This week we highlight a past episode of our Faith and Imagination Podcast. Today’s highlighted guest, Christina Bieber Lake, sees the novel as an expressly theological exercise. Dr. Lake, the Clyde S. Kilby Professor of English at Wheaton College, is the author of the 2019 book Beyond the Story: American Literary Fiction and the Limits of …
The Beauty—the Poetry—of Christian Experience, with Benjamin Myers, Oklahoma Baptist University
Benjamin Myers is the Crouch-Mathis Professor of Literature and the Director of the Honors Program at Oklahoma Baptist University. A former poet laureate of the state of Oklahoma, Ben is the author of four books of poetry and two books of nonfiction. We discuss two of those books today, a 2020 critical work titled A Poetics …
Metaphor, Memoir, and Christian Longing and Vision—All from a Midwest Farm, with Tiffany Eberle Kriner, Wheaton College
Tiffany Eberle Kriner is associate professor of English at Wheaton College in Illinois. The author of the scholarly book The Future of the Word: An Eschatology of Reading as well as a number of articles and chapters in academic venues, Kriner is more recently the author of the memoir In Thought, Word, and Seed: Reckonings from a Midwest …
The Apostle Peter’s Mystical Vision and How It Bears on Modern Life, with Robert Flanagan, Virginia Theological Seminary
Robert Flanagan has served as an Episcopal priest since 2003. He is chaplain at General Theological Seminary in New York and serves as dean’s advisor at Virginia Theological Seminary. We speak today about this 2022 book The Letters of an Unexpected Mystic: Encountering the Mystical Theology in First and Second Peter. We attend especially to how …
Poetry as Attention, as Awakening—as Prayer, with Abigail Carroll, poet and pastor
Abigail Carroll serves as pastor of the arts and spiritual formation at Church of the Well in Burlington, Vermont. She holds a PhD in American Studies from Boston University, and she is an accomplished poet whose third collection of poems, Cup My Days Like Water, a set of meditations on the Psalms, was published just last …
John of the Cross’s “Dark Night” and Our Quest for Justice and Transcendence, with Benedict Shoup, University of Notre Dame
Benedict Shoup is a doctoral candidate in systematic theology at the University of Notre Dame. He is currently writing a dissertation on the pneumatology and contemplative methodology—basically, the spiritual theory and practice—of the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic, John of the Cross. I met Benedict this past summer at a conference in Adelaide, Australia, where he gave …
Highlighted Episode: This Sacred Life: Hope in an Era of Climate Crisis, with guest Norman Wirzba, Duke Divinity School
This week we highlight a past episode of our Faith and Imagination Podcast. Norman Wirzba is the Gilbert T. Rowe Distinguished Professor of Christian Theology and Senior Fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke Divinity School. The author of several books, he’s also the director of a multi-year, Henry Luce Foundation-funded project entitled …
Finding the Sacred in the Everyday, with Darlene Young, poet
I sat down last spring with Darlene Young, a poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction writer who teaches in the English Department at BYU. We spoke about her two volumes of published poems, Homespun and Angel Feathers (2019) and Here (2023). We also talked about the relationship between poetry and faith, bringing humor to sacred things, …
Christ in the “Torn Places,” with Christopher Morris, Catholic Theological College, Melbourne
Christopher Morris is Head of the Department of Pastoral and Spiritual Studies and lecturer in Spirituality at Catholic Theological College in Melbourne, Australia. He is also a spiritual director and has been a Religious Education leader in Catholic education. Much of his scholarship has focused on the notion of “wisdom knowing” and practical ways to …
Layers of the Christian Creative Vision, with poet, novelist, and editor Sally Thomas
We speak today with Sally Thomas about her 2020 poetry collection Motherland as well as her novel, Works of Mercy, published in 2022. A former guest on this podcast, she has published poetry, fiction, reviews, and essays in such venues as First Things, Plough Quarterly, and the New Yorker, and she co-edited, with Micah Mattix, the anthology Christian Poetry in America since …