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

Human growth can seem to just happen—genes, care, and nurture set each of us on a trajectory across the lifespan. But how do people actually grow toward wholeness, and is virtue even the point?
Psychologists Liz Hall and Todd Hall of Biola University’s Rosemead School of Psychology, coauthors of Relational Spirituality, bring psychological science and Christian theology together to answer. The conversation grows out of the Martin Institute’s Practice Unto Virtue project, which gathered theologians, psychologists, philosophers, and biblical scholars at Westmont College in spring 2026 to ask how Christian practices like prayer, fasting, and service form Christlike virtue.
In this episode, Liz and Todd Hall explain a relational account of human transformation: We are formed in relationship, grow through relationship, and relationship is where growth is headed. Their answer to the workshop’s question is direct—virtue alone is not the telos of spiritual growth. The goal is intimacy with God, union with Christ, and practices and virtues matter because they grow out of that union, support it, and make more room for it.
They discuss implicit, gut-level relational knowledge, attachment filters and relational contrast experiences, and why willpower, spiritual highs, intellectualizing, and spiritual bypass so often leave the deepest layer of the self untouched. They also take up whether suffering can lead to growth or whether we grow in spite of it, drawing on Crystal Park’s meaning-making model, Liz’s own cancer diagnosis, the practice of lament, Eleonore Stump on sin as inner fragmentation, and Gordon Smith’s picture of human agency nested within God’s love.
With special thanks to Steve Porter and the Martin Institute for Christianity and Culture at Westmont College, and to the Templeton World Charity Foundation, which helped fund the Practice Unto Virtue workshop.
Episode Highlights
”What we’re aiming for is not a self-improvement project of little aspects of ourself that we’re building up like a tower of Legos or something.” (Liz Hall)
”I wanna be very careful here not to say that suffering is what changes people … because that’s making something that’s intrinsically bad into maybe something good. We don’t wanna go there. But suffering provides an opportunity.” (Liz Hall)
”Because of how intrinsically relational we are, the pathways to change are also relational. So the goal is relational. The pathways are relational.” (Liz Hall)
”It’s not suffering per se that causes growth. It’s the processing of suffering in a particular way in the context of relationship.” (Todd Hall)
”Our agency operates completely inside the circle of God’s love and action and is a response to it and a participation in the life and love of the Trinitarian God.” (Todd Hall)
”It’s not just to become a better person for the sake of being a better person, which often reduces down to oh, that’s gonna promote my own happiness … No, it’s for the goal of deeper intimacy with Christ and union with Christ.” (Todd Hall)
”They have limitations and sometimes I don’t like what comes out of their mouth … but all of that is grist for the mill, isn’t it?” (Liz Hall)
About Liz Hall and Todd Hall
Liz Hall and Todd Hall are professors of psychology at Biola University’s Rosemead School of Psychology and coauthors of Relational Spirituality: A Psychological-Theological Paradigm for Transformation. Liz, a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, researches suffering, meaning-making, and lament; her newest book, with Kelly Kapic and Jason McMartin, is ”When the Journey Hurts.” Todd, a faculty affiliate of the Harvard Human Flourishing Program, is the author of The Connected Life and founder of the Relational Spirituality Academy, which trains Christian leaders in relational approaches to formation. They live in Southern California and have two adult sons.
Helpful Links and Resources
When the Journey Hurts, Kelly M. Kapic, Liz Hall, and Jason McMartin: https://ivpress.com/when-the-journey-hurts
Relational Spirituality, Todd W. Hall with M. Elizabeth Lewis Hall: https://ivpress.com/relational-spirituality
The Connected Life, Todd W. Hall: https://www.ivpress.com/the-connected-life
Dr. Liz Hall, website and resources on lament and meaning-making: https://www.drlizhall.com
Relational Spirituality Academy, Todd Hall’s training site: https://www.relationalspirituality.co/
Practice Unto Virtue, Martin Institute Christian Formation Workshop 2026 sessions (Conversatio Divina): https://conversatio.org/collections/christian-formation-workshop-2026-practice-unto-virtue-the-role-of-christian-practices-in-virtue-formation/
Crystal L. Park, ”Meaning Making Following Trauma” (Frontiers in Psychology): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8984472
Eleonore Stump, Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Suffering: https://academic.oup.com/book/12824
Gordon T. Smith, Called to Be Saints: An Invitation to Christian Maturity: https://ivpress.com/called-to-be-saints
Show Notes
Integrating psychology and theology
Psychological science and Scripture woven into one picture of the person”
Theology setting the scope of the good life, psychology fleshing it out
Symptom-level change versus deeper relational transformation
Implicit relational knowledge
Growth as expanded capacity for relationship with God and others, not a stack of isolated strengths
Putting ourselves in the path of change through gratitude exercises and spiritual disciplines
Controlling change as a way of coping with anxiety and emotional pain
Misguided approaches: willpower, spiritual highs, intellectualizing, spiritual bypass
The implicit self and gut-level memory
Interpersonal neurobiology and affective neuroscience
Attachment filters from early relationships, running automatically
Relational contrast experiences as the engine of deep change
Augustine’s restless heart and a shared human disconnection
Suffering as accelerant, not a different pathway of change
Post-traumatic and stress-related growth
Suffering as opportunity for growth, never good in itself
