Christian Humanist Profiles: Recent Episodes
The Christian Humanists
When I was a novice in Biblical Studies Hans Frei’s book The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative invited me to consider not only the world that gave us the Bible but also the world that the Bible gives us, to read the canonical text as world-generating as well as world-contingent. As I continued in the discipline, another world emerged, namely the world that teaches us to pose certain questions and attend to certain realities within the text. And so I learned to understand the interplay of Torah and creation and wisdom and prophecy in these texts not only as emerging from their moments of composition–that never goes away–but also from the intellectual and cultural and military struggles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The stories of the Bible’s readers stand just as important as the stories of the Bible’s writers. Katherine Dell’s book The Lord by Wisdom Founded the Earth: Creation and Covenant in Old Testament Theology renews our inquiries into all of these worlds, and Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome her to the show.
Slogans have always occupied our public attention, and the ways that an enemy redefines a slogan can be as important as the phrase’s original connotation. We can learn a fair bit about public life and public speech just tracing the course and changes and counter-thrusts surrounding words and phrases like fake news, alt-right, social justice, and woke. Sola Scriptura goes back centuries before these other terms, and its career likewise promises to shed light on some complex relationships between texts and communities whose common lives involve something called Bible. Dr. Ben Witherington’s recent book Sola Scriptura: Scripture’s Final Authority in the Modern World from Baylor University Press explores both the ways Sola Scriptura as a phrase has changed and the important continuities that emerge when careful historians examine the Church’s relationships with the Holy Scriptures.
Taken down to their etymological components, scriptures are any written texts and literature is any human craft involving letters, usually of some alphabet or another. But etymological roots don’t go far making sense of the fascination and the division and the devotion and the emotion that literature and scriptures bring forth in readers of all sorts. David Jasper has spent a career examining the literary character of Christian and Jewish Scriptures, the strange gravitational influences those Scriptures have exerted on recent literature, and all kinds of likewise compelling things, and his new collection of essays Scripture and Literature: A David Jasper Anthology traces some of the big questions that he’s pursued over the years for the benefit of just those readers, including us.
What is education for? The oldest grand library of which I have any knowledge is the tablet-collection of the Assyrian emperor Ashurbanipal, and as far as I can tell, it’s mainly a collection of magic spells for the court sorcerers to draw from when they need this or that kind of wizardry. And on the other end of things, in our little corner of the twenty-first century, some colleges seem to advertise exclusively (or pretty dang near exclusively) what kinds of financial benefits their schools offer to those who enroll. Folks who have heard the Christian Humanist Radio Network talk about education over the years know that we tend to favor visions of education from somewhere in between historically and nowhere in the vicinity theologically, and that’s why I’m excited to have Dr. Jeffrey Bilbro and Dr. David Henreckson on the show to talk about The Liberating Arts: Why We Need Liberal Arts Education from Plough Press. This collection, which they edited with Jessica Hooten Wilson, doesn’t really get into the sorcery end of things–just not that urgent any more, I suppose–but have a good deal to say about the aspirations and visions of education that in our moment stand as a compelling and faithful calls to Christian communities concerned with teaching what’s most worth teaching.
If you don’t spend much time around Biblical-studies people, the neologism “parallelomania” might be a new one on you, so let me explain: for different reasons, some writers in Biblical studies seem bent on discovering, naming, and insisting on a particular significance for any text that looks like, sounds like, works like, and otherwise resembles canonical and orthodox and historically central texts. Sometimes the parallelomaniac insists that the similarities render orthodox Christianity a mere winner among contenders, historically speaking, and sometimes the parallelomaniac wants to say that the tradition that comes down to most of us is not much more than centuries of plagiarism. Dr. Michael F. Bird wants to slow down a bit: yes, the ways that worshipers talk about Jesus develop from generation to generation, and yes, some of the formulations differ from one another, but the conclusions might be too hasty. His recent book Jesus Among the Gods: Early Christology in the Greco-Roman World proposes some different practices for reading a spectrum of ancient texts, and then he shows the reader what those reading processes look like, and Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome him to the show to talk about all of it.
