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

Honesty may be the virtue we prize most in other people, and it is eroding fast. Philosopher Christian B. Miller, A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University and author of The Honesty Crisis, argues that we are living through not one honesty crisis but several at once, each driven by new technologies that make dishonesty more tempting and harder to catch.
In this episode with Evan Rosa, Miller unpacks what has actually changed: why AI cheating feels efficient, effective, and evasive to students who assume everyone else is doing it; how sermon plagiarism moved from borrowed manuscripts to the internet to AI; and how celebrity culture, at every scale from pop stars to local pastors, widens the gap between a curated public image and a private self.
Together they discuss honesty as far more than truth-telling, a virtue that covers cheating, stealing, misleading, BS-ing, and self-deception, along with Miller’s definition of honest behavior as not intentionally misrepresenting or distorting the facts as you see them, which frees honesty from any claim to possess capital-T Truth. Together they also consider why we are neither born nor raised honest, why honest motivation has to be other-centered rather than reward-seeking, how hard reality, trusted friends, and the Holy Spirit can break through self-deception, how rampant dishonesty leaves a society transactional and afraid, and why, in a fallen world with a Nazi at the door, honesty can be outweighed by compassion and justice.
Episode Highlights
”So when you put those two together, greater temptation and also easier to get away with it, that’s a bad combination. It’s a bad formula for trying to preserve what I think is our most important virtue of honesty.”
”We have something that’s efficient, effective, evasive, and everyone else is thought to be using it.”
”I think it’s now we’ve gone so far, there’s no going back … we cannot assume that graded work in education at the middle school, high school, undergraduate, and graduate levels is actually, predominantly the work of the student as opposed to the work of an AI.”
”According to some survey data I’ve seen, at least 25% of pastors are using AI for sermon writing and preparation without acknowledgement. And so they’re standing up there presenting this material as if it were their own.”
”What I want to say is honest behavior is a matter of not intentionally misrepresenting or distorting the facts as you see them.”
”3,000 years ago, when people were saying the Earth is flat, they were wrong, but they weren’t dishonest.”
”Most people want to cheat if they think they can get away with it, and it’s suitably beneficial.”
”This is not just the Taylor Swifts, this is not just the LeBron Jameses of the world, massive celebrities. We are all celebrities to some extent.”
”You are unable to form genuine friendships and loving, caring relationships with anyone, because those presuppose trust and honesty, and dishonesty breaks down trust, and fractures the relationship… And instead, what ends up happening is you live in fear.”
”In these tragic, terrible situations, we have to balance honesty, which is important, with other values like compassion, kindness, caring, justice… Honesty is really important, but it’s not the only thing that matters.”
About Christian B. Miller
Christian B. Miller is the A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University, where he studies virtue and moral character. He directed The Honesty Project, a $4.4 million initiative funded by the John Templeton Foundation, and earlier led The Character Project. He is the author of more than 130 articles and several books, including The Character Gap: How Good Are We?, Honesty: The Philosophy and Psychology of a Neglected Virtue, and, most recently, The Honesty Crisis: Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue in an Increasingly Dishonest World (2026). He lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, with his wife and three children.
Helpful Links and Resources
The Honesty Crisis: Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue in an Increasingly Dishonest World, Christian B. Miller: https://christianbmiller.com/the-honesty-crisis/
The Character Gap: How Good Are We?, Christian B. Miller: https://christianbmiller.com/the-character-gap/
About Christian B. Miller: https://christianbmiller.com/about-me/
The Honesty Project, Wake Forest University: https://honestyproject.philosophy.wfu.edu
On Bullshit, Harry G. Frankfurt: https://press.princeton.edu/books/ebook/9780691276793/on-bullshit-0
Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom, Thomas Jefferson: https://www.monticello.org/encyclopedia/honesty-first-chapter-book-wisdom/
“Lying and Speaking Your Interlocutor’s Language,” Alexander R. Pruss: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/637086/pdf
Show Notes
The honesty crisis
Not one crisis but several, each pairing greater temptation with easier escape from detection
Technology as the cause, though not inherently evil
Crib notes, honor codes, and the internet
AI cheating
Four drivers of student AI use: speed, polish, near-undetectability, and assuming everyone else does it
No going back on assuming graded work reflects a student’s own effort
Technological advance as relational decline and eroded accountability
Sermon plagiarism, from borrowed manuscripts to online sermons to AI
Pastors using AI without acknowledgment, and the broken trust when it surfaces
Lying, cheating, stealing, misleading, fraud, self-deception, and BS-ing
Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit
Deepfakes, AI companions, infidelity websites, and misinformation
Honest behavior defined by the facts as you see them, not capital-T Truth
Flat-earth believers, the Matrix, and trusting experts who let us down
Most people cheat when it pays and detection seems unlikely
Not born honest, not raised honest
Winnicott’s false self and early incentives to hide
Why honest motives must be other-centered, not self-protective
Celebrity culture, curated public images, and feeling above the rules
Everyone with a platform, down to the local pastor, as a minor celebrity
Jefferson on honesty and wisdom
Self-deception
Downplaying unwelcome evidence about a partner, or about ourselves
Hitting bottom, trusted friends, and the Holy Spirit as ways through
Ephesians 4:25 (NIV): "Therefore each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to your neighbor, for we are all members of one body."