When suffering breaks the habitual defenses that kept pain at bay
Global and situational meaning, discrepancy, and distress
Crystal L. Park, ”Meaning Making Following Trauma”: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8984472
A cancer diagnosis and the harder question of trusting God with one’s own children
Deep growth as identity-disrupting, so resisted even when desired
Union with Christ as the goal of formation; human agency nested within divine action
Gordon T. Smith, ”Called to Be Saints”
Lament, gratitude, and identifying with Christ’s suffering
Sin as inner fragmentation, and virtue as the healing that frees us for intimacy with God
Sanctification and intimacy moving in both directions
God as both context and goal of growth
Imperfect church communities as raw material for patience and agape love
#ForTheLifeOfTheWorld #SpiritualFormation #RelationalSpirituality #AttachmentTheory #PsychologyAndTheology #Sanctification #Suffering #Lament #ChristianPsychology #Flourishing
Production Notes
This podcast featured Elizabeth Hall and Todd Hall
Special thanks to Steve Porter, The Martin Institute for Christianity and Culture at Westmont College, and the Templeton World Charity Foundation
Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
Hosted by Evan Rosa
Production Assistance by Noah Senthil
A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Technology, Aaron Cline Hanbury suggests, is never a purely neutral tool. But the history of ethical thinking about technology shows that as long as there's been technology, there's been anxiety about it. Or perhaps more accurately, anxiety about what we might do with it. And increasingly, what it might do to us.
A journalist, founding editor of Common Good magazine, and author of Wired for Wonder, Hanbury came of age as the internet entered the home and has spent his career reporting from the places where technology, faith, and everyday life collide. Rather than offering another list of screen-time tips, he asks a deeper question: How do we relate to the things we make?
In this conversation with Evan Rosa, Hanbury wrestles with what it means to be human when the machines we’ve made can do more and more. He criticizes the seduction that we should embrace technology simply because it is inevitable. He explores how connection, efficiency, and unrestrained technological freedom quietly became unquestioned goods, why our powers of attention are eroding in real time, and wonders what it might take—personally, communally, and structurally—to reclaim our humanity through presence, and the rough ground of embodied life.
About Aaron Cline Hanbury
Aaron Cline Hanbury is a writer and editor whose essays and profiles have appeared in The Atlantic and elsewhere. He is the founding editor of the award-winning magazine Common Good and a past editor of RELEVANT. He writes about the places where technology, faith, and ordinary life meet. His book, Wired for Wonder: Dispatches on Technology, Culture, God, and Self, breaks open the tired binary between tech optimists and Luddites in the context of memoir, ethics, journalism, and theology.
Helpful Links and Resources
Wired for Wonder: Dispatches on Technology, Culture, God, and Self, by Aaron Cline Hanbury: https://www.broadleafbooks.com/store/product/9798889833451/Wired-for-Wonder
Aaron Cline Hanbury's website: https://aaronclinehanbury.com/
Aaron Cline Hanbury's Substack: https://aaronclinehanbury.substack.com
Aaron Cline Hanbury on X: https://x.com/achanbury
Common Good magazine: https://commongoodmag.com/author/aaron-cline-hanbury/
Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, Albert Borgmann: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/T/bo23186480.html
The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt: https://www.anxiousgeneration.com/book
Hannah Coulter, Wendell Berry's novel: https://www.counterpointpress.com/books/hannah-coulter/
Show Notes
Anxiety and technology
Patient zero for life online—coming of age as the internet entered the home
Low-church tradition, quick to adopt and ask questions later
Journalism as a front-row seat to three decades of change
Early adopter or Luddite? Rejecting the spectrum's false ends
The device paradigm—technology as pattern, not neutral tool
A hammer's telos, and why misuse cuts against a tool's design
Made things have a maker—intentions baked into what we build
The inevitability argument—get on board or get run over
Resistance is futile? The Borg, Cannes, and defeatism
Progress as reversion—tobacco bans, ocean dumping, processed-food rollbacks
Family Guy, satire, and pulling tech ethics out of the esoteric
The class and income divide the internet promised to erase
Online radicalization vs the promise of mass education
Children as the guinea pigs of early adoption
Chromebooks, daycares, and offloading discomfort onto kids
Testing tech on the vulnerable—Jonathan Haidt on teen mental health
Social media vs attention media—commodifying human focus
The plug-in drug—parents, screens, and pacified kids
Focused attention and the feeling of being fully alive
Connection, efficiency, freedom—goods we stopped questioning
Dunbar's number and the real limits of friendship
Online ties without public accountability, and bad formation
Embodiment, particularity, and getting back to the rough ground
Wendell Berry's Hannah Coulter and attention that lasts: https://www.counterpointpress.com/books/hannah-coulter/
Skepticism of individual fixes—structure, policy, and church
Elementary-school parenting and “the bevy of required apps”
#WiredForWonder #AaronClineHanbury #ForTheLifeOfTheWorld #TechnologyAndFaith #AttentionMedia #DigitalMinimalism #ChristianEthics #AIandHumanity #DeviceParadigm
Production Notes
This podcast featured Aaron Cline Hanbury
Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
Production Assistance by Noah Senthil
A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Civic friendship is not a nicety. For self-governing people, it is a necessity. What happens to a democracy when citizens stop seeing each other as citizens at all?

