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

• Burnout and Sabbath / Alexis Abernethy

  Clinical psychologist Alexis Abernethy explores burnout, Sabbath rest, and resilience—reframing rest as spiritual practice for individuals and communities.“For me, it’s knowing that the Lord has made me as much to work as much to be and to be still and know that he is God.”On this episode, clinical psychologist Alexis Abernethy (Fuller Seminary) joins Macie Bridge to discuss burnout, Sabbath, worship, mental health, and resilience in the life of the church. Defining burnout through its dimensions of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced sense of accomplishment, Abernethy reflects on how church life can intensify these dynamics even as it seeks to heal them. Drawing from scripture, theology, psychology, and her own experience in the Black church and academic worlds, she reorients us to Sabbath as more than self-care: a sacred practice of being still before God. Sabbath, she argues, is not a quick fix but a preventive rhythm that sustains resilience in leaders and congregations alike. Along the way, she points to the necessity of modeling rest, the impact of daily and weekly spiritual rhythms, and the communal posture that makes Sabbath transformative.Episode Highlights“For me, it’s knowing that the Lord has made me as much to work as much to be and to be still and know that he is God.”“Often people have overextended themselves in face of crises, other circumstances over a period of time, and it’s just not really sustainable, frankly, for anyone.”“We act as if working hard and excessively is dutiful and really what the Lord wants—but that’s not what He wants.”“When you are still with the Lord, you look different when you’re active.”“Sabbath rest allows you to literally catch your own breath, but also then be able to see what the congregation needs.”Helpful Links and ResourcesThat Their Work Will Be a Joy, Kurt Frederickson & Cameron LeeHoward Thurman, Meditations of the HeartEmily Dickinson, “Some Keep the Sabbath” (Poetry Foundation)About Alexis AbernethyAlexis Abernethy is a clinical psychologist and professor in the School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy at Fuller Seminary. Her research explores the intersection of spirituality and health, with particular focus on Christian spirituality, church leadership, and group therapy models.Topics and ThemesBurnout in Church Leadership and Congregational LifeDefining Burnout: Emotional Exhaustion, Depersonalization, and Reduced AccomplishmentSpiritual Misconceptions of Work and DutySabbath as Sacred Rest, Not Just Self-CareSilence, Stillness, and the Presence of GodScriptural Foundations for Sabbath: Psalm 23, Psalm 46, John 15The Role of Pastors in Modeling RestPandemic Lessons for Church Rhythms and ParticipationEmily Dickinson and Creative Visions of SabbathResilience Through Sabbath: Lessons from New Orleans PastorsPractical Practices for Sabbath in Everyday LifeShow NotesExodus 20:8-11: 8 Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. 9 Six days you shall labor and do all your work. 10 But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. 11 For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and consecrated it.Opening framing on burnout, Sabbath, and confusion about self-careIntroduction of Alexis Abernethy, her background as psychologist and professorChildhood in a lineage of Methodist pastors and formative worship experiencesEarly academic path: Howard University, UC Berkeley, affirmation from her fatherDefining burnout: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, reduced accomplishment“I’m just stuck. I used to enjoy my job.”The church as both source of fulfillment and site of burnoutMisconceptions of spirituality equating overwork with dutyReference: That Their Work Will Be a Joy (Frederickson & Lee)Scriptural reflections: Psalm 23, Psalm 46, John 15Stillness, quiet, and Howard Thurman on solitude“When you are still with the Lord, you look different when you’re active.”Sabbath as sacred rest, not a quick fix or pillPastors modeling Sabbath for congregations, including personal family timeCOVID reshaping church rhythms and recalculating commitment costsEmily Dickinson’s poem “Some Keep the Sabbath”Lessons from New Orleans pastors after Hurricane KatrinaSabbath as resilience for leaders and congregationsPractical steps: scripture meditation, playlists, Lectio Divina, cultivating quietClosing invitation: Sabbath as both individual discipline and community postureProduction NotesThis podcast featured Alexis AbernethyInterview by Macie BridgeEdited and Produced by Evan RosaHosted by Evan RosaProduction Assistance by Alexa Rollow and Emily BrookfieldA Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/aboutSupport For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

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• How to Read the Gospel of John / David Ford