A dishonest society as transactional, friendless, and afraid
The Nazi at the door, when compassion and justice outweigh honesty
Alexander Pruss on lying
Preserving valuable connections at the cost of corrupted ones
#ForTheLifeOfTheWorld #Honesty #HonestyCrisis #AIEthics #AcademicIntegrity #MoralPsychology #Virtue #Philosophy #ChristianEthics #Podcast
Production Notes
This podcast featured Christian B. Miller
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

What happens when an ancient discipline built to remake the self in the context of a way of life and normative map gets sold back to us as lifehacking for stress relief and optimization?
Experimental psychologist Miguel Farias, co-author of The Buddha Pill and founding director of the Brain, Belief, and Behaviour Lab at Coventry University, has spent two decades studying what meditation actually does to people, and what modern appropriation has forgotten about ancient tradition.
“The possibilities of self-deception are endless. … The mind is clever, so you have to move beyond that level of cleverness.”
In this episode with Evan Rosa, Farias returns to the oldest question in the contemplative traditions: What is this self, and how might it change? He moves from the Delphic command to “know thyself,” through the charioteer of Plato and the Katha Upanishad, to Teresa of Ávila’s interior castle and the delights of prayer that arrive as gift rather than achievement. Along the way he argues that modern meditation, including much Western Buddhist practice, rests on a naive confidence that we can do this alone, when nearly every tradition insists on the opposite: you need guides, community, and a map, because our capacity to fool ourselves runs deep.
Together they discuss why insight alone rarely changes anyone, the difference between change and transformation, how cognitive psychology misread Pascal’s reasons of the heart, and the paradox of rigorous self-mastery practiced in order to let go. They also take up the question of Freud’s lasting relevance, mindfulness as a placating opiate rather than a rupture of conformity, why hours of daily meditation can coexist with selfishness, suffering as fuel for transformation rather than something merely to soothe, Francis of Assisi’s gratitude for Sister Death, and what a seeker without a tradition’s map can do when meditation stirs up more than expected. The conversation closes on Ezekiel’s promise of a heart of flesh in place of a heart of stone, a week spent caring for the sick at Lourdes, and the claim that sudden awakenings come more often from encounters with other people than from sitting alone.
Episode Highlights
”Here you do indeed have a major difference between all these spiritual traditions and modern meditation, including Western Buddhist meditation, which is very new in the sense that it has this exceedingly naive idea that you can do this by yourself.”
”No, no, no, no, do not trust yourself. That’s actually a major thing. You need other people… the possibilities of self-deception are endless.”
”You can meditate for 23 hours a day and have all these wonderful, blissful experiences. And then for the one hour that you’re not meditating, you can be the most selfish bastard on earth.”
”The mind is clever, so you have to move beyond that level of cleverness. And in many, many ways, what’s the best thing that meditation is doing for many people today is to help them learn how to unlearn many of the stupid things we have learned.”
”You exert this astonishing level of control so that you can entirely let go of it.”
”Now I tell my colleagues who do mindfulness, the way to hell is paved with good intentions. There’s a deep wisdom in this.”
”What these traditions… are talking about is really the transformational possibility of suffering. How suffering can be a tool, can be an energy, can be an oil, fuel for something deep.”
