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

Today we’re bringing you an episode with Esau McCaulley, from the Lenten season of 2023. Esau sees Lent as a practice of collective generational wisdom, passed down through centuries of sacramental rhythms—but as a contemporary reality, Lent is a spiritual rebellion against mainstream American culture.

He construes Lent as a season of repentance and grace; he points out the justice practices of Lent; he walks through a Christian understanding of death, and the beautiful practice of stripping the altars on Maundy Thursday; and he’s emphatic about how it’s a guided season of pursuing the grace to find (or perhaps return) to yourself as God has called you to be.

In his classic text, Great Lent, Orthodox priest and theologian Alexander Schmemann calls this season one of “bright sadness”—an important paradox that represents both Christian realism and hope.

Lent is not about gloom, self-loathing, performative penitence, or despair. Instead it brings us face to face with our human condition, reminding us that we did not bring ourselves into being and someday we will die, sober about the reality and banality of evil, and sorrowful in a way that leads back to joy.

Esau McCaulley is The Jonathan Blanchard Associate Professor of New Testament and Public Theology at Wheaton College, a contributing writer for the New York Times, and is author of many books, including children’s books. Notables are Reading While Black, a theology of Lent, and his latest: How Far to the Promised Land: One Black Family’s Story of Hope and Survival in the American South.

This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information, visit tyndale.foundation.

About Esau McCaulley

Esau McCaulley is The Jonathan Blanchard Associate Professor of New Testament and Public Theology at Wheaton College, a contributing writer for the New York Times, and is author of many books, including children’s books. Notables are Reading While Black, a theology of Lent, and his latest: How Far to the Promised Land: One Black Family’s Story of Hope and Survival in the American South. Learn more at https://esaumccaulley.com/.

Show Notes

Lent: The Season of Repentance and Renewal — https://esaumccaulley.com/books/lent-book/

Commodifying our rebellion—the agency on offer is a thin, weakened agency.

Repentance, grace, and finding (or returning to) yourself

Examination of conscience

The Great Litany: “For our blindness to human need and suffering, and our indifference to injustice and cruelty. Except our repentance, Lord.”

The beauty of Christianity

“Liturgical spirituality is not safe. God can jump out and get you at any moment in the service.”

“The great thing about the, the, the season of Blend in the liturgical calendar more broadly is it gives you a thousand different entry points into transformation.”

Lent is bookended by death. Black death, Coronavirus death, War death.

Jesus defeated death as our great enemy.

“Everybody that I know and I care about are gonna die. Everybody.”

“I, as a Christian, believe that because we're going to die. our lives are of infinite value and the decisions that we make and the kinds of people we become are the only testimony that we have and that I have chosen to, to, in light of my impending death, put my faith in the one who overcame death.”

Two realities: We’re going to die and Jesus defeated death.

Stripping of the Altars on Maundy Thursday.

Silent processional in black; Good Friday celebrates no eucharist.

“I'm, like, the one Pauline scholar who doesn't like to argue about justification all of the time.”

Good Friday’s closing prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, son of the living God, we pray you to set your passion cross and death between your judgment and our souls.”

“You end Lent with: Something has to come between God’s judgement and our souls. And that thing is Jesus.”

“Lent is God loving you enough to tell you the truth about yourself, but not condemning you for it, but actually saying that you can be better than that.”

Production Notes

This podcast featured Esau McCaulley

Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa

Hosted by Evan Rosa

Production Assistance by Macie Bridge, Luke Stringer, and Kaylen Yun.

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

Acknowledgements

This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of Blueprint 1543. For more information, visit http://blueprint1543.org/.

