recent book, Reading Genesis. Known for novels such as Housekeeping, Gilead, Home, and Lila, she offers a unique perspective on ancient scripture in her latest work of nonfiction.

In this enriching and expansive conversation, they discuss the theological, historical, and literary value in the Book of Genesis; the meaning of our shared humanity; fear and reverence; how to free people from the view of God as threatening; the complicated and enigmatic nature of human freedom; the amazing love, mercy, and long-suffering of God on display in the unfolding drama of the Genesis narrative; and overall: “The beautiful ordinariness of a God-fashioned creature in ordinary communion with one another.”

About Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson is an award-winning American novelist and essayist. Her fictional and non-fictional work includes recurring themes of Christian spirituality and American political life. In a 2008 interview with the Paris Review, Robinson said, "Religion is a framing mechanism. It is a language of orientation that presents itself as a series of questions. It talks about the arc of life and the quality of experience in ways that I've found fruitful to think about."

Her novels include Housekeeping (1980, Hemingway Foundation/Pen Award, Pulitzer Prize finalist), Gilead (2004, Pulitzer Prize), Home (2008, National Book Award Finalist), Lila (2014, National Book Award Finalist), and most recently, Jack (2020). Robinson's non-fiction works include Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution (1989), The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998), Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (2010), When I was a Child I Read Books: Essays (2012), The Givenness of Things: Essays (2015), and What Are We Doing Here?: Essays (2018). Her latest book is Reading Genesis (2024).

Marilynne Robinson received a B.A., magna cum laude, from Brown University in 1966 and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Washington in 1977. She has served as a writer-in-residence or visiting professor at a variety of universities, including Yale Divinity School in Spring 2020. She currently teaches at the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. She has served as a deacon for the Congregational United Church of Christ. Robinson was born and raised in Sandpoint, Idaho and now lives in Iowa City.

Show Notes

• Get your copy of Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson
• Mark introduces Marilynne Robinson and her most recent foray into biblical interpretation
• Overarching narrative of God’s time vs. Human time
• Theological, biblical, historical, and literary categories
• Why Genesis? Why biblical commentary?
• “Genesis is the foundational text, and God’s self-revelation is the work of Genesis.”
• The expansiveness of the creation narrative from the beginning of everything to two people hoeing in a garden.
• Elohim and the universal God-name
• Monotheism and the enormously cosmic assertion of the nature of God
• From cosmology to granular human existence
• Amazement and the Book of Genesis
• “God saw the intentions of our heart and they were only evil always.”
• Conjuring the idea of a vindictive God—as opposed to a merciful, long-suffering, and loving God
• “It's hard to wiggle people free from the idea that God is primarily threatening.”
• The role of fear in sin, temptation, and evil
• “I think the fall is a sort of realization of a fuller aspect of our nature, which is painful to us and painful to God. But it's our humanity.”
• From the book: “The narrative of scripture has moved with astonishing speed from let there be light to this intimate scene of shared grief and haplessness. There is no incongruity in this. Human beings are at the center of it all. Love and grief are, in this infinite creation, things of the kind we share with God. The fact that they have their being in the deepest reaches of our extensionless and undiscoverable souls only makes them more astonishing. Over and against the roaring cosmos, that they exist at all can only be proof of a tender solicitude.”
• Ancient Near Eastern mythology
• “Meaning cannot leak out of this. It’s absolutely meaningful.”
• Genesis is a “particular series of stories that are stories of the tumbling, bumbling, faithful, faithless, violent, peaceable, loyal, disloyal agency of human beings.”
• Mystery
• Theology as a vision, a revelation
• “The beautiful ordinariness of a God-fashioned creature in ordinary communion with one another.”
• The impact of Genesis in the history of our understanding of humanity, freedom, relationships, and so much more.
• Law as a liberation of one another: it limits your behavior and is emancipating to everyone around you.
• God’s patience with human freedom and the ability to go wrong
• The enigma of freedom
• “From the very beginning, the Bible seems aware that we are our enemy and that we are our apocalyptic beast.”
• “Our freedom is very costly. It’s costly to us. It’s costly to God.”
• Imagination and the dynamics of freedom
• “An enhanced reverence for oneself has to be rooted in a reverence for God.”
• “The idea of the sacredness of God and the sacredness of the self.”
• Fear and reverence
• “You are holding in your imagination … and helping us to see, feel, and hear the voices and see the actions of ordinary human beings, who are both (like Psalm 8), ‘a little lower than the angels,’ and at the same time, ‘we are dust and to dust you will return.’”
• Paying attention
• Marilynne Robinson’s upbringing, access to nature, access to books, and plenty of solitude
• Joseph and the ending of the Genesis narrative: How might the story of Joseph speak to our time?
• “We have to go back to the very basic thing of understanding our shared humanity. And we've departed a long way from that—even the best of us, I'm afraid. It is just stunning. I mean, we are such a danger to everything we value. We are a danger to everything we value. And the fact that we can persist in doing that or tolerating it … there we are, you know? … We've always been strange, we human beings.”
• The perplexity of freedom
• “The way that Joseph understands his history is a comment on the idea of divine time.”
• “Joseph did enslave the Egyptians.”
• “There is no bow to tie around anything. There's simply whatever it yields in terms of meaning and beauty and so on.”
• Matthew 28 and the Great Commission
• “Christianity sliding into empire”
• The value of resolution and the open-ended nature of the Genesis narrative