  The Gospel of John is a gospel of superabundance. The cosmic Christ made incarnate would of course yield an absolute superabundance of grace, love, and unity.What makes John’s Gospel so distinct from the Synoptics? Why does it continue to draw readers into inexhaustible depths of meaning? In this conversation, theologian David Ford reflects on his two-decade journey writing a commentary on John. Together with Drew Collins, he explores John’s unique blend of theology, history, and literary artistry, describing it as a “gospel of superabundance” that continually invites readers to trust, to reread, and to enter into deeper life with Christ. Together they explore themes of individuality and community; friendship and love; truth, reconciliation, and unity; the tandem vision of Jesus as both cosmic and intimate; Jesus’s climactic prayer for unity in chapter 17. And ultimately the astonishing superabundance available in the person of Christ. Along the way, Ford reflects on his interfaith reading practices, his theological friendships, and the vital role of truth and love for Christian witness today.“There’s always more in John’s gospel … these big images of light and life in all its abundance.”Episode Highlights“It is a gospel for beginners. But also it’s endlessly rich, endlessly deep.”“There’s always more in John’s gospel and he has these big images of light and, life in all its abundance.”“It all culminates in love. Father, I desire that those also you, whom you have given me, may be with me.”“On the cross, evil, suffering, sin, death happened to Jesus. But Jesus happens to evil, suffering, sin, death.”“We have to go deeper into God and Jesus, deeper into community, and deeper into the world.”Show NotesDavid Ford on writing a commentary on John over two decadesJohn’s Gospel compared to the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke)John as theological history writing (Rudolf Schnackenburg)John’s purpose statement in chapter 20: written so that you may trust“A gospel for beginners” with simple language and cosmic depthJohn as a gospel of superabundance: light, life, Spirit without measureJohn’s focus on individuals: Nicodemus, Samaritan woman, man born blind, Martha, Mary, LazarusThe Beloved Disciple and John’s communal authorshipFriendship, love, and unity in the Farewell Discourses (John 13–17)John 17 as the most profound chapter in ScriptureThe crisis of rewriting: scrapping 15 years of writing to begin anewScriptural reasoning with Jews, Muslims, and Christians on John’s GospelWrestling with John 8 and the polemics against “the Jews”Reconciliation across divisionsJohn’s vision of discipleship: learning, loving, praying, and living truthHelpful Links and ResourcesDavid Ford, The Gospel of John: A Theological CommentaryRudolf Schnackenburg, The Gospel According to St. JohnAbout David FordDavid F. Ford is Regius Professor of Divinity Emeritus at the University of Cambridge. He has written extensively on Christian theology, interfaith engagement, and scriptural reasoning. His most recent work is The Gospel of John: A Theological Commentary (Baker Academic, 2021). Ford is co-founder of the Cambridge Interfaith Programme and the Rose Castle Foundation.Production NotesThis podcast featured David FordInterview by Drew CollinsEdited and Produced by Evan RosaHosted by Evan RosaProduction Assistance by Macie Bridge, Alexa Rollow, and Emily BrookfieldA Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/aboutSupport For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/giveThis episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information visit Tyndale.foundation.

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• Amor Mundi Part 5: Humility and Glory of Love / Miroslav Volf's 2025 Gifford Lectures

  Miroslav Volf critiques ambition, love of status, and superiority, offering a Christ-shaped vision of agapic love and humble glory.“’And if you received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift?’ If you received everything you have as a gift and if your existence as the recipient is also a gift, all ground for boasting is gone. Correspondingly, striving for superiority over others, seeking to make oneself better than others and glorying in that achievement, is possible only as an existential lie. It is not just a lie that all strivers and boasters tell themselves. More troublingly, that lie is part of the ideology that is the wisdom of a certain twisted and world-negating form of the world.”In Lecture 5, the final of his Gifford Lectures, Miroslav Volf offers a theological and moral vision that critiques the dominant culture of ambition, superiority, and status. Tracing the destructive consequences of Epithumic desire and the relentless “race of honors,” Volf contrasts them with agapic love—God’s self-giving, unconditional love. Drawing from Paul’s Christ hymn in Philippians 2 and philosophical insights from Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Max Scheler, Volf reveals the radical claim that striving for superiority is not merely harmful but fundamentally false. Through Christ’s self-emptying, even to the point of death, we glimpse a redefinition of glory that subverts all worldly hierarchies. The love that saves is the love that descends. In a world ravaged by competition, inequality, and devastation, Volf calls for fierce, humble, and world-affirming love—a love that mends what can be mended, and makes the world home again.Episode Highlights“Striving for superiority over others… is possible only as an existential lie.”“Jesus Christ was no less God and no less glorious at his lowest point.”“To the extent that I’m striving for superiority, I cannot love myself unless I am the GOAT.”“God cancels the standards of the kind of aspiration whose goal is superiority.”“This is neither self-denial nor denial of the world. This is love for the world at work.”Show NotesAgapic love vs. Epithemic desire and self-centered striving“Striving for superiority… is possible only as an existential lie.”Paul’s hymn in Philippians 2 and the “race of shame”Rousseau: striving for superiority gives us “a multitude of bad things”Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity and pursuit of powerMax Scheler: downward love, not upward striving“Jesus Christ was no less God and no less glorious at his lowest point.”Self-love as agapic: “I am entirely a gift to myself.”Raphael’s Transfiguration and the chaos belowDemon possession as symbolic of systemic and spiritual powerlessness“To the extent that I’m striving for superiority, I cannot love myself unless I am the GOAT.”“The world is the home of God and humans together.”God’s love affirms the dignity of even the most unlovable creatureLove as spontaneous overflow, not moral condescension“Mending what can be mended… mourning with those who mourn and dancing with those who rejoice.”Production NotesThis podcast featured Miroslav VolfEdited and Produced by Evan RosaHosted by Evan RosaProduction Assistance by Taylor Craig and Macie BridgeA Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/aboutSupport For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/giveSpecial thanks to Dr. Paul Nimmo, Paula Duncan, and the media team at the University of Aberdeen. Thanks also to the Templeton Religion Trust for their support of the University of Aberdeen’s 2025 Gifford Lectures and to the McDonald Agape Foundation for supporting Miroslav’s research towards the lectureship.