Work shapes identity, community, and meaning—but how should faith show up in professional life? Sociologist Elaine Ecklund discusses religion in the workplace, drawing on research conducted with co-author Denise Daniels.
“I think our faith compels us to hope for and enact flourishing for everyone.”
In this episode with Evan Rosa, Ecklund reflects on vocation, gender, authenticity, and principled pluralism in modern workplaces. Together they discuss workplace identity, gender discrimination, calling across occupations, boundaries around work, religion’s public role, and pluralism in professional life.
Episode Highlights
“I think our faith compels us to hope for and enact flourishing for everyone.”
“People use their religion to bring justice to their workplaces.”
“They don’t want to pretend they’re someone different.”
“There are ways in which our faith traditions can put needed boundaries around our work.”
“I am being fully who I am and I am oriented toward the other.”
About Elaine Ecklund
Elaine Howard Ecklund is a sociologist of religion and professor at Rice University, where she directs the Boniuk Institute for the Study and Advancement of Religious Tolerance. Her research focuses on religion in public life, science and faith, and workplace culture. She is the author or co-author of numerous books, including Religion in a Changing Workplace and Working for Better: A New Approach to Faith at Work (with Denise Daniels). Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation and featured in major media outlets.
Helpful Links And Resources
Working for Better: A New Approach to Faith at Work https://www.ivpress.com/working-for-better
Religion in a Changing Workplace https://academic.oup.com/book/58194
Boniuk Institute for Religious Tolerance https://boniuk.rice.edu/
Elaine Ecklund website https://elaineecklund.com
Show Notes
Religion and workplace life
Sociology of belief research background
Studying scientists and religion
Expanding research beyond science workplaces
Collaboration with Denise Daniels
Academic and practical faith-at-work books
Defining work as paid labor
Honoring caregiving and volunteer labor
“People don’t want to pretend they’re someone different.”
Bringing whole selves to work
Calling across occupational sectors
Workplace autonomy and meaning
“People use their religion to bring justice to their workplaces.”
Faith creating boundaries around work
Gender dynamics in workplaces
Story of hiding motherhood in academia
Fragmentation and identity performance
“There are ways in which our faith traditions can put needed boundaries around our work.”
Church gender expectations
Billy Graham rule implications
Work skills serving congregations
Living in pluralistic society
Principled pluralism explained
“I am being fully who I am and I am oriented toward the other.”
Embrace, dignity, and learning from difference
#FaithAndWork #ElaineEcklund #PrincipledPluralism #ReligionAndWorkplace #Vocation #GenderAndWork #HumanFlourishing
Production Notes
This podcast featured Elaine Ecklund
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

Can faith sustain courage and openness in a polarized democracy? Former Ohio governor and presidential candidate John Kasich reflects on faith, fear, character, and public life amid deep political polarization and religious tension in America.
“There is a certain comfort in knowing you have somebody who’s always in your corner.”
In this conversation with Evan Rosa, Kasich reflects on personal faith shaped by tragedy, the search for purpose, and why character matters more than ideology in leadership. Together they discuss religious faith in American life, his experience running in the 2016 Republican presidential primaries, voting on character over beliefs, firm political commitments, open-minded perspective taking, his vision of a life worth living, and before the end of this conversation, you’ll find out his favorite Metallica song.
Episode Highlights
“There is a certain comfort in knowing you have somebody who’s always in your corner.”
“You can be firm while at the same time looking at a point of view of somebody who’s diametrically opposed to you.”
“I look for character. I don’t look for what somebody thinks about the Book of Revelation.”
“Faith informs the way I think about things, but it doesn’t spell out what I’m going to do.”
“If you begin to work together to solve a problem locally, it can actually create friendship.”
About John Kasich
John Kasich is a former U.S. congressman, two-term governor of Ohio, and presidential candidate with more than four decades of experience in public service, media, and civic leadership. First elected to the Ohio State Senate at age 26, he later served 18 years in the U.S. House of Representatives before becoming governor in 2011. Kasich has authored six books exploring politics, faith, leadership, and civic responsibility, including his most recent, Heaven Help Us: How Faith Communities Inspire Hope, Strengthen Neighborhoods, and Build the Future. He is known for emphasizing character, dignity, and community-based solutions over ideological rigidity. Kasich frequently speaks on leadership, faith in public life, and democratic renewal, and continues to engage across political and cultural divides in pursuit of common purpose. Learn more and follow at https://johnkasich.com and https://twitter.com/JohnKasich
Show Notes
Growing up Catholic, altar service, early religious formation
Tragedy in 1987, parents killed by drunk driver
“Where do you stand vis-à-vis your eternal destiny?”
Faith as ongoing window of questioning, not certainty
God’s existence, care, and personal relationship
“Faith itself is a gift. God has to act first.”
Fear, loss, and the backstop of divine presence
“You’ve got the most powerful being in all of history kind of got your back.”
Faith shared as gift, not coercion or argument
Voting based on character, not doctrinal alignment
Scripture informing decisions, not dictating policy
Respect for the poor as moral baseline
Christian nationalism and the question of objective truth
Politics and faith distinct, neither hostile nor coercive
Singles win games, local action over grand crusades
Faith communities as clubhouses for moral action
Working locally dissolves partisan hostility
Life worth living as purpose, gifts, and contribution
Character, integrity, and not taking advantage of others
Freedom from fear, boxes, and rigid identities
Kindness versus niceness as moral distinction
Open-mindedness as antidote to boredom and fear
Campaigning as test of endurance, character, and empathy
“People wanted to know who you were more than your ideas.”
Pursuing convictions while staying rooted in faith communities
Production Notes
This podcast featured John Kasich
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
#FaithAndPolitics
#CharacterMatters
#PublicFaith
#CivicLife
#CommonGood
#JohnKasich