Production Credits

Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment magazine and Fuller Seminary.

“I’m here because you’re here.”

Berkeley, California is known for being the home to the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s. It was and is the site of many protests, drawing vocal minorities to Sproul Plaza and People’s Park for demonstrations, activism, and public assembly. So it’s come to symbolize what it means to speak out and be heard. But what does it mean to minister to an energized public square?

In this Conversing Short, Mark Labberton thinks back to his time ministering in Berkeley, CA. First Presbyterian Church remains a close neighbor to the University of California, Berkeley campus. He describes an approach to public engagement marked by generous listening, a desire to know the individuals so moved to protest and speak out, and offer faithful presence to a community dedicated to protest and activism.

About Conversing Shorts

“In between my longer conversations with people who fascinate and inspire and challenge me, I share a short personal reflection, a focused episode that brings you the ideas, stories, questions, ponderings, and perspectives that animate Conversing and give voice to the purpose and heart of the show. Thanks for listening with me.”

About Mark Labberton

Mark Labberton is the Clifford L. Penner Presidential Chair Emeritus and Professor Emeritus of Preaching at Fuller Seminary. He served as Fuller’s fifth president from 2013 to 2022. He’s the host of Conversing.

Show Notes

• Berkeley, CA
• People’s Park
• Sproul Plaza (site of famous Free Speech Protests of the 1960s)
• How to intensify their thirst?
• “What I really wanted was a conversation.”
• “Listening to God, which is what the life of Christian worship actually is.”
• “Living a life of listening, which is central to all Christian discipleship.”
• “I’m here because you’re here.”
• “I wish there had been a lineup of protesters outside first press asking, ‘How dare you?’… why are we not gathering protestors?”
• “I was wanting to so authentically speak and preach and live the gospel, that we would be the peculiar people that would cause people to say, ‘Why are you so peculiar?’—not just in that sense of church oddness, but in that deeper sense of why are you the peculiar people of unexplained mercy, unexplained forgiveness, unexplained passion for justice, unexplained sensitivity to individuals, and to societal, social, and systemic needs.”

Production Credits

Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment Magazine and Fuller Seminary.

“Wisdom is not just about knowledge. Wisdom adds to knowledge with discernment, with understanding, with a moral sense of what’s right and wrong.”

We live in a time of overflowing and interweaving crises. A global pandemic exacerbates a mental health crisis caused social media technology. The upheaval of American electoral politics caused by an erosion (or breakdown?) of social and relational trust. The rise of nationalism, the proliferation of war, and longing for justice in the realms of gender and race.

Underneath it all appears to be a crisis of knowledge and its convergence around skepticism of science, a culture of suspicion, and confusion about basic factual information, let alone right and wrong.

We need wisdom. Badly. But in times of crisis and chaos, where are we to turn for wisdom?

In this episode Mark Labberton is joined by longtime friend Francis Collins, physician, researcher, and former director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Known for his leadership in mapping the human genome, his public service at the NIH spanned three presidencies and culminated with overseeing the national response to Covid-19 pandemic.

The author of many books, including his bestselling The Language of God, Collins’s new book is *The Road to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust,* a reflection on the crisis of truth, science, faith, and trust, and how the exhausted middle might chart a path toward a better future.

About Francis Collins

Francis S. Collins, MD, PhD, is the former director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). As the longest serving director of NIH—spanning twelve years and three presidencies—he oversaw the work of the largest supporter of biomedical research in the world, from basic to clinical research.