Robert P. George is Princeton’s McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions (and known for his enduring friendship with Cornel West) argues that “the collapse of civic friendship is a catastrophic threat to public life.”

In this bonus segment from his November 2020 conversation with Evan Rosa, Robert George presents the difference between civility and mere ‘politesse; the habit of wrapping our emotions so tightly around our convictions that we assume a posture of infallibility; and the intellectual humility it takes to consider that a political enemy might have something to teach us as a civic friend. They also discuss the courage required to break ranks—George recounts how he and West, from opposite political poles, each found themselves treated as heretics in 2016 for declining to back their respective party’s nominee—and why he urges his students and his own children to cultivate humility, open-mindedness, and courage, knowing exactly what it can cost to stand by a conscientious belief.

Episode Highlights

”Civic friendship is actually important for all sorts of policies, but for a self-governing people, for a democratic people, civic friendship is really critically important.”

”But if we do, as we are prone to do, wrap our emotions too tightly around our convictions, then we become dogmatists. Then we become unwilling to consider the possibility that we might be wrong and that a critic might be right.”

”This is hard, but it takes humility to recognize that I might be wrong, not merely about the less important superficial and more trivial things of life, but I might be wrong even about the most important things.”

”Civic friendship, civility is not just politesse … Civility is something deeper. It is genuinely listening to the guy who disagrees with you … listening with an openness to learning, considering whether in fact he might be right.”

”You can’t have an open mind unless you have intellectual humility.”

”You can become a heretic very fast by breaking ranks, even on a single issue, if the issue was even moderately important.”

”So I really encourage my young people … to try to develop the virtues of intellectual humility, open-mindedness, and courage, because sometimes courage is going to be needed.”

About Robert P. George

Robert P. George is the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. A legal philosopher and public intellectual, he has chaired the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and served on the President’s Council on Bioethics and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. His books include ”Making Men Moral,” ”In Defense of Natural Law,” and ”Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth,” and, with Cornel West, ”Truth Matters,” a dialogue on fruitful disagreement. A West Virginia native, he plays bluegrass banjo and guitar.