History as a practice examines the contingent. Everything that leaves evidence of having-happened might have happened otherwise, and nothing that has come to be except that it displaced other things that might have been. In the realm of Black religion in the United States, the what-if questions and counterfactuals wonder about a seventy-year-old Dr. King, to be sure, but they also wonder about the directions that theological and political and cultural movements took and what possibilities, lost to contingency, might be worth reclaiming. Such claims and counter-claims are the stuff of Dr. Gary Dorrien’s book A Darkly Radiant Vision: The Black Social Gospel in the Shadow of MLK from Yale University Press, and Christian Humanist Profiles is thrilled to welcome Dr. Dorrien back to the show.
Some of us first encounter them as the wicked city that Jonah eventually visits. For others they’re one of the Asian empires that Herodotus surveys on his way to the grand showdown between the Persians and the Greek-speaking city-states. Some of us have run into their legendary figures Sardanapallus and Semiramis in Dante or Byron. And of course some of us still aren’t sure how to avoid the Gorge of Eternal Peril when the old man asks us “What is the capital of Assyria?” (We’ll address that one later.) But relatively few of us know much about the Assyrians as they present themselves and how they fit into the changing landscape of ancient civilization. So Christian Humanist Profiles is glad today to welcome Eckart Frahm, whose recent book Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Empire does just what the title promises, showing us what that ancient world looks like from inside Assyria as well as the spectrum of views from beyond the fall of those grand urban walls.
You have heard that it is said: love your neighbor and hate your enemy. Translations might differ, but what follows comes across well in most translations: Jesus enjoins those hearing the Sermon on the Mount to love enemies and pray for persecutors. Those unsettling commandments never stop scandalizing those who spend time meditating on them, and those who contemplate the New Testament and pray the Old Testament run into another problem: certain of the Psalms pray regarding enemies, but few readers would mistake them for loving intercessions. How can a follower of the one who forgave his enemies from the cross pray onthe same God that God break those enemies’ teeth? That question has always been before us, whether we know it or not, and Dr. Trevor Laurence’s book Cursing with God takes it as seriously as Holy Scriptures demand, articulating a theology of Scripture, of forgiveness, and of the role of the faithful along the way. Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome Dr. Laurence to the show.
Theology and literature have always seemed a natural pair to me. In fact, I’ve written a Master’s Thesis examining Ezekiel with the help of William Blake; another digging into Christology through Aemelia Lanier and John Milton; and a doctoral dissertation arguing that Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton were making moves in theological ethics that the theological academy only caught up to in the late twentieth century. So when I found out that Dr. Shaun Ross had a book for me to read about the Eucharist and seventeenth-century English poets, I knew I was going to be talking to my kind of thinker. Shaun’s recent book The Eucharist, Poetics, and Secularization from Oxford University Press poses some really great questions about some really great poems, and Christian Humanist Profiles is really glad to welcome him to the show.
The stereotype, whether we want to dismantle it or acknowledge it, holds that those who teach college English begin a quest in graduate school to be rid of teaching writing. As early as the mid-twentieth century Richard M. Weaver told the same story, and Weaver was among the first to take that stereotype not as an acknowledgment of rerum naturem but as the story of a fall, a decline from a day when the professor of rhetoric stood at the pinnacle of undergraduate education to a moment when those who still teach it in mid-career must have fumbled somehow. Mercifully, in the last decades of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st, a sort of rhetorical renaissance has blossomed in English departments, and Dr. Heather Hoover’s book Composition as Conversation: Seven Virtues for Effective Writing has taken a seat at that grand banquet of teachers who celebrate writing rather than fleeing the same. Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome Dr. Hoover to talk with us about the book.
With Theology Beer Camp 2023 just around the corner (alas, I won’t be here, as I’m trying to be judicious taking days off during year one of my career change), I wanted to get Myron Penner’s talk from last year’s camp, along with our conversation that happened a spell later, out to you.
Here’s the backstory: Myron and I did a live podcast back in October 2022, but the laptop on which the interview was being recorded cut out 30 minutes in. So Myron and I got together on Zoom some time later and had a conversation, with the benefit of a few months’ reflection, based on our notes from that weekend.
Visit www.christianhumanist.org to view Penner's talk from Theology Beer Camp for some context.
Genesis–Bereshith in the Hebrew–opens with grand narratives of beginnings and generations, and the New Testament starts with four distinctive narrative accounts of Jesus, the anointed one. For traditions that consider theology an interpretive endeavor at the outset, then, stories are the start, and Psalms and hymns and prophetic verse follow close behind. But somewhere along the line, the propositions and syllogisms and refutations and such that get their start as commentaries on the narrative and Psalmic and apocalyptic start to make demands of their own, and theology becomes even more a ground for contest than it seems to be in the texts that we call Bible. Where does that leave us when it comes to theology? Dr. Thomas Gardner’s book Lyric Theology calls us back to verse and narrative and on ahead into film, reminding us that it can’t hurt to come back home when it comes to theology.
