As is traditional for this podcast, we conclude this season of episodes by reflecting together as a production team on the podcast as a whole, on our extraordinary guests, and on some moments in conversation with these guests that made a particular impression on us.

Andrew Skotnicki is Professor of Religious Studies at Manhattan College. He has been a devoted minister to people in prison for more than a half century, and we discuss some of the lessons that ministry has taught him, problems he perceives with our system of criminal justice, and the blessings he has received from heeding Jesus’s words to visit those who are sick and in prison.

C. Vanessa White is Associate Professor of Spirituality and Ministry, and Director of the Certificate in Black Theology and Ministry, at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. She also holds a dual appointment at Xavier University of Louisiana’s Institute for Black Catholic Studies. She belongs to several academic societies, among them the National Black Storyteller Association, the American Academy of Religion, and the Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality. We speak today about her work as an activist and theologian, and how spiritual life bridges social and religious identities and offers healing in a time of intense division.

Jeffrey Vogel is Associate Professor of Theology and Ethics at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia. An expert thinker and writer on topics like divine silence and apophatic theology—or theology of what lies beyond saying—he is also the author of a beautiful new book, All Manner of Things: Meditations on Suffering, Death, and Eternal Life, which we discuss today.

This week we highlight a past episode of our Faith and Imagination Podcast. Today’s highlighted guest, Christina Bieber Lake, sees the novel as an expressly theological exercise. Dr. Lake, the Clyde S. Kilby Professor of English at Wheaton College, is the author of the 2019 book Beyond the Story: American Literary Fiction and the Limits of Materialism. On this episode, Matthew Wickman of BYU’s Faith and Imagination Institute speaks with Christina about how theology helps us understand literature, whether those same principles apply to literary criticism, how one finds one’s purpose as a teacher and scholar, and what it means to […]

Benjamin Myers is the Crouch-Mathis Professor of Literature and the Director of the Honors Program at Oklahoma Baptist University. A former poet laureate of the state of Oklahoma, Ben is the author of four books of poetry and two books of nonfiction. We discuss two of those books today, a 2020 critical work titled A Poetics of Orthodoxy: Christian Truth as Aesthetic Foundation, and his beautiful 2022 collection of poems, The Family Book of Martyrs.

Tiffany Eberle Kriner is associate professor of English at Wheaton College in Illinois. The author of the scholarly book The Future of the Word: An Eschatology of Reading as well as a number of articles and chapters in academic venues, Kriner is more recently the author of the memoir In Thought, Word, and Seed: Reckonings from a Midwest Farm, a book that shares her experience operating a sixty-acre farm against the backdrop of America’s racial troubles, the COVID pandemic, and her desire more fully to understand the grace and kingdom of God.

Robert Flanagan has served as an Episcopal priest since 2003. He is chaplain at General Theological Seminary in New York and serves as dean’s advisor at Virginia Theological Seminary. We speak today about this 2022 book The Letters of an Unexpected Mystic: Encountering the Mystical Theology in First and Second Peter. We attend especially to how Peter’s mystical theology bears on modern life and on what it teaches us about what it means to encounter God and what that encounter may entail.

Abigail Carroll serves as pastor of the arts and spiritual formation at Church of the Well in Burlington, Vermont. She holds a PhD in American Studies from Boston University, and she is an accomplished poet whose third collection of poems, Cup My Days Like Water, a set of meditations on the Psalms, was published just last year, 2023. We talk about these new poems, particularly the connections between poetry, stillness, prayer, and what it means to seek and follow inspiration in one’s life and work.

Benedict Shoup is a doctoral candidate in systematic theology at the University of Notre Dame. He is currently writing a dissertation on the pneumatology and contemplative methodology—basically, the spiritual theory and practice—of the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic, John of the Cross. I met Benedict this past summer at a conference in Adelaide, Australia, where he gave a great talk on the ways John of the Cross’s mystical vision informs and potentially empowers seekers in our modern world.