”If you start moving across too many wells, because you’re thirsty and you’re looking for water, if you move from well to well… and as you just sip from it, you may end up dying of thirst.”
”Most tales we have of sudden enlightenment are not the outcome of meditation, they’re the outcome of encounters with others.”
”What matters is that your heart is pure. It is a heart of flesh. It is a heart that allows light in. It is not a heart of stone.”
About Miguel Farias
Miguel Farias is an experimental psychologist, associate professor, and founding director of the Brain, Belief, and Behaviour Lab at Coventry University. He studied psychology and psychotherapy at the University of Lisbon before earning his doctorate in experimental psychology at Oxford, where he lectured. He co-wrote, with Catherine Wikholm, ”The Buddha Pill: Can Meditation Change You?” and is lead editor of ”The Oxford Handbook of Meditation.” His research spans belief, ritual, pilgrimage, and meditation, including the first randomized controlled trial of yoga and meditation in prisons. In 2026 he launched ”The Buddha Pill Podcast,” a documentary series on meditation.
Special thanks to Steve Porter and the Martin Institute for Christianity & Culture at Westmont College. For more information visit https://www.westmont.edu/about/institutes-and-centers/martin-institute.
Made possible in part by the Templeton World Charities Foundation
Helpful Links and Resources
Miguel Farias website: https://miguelfarias.co.uk/
Miguel Farias, Coventry University research profile: https://www.coventry.ac.uk/research/researchers/dr-miguel-farias/
The Buddha Pill: Can Meditation Change You?, by Miguel Farias and Catherine Wikholm: https://www.amazon.com/Buddha-Pill-Can-Meditation-Change/dp/1786782219
The Oxford Handbook of Meditation, edited by Miguel Farias, David Brazier, and Mansur Lalljee: https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/40700
The Buddha Pill Podcast, Part 1, via Templeton World Charity Foundation: https://www.templetonworldcharity.org/blog/the-buddha-pill-with-miguel-farias-part1-what-is-meditation
The Interior Castle, by Teresa of Ávila (Christian Classics Ethereal Library): https://www.ccel.org/ccel/teresa/castle2.html
Pascal’s Pensées (Project Gutenberg): http://www.gutenberg.org/files/18269/18269-h/18269-h.htm
Canticle of the Creatures, by Francis of Assisi (Franciscan Friars): https://friars.us/article/2025/01/11/franciscans-celebrate-800th-anniversary-of-canticle-of-the-creatures
Show Notes
Colossians, Freud, and the old self
Know yourself: the Delphic inscription behind philosophy and religion
Plato and the Katha Upanishad on the charioteer and the horses
Not a perennialist: where the Buddha departed from his Hindu context
Embodied ascetic practices for mastering the passions
Teresa of Ávila’s Interior Castle: https://www.ccel.org/ccel/teresa/castle2.html
Delights of prayer, and what effort achieves versus what arrives as gift
Pascal’s reasons of the heart, misread by cognitive psychology
A Thai temple advertising willpower, with an inner sanctuary for asking grace
Why the traditions distrust solo practice and insist on guides and community
A Hindu priestess on long hours of meditation coexisting with selfishness
Insight versus assimilation
Change versus transformation
Unlearning what a clever, overeducated mind has absorbed
Conformity and obedience in the most individualistic culture
The paradox of rigorous self-control practiced so control can be surrendered, the margin where real creativity and uniqueness begin
Thérèse of Lisieux’s garden of saints against spiritual monoculture
Freud taught in Oxford literature degrees, not psychology
Therapeutic meditation as placebo or opiate rather than a rupture of conformity
Why alleviating suffering and being transformed by it are different goals, with Christianity treating suffering as fuel for drawing closer to God
Francis of Assisi’s Canticle and gratitude for Sister Death: https://friars.us/article/2025/01/11/franciscans-celebrate-800th-anniversary-of-canticle-of-the-creatures
An unsettled atheist after a retreat, and an Iranian exile angry at religion
Moving from well to well without drinking deeply
Enlightenment through encounters with others, not solitary sitting
Ezekiel’s heart of stone and heart of flesh
A first week caring for the sick at Lourdes and a heart slowly exercised into new sensitivity
#ForTheLifeOfTheWorld #Meditation #Mindfulness #Contemplation #ChristianSpirituality #PsychologyOfReligion #TeresaOfAvila #SpiritualFormation #Podcast
Production Notes
This podcast featured Miguel Farias
Special thanks to Steve Porter and the Martin Institute for Christianity & Culture at Westmont College
Made possible in part by the Templeton World Charities 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

It took Odysseus ten years to sail home from Troy to Ithaca; we can fly the same distance in about an hour. But faster travel hasn't brought us any closer to home. We can know more, do more, and connect more than ever, and yet our ability to belong to our own reality seems to be shrinking. Philosopher Ian Marcus Corbin, who teaches at Harvard Medical School and directs Harvard's Public Culture Project, takes up that paradox in his new book, To Arrive Where We Started: Belonging in the Modern World. The title comes from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, and Corbin reads Eliot's lines as something like a mission statement for humanity: the point of the journey is not to escape reality or optimize our way around it, but to truly belong to it.