Mortality, fragility, forgiveness, and peace. Journalist and author Stan Grant offers a genre-bending work of prayer, memory, and theology shaped by fatherhood, Aboriginal inheritance, masculinity, and mortality.
“I see this as a gift from God, a creator that allows us to find each other again.”
In this conversation with Evan Rosa, Grant reflects on his 2025 book, Murriyang: Song of Time—his philosophical and spiritual exploration of the human place in the world and faith as lived experience rather than abstraction. He looks closely at his father’s life in order to come to terms with his own, the meaning of fatherhood and how to understand and forgive our fathers, masculinity and vulnerability, Aboriginal history and identity, masculinity and vulnerability, forgiveness and sacrifice, prayer and poetry, and the whole human experience of time and eternity.
Episode Highlights
“We inherit our father’s cups.”
“We must forgive our fathers. It is the only way that we can forgive ourselves.”
“We cannot survive without each other.”
“Man is not made for history. History is made for man.”
“ … to confront the beauty of that mortality—my father’s final gift to me is his death.”
About Stan Grant
Stan Grant is an Australian journalist, author, and public intellectual of Wiradjuri, Kamilaroi, and Dharawal heritage. A former international correspondent and broadcaster, he has written widely on Indigenous identity, history, faith, and moral responsibility. Grant is the author of several acclaimed books, including Talking to My Country and Murriyang: Song of Time, which blends prayer, memoir, poetry, and theology. His work consistently resists abstraction in favor of embodied human experience, emphasizing forgiveness, attention, and the dignity of the human person. Grant has received national honors for journalism and cultural leadership and remains a leading voice in conversations about history, masculinity, faith, and what it means to live lives worthy of our shared humanity.
Helpful Links and Resources
Murriyang: Song of Time https://www.harpercollins.com.au/9781460763827/murriyang/
Talking to My Country https://www.harpercollins.com.au/9781460752210/talking-to-my-country/
Stan Grant official website https://www.stangrant.com.au
Show Notes
Fathers and sons; inherited burden, sacrifice, and responsibility
“We inherit our father’s cups”
Christ in Gethsemane as archetype of father-son suffering
Masculinity as physical burden, scars, toughness
“We must forgive our fathers. It is the only way that we can forgive ourselves and live in a world of forgiveness with the other.”
Yindyamarra: respect, gentleness, quietness, forgiveness
Improvisation and rehearsal; jazz as spiritual and artistic model
“I have never written a second draft.”
Second thought as artifice, hiding, dishonesty
Forgiveness of self before speaking; imperfection and risk
“If silence is violence, then we have redefined the very nature of violence itself.”
Giftedness of life; what is given and received
Gift exchange versus transaction in modern society
“We offer the gift of ourselves to each other.”
Murriyang as Psalter, prayer, song, contemplation of time and God
Reading slowly; opening anywhere; shelter from modern noise
“We cannot survive without each other.”
One-person performance; no script, immediacy, intimacy
Music, poetry, time, mortality woven together
Father’s body as history; sawmills, injuries, exhaustion
Childhood memory of bath; “the water is stained black with blood”
Mother’s touch; tenderness amid survival
Late-life renaissance; language recovery, teaching, honors
Murriyang (heaven) and Babiin (father) liturgical, prayerful, dialogical alternation throughout the text
St. Augustine: “What was God doing before he made time? He was making hell for the over-curious.”
Is God in time? Or out of time?
Speaking of eternity or timelessness still imputes the concept of time.
“ The imaginative space of time itself, it reaches to an horizon. But what is beyond the horizon? For modernity, of course, time is the big story. To be modern is to reinvent time. It's to be new. Modernity and technology is all about taming time.”
“Man is not made for history. History is made for man.”
Attention, affliction, abstraction, and the loss of human touch
“My father’s gift to me is his death.”
Mortality as meaning; resisting transhumanism
Time, modernity, instant life, collapsing space
Fragility, love, forgiveness, and beginning again
Ending where we began
#StanGrant
#Murriyang
#Fatherhood
#Masculinity
#Forgiveness
#TimeAndFaith
#HumanFlourishing
#Australia
Production Notes
This podcast featured Stan Grant
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