Collins is a physician-geneticist noted for his landmark discoveries of disease genes and his leadership of the international Human Genome Project, which culminated in April 2003 with the completion of a finished sequence of the human DNA instruction book. He served as director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the NIH from 1993 to 2008.

Collins's research laboratory has discovered a number of important genes, including those responsible for cystic fibrosis, neurofibromatosis, Huntington's disease, a familial endocrine cancer syndrome, and most recently, genes for type 2 diabetes, and the gene that causes Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome, a rare condition that causes premature aging.

Collins received a BS in chemistry from the University of Virginia, a PhD in physical chemistry from Yale University, and an MD with honours from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prior to coming to the NIH in 1993, he spent nine years on the faculty of the University of Michigan, where he was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. He is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences. Collins was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in November 2007 and the National Medal of Science in 2009.

Show Notes

• Get your copy of The Road to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust
• “The crisis behind the crisis. It’s the crisis of culture. It’s the crisis of mind and heart. It’s the crisis of society. It’s the crisis of faith.”
• Collins occupying various roles through this book: professor, advocate, mentor, philosopher, coach, scientist, pathologist, and perhaps most saliently, cultural diagnostician.
• Being on the road to wisdom
• Helping those in the exhausted middle, to offer ways to do something to address cultural crises
• Collins summarizes the arc of the book
• TRUTH: “There is such a thing as objective truth. But it is not necessarily very popular in many circumstances.”
• “Facts—*established facts—*are now sometimes called into question because somebody doesn’t like the fact.”
• Jonathan Rauch on the “Constitution of Knowledge”
• “You will know the truth and the truth will set you free. He doesn’t say the counter that lies will imprison you, but you might have to think about that.”
• Science as a pathway to the truth
• Anecdotes vs. empirical science
• “We have to bring faith into this conversation if we’re trying to shape a future that it gives you a chance to tap into all the wisdom that's there.”
• TRUST: “I found in my own experience, some of the information that turned out to be most life-changing came from a source that I never would have considered as part of my reliable circle of buddies, but I needed to hear it.”
• “Wisdom is not just about knowledge. Wisdom adds to knowledge with discernment, with understanding, with a moral sense of what’s right and wrong.”
• “Our society is in trouble.”
• Where will the solution come from? No politicians, not media, but only us.
• Empowering people to be part of the solution
• “Love is your calling. Anger and fear are not your calling.”
• “Listen to understand.”
• Don’t distribute information unless you’re sure it’s true.
• Build bridges with neighbours and within communities.
• Braver Angels Website
• “If you put information in front of people that’s well established, they’ll make rational decisions. And I assume that’s what science is all about.”
• Collins’s experience leading the charge to develop Covid-19 vaccines, and then managing the resistance to vaccines
• “People of faith in many instances were the most likely to fall into the category of not trusting what science had to say.”
• The cultural crisis beneath the medical crisis of Covid vaccine skepticism
• Collins reflects on public health responses to Covid-19 (school closures, mask mandates, etc.)
• Systemic breakdown caused by fear, anxiety, distrust, and suspicion
• Collins comments on Anthony Fauci’s public service throughout Covid-19
• Discrediting and redefining science, subverting faith
• Postmodernism and the erasure of objectivity and reason in science
• “Nothing is true except our perspective.”
• Francis Collins’s perspectives on the Christian church
• Christians’ ungrounded fear that this is a war
• Tim Alberta’s book The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory
• “Seeing through a glass darkly.” (1 Cor 13)
• A book of hope and whole human experience
• “There are profound reasons for each of us to engage. This is an argument about not standing aside. It’s crucial to see that what we are fighting for is great and glorious, and worth every bit of the effort from each of us. Truth, science, faith, and trust are not just sources of relief from a painful period in our country’s life. They represent the grandest achievements and insights of human civilization. They literally hold down the promise of a better life for every person on this planet in material terms, in spiritual terms, and in social and cultural terms. To take up this challenge is therefore not an act one of exhaustion or desperation. But one arising from the hopeful pursuit of the promise of greater flourishing of our entire humandom.”

Production Credits

Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment magazine and Fuller Seminary.

Is perfection possible? And if so, is it worth the cost to your mental and spiritual health?

The quest for perfection haunts many people: students, athletes, employees, parents—and the children of those parents!

While this quest is often framed as the pursuit of excellence, virtue, and success, perfectionism often results in various maladaptive behaviours—such as procrastination, people-pleasing, relational stress, and mental illnesses, including anxiety and depression disorders.