Helpful Links and Resources

Civic Friendship, Courageous Humility, and Seeking Truth Together, Episode 38 and the full interview for this clip: https://faith.yale.edu/media/civic-friendship-courageous-humility-and-seeking-truth-together

Robert P. George’s website: https://robertpgeorge.com/

Robert P. George on X: https://twitter.com/McCormickProf

Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth: Law and Morality in Our Cultural Moment, George’s most recent book: https://www.encounterbooks.com/books/seeking-truth-speaking-truth/

Truth Matters: A Dialogue on Fruitful Disagreement in an Age of Division, by Robert P. George and Cornel West: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Truth-Matters/Robert-P-George/9798888451700

Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality, George’s best-known scholarly book: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/making-men-moral-9780198260240

Election of 1800, from the Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia at Monticello: https://www.monticello.org/encyclopedia/election-1800

Show Notes

Civic friendship: indispensable and necessary for a self-governing people

Fellow citizens recast as enemies to be defeated and destroyed

Are elections as existential contests?—with the losing side expecting retaliation, the winning side claiming the norms

Breakdown near the founding of the Republic

The election of 1800, incumbent John Adams against Thomas Jefferson: https://www.monticello.org/encyclopedia/election-1800

Federalists seeing Jeffersonians as carriers of the French Revolution; Jeffersonians seeing Federalists as would-be British monarchists

Antebellum America: North and South unable to imagine sharing one republic

Is our identity constructed around belief?

Emotional investment in conviction as a good thing in itself

Wrapping emotions too tightly, and the slide into dogmatism

A practical posture of infallibility

Disagreement recoded as moral defect, and friendship ruled out

Intellectual humility as the missing virtue

Being wrong about the most important things, not just the trivial ones

Civility as more than politesse

Listening with an openness to learning, not waiting for a turn to speak

Honoring the other as a rational creature with something to teach

Open-mindedness without paralysis

A conservative and a democratic socialist as frequent interlocutors: https://www.cornelwest.com/about/

Courage as a civic virtue

Tribalism in formal institutions and informal friend circles alike

Becoming a heretic by breaking ranks on a single issue

Excommunication, suspicion, and the social cost of independent thought

Two friends at opposite poles, both out of step in 2016

Counsel to students and to his own children: humility, open-mindedness, courage

#CivicFriendship #IntellectualHumility #Civility #Polarization #RobertPGeorge #CornelWest #FaithAndCulture #ForTheLifeOfTheWorld

Production Notes

This podcast featured Robert George

Hosted and Produced by Evan Rosa

Production assistance and editing by Noah Senthil

A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about

Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

Why don’t more doctors talk about death? Dr. Lydia Dugdale has been asking this question since she was a medical student. She is the Silberberg Professor of Medicine and directs the Center for Clinical Medical Ethics, and two books on how we die, including "The Lost Art of Dying."

"Most medical professionals today are very unpracticed at talking to patients about their mortality," she says.

Not only unpracticed, but even themselves afraid.

In this bonus clip from Episode 232 with Macie Bridge, Dugdale traces the path from that early perplexity on the wards to the ars moriendi, the medieval art of dying, grounded in the idea that dying is part of living, so if you want to die well you have to live well.

Lydia comments on the emergence of palliative care and the way it let physicians hand conversations about death to specialists; the doctor who inherited the priest's old place at the threshold between life and death; the death anxiety clinicians carry without examining; virtue as preparation for dying, and community as the other half of living well; the unrepresented patients of New York City who die alone; and a grumpy old man, hospitalized for 20 years, who wept when she read aloud what she had written about him.

Episode Highlights

“Most medical professionals today are very unpracticed at talking to patients about their mortality.”

“we are really the intermediaries between life and death, I'm not saying we're priests, but that used to be the role of the priest. And so it is now the role of the physician.

“If you want to die well, you have to live well.”

We have to be all in or we end up like all of these patients here in New York City who have no one that I can reach out to as they're dying.

“He started weeping and he said, someone finally saw me. Someone finally saw me. I've been in this hospital for 20 years and I didn't think anyone ever saw me.”