Slavery did not end in the nineteenth century—it persists today, hidden in global supply chains, religious justifications, and systems of power. Kevin Bales and Michael Rota join Evan Rosa to explore modern slavery through history, psychology, and theology, asking why it remains so difficult to see and confront.
“It’s time some person should see these calamities to their end.” (Thomas Clarkson, 1785)
“There are millions of slaves in the world today.” (Kevin Bales, 2025)
In this episode, they consider how conscience, power, and religious belief can either sustain enslavement or become forces for abolition. Together they discuss the psychology of slaveholding, faith’s complicity and resistance, Quaker abolitionism, modern debt bondage, ISIS and Yazidi slavery, and what meaningful action looks like today.
https://freetheslaves.net/
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Episode Highlights
“There are millions of slaves in the world today.”
“Statistics isn’t gonna do it. I need to actually show people things.”
“They have sexual control. They can do what they like.”
“Slavery is flowing into our lives hidden in the things we buy.”
“We have to widen our sphere of concern.”
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About Kevin Bales
Kevin Bales is a leading scholar and activist in the global fight against modern slavery. He is Professor of Contemporary Slavery at the University of Nottingham and co-founder of Free the Slaves, an international NGO dedicated to ending slavery worldwide. Bales has spent more than three decades researching forced labor, debt bondage, and human trafficking, combining academic rigor with on-the-ground investigation. His work has shaped international policy, influenced anti-slavery legislation, and brought global attention to forms of enslavement often dismissed as historical. He is the author of several influential books, including Disposable People and Friends of God, Slaves of Men, which examines the complex relationship between religion and slavery across history and into the present. Learn more and follow at https://www.kevinbales.org and https://www.freetheslaves.net
About Michael Rota
Michael Rota is Professor of Philosophy at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, where he teaches and researches in the philosophy of religion, moral psychology, and the history of slavery and religion. His work spans scholarly articles on the definition of slavery, the moral psychology underlying social change and abolition, and the relevance of theological concepts to ethical life. Rota is co-author with Kevin Bales of Friends of God, Slaves of Men: Religion and Slavery, Past and Present, a comprehensive interdisciplinary study of how religions have both justified and resisted systems of enslaving human beings from antiquity to the present day. He is also the author of Taking Pascal’s Wager: Faith, Evidence, and the Abundant Life, an extended argument for the reasonableness and desirability of Christian commitment. In addition to his academic writing, he co-leads projects in philosophy and education and is co-founder of Personify, a platform exploring AI and student learning. Learn more and follow at his faculty profile and personal website https://mikerota.wordpress.com and on X/Twitter @mikerota.
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Helpful Links And Resources
Disposable People by Kevin Bales
https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520281820/disposable-people
Friends of God, Slaves of Men by Kevin Bales and Michael Rota
https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520383265/friends-of-god-slaves-of-men
Free the Slaves
https://www.freetheslaves.net
Voices for Freedom
https://voicesforfreedom.org
International Justice Mission
https://www.ijm.org
Talitha Kum
https://www.talithakum.info
––––––––––––––––––
Show Notes
– Slavery named as a contemporary moral crisis obscured by twentieth-century abolition narratives
– Kevin Bales’s encounter with anti-slavery leaflet in London, mid-1990s
– “There are millions of slaves in the world today … I thought, look, that can’t be true because I don’t know that. I’m a professor. I should know that.”
