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

By: Miroslav Volf Matthew Croasmun Ryan McAnnally-Linz Drew Collins Evan Rosa
  • Summary

  • Seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. Theological insight, cultural analysis, and practical guidance for personal and communal flourishing. Brought to you by the Yale Center for Faith & Culture.
    2020-2028 Yale Center for Faith & Culture
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Episodes
  • The Chosen People: Christian Nationalism Now / Eliyahu Stern & Philip Gorski
    Jan 8 2025
    Is America a nation Chosen by God? A New Jerusalem and Shining City on a Hill? What is the shape of Christian Nationalism today?Now 4 years past Jan 6, 2021 and anticipating the next term of presidential office, Yale professors Eliyahu Stern and Philip Gorski join Evan Rosa for a conversation about religion, politics, and the shape of Christian nationalism now.Together they discuss what religion really means in sociological and historical terms; the difference between religions of power and religions of law or morality; the American syncretism of pagan Christianity (perhaps captured in the Qnon Shaman with the horns and facepaint); the connection between nationalism and the desire to be a Chosen People; the supersessionism at the root of seeing the Christian conquest of America as a New Jerusalem; and how ordinary citizens come to adopt the tenets of Christian Nationalism.Eliyahu Stern is Professor of Modern Jewish Intellectual and Cultural History in the Departments of Religious Studies and History and his current project is entitled No Where Left to Go: Jews and the Global Right from 1977 to October 7.Philip Gorski is Frederick and Laura Goff Professor of Sociology at Yale University and is author of The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy (with Samuel Perry) as well as American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present.Special thanks to our production assistant Zoë Halaban for pitching this conversation.About Eliyahu SternEliyahu Stern is Professor of Modern Jewish Intellectual and Cultural History in the Departments of Religious Studies and History. Previously, he was Junior William Golding Fellow in the Humanities at Brasenose College and the Oriental Institute, University of Oxford. He is the author of the award-winning, The Genius: Elijah of Vilna and the Making of Modern Judaism (Yale University Press in 2012). His second monograph Jewish Materialism: The Intellectual Revolution of the 1870s (Yale University Press, 2018) details the ideological background to Jews’ involvement in Zionism, Capitalism, and Communism. His courses include The Global Right: From the French Revolution to the American Insurrection, Secularism: From the Enlightenment to the Present, Modern Jewish Intellectual History, The Holocaust in Culture and Politics. He has served as a term member on the Council on Foreign Relations and a consultant to the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, Poland. Currently, he is a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the Center of Jewish History.His latest project is entitled No Where Left to Go: Jews and the Global Right from 1977 to October 7.About Philip GorskiPhilip S. Gorski is a comparative-historical sociologist with strong interests in theory and methods and in modern and early modern Europe. He is Frederick and Laura Goff Professor of Sociology at Yale University. His empirical work focuses on topics such as state-formation, nationalism, revolution, economic development and secularization with particular attention to the interaction of religion and politics. Other current interests include the philosophy and methodology of the social sciences and the nature and role of rationality in social life. He’s author with Samuel L. Perry of The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy, as well as American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present.Show NotesTrump: “I’m a nationalist.”Increased ownership and proud identification as Christian NationalismEliyahu Stern, No Where Left to Go: Jews and the Global Right from 1977 to October 7The human practice of religion“ The way one person will invoke Christianity will be something very different than say the way a church or the way another person or another religious figure is going to invoke that term.”Humility and a leap“ The History of the Sacred from Babylon to Beyoncé”Religion vs “The Sacred””Western nationalism itself is, the offspring of a Christian supersessionist appropriation of Judaism.”“A new chosen people”The Deep Story Philip Gorski tells in The Flag and the CrossPagan understandings of nationalism“The Deep Story runs something like this. America was founded as a Christian nation. The founders were Orthodox Christians. The founding documents were based on quote, biblical principles or perhaps even divinely inspired. The United States has a special role to play. In history as an exceptional or chosen nation in order to carry out that mission, it's been blessed with unique power and prosperity. But the project, the mission, and also the prosperity and the power are all increasingly endangered by the presence of non-whites, non-native born people, non-Christians on American soil.”Covenantal logicThe tendency to see oneself as “Chosen”England, Netherlands claiming the mantle of Chosenness for political purposes“Jews are ...