This week we highlight a past episode of our Faith and Imagination Podcast. Norman Wirzba is the Gilbert T. Rowe Distinguished Professor of Christian Theology and Senior Fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke Divinity School. The author of several books, he’s also the director of a multi-year, Henry Luce Foundation-funded project entitled “Facing the Anthropocene.”  On this episode, Matthew Wickman of BYU’s Faith and Imagination Institute, speaks with Norman about humankind’s stewardship of the natural world as delineated in his powerful and sobering book, This Sacred Life: Humanity’s Place in a Wounded World.

I sat down last spring with Darlene Young, a poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction writer who teaches in the English Department at BYU. We spoke about her two volumes of published poems, Homespun and Angel Feathers (2019) and Here (2023). We also talked about the relationship between poetry and faith, bringing humor to sacred things, and finding a distinctive voice as a poet and as a devoutly religious person.

Christopher Morris is Head of the Department of Pastoral and Spiritual Studies and lecturer in Spirituality at Catholic Theological College in Melbourne, Australia. He is also a spiritual director and has been a Religious Education leader in Catholic education. Much of his scholarship has focused on the notion of “wisdom knowing” and practical ways to cultivate wholeness. In his recent work, these interests have him investigating what this may mean for survivors of trauma—what Chris calls “Christ in the torn places.”

We speak today with Sally Thomas about her 2020 poetry collection Motherland as well as her novel, Works of Mercy, published in 2022. A former guest on this podcast, she has published poetry, fiction, reviews, and essays in such venues as First Things, Plough Quarterly, and the New Yorker, and she co-edited, with Micah Mattix, the anthology Christian Poetry in America since 1940. Presently, she serves as Associate Poetry Editor for The New York Sun.

We resume a tradition from the past two seasons, discussing some favorite books we read in 2023. As always, our themes involve religion, spirituality, and the intersection of faith and intellect. And we are privileged, again, to welcome our guest, George Handley, Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities at BYU. Dr. Wickman’s Honorable Mentions: Jeffrey A. Vogel, All Manner of Things: Meditations on Suffering, Death, and Eternal Life (Cascade Books, 2023) Patrick Saint-Jean, The Crucible of Racism: Ignatian Spirituality and the Power of Hope (Orbis Books, 2022) Sally Thomas, Motherland (Able Muse Press, 2020) Darlene Young, Homespun and Angel Feathers (By Common Consent Press, 2019) Benjamin Myers, The Family Book of […]

Jill Peláez Baumgaertner is Professor Emerita and former Dean of Humanities and Theological Studies at Wheaton College. The author of several collections of poetry as well as scholarly books on such writers as Flannery O’Connor, she currently serves as poetry editor at The Christian Century. We talk today about a beautiful volume of poems she […]

This is the first episode we have released in three months. We were having technological difficulties with the system that distributes the podcasts, and it now seems mostly to be fixed. Thank you for your patience—and for listening to these episodes with our wonderful guests. Mischa Willett is a poet, scholar of nineteenth-century British literature, and assistant […]

Diane Glancy is a prolific and acclaimed poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, and professor emeritus at Macalester College. Her awards include the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, the Arrell Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oklahoma Center for the Book, the American Book Award, the Pushcart Prize, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas. In 2018, Publishers Weekly named her book Pushing the Bear: A Novel of the Trail of Tears one of the ten essential Native American novels. Today, we discuss her 2020 poetry collection Island of the Innocent: A Reconsideration of the Book of Job.

We’ve come to the end of Season 3 of the podcast. I talk with Sophia Snyder, the podcast’s producer, and we share a few thoughts about the podcast generally and especially about this season’s guests. We also discuss brief clips from a few of this season’s episodes and talk about them – a small sampling of things that stood out to us this season.

Chad Thralls is a scholar of Christian spirituality and mysticism who teaches at Seton Hall University. His primary area of focus is the contemplative spiritual life, and today we discuss his book Deep Calls to Deep: Mysticism, Scripture, and Contemplation.