The one who saves his life will lose it. The one who sows to the spirit will reap life. I am the way and the truth and the life. Life is like a box of chocolates. Ways of life and forms of life and such matters concerning life have occupied sages and philosophers and poets and preachers as long as human beings became word-slingers, and yet attempting the good life seems to require that each generation start anew somehow, to shape lives and to seek life for the first time every time. Meghan Sullivan and Paul Blaschko’s recent book The Good Life Method: Reasoning Through the Big Questions of Happiness, Faith, and Meaning grew out of a redesigned introduction to philosophy class that deliberately sets that shaping and seeking of a good life at the project’s center, and we’ll talk about that at some length before too long. For now Christian Humanist Profiles is happy to welcome Dr. Paul Blaschko to the show to talk about that journey and that book.
Somethin’s brewin’ on the podcast. I wonder what it could be? If you’ve seen the stage musical version of “The Cotton Patch Gospel” you know what and whom we’re talking about, but just in case you’ve never heard that musical, or if you’ve not read The Cotton Patch Gospels, or if you have no idea about anything I’ve mentioned up to this point, you’re just the person to have a seat and chat with us. Clarence Jordan, Georgia Baptist preacher and the best kind of trouble-maker, was preaching and starting up Koinonia Farm and drawing the wrath of the KKK and publishing a new version of the Bible and keeping entirely busy in the middle twentieth century, and we’re here to talk some about what he said and what he wrote, compiled in the recent Plough Publishing House book The Inconvenient Gospel. Joining me is Bren Dubay, who runs Koinonia Farm today (and who no doubt will correct that verb as soon as I shut up here), and Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome her on the show.
The book I expected to read would present all the ways in which human communities in the digital age are dealing with a decentralized authority structure, how any given woman or man might jump on the Internet, either through a browser or a social-media program or by some other means, and encounter half a dozen figures, all competing for status as authorities on the question at hand, disagreeing with each other not on marginal matters but on the most important, most central parts of the public policy or scientific finding or the political tension at hand. The book I expected to read would look at all that and warn me about the dangers of a post-truth world. Peter K. Fallon takes a look at the same stew of unstable sources and says, “How cool is that?” His new book Propaganda 2.1 from Cascade Books draws from the rightly-renowned examinations of Jacques Ellul and then launches forward, never denyinig the dangers of citizenship in an Internet context but also looking at the genuinely good possibilities that emerge. Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome Dr. Fallon to the show.
Walter Brueggemann did not only teach me to read the Bible: he taught me to read. In the twenty-two years since I first read A Theology of the Old Testament I’ve been bringing the questions that book poses to Biblical texts over to every literary text I’ve come across: in what ways am I reading primary testimony or counter-testimony as I take on Toni Morrison or John Milton or Sophocles? How are these texts relating to and creating audiences when I teach Shakespeare or Plato or James Baldwin? And where do my own readings fit into stories of interpretive and disciplinary conversations whenever I engage with any text? Those questions keep on doing their work in Brueggemann’s recent collection of essays Resisting Denial, Refusing Despair, and Christian Humanist Profiles is thrilled to welcome him back to the show.
I don’t often talk about my own high-school years on this podcast, but I remember in high-school jazz band playing a Christmas medley called “Heaven and Nature Swing.” It led with a “Caravan”-inspired arrangement of “We Three Kings”--if you don’t know “Caravan,” hit YouTube post-haste–and when I hear the hymn, these thirty years later, I always feel cheated when it doesn’t break out into snake-charmer saxophone runs at the ends of the rhyming lines. Today we’re not talking about jazz, but we are talking about what we think we should see and we should hear when we take on stories and characters that we think we know. Eric Vanden Eykel’s recent book The Magi: Who They Were, How They’ve Been Remembered, and Why They Still Fascinate treats the Magi (and my pronunciation of that word is going to move around as we talk–blame seminary Greek and T.S. Eliot) as a kind of jazz standard–we do well to study the first recording, and we also learn some really cool things when we take on later arrangements and reimiginings and even deconstructions of these mysterious figures from Matthew. Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome Dr. Vanden Eykel to the show.