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    58 mins
  • How to Read Simone Weil, Part 3: The Existentialist / Deborah Casewell
    Dec 26 2024
    “All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception.” … “It is necessary to uproot oneself. To cut down the tree and make of it a cross, and then to carry it every day.” … “I have to imitate God who infinitely loves finite things in that they are finite things.” … “To know that what is most precious is not rooted in existence—that is beautiful. Why? It projects the soul beyond time.”(Simone Weil, Gravity & Grace)“That's how the figure of Christ comes into this idea of the madness of love. It's that kind of mad, self emptying act completely. And it's the  one thing, she says, it's the only thing that means that you  are able to love properly. Because to love properly, and therefore to be just properly, you have to love like Christ does. Which is love to the extent that you, that you empty yourself and, you know, die on a cross.” (Deborah Casewell, from this episode)This is the third installment of a short series on How to Read Simone Weil—as the Mystic, the Activist, and the Existentialist.This week, Evan Rosa invites Deborah Casewell, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chester, author of Monotheism & Existentialism, and Co-Director of the Simone Weil Research Network in the U.K.—to explore how to read Simone Weil the Existentialist.Together they discuss how her life of extreme self-sacrifice importantly comes before her philosophy; how to understand her central, but often confusing concept of decreation; her approach to beauty as the essential human response for finding meaning in a world of force and necessity; the madness of Jesus Christ as the only way to engage in struggle for justice and how she connects that to the Greek tragedy of Antigone, which is the continuation of the Oedipus story; and, the connection between love, justice, and living a life of madness.About Simone WeilSimone Weil (1909–1943) was a French philosopher, mystic, and political activist. She’s the author of Gravity and Grace, The Need for Roots, and Waiting for God—among many other essays, letters, and notes.About Deborah CasewellDeborah Casewell is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chester, author of Monotheism & Existentialism, and is Co-Director of the Simone Weil Research Network in the U.K.Show NotesSimone Weil’s Gravity & Grace (1947) (Available Online)Deborah Casewell’s Monotheism & ExistentialismSimone de Beauvoir’s anecdote in Memories of a Beautiful Daughter: “Shouldn’t we also get people’s minds, not just their bodies? Weil: “You’ve never been hungry have you?”Leon Trotsky yells violently at WeilThe odd idolizing of Weil without paying attention to her writing”You get a kind of, as you say, a kind of odd idolization of her, or a sense in which  you can't then interact so critically   or systematically with her philosophy, because her figure stands in the way so much, and the kind of the respect that people have.”Anti-Semitism despite JewishnessSimone Weil’s relationship to food: an unhealthy role model“She’d reject anything that wasn’t perfect.”Extreme germophobeExpression of solidarity with the unfortunateHer life comes before her philosophy. Being, you might say, comes before thinking.Weil’s life of extreme self-sacrifice as “mad”—alienating, insane, strange to the outside world.“ I think an essential part of, to an essential part of understanding her is to understand that   world is kind of structured and  set up in such a way that it runs without God, without the supernatural, God's kind of abdicated through the act of creation. And as a result, the universe operates through necessity and through force. So left to its own devices, the universe, I think, tends towards crushing people.”Abandonment vs abdicationPeople possess power and ability and action—a tension between activity and passivityWeil’s Marxism and theory of labor and workActivity becomes sustained passivityConsent, power, and the social dynamics of force and necessityI think she sees the best human existence is to be in a state of obedience instead. And so what you have to do is relinquish power over people.The complexity of human relationships“She was a very individual person … a singular, individual life.”The Need for Roots“And this is what I do like about Simone Weil—is that she's always happy to let contradictions exist. And so when she describes human nature and the needs of the soul, they're contradictory. They all contradict each other. It's freedom and obedience.”Creating dualismsShe is a dualistSimone Weil on Beauty and Decreation”Decreation is essentially your way to exist in the world ruled by force and necessity without succumbing  to force and necessity, because in a way there's less  of you to succumb to force and necessity.”Platonic idea of MetaxuWeil on the human experience of beauty—” people ...