In this episode with Evan Rosa, Corbin unpacks why so many of us feel, as Rilke put it, not really at home in our interpreted world, and why technology may leave us suffering too little to live out the old mythic lessons of departure and return. Together they discuss why coming home first requires a breaking, from the Lakota vision quest to Eliot's apophatic poetry, and what it means for a world to decay, leaving people with no past and no future, whether their culture has been devastated or they are being raised on ten-second clips. They also explore what Corbin calls “ownerism,” the high fences and heated pools we build when the world stops feeling like home, along with contempt for the world, collapsing birth rates, and the dream of escaping the planet, to Mars or into the metaverse. Along the way, Corbin draws on Simone Weil's wager that we could not be born at a better time than when we have lost everything, and on Father Zosima's call in Dostoevsky to love all of God's creation, every leaf and every ray of light, as a way back into belonging.
Episode Highlights
"For me, feeling like I belong in my world and I understand it and I fit it's never been a simple thing, and I've always had the sense that this is something I was questing towards."
"That's either a world in decay or that's a world that hasn't had the chance to get fully formed in the first place. And I think that's an incredibly strange and dangerous place to be."
"Maybe it takes you 10 years to get back to Ithaca or whatever. But… to be a young person striking out into the adult world with very little sense of what matters to you or who you are or where you come from, gosh… I wouldn't trade with them."
"It looks to me honestly like a society hurtling. And I don't know what we're hurtling towards, but we're hurtling. And like with scant ability to look up and ask, 'Well, is that where we wanna go?'"
"The world is not a home to us, right? It is this empty, cruel thing. So the best I can do is throw up some really high fences, get a nice heated pool, right? Get a nice security system."
"We can't just produce and promulgate whatever the consumer will click on because I am a weak man, and I will click on things, right, that aren't in the long run good for me."
"Take a good teacher who cares a lot and take one really good book and 12 kids and put them in a room with no distractions and no telephones… and my goodness, you'll have the most transformative and beautiful experience of learning and community you could hope for."
"Every good thing around you will die, as will you. And you have to be strong enough to stand there and take that punch, right?"
"Who's the crazy one here?… I sound woo-woo, but the system that I'm pushing back against is kinda suicidal."
About Ian Marcus Corbin
Ian Marcus Corbin is a philosopher on the neurology faculty at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, director of Harvard's Public Culture Project, and an instructor at the HMS Center for Bioethics. His first book, "To Arrive Where We Started: Belonging in the Modern World," was published by Yale University Press in 2026. He studied politics, religion, and philosophy at Gordon College, Oxford, Yale, and Boston College, and has written for The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Plough. Before all that, he founded and ran a contemporary art gallery in Boston's South End.