– Stories disrupting moral distance more powerfully than statistics
– “There were three little stories inside, about three different types of enslavement … it put a hook in me like a fish and pulled me.”
– United Nations documentation mostly ignored despite vast evidence
– Decades of investigation into contemporary slavery
– Fieldwork across five regions, five forms of enslavement
– Kevin Bales’s book, Disposable People as embodied witness with concrete stories
– “Statistics isn’t gonna do it. I need to actually show people things. There’s gonna be something that breaks hearts the way it did me when I was in the field.”
– Psychological resistance to believing slavery touches ordinary life
– Anti-Slavery International as original human rights organization founded in U.K. in 1839
– Quaker and Anglican foundations of abolitionist movements
– Religion as both justification for slavery and engine of resistance
– Call for renewed faith-based abolition today
– Slavery and religion intertwined from early human cultures
– Colonial expansion intensifying moral ambiguity
– Columbus, Genoa, and enslavement following failed gold extraction
– Spanish royal hesitation over legitimacy of slavery
– Las Casas’s moral conversion after refusal of absolution
– “He eventually realized this is totally wrong. What we are doing, we are destroying these people. And this is not what God wants us to be doing.”
– Sepúlveda’s Aristotelian defense of hierarchy and profit
– Moral debate without effective structural enforcement
– Power described as intoxicating and deforming conscience
– Hereditary debt bondage in Indian villages
– Caste, ethnicity, and generational domination
– Sexual violence as mechanism of absolute control
– “They have sexual control. They can beat up the men, rape the women, steal the children. They can do pretty much what they like.”
– Three-year liberation process rooted in trust, education, and collective refusal
– Former slaves returning as teachers and organizers
– Liberation compared to Plato’s allegory of the cave
– Post-liberation vulnerability and risk of recapture
– Power inverted in Christian teaching
– “The disciples are arguing about who’s the greatest, and Jesus says, the greatest among you will be the slave of all… don’t use power to help yourself. Use it to serve.”
– Psychological explanations for delayed abolition
– The psychological phenomenon of “motivated reasoning” that shapes moral conclusions
– “The conclusions we reach aren’t just shaped by the objective evidence the world provides. They’re shaped also by the internal desires and goals and motivations people have.”
– Economic self-interest and social consensus sustaining injustice
– Quaker abolition through relational, conscience-driven confrontation
– First major religious body to forbid slaveholding
– Boycotts of slave-produced goods and naval blockade of slave trade
– Modern slavery as organized criminal enterprise
– ISIS enslavement of Yazidi women
– Religious reasoning weaponized for genocide
– “They said, for religious reasons, we just need to eradicate this entire outfit.”
– Online slave auctions and cultural eradication
– Internal Islamic arguments for abolition
– Restricting the permissible for the common good
– Informing conscience as first step toward action
– Community sustaining long-term resistance
– Catholic religious sisters as leading global abolitionists
– Hidden slavery embedded in everyday consumer goods
– “There’s so much slavery flowing into our lives which is hidden… in our homes, our watches, our computers, the minerals, all this.”
– Expanding moral imagination beyond immediate needs
– “Your sphere of concern has to be wider… how do I start caring about something that I don’t see?”
– “It’s time some person should see these calamities to their end.” (Thomas Clarkson, 1785)
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#ModernSlavery
#FaithAndJustice
#HumanDignity
#Abolition
#FreeTheSlaves
Production Notes
This podcast featured Kevin Bales and Michael Rota
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