Faith and Imagination: A BYU Humanities Center Podcast
How do we envision our highest ideals and deepest commitments? How do we name and express our most expansive sense of who we are? The Faith and Imagination podcast explores these questions by conversing with scholars and others who address our religious and spiritual lives creatively and insightfully. Sponsored by the BYU Humanities Center.
We’ve come to the end of Season 3 of the podcast. I talk with Sophia Snyder, the podcast’s producer, and we share a few thoughts about the podcast generally and especially about this season’s guests. We also discuss brief clips from a few of this season’s episodes and talk about them – a small sampling …
Chad Thralls is a scholar of Christian spirituality and mysticism who teaches at Seton Hall University. His primary area of focus is the contemplative spiritual life, and today we discuss his book Deep Calls to Deep: Mysticism, Scripture, and Contemplation.
Zachary Davis is the Executive Director of the Faith Matters Foundation, the host of the Ministry of Ideas, Writ Large, and Making Meaning podcasts, and the editor of Wayfare Magazine. We discuss the article he published in the inaugural issue of Wayfare, a beautiful piece on the history of pilgrimage that doubles as a story about his personal faith journey.
Stephanie Paulsell is Susan Shallcross Swarz Professor of the Practice of Christian Studies at Harvard Divinity School and Faculty Dean of Eliot House at Harvard College. The author of a book on Virginia Woolf, the editor of a book on Toni Morrison, and writer of articles on many other literary figures as well as on …
Richard McLauchlan is an independent scholar, a professional biographer, and the author of Saturday’s Silence: R.S. Thomas and Paschal Reading. With Easter approaching, we wanted to re-release this 2021 conversation with McLauchlan about how Thomas’s poetry captures the meaning of the day between Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, a day of suffering and silence that speaks to …
Daniel Train is the associate director of Duke Initiatives in Theology and the Arts at Duke Divinity School, where he directs the Certificate in Theology and the Arts program. He is the coeditor of The Saint John’s Bible and Its Tradition: Illuminating Beauty in the Twenty-First Century (2018) and also of a 2022 collection we …
Leonard McMahon is an assistant professor of pastoral care, spirituality, and political theology at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, and also founder and CEO of Common Ground Dialogue, a political consulting firm specializing in facilitating conversation around complicated social issues, bringing together divergent communities. We speak about his work addressing such issues, exploring what …
The Reverend Douglas S. Hardy is Professor of Spiritual Formation at Nazarene Theological Seminary in Kansas City. Doug has earned degrees in psychology as well as theology, he is a practicing minister and spiritual director, and he recently completed a term as President of the Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality. We’re speaking today …
Jennifer Frey is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina, a faculty fellow at the Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America, and a Newbigin Interfaith Fellow with the Carver Project. She works extensively in moral philosophy and is particularly interested in matters of virtue. But she is also …
This week we highlight a past episode of our Faith and Imagination Podcast. Kelsey Osgood is a freelance writer and the author of “How to Disappear Completely: On Modern Anorexia.” Her work has appeared in such venues as The New Yorker’s Culture Desk Blog, Time, Harper’s, the New York Times, and Salon. Recently, in Plough Quarterly, she published “The Yahrzeit of Ernest …