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• Amor Mundi Part 4: The Earth Embraced / Miroslav Volf's 2025 Gifford Lectures

  Miroslav Volf explores agapic love, creation’s goodness, and God’s grief—an alternative to despair, power, and world rejection.“When a wanted child is born, the immense joy of many parents often renders them mute, but their radiant faces speak of surprised delight: ‘Just look at you! It is so very good that you are here!’ This delight precedes any judgment about the beauty, functionality, or moral rectitude of the child. The child’s sheer existence, the mere fact of it, is ‘very good.’ That’s what I propose God, too, exclaimed, looking at the new-born world. And that unconditional love grounds creation’s existence.”In this fourth Gifford Lecture, Miroslav Volf contrasts the selective and self-centered love of Ivan Karamazov with the radically inclusive, unconditional love of Father Zosima. Drawing deeply from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Genesis’s creation and flood narratives, and Hannah Arendt’s concept of amor mundi, Volf explores a theology of agapic love: unearned, universal, and enduring. This is the love by which God sees creation as “very good”—not because it is perfect, but because it exists. It’s the love that grieves corruption without destroying it, that sees responsibility as mutual, and that offers the only hope for life in a deeply flawed world. With references to Luther, Nietzsche, and modern visions of power and desire, Volf challenges us to ask what kind of love makes a world, sustains it, and might one day save it. “Love the world,” he insists, “or lose your soul.”Episode Highlights“The world will either be loved with unconditional love, or it'll not be loved at all.”“Unconditional love abides. If the object of love is in a state that can be celebrated, love rejoices. If it is not, love mourns and takes time to help bring it back to itself.”“Each is responsible for all. Each is guilty for all. Each needs forgiveness from all. Each must forgive all.”“Creation is not primarily sacramental or iconic. It is an object of delight both for humans and for God.”“Agapic love demands nothing from the beloved, though it cares and hopes much for them and for the shared world with them.”Show NotesSchopenhauer and Nietzsche’s visions of happiness: pleasure and power as substitutes for love“Love as hunger”: the devouring nature of epithemic desireIvan Karamazov’s tragic love for life—selective, gut-level, and self-focused“There is still… this wild and perhaps indecent thirst for life in me”Father Zosima’s universal love for “every leaf and every ray of God’s light”“Love man also in his sin… Love all God’s creation”Sonya and Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment: love as restoration“She loved him and stayed with him—not although he murdered, but because he murdered”God’s declaration in Genesis: “And look—it was very good”Hannah Arendt’s amor mundi—“I want you to be” as pure affirmationCreation as gift: “Each is itself by being more than itself”Martin Luther on marriage, sex, and delight as godly pleasuresThe flood as hypothetical: divine grief replaces divine destruction“It grieved God to his heart”—grief as a form of agapic love“Each is responsible for all. Each is guilty for all.”Agape over erotic love: not reward and punishment, but faithful presence and care“Agapic love demands nothing… It is free, sovereign to love, humble.”Closing invitation: to live the life of love, under whatever circumstancesProduction NotesThis podcast featured Miroslav VolfEdited and Produced by Evan RosaHosted by Evan RosaProduction Assistance by Taylor Craig and Macie BridgeA Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/aboutSupport For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/giveSpecial thanks to Dr. Paul Nimmo, Paula Duncan, and the media team at the University of Aberdeen. Thanks also to the Templeton Religion Trust for their support of the University of Aberdeen’s 2025 Gifford Lectures and to the McDonald Agape Foundation for supporting Miroslav’s research towards the lectureship.