Some intellectuals are famous, and some are intellectual-famous. N.T. Wright appeared on The Colbert Report, and Reinhold Niebuhr testified before Congress, and Cornel West was in a couple Matrix movies. George Lindbeck didn’t do any of those, as far as I know, but in certain circles of Christian theologians, he’s indisputably intellectual-famous, opening up possibilities for ecumenical engagement and influencing Stanley Hauerwas and attending Vatican II and such. My own engagement with Lindbeck has been almost exclusively with his 1984 book The Nature of Doctrine, so when I got a chance to read Shaun C. Brown’s recent book George Lindbeck: A Biographical and Theological Introduction, I came away seeing his work in that book as a chapter in a rich and rightly intellectual-famous career. Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome the Doctor Reverend Brown to the show.
“Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” I pray those words every Sunday morning at Bogart Christian Church, and I think I have a basic idea of what I mean when I do. But that sense of solid knowledge conceals philosophical and theological disputes not only what the verb “to forgive” and the noun “forgiveness” mean but also how those realities relate to violence, reconciliation, narrative, memory, and all sorts of other complex matters. In his recent book Forgiveness: An Alternative Account, Matthew Ichihashi Potts proposes that to ask God to forgive us as we forgive is a matter of analogy, not identity, and the temporality and finitude of human existence stand crucially important to our understanding and our practicing forgiveness. Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome the Doctor Reverend Potts to the show.
Every ethics presumes a sociology. That formula has followed me through nearly twenty-five years of study, and its source text, After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre, has been a constant conversation partner as I have studied and taught. What I haven’t attended to nearly enough is the life of the human being behind After Virtue, but Nathan Pinkoski is here to remedy that. His translation of Emile Perrau-Saussine’s book Alasdair MacIntyre: An Intellectual Biography walks through the where and the who and the what and the how that got MacIntyre asking the questions that have become my own, and Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome him to the show.
When we set several theologies next to each other, naming their core claims helps us to make sense of their relationships, even as we grant that more complexity rewards careful reading and study. So without necessarily reducing them, we can speak and write about Calvin’s theology of sovereignty, Schleiermacher’s theology of experience, Bultmann’s theology of kerygma, Thomas Aquinas’s theology of revelation, and so on. In his book Theology of Consent from SacraSage, Jonathan Foster proposes a certain notion of consent, borrowing elements from Rene Girard’s mimetic theory and others from Alfred North Whitehead’s process thought, to make a bid for our understanding of the ways in which we engage with God. Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome Dr. Foster to talk with us about some of his ideas.
As a student in a good Old Testament Introduction class will be able to tell you, Genesis 1 borrows structures and symbols and maybe even vocabulary from Babylonian texts like Enuma Elish to paint its particular picture of creation. Likewise Proverbs 8 casts world-making in terms of international wisdom traditions, and John 1 appropriates Greek philosophical vocabularies to tell us of the logos who becomes sarx. In his recent book God After Einstein: What’s Really Going on in the Universe, John Haught presents some possibilities for God-talk in light of three great immensities with which modern science concerns itself: the great spans of time from the Big Bang to last week; the great spans of distance that an expanding universe encompasses; and the great spans of complexity that emerge with life, consciousness, and everything that comes with them. Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome Dr. Haught to talk about all that and more.
When my students ask me–and soon enough they learn not to ask me–I always tell them I’m an unrepentant left-winger; after all, I’ve never thought that a Capetian monarch should rule France, so once that question is settled, I’m pretty well in place on that question. Of course, the seating arrangements in the Estats General have come down to us as our lexical inheritance, so I suppose we should talk a bit about the Right. The good news here is that we’ve invited Matt Continetti to the show, whose recent book The Right gives us a good sense of the tensions that characterize conservatism over the last century or so.
Some truths seem self-evident once somebody has spoken them, but someone needs to make that move. So here goes: whenever any of us teaches, that teacher teaches something. Teaching a mechanic how to maintain an automobile’s engine involves things that teaching differential calculus doesn’t, and neither of those is quite the same as teaching Shotokan karate. Michael Burger’s new book Reading History from University of Toronto Press sets out to explore what it might look like to teach history, and Christian Humanist Profiles is happy to welcome him to the show to talk about that book and that enterprise.