In this episode, Mark Labberton welcomes Dr. Kenneth Wang, Professor of Psychology at Fuller School of Psychology, to talk about the psychological and spiritual dynamics of perfectionism.

Together, they explore the connections between perfectionism and a range of personal and mental health issues, such as depression, achievement, religiosity, racial identity, and self-esteem. They reflect on the cultural obsession with perfection; the severe psychological and social burdens of trying to be perfect; the toxicity of comparison to others; the meaning of being “good enough”; and the spiritual impact of encouraging perfection in education, career, relationships, and personal life.

About Kenneth Wang

Kenneth Wang is Professor of Psychology at Fuller School of Psychology. He’s an experienced therapist, and has conducted extensive research that spans the psychology of religion, to mindful meditation, to coping with trauma, mental health and race, moral character and virtue formation, diversity, and cross-cultural adjustment. His expertise is in the psychological study of perfectionism in familial, educational, religious contexts—looking at the phenomenon across a variety of cultures. Visit Dr. Kenneth Wang’s website to take an online assessment for perfectionism and consider guidance and coaching from Dr. Wang.

Show Notes

• Societal perfectionism and the lure of the perfect through technology
• Comparing perfectionism in Asia vs America
• Comparing ourselves to others
• “Editing for the perfect shot”
• “There’s no time to relax or rest.”
• “One thing that's underlying challenges of perfectionism is that we compare ourselves with others and we feel like we're not good enough.”
• Rank-ordered report cards in Taiwan
• The psychological weight of pressure to perform
• Competition and perfectionism
• The elusive search for contentment
• The difference between performance and perfectionism
• Perfectionism’s two core dimensions: (1) striving to meet very high standards of excellence / (2) discrepancy or evaluative concerns—being truly bothered by any amount of imperfections
• “Extreme perfectionists can’t tolerate any imperfection.”
• Shame, rumination, and anxiety
• Kenneth guides Mark through a live perfectionism evaluation
• “Is your best good enough?”
• “Adaptive perfectionism”
• “I did the best I could” vs “I’m sure I always could have done better.”
• Cross-cultural dimensions of perfectionism: wanting to fit in, the exhaustion of trying to get things right, and language apprehensiveness
• Timidity and fear to make a mistake
• Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder and perfectionism
• The view of oneself: performance achievement mentality, seeking validation, unstable self-worth
• Perfectionists magnify imperfections
• Inner critic
• Kenneth Wang’s recovery as a perfectionism
• Can perfectionists forgive themselves for displeasing others?
• How to deal with the emotions that come along with perfectionist catastrophizing
• Training mental muscles to become more resilient to negative emotions
• How to “sit with emotions”
• Japanese Kintsugi practices and the visibility of a history of brokenness: gold paint that highlights brokenness and imperfect repair
• Theological reflections on perfection: “Only God is perfect.”
• How does Christianity speak into perfectionism with grace and truth?
• “I am the vine, you are the branches.”
• Shame and giving up on our illusions of perfection
• Coping with inadequacy
• Allowing God to lead us into the broad place instead of the narrow place
• Fuller Theological Seminary’s “Imperfect Culture Lab”

Production Credits

Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment Magazine and Fuller Seminary.

The news media offers a steady drip of audacity, nerve, and offence—something for each end of the political spectrum and every corner of the public square.

But when we integrate audacity with a humble confidence, it can lead to powerful acts of love and justice.

The gospel makes an audacious claim about God’s grace. It makes an audacious demand that we love our neighbours in humility. And that combination of audacity and humility keeps us seeking to engage in real conversations about ultimate things—despite our differences, despite resentments, despite all the reasons to give up on building something together.

In this Conversing Short, Mark Labberton reflects on the meaning of audacity, humility, and courage when the church engages in public life.

About Conversing Shorts

“In between my longer conversations with people who fascinate and inspire and challenge me, I share a short personal reflection, a focused episode that brings you the ideas, stories, questions, ponderings, and perspectives that animate Conversing and give voice to the purpose and heart of the show. Thanks for listening with me.”

About Mark Labberton

Mark Labberton is the Clifford L. Penner Presidential Chair Emeritus and Professor Emeritus of Preaching at Fuller Seminary. He served as Fuller’s fifth president from 2013 to 2022. He’s the host of Conversing.