Helpful Links and Resources
To Arrive Where We Started: Belonging in the Modern World, by Ian Marcus Corbin: https://www.amazon.com/Arrive-Where-We-Started-Belonging/dp/0300263627
Ian Marcus Corbin's website: https://www.ianmarcuscorbin.com/about
Ian Marcus Corbin on Substack: https://ianmarcuscorbin.substack.com/
The Public Culture Project at Harvard: https://artsandhumanities.fas.harvard.edu/public-culture-project
Radical Hope Retrospective, an interview with Jonathan Lear: https://socialconcerns.nd.edu/virtues/magazine/radical-hope-retrospective-an-interview-with-jonathan-lear/
Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot: https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/four-quartets-t-s-eliot/237356
Show Notes
Four Quartets and Duino Elegies
Belonging as a lifelong, never-finished quest
Apophatic breaking: old certainties collapsing so something new can be seen
Lakota vision quest: fasting, sleeplessness, and a vision the elders help interpret into an adult role in the tribe
Rites of passage and the communal structure that catches you afterward
Smartphones, rural Uganda, and the lure of the city
Crow people, cultural collapse, and Jonathan Lear's Radical Hope
Radical Hope Retrospective, an interview with Jonathan Lear: https://socialconcerns.nd.edu/virtues/magazine/radical-hope-retrospective-an-interview-with-jonathan-lear/
Simone Weil on being born at the right time
World decay
Critiques of Rawlsian liberalism from Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre
Survey data on young adults lacking meaning and purpose
Ten-second clips, endless takedowns, and the struggle to form convictions worth dying for
Wittgenstein's rough ground
Meme culture: real ingenuity inside a nihilistic vacuum
Home as the place one starts from, and a generation sent out without one
Odysseus and the archetypal departure and return
Progress as a stand-in for providence
Falling birth rates and worldwide pessimism about the future
Rilke and oikophilia
Contemptus mundi and odium mundi
Mars and the metaverse as twin escape routes from Earth
Hans Jonas on a natural world emptied of care
Ownerism: fences, heated pools, and a paranoid intuition of scarcity
Black Elk in New York City
Consumerism as a life lived in anticipation
Iris Marion Young and the myth of the calculating, self-made individual
Dostoevsky's Zosima and loving every leaf
One good teacher, one good book, twelve students, no phones
Learning to look at death and finitude without turning away
Piety toward the places and moments we are given
Graduates booing AI boosterism at commencement, and a generation that may refuse the deal on offer
#Belonging #Alienation #Philosophy #MeaningCrisis #TechnologyAndSociety #TSEliot #FaithAndCulture #ForTheLifeOfTheWorld #Podcast #Yale #Harvard
Production Notes
This podcast featured Ian Marcus Corbin
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

Everything is “maxxed” right now, and the news cycle in particular seems to be historymaxxing, insisting that things have never been worse than they are now. And the threats are real, from AI and global warming to election integrity—foreign affairs gone wrong, and violence abroad, in our homes, and in our schools. But the news maxxes us on fear, and so do politicians and corporations, because they want us to do something. If theologian Lee C. Camp is right, history was already maxed at the incarnation, and it came through a subversive way of life: humble, compassionate, at times angry, but radical and scandalous all the same. Camp, author of Scandalous Witness: A Little Political Manifesto for Christians and founder and host of the nationally syndicated podcast and radio show No Small Endeavor, argues that the idolatry of the nation state, and even the effort to legislate Christian morality and values into a political movement, is a subversion of Christianity.
“I think people will better understand Christianity. They stop thinking about it as a religion and think of it more as an interpretation of human history.”
In this episode with Evan Rosa, Camp revisits the newly released edition of the book, with a new preface, and makes the case that stories and history, far more than rational argument, are what change how we see the world. Together they discuss what it means to be formed by history and by story, the early twentieth-century Protestant roots of Christian nationalism, Christian values as a parody of Christianity, and the difference between bearing witness and wielding power. They also take up the gravedigger dilemma, the irony of fearful people bringing about the very decline they dread, and what it means to be a neighbor across ideological difference, with stops along the way at a firebombed bus in Camp's native Alabama, a row of Confederate gravestones in his hometown cemetery, and Eboo Patel's account of rival fire departments in Mostar.
Episode Highlights
"as conservatives increasingly get swept up into the American political moment, there's this new kind of idolatry, I think, of the nation state."
"I generally find the whole Christian values movement destructive to Christianity … when you talk about you're wanting to prioritize certain so-called values and then by hook or by crook, you do whatever you need to to try to get those propagated. You've subverted Christianity."
"I think people will better understand Christianity. They stop thinking about it as a religion and think of it more as an interpretation of human history."
"we believe that death has been overcome by life. That hostility has been overcome by love. That the way even of love of enemies has trounced upon all of the handmaidens of death."