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    1 hr and 6 mins
  • How to Read Simone Weil, Part 2: The Activist / Cynthia Wallace
    Dec 18 2024
    “What are you going through?” This was one of the central animating questions in Simone Weil’s thought that pushed her beyond philosophy into action. Weil believed that genuinely asking this question of the other, particularly the afflicted other, then truly listening and prayerfully attending, would move us toward an enactment of justice and love.Simone Weil believed that any suffering that can be ameliorated, should be.In this episode, Part 2 of our short series on How to Read Simone Weil, Cynthia Wallace (Associate Professor of English at St. Thomas More College at the University of Saskatchewan), and author of The Literary Afterlives of Simone Weil: Feminism, Justice, and the Challenge of Religion and Evan Rosa discuss the risky self-giving way of Simone Weil; her incredible literary influence, particularly on late 20th century feminist writers; the possibility of redemptive suffering; the morally complicated territory of self-sacrificial care and the way that has traditionally fallen to women and minorities; what it means to make room and practicing hospitality for the afflicted other; hunger; the beauty of vulnerability; and that grounding question for Simone Weil political ethics, “What are you going through?”We’re in our second episode of a short series exploring How to Read Simone Weil. She’s the author of Gravity and Grace, The Need for Roots, and Waiting for God—among many other essays, letters, and notes—and a deep and lasting influence that continues today.In this series, we’re exploring Simone Weil the Mystic, Simone Weil the Activist, Simone Weil the Existentialist. And what we’ll see is that so much of her spiritual, political, and philosophical life, are deeply unified in her way of being and living and dying.And on that note, before we go any further, I need to issue a correction from our previous episode in which I erroneously stated that Weil died in France. And I want to thank subscriber and listener Michael for writing and correcting me.Actually she died in England in 1943, having ambivalently fled France in 1942 when it was already under Nazi occupation—first to New York, then to London to work with the Free French movement and be closer to her home.And as I went back to fix my research, I began to realize just how important her place of death was. She died in a nursing home outside London. In Kent, Ashford to be precise. She had become very sick, and in August 1943 was moved to the Grosvenor Sanitorium.The manner and location of her death matter because it’s arguable that her death by heart failure was not a self-starving suicide (as the coroner reported), but rather, her inability to eat was a complication rising from tuberculosis, combined with her practice of eating no more than the meager rations her fellow Frenchmen lived on under Nazi occupation.Her biographer Richard Rees wrote: "As for her death, whatever explanation one may give of it will amount in the end to saying that she died of love.In going back over the details of her death, I found a 1977 New York Times article by Elizabeth Hardwick, and I’ll quote at length, as it offers a very fitting entry into this week’s episode on her life of action, solidarity, and identification with and attention to the affliction of others.“Simone Weil, one of the most brilliant, and original minds of 20th century France, died at the age of 34 in a nursing home near London. The coroner issued a verdict of suicide, due to voluntary starvation—an action undertaken at least in part out of wish not to eat more than the rations given her compatriots in France under the German occupation. The year of her death was 1943.“The willed deprivation of her last period was not new; indeed refusal seems to have been a part of her character since infancy. What sets her apart from our current ascetics with their practice of transcendental meditation, diet, vegetarianism, ashram simplicities, yoga is that with them the deprivations and rigors‐are undergone for the pay‐off—for tranquility, for thinness, for the hope of a long life—or frequently, it seems, to fill the hole of emptiness so painful to the narcissist. With Simone Well it was entirely the opposite.“It was her wish, or her need, to undergo misery, affliction and deprivation because such had been the lot of mankind throughout history. Her wish was not to feel better, but to honor the sufferings of the lowest. Thus around 1935, when she was 25 years old, this woman of transcendent intellectual gifts and the widest learning, already very frail and suffering from severe headaches, was determined to undertake a year of work in a factory. The factories, the assembly lines, were then the modem equivalent of “slavery,” and she survived in her own words as “forever a slave.” What she went through at the factory “marked me in so lasting a manner that still today when any human being, whoever he may be and in whatever circumstances, speaks to me ...
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    1 hr and 11 mins

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