Show Notes

• What is audacity?
• Virtuous audacity, e.g., The Audacity of Hope (like Barack Obama)
• Injurious audacity, e.g., preposterous, foolish, offensive, distorting, railroading, steamrolling, shutting down, closing off
• But an additional form of audacity “has led to the humblest and most sacrificial forms of human service and love and compassion and mercy and justice.”
• Imagine a crowd of Berkeley, CA, protesters lined up before you, demanding: “How dare you?”
• Audacity and courage
• “It actually helped galvanize in my own voice—in my heart, in my lungs, in my mind—a sense of what I hope was humble confidence in proclaiming a gospel that I did and do believe is true.”
• “How do we actually engage in real conversation about ultimate things?”
• Adopting a stance of “we are all in this together”
• “How dare we believe and speak in God’s name?”
• “Indeed how dare I, and then also how dare I not if this is actually true?!”
• Integrating humility, confidence, courage

Production Credits

Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment magazine and Fuller Seminary.

How should we approach disagreements when our deepest convictions and commitments are challenged or questioned? A healthy society is built around the ability to navigate these kinds of disagreements with responsibility and respect, but in our increasingly polarized society, it’s becoming harder and harder to cultivate the habits, skills, and virtues that can keep us united amid our vehement disagreements.

In this episode Mark welcomes legal scholar and law professor John Inazu to discuss how to approach disagreement with wisdom, care, and a commitment to the well-being of the other. John is the Sally D. Danforth Distinguished Professor of Law and Religion at Washington University in St. Louis. He speaks and writes frequently about pluralism, assembly, free speech, and religious freedom. His latest book is Learning to Disagree: The Surprising Path to Navigating Differences with Empathy and Respect.

Together Mark and John discuss the role of fear management when approaching difficult conversations; how to appreciate the complexity and diversity of perspectives in others; the role of empathy in communication; how to learn to disagree constructively in different life contexts from work to home to politics; how authority, power dynamics, and social roles factor in productive disagreements; the light and dark sides of civility; and how to navigate and negotiate our disagreements with compassion and love.

About John Inazu

John Inazu is the Sally D. Danforth Distinguished Professor of Law and Religion at Washington University in St. Louis. He teaches criminal law, law and religion, and various First Amendment courses. He writes and speaks frequently about pluralism, assembly, free speech, religious freedom, and other issues. John has written three books—including Learning to Disagree: The Surprising Path to Navigating Differences with Empathy and Respect (Zondervan, 2024) and Liberty’s Refuge: The Forgotten Freedom of Assembly (Yale University Press, 2012)—and has published opinion pieces in the Washington Post, The Atlantic, Chicago Tribune, LA Times, USA Today, Newsweek, and CNN. He is also the founder of the Carver Project and the Legal Vocation Fellowship and is a senior fellow with Interfaith America.

Show Notes

• Get your copy of Learning to Disagree: The Surprising Path to Navigating Differences with Empathy and Respect (https://www.jinazu.com/learning-to-disagree)
• John Inazu’s background as a legal scholar and expert on first amendment rights, including the freedom to assemble peaceably, or “the right to peaceful assembly”
• How to learn from lawyers about how to disagree
• How does fear factor into communicating through disagreement?
• What neuroscience has taught as about fear
• “I can understand why you feel that…”
• Well-practiced habits
• Be prepared to engage differently
• Learning how to practice communication outside of a toxic social media or online context
• Empathy and the complexity of others’ views
• Canadian psychological research on empathy
• Avoiding abstraction in order to cultivate empathy
• David Brooks’s book, How to Know a Person
• How to understand fundamental versus surface-level differences
• Heated political issues and the social roles we inhabit
• Power dynamics, authority, and responsibility
• Power dynamics in the classroom
• How to approach disagreement in political protests on college campuses, e.g., Columbia University
• “Part of that responsibility is recognizing that people are hurting in very deep ways. … We’re not talking about abstractions or debating some historical event, we’re talking about real felt emotions.”
• “I'm aware that the capacity for interpersonal interaction has fallen off and it becomes more and more a school, or an environment, or a culture in which disagreement is not allowed.”
• Civility as a virtue or a vice?
• Purely cognitive rationality vs complex, emotional passions
• Fannie Lou Hamer and playing by a different set of social norms and rules
• Polarization and political tensions in partisan America
• “Totalizing positions” and the shrinking possibility of genuine communications
• Shirley Mullen’s book, Claiming the Courageous Middle
• How to uphold convictions without surrendering any ultimate truth claims
• How John Inazu has been shaped, formed, and influenced
• Curiosity and patience
• Close relationships that do formative work
• The Antidote for our cultural moment: “A lot of very small and very personal efforts where individual lives change postures … and contribute to social change with storytelling and exemplars and costly practices.”
• Small incremental steps: Jesus’s metaphor that the Kingdom of God is like yeast
• What would happen if American Christians started listening to the global church?
• What is the role of the imagination in learning to disagree?