I’ve had a working hypothesis for quite a while now that stories about the devil tell us about as much about an author’s priorities as anything else. Milton’s devils and especially his version of Satan lead a reader into some profound worries about the powers of rhetoric and reason. Goethe’s Mephistopheles can’t seem to keep up with the ambition of Heinrich Faust, and his attempts at temptation are farcical compared to the grandeur of the great man’s desires. And certainly nobody who’s read C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters can mistake the features of 20th-century life that stand as the Oxford Don’s pet peeves. Bart Ehrman, in his new book Journeys to Heaven and Hell, examines another kind of story, a set of narratives in which the living have a look at what awaits the dead, and discovers a similar dynamic: what’s magnified on the other side tells some fascinating stories about the struggles of this side. And I’m glad that he’s joining us on Christian Humanist Profiles today to talk about some of those stories.
When I started my undergraduate years at Milligan College in 1995, its interdisciplinary Humanities sequence was already a well-established hallmark of its educational project. In each of my first four semesters we read history and theology and literature and philosophy and all kinds of texts from different eras, always letting each inform the others. Dr. Roosevelt Montas’s journey from the Dominican Republic to New York City differs from my own from Indiana to Georgia, but we share a love for the questions that arise from these books and the life of teaching the same. Christian Humanist Profiles is thrilled to welcome Roosevelt to the show to talk about his new book Rescuing Socrates.
I’m still a young enough professor that I don’t remember a time before “critical thinking” was a buzzword in the profession. Back in the fall of 2000, when first I started, John Bean convinced me that the goal of core-curriculum classes should be to introduce novices to the practices and standards of the university disciplines, and I still think that’s about right. A decade later, concerns had shifted to helping students engage in metacognition, the examination of one’s own thought-processes, and I’m still a fan of that as well. But some time in the last decade, if you believe some social psychologists, something went seriously wrong in American epistemology through entire limbs of the body politic, and in response a new call went forth: critical thinking became less a bonus and more a bulwark, something to save us from the idiocy that so many of us invite into our eyeballs through our phone screens. Dr. Bethany Kilcrease’s book Falsehood and Fallacy engages in that rescue mission at the undergraduate level, using the tools of history to improve our habits of thinking. Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to have Dr. Kilcrease on the show today.
Victoria Reynolds Farmer talks with Amy Kenny about her new book "My Body Is not a Prayer Request."
Nathan Gilmour talks with John Dominic Crossan about his new book "Render Unto Caesar."
Christina Bieber Lake talks with Felicia Wu Song about her recent book "Restless Devices."
Nathan Gilmour talks with Larry Shapiro about his recent book "When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People."
Victoria Reynolds Farmer talks with Mary DeMuth about her recent book "The Most Misunderstood Women of the Bible."
Nathan Gilmour talks with Harvey Weingarten about his recent book "Nothing Less than Great."
Nathan Gilmour talks with Charles Moore about his recent anthology "Following the Call."
Nathan Gilmour talks with Gary Dorrien about his recent book "American Democratic Socialism."
Nathan Gilmour talks with Thomas Jay Oord about his recent book "Open and Relational Theology."
Poet James Matthew Wilson joins Michial Farmer to talk about Angelico Press's new edition of Claude McKay's "Harlem Shadows."
Michial Farmer interviews Robert Erlewine about his new collection of Abraham Joshua Heschel’s writings, Thunder in the Soul.
David Grubbs interviews Jeffrey Niehaus about his recent book "When Did Eve Sin? The Fall and Biblical Historiography."
Michial Farmer interviews the poet Charles Hughes about his latest collection, "The Evening Sky."
Michial Farmer interviews David Deavel and Jessica Hooten Wilson about their recent edited collection "Solzhenitsyn and American Culture."
Michial Farmer interviews James Matthew Wilson about his recent book "The Strangeness of the Good."
David Grubbs interviews Tim Perry about his recent book "The Theology of Benedict XVI: A Protestant Appreciation."
David Grubbs interviews Matt Jenson about his recent book "Theology in the Democracy of the Dead."
David Grubbs interviews Barry Harvey about his recent book "Baptists and the Catholic Tradition."
David Grubbs interviews Matthew Emerson about his recent book "Baptists and the Christian Tradition."
Victoria Reynolds Farmer interviews Kristen Kobes du Mez about her recent book "Jesus and John Wayne."
Nathan Gilmour interviews Scott Newstok about his recent book "How to Think Like Shakespeare."
Michial Farmer interviews the editors of a new Walker Percy collection called "Symbol and Existence."