"those who are insisting, no, we wanna bring Christianity back to the public square. By and large may be doing much, much more damage than the secularists ever were able to do to Christianity."
"When you show up with curiosity in a public space it's remarkable what kinds of beautiful moments can occur."
"that one story, you know, opened up a huge vista to me of like, what have I been blind to? What's been going on that I've not paid any attention to?"
"We can act as if we are not shaped by historical time, place, location, historical contingency, but that just makes us blind to it because we are, and that's just what it means to be human."
"a lot of those are seen as scandalous because we've forgotten what Christianity is … we're screwing up right and left because we have refused to take seriously the basics of scripture and the basics of the Christian story."
"you are my neighbor. Regardless of what you claim about the identity of Jesus or the identity of, of Muhammad, you are my neighbor. And I owe to you love and I owe to you respect and I owe to you hospitality."
About Lee C. Camp
Lee C. Camp is the creator and host of No Small Endeavor, a podcast and radio show exploring what it means to live a good life. For 27 years he taught theology and ethics at Lipscomb University in Nashville, concluding his tenure as a Distinguished Faculty Fellow. He is the author of "Mere Discipleship," "Who Is My Enemy?," and "Scandalous Witness: A Little Political Manifesto for Christians," now in paperback with a new preface. An Alabamian with a PhD in moral theology from Notre Dame, he shares life with his wife, Laura, three adult sons, and a havapoo named Otis.
Helpful Links and Resources
Scandalous Witness: A Little Political Manifesto for Christians, by Lee C. Camp: https://www.eerdmans.com/9780802877352/scandalous-witness/
Mere Discipleship: Radical Christianity in a Rebellious World, by Lee C. Camp: https://bakerpublishinggroup.com/books/mere-discipleship-2nd-edition/229392
Lee C. Camp's site, featuring the Scandalous Witness online course: https://www.leeccamp.com/scandalous
No Small Endeavor, Lee C. Camp's podcast and public radio show: https://www.nosmallendeavor.com/
No Small Endeavor on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nosmallendeavor/
Eyes on the Prize, the civil rights documentary series, PBS American Experience: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/eyesontheprize/
The Democratization of American Christianity, Nathan O. Hatch (Yale University Press): https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-300-05060-8
Show Notes
Everything maxxed: a news cycle history-maxing on fear
History maxxed at the incarnation
Scandalous Witness, begun after 2016, now in a new edition with a new preface
A Christian voice beyond partisan left and right
Early 20th-century Protestant liberalism and Christian nationalism
Woodrow Wilson's post-presidency tour casting America as the world's savior
19th-century Restorationist leaders: pacifist, anti-militarist, critics of robber barons and Jim Crow Christianity
Idolatry of the nation state
Religions of morality vs. religions of power
Christian values as a subversion of Christianity
Christianity as an interpretation of human history
The kingdom of God breaking into history
Bearing witness vs. wielding power, from the Moral Majority to MAGA
The gravedigger dilemma: defenders of public Christianity eroding respect for it
Fear bringing about what it dreads
Individual vs. system
Broken friendships, churches, families; prudence over argument
Hosting No Small Endeavor: hospitality and curiosity amid disagreement
Hume, reason, and the passions
Humans as creatures shaped by story
A seminary screening of Eyes on the Prize, a firebombed bus near his Alabama childhood home, and a new, systemic view of faith
Nietzsche and the philosopher's missing historical sense
A teenage argument over baptism with a Southern Baptist history teacher
Alexander Campbell, John Locke, and the myth of standing outside history: The Democratization of American Christianity, Nathan O. Hatch: https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-300-05060-8
Two rows of Confederate gravestones in the hometown cemetery
The fifteen propositions, read aloud
Provocative, not novel: basic Christianity forgotten
Letting familiar convictions feel strange again
Classical political liberalism and its relative goods
Mostar, Bosnia, and fire departments divided by faith
Neighbor-love regardless of creed
#LeeCamp #ScandalousWitness #ChristianNationalism #FaithAndPolitics #PoliticalTheology #ChristianWitness #NoSmallEndeavor #Pluralism #ForTheLifeOfTheWorld
Production Notes
This podcast featured Lee Camp
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

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