Production Credits

Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment magazine and Fuller Seminary.

“The mystery has great meaning.”

Joy and sorrow don’t have to be dissonant opposites, author Amy Low suggests. There can be harmony in the space between triumph and tragedy. In her recent memoir, *The Brave In-Between: Notes from the Last Room,* she recounts her battle with Stage IV metastatic colon cancer following the end of her marriage.

Her gracious, generous wisdom is beautifully expressed on her book’s back cover: “Through the swirl of prolonged trauma and unbearable grief, a vantage point emerged—a window that showed her the way to relish life and be kinder to herself and others while living through the inevitable loss and heartbreak that crosses everyone’s paths.”

In this episode, Mark Labberton welcomes Amy for a conversation about the lessons she’s learned from living with cancer, including: how to come to terms with our own deaths; dealing with divorce and a traumatic end of a relationship; how to walk the path of forgiveness and humility; the immense complexity and beauty of humanity; how to explore the meaning of mystery without fear; the role of friendship and community in dealing with cancer; and the hope of imagining heaven.

About Amy Low

Amy Low, author of *The Brave In-Between: Notes from the Last Room,* has been a storyteller all her life. She grew up in and continues to live life through parables and metaphors. She sees her life as an invitation to discovering the new every day and even records some of these discoveries in her Substack, Postcards from the Mountain. As the managing director for fellowships and non-profit journalism at the Emerson Collective, she directs efforts to empower individuals and newsrooms to strengthen our shared conversation in the public square. Most important, Amy is mom to Connor and Lucy. Her proudest achievement is raising a son and daughter who are unafraid, grateful, and curious, whether in class, at home, on stage, or especially in the band.

Get your copy of *The Brave In-Between: Notes from the Last Room.*

Follow Amy’s story through her Substack, Postcards from the Mountain.

Being in the last room of one’s life

The profundity and sacredness of discussing one’s “last room”—”the most human place of all”

Bravery, imagination, and generosity

Amy Low’s cancer diagnosis of Stage IV metastatic colon cancer at 48 years old

Discovering metastases

Living in the last room: an unusual place to inhabit in mid-life

There are different ways to live in the last room.

St. Paul’s “last room” as described in the Letter to the Philippians

Lament and levity

Grief and being with people in their last rooms

Being fully alive in the midst of facing one’s death

“I can say with confidence for me that divorce was far harder than cancer. When I had to grapple with the gravity of my disease and the diagnosis and what I was going to face … I had come through a space of the woods that I can say was far more ominous, far harder, far more heartbreaking.”

Divorce

Forgiveness and receiving care from her ex-husband

How to create a new story in the wake of tragedy and trauma

Forgiveness as “releasing people from the negative consequences of their behavior”

“Giving yourself permission to be truly loved, and to be truly released from shame.”

Fear

Amy’s honest, artful, candid expression of her story

“Metaphors are places that hold ambiguity.”

Finding peace with ambiguity and mystery

Joy and purpose

“The worst thing anyone ever said to me was, you know, this whole thing is like so random. … And I thought, ‘No. No. The minute you call this random, the minute this doesn’t have any meaning.”

“The mystery has great meaning.”

Grappling with the tension of purpose and pain

How specific friends stood by Amy in approaching the experience of her cancer diagnosis

“Don’t just do something. Stand there.”

The challenge of receiving without giving much back—and reframing the meaning of “giving back”

The hope of imagining heaven

Heaven on earth as parachuting hot dogs

“The great hope is that we all wake up and we laugh at the good stuff and be brave at the hard stuff.”

Production Credits

Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment Magazine and Fuller Seminary.

“A certain degree of faith in Providence and a certain degree of confidence in America … May that combination not be overwhelmed by some disaster.” (New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, offering a blessing for election season)

Contemporary political debate and commentary operates from deeply moral sources. People tend to vote their conscience. Our values and ideals, our sense of right and wrong, and our beliefs about what contributes or detracts from the common good often inform our politics.