About Lydia Dugdale

Lydia Dugdale is a physician and medical ethicist who has spent fifteen years asking why medicine finds death so hard to talk about. She is the Silberberg Professor of Medicine at Columbia, directs the Columbia Center for Clinical Medical Ethics, and co-directs clinical ethics at NewYork-Presbyterian Milstein Hospital, where she still sees patients. She edited "Dying in the Twenty-First Century" and wrote "The Lost Art of Dying," a modern ars moriendi. She trained at the University of Chicago and Yale-New Haven Hospital, holds a master's in ethics from Yale Divinity School, and in 2025 founded the nonprofit Heal the Nation.

Helpful Links and Resources

“Dying Alone,” the full Episode 232 with Lydia Dugdale and Macie Bridge: https://faith.yale.edu/media/dying-alone

Lydia Dugdale's website: https://lydiadugdale.com/

The Lost Art of Dying: Reviving Forgotten Wisdom, Lydia Dugdale's book: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-lost-art-of-dying-ls-dugdale

Dying in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Lydia Dugdale: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262534598/dying-in-the-twenty-first-century/

Columbia Center for Clinical Medical Ethics, which Dugdale directs: https://www.vagelos.columbia.edu/departments-centers/columbia-center-clinical-medical-ethics

Columbia Center for Clinical Medical Ethics on X: https://x.com/columbia_ccme

Ars moriendi, the medieval art of dying, at the Morgan Library and Museum: https://www.themorgan.org/blog/new-acquisition-ars-moriendi-blockbook

Ars moriendi block book, 1475, at the Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov/item/2021666798/

Lydia Dugdale at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/people/lydia-dugdale-md

Show Notes

Death anxiety in medicine

Why doctors avoid frank conversations about mortality

Palliative care's arrival as a discipline, and what it made possible

Real gains in symptom relief for the sick and the dying

The unintended cost: death conversations outsourced to specialists

Clinicians as intermediaries between life and death

The priest's old place at the threshold, now the physician's

Nurses at the bedside, doctors calling the shots on treatment

Existential questions physicians have never worked through

A colleague who would never tell a patient they were dying, out of her own fear of death

Digging into how other times and places handled mortality

Ars moriendi: the medieval genre on the preparation for death

Illustrated editions made for people who could not read

Fifteen years and two books spent reviving the art of dying

Living well as the precondition of dying well

Virtue as preparation: hope, patience, joy against bitterness and despair

The role of community in dying well

New York's unrepresented patients, dying alone

A reader estranged from his adult children who committed to years of repair after the book

Relationship as ongoing work: rupture, forgiveness, iron sharpening iron

A long-hospitalized patient nobody wanted assigned to their team

Modeling care for young doctors, and being verbally destroyed in front of them

Loneliness of the neighbor, the colleague, the checkout person

Practice as the only way to get better at it

#ForTheLifeOfTheWorld #LydiaDugdale #TheLostArtOfDying #ArsMoriendi #MedicalEthics #DyingWell #Loneliness #EndOfLifeCare

Production Notes

This podcast featured Lydia Dugdale

Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa

Hosted by Evan Rosa

Production Assistance by Noah Senthil

A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about

Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give

We were made by a Maker to be makers. Bruce Herman joins Evan Rosa to diagnose the quiet illness of a passive consumer culture that trains us to sit in front of screens and scroll and take, rather than make. “When we’re not making something, we’re not whole. We’re not healthy.“ His cure is stubbornly ordinary: go make a loaf of bread, grab a stick and start carving, make a good meal or a good cocktail for the person visiting you—anything is resistance to this hypnotic, passive culture.

From episode 216 of the podcast, in this segment, Herman traces what it means to receive art not as a consumer but through submission—not master and slave, but subject to subject, that vulnerable openness that lets a poem or a painting change your life. He reflects on making as human wholeness, the difference between art and info-tainment, why suffering can rip us open to beauty (from Walker Percy’s writing to Christian Wiman’s poetry), Rilke’s charge that “you must change your life,“ hospitality as the ultimate act of art, and Herman’s closing counsel to make out of love, not fear.

Episode Highlights

We are in relationship, and we were made by a Maker to be makers. If we let that go somehow and we become mere consumers, I think we begin to enter into some kind of illness of one sort or another.

When we’re not making something, we’re not whole. We’re not healthy. And I don’t want to make an idol out of health either, but I do think our culture is unhealthy right now.