Katie Grubbs interviews Christina Bieber Lake about her recent book "The Flourishing Teacher."
Michial Farmer interviews Nick Ripatrazone about his recent book, "Longing for an Absent God."
Jessica Hooten Wilson joins Christina Bieber Lake to talk about her recent First Things article, "How Flannery O'Connor Fought Racism," a response to a recent Paul Elie New Yorker piece.
Michial Farmer talks with Christina Bieber Lake about her recent book "Beyond the Story."
Nathan Gilmour talks with John Kloppenborg about his recent book "Christ's Associations."
Nathan Gilmour talks with Dan Koch of the You Have Permission podcast about his recent project "End Times Anxiety."
Nathan Gilmour interviews Ed Greenstein about his recent translation of Job for Yale University Press.
Nathan Gilmour interviews Francis J Beckwith about his recent book "Never Doubt Thomas."
Yesterday, 12 January 2020, English philosopher Roger Scruton died. Christian Humanist Profiles invites our listeners to remember his thought with this interview on his 2015 book "How to Be a Conservative."
David Grubbs interviews Donald Fairbairn about his new book "The Story of Creeds and Confessions."
David Grubbs interviews Greg Peters about his new book "The Monkhood of All Believers."
David Grubbs interviews David Lyle Jeffrey about his new book "Scripture and the English Poetic Imagination."
Nathan Gilmour interviews W.H. Bellinger about his new book "Psalms as a Grammar for Faith."
David Grubbs interviews Phillip Cary about his new book "The Meaning of Proestant Theology."
Nathan Gilmour interviews David Bentley Hart about his new book "That All Shall Be Saved."
Coyle Neal interviews David Innes about his recent book "Christ and the Kingdoms of Men."
Coyle Neal interviews David Koyzis about his recent book "Political Visions and Illusions."
Nathan Gilmour interviews John J. Collins about his new book "What Are Biblical Values?"
Nathan Gilmour interviews Charlie Camosy about his new book "Resisting Throwaway Culture."
Coyle Neal interviews Jacob Shatzer about his recent book "Transhumanism and the Image of God."
Michial Farmer interviews Christina Bieber Lake about the re-release of her book "The Incarnational Art of Flannery O'Connor."
Nathan Gilmour interviews Heidi Hornik about her recent book "The Art of Christian Reflection."
Nathan Gilmour interviews Nick Riggle about his recent book "On Being Awesome: A Unified Theory of How Not to Suck."
Nathan Gilmour interviews Peter Lindsay about his recent book "The Craft of University Teaching."
Michial Farmer interviews Craig M. Gay about his recent book "Modern Technology and the Human Future."
Michial Farmer interviews Carole Vanderhoof about her recent book "The Gospel in Dorothy L. Sayers."
Nathan Gilmour interviews Adam Clark about James Cone, with whom Adam studied at Union Seminary.
Victoria Reynolds Farmer interviews Rachel Marie about her recent album "False Foundations."
Coyle Neal chats with Kenneth Stewart about his recent book "In Search of Ancient Roots" and other things.
Michial Farmer and Nathan Gilmour interview Steve Taylor about his 1993 album "Squint."
Victoria Reynolds Farmer interviews Dr. Kristin DuMez about her 2015 book A New Gospel for Women: Katherine Bushnell and the Challenge of Christian Feminism.
Nathan Gilmour interviews Jason M. Baxter about his new book, "A Beginner's Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy."
David Grubbs interviews Fred Sanders about his new book, "Retrieving Eternal Generation"
Michial Farmer interviews Gregory Alan Thornbury about his new book, "Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?"
David Grubbs interviews Philip Ryken about his new book, "The Messiah Comes to Middle Earth."
Coyle Neal interviews Robert W. Caldwell about his new book "Theologies of the American Revivalists."
Nathan Gilmour interviews John Dominic Crossan about his new book "Resurrecting Easter."
Nathan Gilmour interviews David Bentley Hart about his new translation of the New Testament.
David Grubbs interviews Michael Kruger about his new book "Christianity at the Crossroads."
Nathan Gilmour interviews Andrea Grosso Ciponte and Dacia Palmerino about their graphic biography of Martin Luther "Renegade."
David Grubbs interviews Terrence Kardong about his recent book "Saint Columban: His Life, Rule, and Legacy."
Nathan Gilmour interviews filmmaker Nathan Jacobs about the forthcoming film "Becoming Truly Human."