And across the political spectrum, Americans of all stripes exercise their citizenship and public engagement through a religious faith that grounds it all. So, what better space to explore this conjunction of faith, morality, and political life than The New York Times Opinion section?

Today on the show, Ross Douthat joins Mark Labberton to discuss how his faith and theological commitments ground his moral and political perspectives. Douthat joined The New York Times as an Opinion columnist in 2009, and regularly appears on the weekly Opinion podcast, “Matter of Opinion.” He’s also a film critic for National Review and was previously senior editor at The Atlantic.

In this episode, they discuss the spiritual and political background of Douthat’s youth and how Roman Catholic Christianity grounded his religious and political views; the challenges for how the Catholic Church and its moral teachings can adapt to contemporary culture; how faith and morality can speak to our dynamic political moment during the 2024 election season; and finally Ross’s hope and faith in divine providence met with confidence in America’s resilience and capacity for good.

About Ross Douthat

Ross Douthat joined The New York Times as an Opinion columnist in 2009, and regularly appears on the weekly Opinion podcast, “Matter of Opinion.” He’s also a film critic for National Review. Previously, he was a senior editor at The Atlantic. He is the author of several books, including The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery (2021), The Decadent Society (2020), To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism (2018), Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics (2012); Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class (2005), and, with Reihan Salam, Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream (2008). His newest book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, will be published in early 2025.

Show Notes

Ross Douthat’s spiritual background as Episcopalian, Pentecostal-Evangelical, and eventually Roman Catholic

Our “spiritually haunted environment”

How Catholicism has changed from Pope John Paul II to Pope Francis

Adapting moral teachings to contemporary challenges

“Many, many of the problems in our culture and the reasons for people's unhappiness are related to issues of sex and relationships.”

“Jesus says incredibly stringent and strenuous things in the Gospels about sex.”

“I think if the church stops having some sort of countercultural message on those issues, then it won't actually be speaking to the big challenges and derangements of our time.”

“All of the developed world is heading over this demographic cliff…”

People aren’t getting married anymore. They aren’t forming relationships anymore.”

Pope Francis, pastoral sensitivity, and making moral concessions to contemporary culture

Pope Francis squelching the Latin mass

Commenting on the dynamics and craziness of our political moment

“Over the course of my career, I have tried to spend a lot of time with the idea that Catholicism in particular, and I think Christianity in general, should stand a little bit outside of partisan categories.”

How the Republican Party can address the needs of the working class

Ross Douthat’s views during the Trump Era

Providence and appealing to God’s control

"Man proposes, and God disposes.”

“The world has grown weirder in general, in the last decade, than it was when I was in my twenties.”

Providence and freedom

Ross’s thesis in The Decadent Society: “The Western world and really the whole planet was sort of stuck stagnant. We'd achieved this incredible level of wealth and technological power, we'd filled the earth and subdued it to some degree, but we were suffering from uncertainty, malaise, and ennui because we didn't know what to do next.”

Space travel and Elon Musk

Looking for help from some other power: God, Aliens, or A.I.

The unique perspective Ross Douthat brings to The New York Times

“As the world has grown weirder, I've felt a little more comfortable being weird myself, and that so far hasn't gotten me fired.”

“You know, not to brag, but yeah, I'm probably the weirdest columnist at a major American newspaper.”

Offering a blessing for the nation’s experience between now and election day

“Life in the United States is an underrated good. Americans have become very pessimistic, very unhappy with each other, sometimes unhappy with themselves … And I think actually, beneath that difficult surface, America has a lot of real strengths and real resilience and American culture is better positioned, I think, than a lot of cultures around the world to navigate the next 50 to 100 years of human history. So I think that should give people some confidence.”

“A certain degree of faith in Providence and a certain degree of confidence in America.”

Production Credits

Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment Magazine and Fuller Seminary.

Sacred spaces are not secret spaces. The church enacts a gospel reality that is inherently universal and transparent in the world. And what better metaphor than building a church sanctuary made of glass to communicate the invitation of the gospel to the world?

In this Conversing Short, Mark Labberton reflects on the implications of this architectural decision. He also considers the opportunities for community conversation; the invitation to communion, dialogue, and unity; and a fearless, gospel-centered transparency between the church and the world.

About Conversing Shorts

“In between my longer conversations with people who fascinate and inspire and challenge me, I share a short personal reflection, a focused episode that brings you the ideas, stories, questions, ponderings, and perspectives that animate Conversing and give voice to the purpose and heart of the show. Thanks for listening with me.”