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• Amor Mundi Part 3: Loving Our Fate? / Miroslav Volf's 2025 Gifford Lectures

  Miroslav Volf critiques Nietzsche’s vision of power, love, and suffering—and offers Jesus’s unconditional love as a more excellent way.The idea that competitive and goalless striving to increase one's power is the final Good, does very important work in Nietzsche’s philosophy. For Nietzsche, striving is good. Happiness does not rest in feeling that one's power is growing. In the modern world, individuals are, as Nietzsche puts it, ‘crossed everywhere with infinity.’ …And therefore condemn to ceaseless striving … The will to power aims at surpassing the level reached at any given time. And that goal can never be reached. You're always equally behind.Striving for superiority so as to enhance power does not just elevate some, the stronger ones. If the difference in power between parties increases, the weak become weaker in socially significant sense, even if their power has objectively increased. Successful striving for superiority inferiorizes.”In this third installment of his Gifford Lectures, Miroslav Volf offers a trenchant critique of Friedrich Nietzsche’s moral philosophy—especially his exaltation of the will to power, his affirmation of eternal suffering, and his agonistic conception of love. Nietzsche, Volf argues, fails to cultivate a love that can endure possession, withstand unworthiness, or affirm the sheer existence of the other. Instead, Nietzsche’s love quickly dissolves into contempt. Drawing from Christian theology, and particularly Jesus’s teaching that God causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good alike, Volf explores a different kind of love—agapic, unconditional, and presuppositionless. He offers a vision of divine love that is not driven by need or achievement but that affirms existence itself, regardless of success, strength, or status. In the face of suffering, Nietzsche's amor fati falters—but Jesus’s embrace endures.Episode Highlights"The sun, in fact, has no need to bestow its gift of light and warmth. It gains nothing from imparting its gifts.""Love that is neither motivated by need nor based on worthiness—that is the kind of love Nietzsche thought prevented Jesus from loving humanity and earth.""Nietzsche aspires to transfiguration of all things through value-bestowing life, but he cannot overcome nausea over humans.""God’s love for creatures is unconditional. It is agapic love for the states in which they find themselves.""Love can only flicker. It moves from place to place because it can live only between places. If it took an abode, it would die."Show NotesMiroslav Volf’s engagement with Nietzsche’s workFriedrich Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity as life-denying and his vision of the will to powerSchopenhauer’s hedonism vs. Nietzsche’s anti-hedonism: “What is good? Everything that heightens the feeling of power.”The will to power as Nietzsche’s supreme value and “hyper-good”“The will to power is not a philosophy of life—it’s a philosophy of vitality.”Nietzsche’s agonism: the noble contest for superiority among equally powerful opponents“Every GOAT is a GOAT only for a time.”Amor fati: Nietzsche’s love of fate and affirmation of all existenceNietzsche’s ideal of desire without satisfaction: “desiring to desire”Dangers of epithumic (need-based, consuming) love“Love cannot abide. Its shelf life is shorter than a two-year-old’s toy... If it took an abode, it would die.”Nietzsche’s nausea at the weakness and smallness of humanity: “Nausea, nausea... alas, man recurs eternally.”Zarathustra’s conditional love: based on worthiness, wisdom, and power“Joy in tearing down has fully supplanted love’s delight in what is.”Nietzsche’s failure to love the unworthy: “His love fails to encompass the great majority of actually living human beings.”Volf’s theological critique of striving, superiority, and contempt“Nietzsche affirms vitality at the expense of concrete human beings.”The biblical God’s love: “He makes his sun rise on the evil and the good.”“Even the poorest fisherman rows with golden oars.”Jesus’s unconditional love versus Nietzsche’s agonistic, conditional loveKierkegaard and Luther on the distinction between person and workHannah Arendt’s political anthropology and enduring love in the face of unworthinessVolf’s proposal for a theology of loving the present world in its broken form“We can actually long also for what we have.”“Love that cannot take an abode will die.”A vision of divine, presuppositionless love that neither requires need nor merit

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