Think clearly. Act well. Appreciate life.
Van Gessel is Professor Emeritus of Japanese Literature at Brigham Young University, where he also served as dean of the College of Humanities. He is a distinguished scholar of Japanese literature, including of the Japanese Catholic writer Shusaku Endo, six of whose novels (and two short story collections) Van has also translated. Endo writes hauntingly …
Deanna Thompson is Martin E. Marty Regents Chair in Religion and the Academy at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, where she also serves as Inaugural Director of the Lutheran Center for Faith, Values, and Community. A distinguished Christian theologian, she has written powerfully in recent years about her experience of living with cancer – the …
Romana Huk teaches in the English Department at the University of Notre Dame, where she also serves as editor-in-chief of the journal Religion and Literature, a prominent journal in literary studies. A former guest of the BYU Humanities Center, she spoke on this episode of the Faith and Imagination podcast about her experience teaching at …
Arthur Holder is a priest of the Episcopal Church and also a historian and professor of Christian Spirituality at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, where for many years he served as dean and Vice President of Academic Affairs. His current research explores how medieval Christians imagined what it means to see God and become …
The twentieth-century Welsh poet R.S. Thomas has been called a poet of Holy Saturday. Holy Saturday falls between the day of Christ’s crucifixion and the morning of His resurrection. Commemorative of Christ’s descent to the realm of the dead, Holy Saturday, and the poetry of R.S. Thomas, also speak evocatively to times when we feel …
Makoto Fujimura is an acclaimed contemporary artist whose work has been exhibited across the world. He is founder of the International Arts Movement and a former presidential appointee to the National Council on the Arts. Most recently, he is the author of Art + Faith, published in January of this year by Yale University Press. On …
On this episode of the Faith and Imagination podcast, we spoke with Anne Snyder. Anne is editor-in-chief of Comment Magazine, a national venue for public theology, and she founded their partner project Breaking Ground, a collaborative web commons created to address the crises of the past year with wisdom, imagination, and hope. She is also the author of the book The Fabric of Character: A …
We sometimes playfully label things we love – a great movie, a sporting event, a delectable meal – “religious experiences.” But today’s guest, Professor Michael D. Hurley of Cambridge University, says that some well-known English authors sought earnestly to create precisely that kind of experience, a religious experience, through their poetry. Professor Hurley teaches at …
How do we experience God in a time of crisis? Which may be to ask, how do we experience God? How do we experience a disruption of our sense of identity and purpose that transforms us and calls us to a new way of life? Our guest on this episode of the Faith and Imagination …
Feelings of self-transcendence, of connectedness to God, others, and the world, are widely seen as a principal feature of spiritual well-being. So when pandemic conditions shut us in and, to a degree, cut us off from our normal routines of living, this can lead to psychological and even spiritual depression. David Perrin is a professor of …