About Mark Labberton

Mark Labberton is the Clifford L. Penner Presidential Chair Emeritus and Professor Emeritus of Preaching at Fuller Seminary. He served as Fuller’s fifth president from 2013 to 2022. He’s the host of Conversing.

Show Notes

Preaching in a glass-walled sanctuary at First Presbyterian Berkeley, CA

“It’s one cross, in the world and for the church… but it’s for everyone.”

The “live theater” of preaching in a glass-walled sanctuary

We live in a church and world of both stillness and movement—which is embodied in Jesus’s ministry

“I wanted to feel like what I was doing in the sanctuary would land as much with realistic speech and tone and assumption in the streets of Berkeley as it would land inside the sanctuary.”

“It was a good way to hold my feet to the fire. Would I say this if I was standing exposed as it were on the street outside? Or would I only say this inside the closed walls of, yes, a clear glass wall church? So it became a metaphor—a reality—a vivid visual play that was part of every Sunday.”

Utter transparency of glass over stone walls

In a sacred space there is a transparency.

“The same kind of tyranny against faith exists inside us, but also around us. And now we're together going to share in the celebration of the Lord's table. ‘Come all you who are hungry. Eat and drink of this body and this bread.’ We're doing that in public view.

How do we live the claims of the gospel in a way that’s humble—not arrogant, not presumptuous, not full of pride, not insider-outsider, not us-versus-them… we are the us.”

“The gospel is for all of us.”

Production Credits

Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment Magazine and Fuller Seminary.

“When we pursue excellence it doesn’t have to come at the cost of our emotional and relational health.” (Ben Houltberg)

How do we form an identity and sense of self? Do we define ourselves based on the fragile glass shelter of what we achieve or how well we perform? If so, how does that affect our sense of meaning and purpose in life?

With the 2024 Paris Olympics underway, it’s easy to imagine how an elite athlete at the top of her game might form an identity based on her athletic or competitive performance.

In this episode, Mark Labberton welcomes developmental scientist Ben Houltberg to reflect on the pursuit of achievement and excellence, exploring what’s at stake for our psychological and spiritual health when we find our identity and life’s meaning in our performance.

Together they discuss: the glass shelter of athletic achievement and the opportunity that emerges when it inevitably shatters; the various performance contexts of family, relationships, education, sports, career, and religion; the dangers of conditional acceptance based on performance; the performance-enhancing impact of healthy coaching and mentoring relationships; the transformative effects of unconditional love; and ultimately, how to be free from a performance-based identity.

About Ben Houltberg

Benjamin Houltberg is a developmental scientist, experienced marriage and family therapist, and president and CEO of Search Institute. He is associate research professor at the University of Southern California, and was previously associate professor of human development at Fuller Theological Seminary’s School of Psychology. Follow him @benhoultberg, and learn more about Search Institute online.

Show Notes

About Ben Houltberg: developmental scientist, licensed marriage and family therapist, and CEO of Search Institute

About “performance-based identity”

Olympics and athletic performance-based identity

“When we pursue excellence it doesn't have to come at the cost of our emotional and relational health.”

“What is my purpose?”

Olympic athlete Simone Biles’ public breakdown and dominant return to gymnastics

“If you think about the natural trajectory of an elite athlete, it is towards a performance-based identity.”

How elite athletes form their identity in their athletic performance.

“A Glass Shelter” of athletic achievement: what happens when that glass shelter breaks?

When the glass shelter breaks, it becomes a transformative opportunity.

“Whether it was youth sports and training for a marathon, or whether it was in elite athletes or whether it was in different large organizations and their staff employees … the profile emerges that it is in some ways a human condition: that performance-based identity can really trap us into an approach to life and an approach to relationships and approach to competition that is undermining us and will eventually lead to a shattered sense of self.”

Actor vs performer in the world (Action vs. Performance)

Influenced by what other people think we are

How to understand “performance context” across domains of sports, education, career, relationships, family, morality, and society at large

The dangers of limiting our identities to performance

Conditional acceptance based on performance

Human relationships, connectivity, and collectivism as performance enhancing

Coaching and mentoring to deal with the stress of performing

NCAA sports

Helping young people find “the spark”—their passion and potential and purpose

How the Search Institute studies performance-based identity

Christian faith and unconditional love

How to be free from a performance-based identity

Finding our identity in beauty, connection, and commonality

Production Credits

Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment Magazine and Fuller Seminary.