We think of it as, we’re discerning buyers. But the fact is we’re being turned into very passive creatures.

One of the best things you can do is go make a loaf of bread. Go out and grab a stick and start carving it. Anything is resistance to this sort of hypnotic passive culture.

If you want to really receive what a poem is communicating, you have to submit to it. You have to let yourself go and enter into what might feel like a bad risk of being changed.

Not submit in a sense that I’m a master and you’re my slave. It’s more like you’re a subject and I’m a subject. Mutual submission.

We’re so guarded so much of the time that it takes something catastrophic to open us up again.

Do away with the nonsense that you’re not an artist. You can’t help it. You were made by a Maker to be a maker. End of story.

The ultimate act of art is hospitality, where you’re welcoming someone in, to make something beautiful for them.

Challenge the bad news with a recognition that daily kindnesses are being poured out everywhere, on every street. Don’t give in to fear, because it’s not a basis for anything good.

About Bruce Herman

Bruce Herman is a painter, writer, and educator whose work has been shown in more than 150 exhibitions across the United States and internationally, and held in collections including the Vatican Museums in Rome, the Cincinnati Museum of Fine Arts, and the Grunewald Print Collection of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. He taught at Gordon College for nearly four decades, where he founded the art department and held the Lothlórien Distinguished Chair in Fine Arts. His books include “Through Your Eyes“ and “Ordinary Saints,“ and he was a collaborator on the touring “QU4RTETS“ project with Makoto Fujimura, Christopher Theofanidis, and Jeremy Begbie. His most recent book, “Makers by Nature: Letters from a Master Painter on Faith, Hope, and Art,“ was published by IVP Academic in 2025.

Helpful Links and Resources

Makers by Nature, Bruce Herman’s 2025 book from IVP Academic: https://www.ivpress.com/makers-by-nature

Bruce Herman’s website and painting archive: https://www.bruceherman.com

Bruce Herman, artist bio and background: https://www.bruceherman.com/about

Archaic Torso of Apollo by Rainer Maria Rilke (“You must change your life“), trans. Stephen Mitchell: https://poets.org/poem/archaic-torso-apollo

Real Presences by George Steiner, on courtesy and hospitality in art: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/R/bo3684420.html

Christian Wiman: https://poetryfoundation.org/poets/christian-wiman

QU4RTETS, the collaborative project on T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: https://www.bruceherman.com/series

Show Notes

Made to make

We are in relationship; identity begins there, not in isolation

Makers by nature—letting the maker-impulse go tips us toward illness, moral, mental, and emotional

Wholeness and health—the claim that not-making leaves us unwell, without idolizing health

Consumer culture—the commercial aim to sell, and to keep us passive in front of screens

Discerning buyers, or passive creatures? The illusion of control while being trained to take

Screens and scrolling

Political theater and infotainment—very little real journalism left, mostly consumer entertainment

Neil Postman and amusing ourselves to death as the frame for the diagnosis

Making as resistance—bake bread, carve a stick, do anything against the hypnotic pull

Reception as submission—a word out of fashion, reclaimed away from enslavement

Mutual submission—the erotic analogy, and desire’s corruption in the sexual sins

To receive a poem you must risk being changed

Rilke’s Grecian torso and the charge, you must change your life

Subject to subject, not master and slave

Walker Percy’s museum story—a painting that blazed into life, then went quiet

Bringing a friend to re-enter the original encounter vicariously

The workman through the skylight—catastrophe reopens what habit had closed

Guardedness—why it can take suffering to break us open

Christian Wiman—cancer, poetry, and being ripped open toward receptivity

You might be changed, and it might not be what you wanted; the risk of real encounter

Make from love, not fear

Do away with the nonsense that you’re not an artist

Everyday making—a loaf, a meal, a good cocktail, hospitality

Hospitality as the ultimate art; George Steiner’s Real Presences and courtesia

Beauty can be complex, not merely pretty

Fear-mongers left and right—and why not to listen

Daily kindnesses—the neighbor, the shoveled driveway, the half-decent casserole

Welcome to the festival; let the festival begin

#BruceHerman #MakersByNature #ForTheLifeOfTheWorld #FaithAndArt #TheologyOfMaking #ArtAndFaith #Creativity #Hospitality #MakeNotConsume #YaleFaithAndCulture