Amanda Hackney interviews Ruth Tucker about her recent book, "Katie Luther, First Lady of the Reformation."
Nathan Gilmour interviews Michial Farmer about his recent book "Imagination and Ideealism in John Updike's Fiction."
David Grubbs interviews Jonathan Pennington about his recent book "The Sermon on the Mount and Human Flourishing."
Nathan Gilmour interviews Steven G. Ogden about his recent book "The Church, Authority, and Foucault."
Dan Dawson interviews Roger Olson about his recent book "The Essentials of Christian Thought."
David Grubbs interviews Michael Kulikowski about his recent book "The Triumph of Empire."
David Grubbs interviews Fred Sanders about the second edition of "The Deep Things of God."
Michial Farmer interviews Jeffrey Bilbro about his recent book, "Wendell Berry and Higher Education."
Nathan Gilmour interviews Eric Hall about his recent book "The Homebrewed Christianity Guide to God."
Nathan Gilmour interviews Thomas Jay Oord about his recent book "The Uncontrolling Love of God."
Coyle Neal interviews Robert Benne about his recent book "Good and Bad Ways to Think about Religion and Politics."
Charles Hackney interviews R.R. Reno about his recent book "Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society."
Nathan Gilmour interviews Daniel Blue about his recent book "The Making of Friedrich Nietzsche."
Nathan Gilmour interviews N.T. Wright about his recent book "The Day the Revolution Began."
Coyle Neal interviews Peter J. Leithart about his recent book "The End of Protestantism."
David Grubbs interviews Kevin Vanhoozer about his recent book "Biblical Authority after Babel."
Danny Anderson interviews Jeff Taylor about his recent book "The Political World of Bob Dylan."
David Grubbs interviews Chris Armstrong about his recent book "Medieval Wisdom for Modern Christians."
Nathan Gilmour interviews Marcia Pally about her recent book "Commonwealth and Covenant: Economics, Politics, and Theologies of Relationality."
Michial Farmer interviews Stephen Backhouse about his recent book, "Kierkegaard: A Single Life."
Nathan Gilmour interviews Richard Hays about hs recent book, "Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels."
Danny Anderson interviews Elijah Siegler about the recent book, "Coen: Framing Religion in Amoral Order."
Michial Farmer interviews Alyssa Wilkinson and Robert Joustra about their recent book, "How to Survive the Apocalypse."
David Grubbs talks with Derek Olsen about his recent book "Reading Matthew with Monks."
Nathan Gilmour talks with Stephanie Semler about her recent book, A Person as a Lifetime, an Aristotelian exploration of the philosophy of personhood.
In his latest book, Reviving Old Scratch: Demons and the Devil for Doubters and the Disenchanted, Richard Beck argues that modern Christians should restore a belief in the forces of evil. Michial Farmer interviews him for this episode of Christian Humanist Profiles.
Nathan Gilmour interviews Walter Feinberg on his new book "What Is a Public Education and Why We Need It.
Nathan Gilmour interviews Caner Dagli, one of the General Editors of the new Harper Study Quran.
Michial Farmer interviews John Koessler about his recent book "The Radical Pursuit of Rest."
Michial Farmer interviews Stephen J. Lind about his recent book "A Charlie Brown Religion."
Charles Hackney interviews Heather Vacek about her recent book "Madness: American Protestant Responses to Mental Illness."
Michial Farmer interviews Norman Wirzba about his recent book "From Nature to Creation."
Nathan Gilmour interviews Stephen Prothero about his recent book "Why the Liberals Win the Culture Wars, Even when They Lose Elections."
Nathan Gilmour interviews Roger Scruton about his recent book "How to Be a Conservative."
Brit Stack interviews Stephanie Summers about her recent book "Unleashing Opportunity."
Nathan Gilmour interviews Father Thomas Esposito about his recent book "Letters of Fire."
Michial Farmer takes a tour of the Hong Kierkegaard Library with Eileen Shimota and Jamie Lorentzen.
Nathan Gilmour has a long conversation about Jesus, Jesus, and more Jesus with Tripp Fuller as they discuss Fuller's new book "The Homebrewed Christianity Guide to Jesus: Lord, Liar, Lunatic, or Just Freakin' Awesome?"
David Grubbs talks with Gerald Bray about his recent book "Augustine on the Christian Life."
Nathan Gilmour interviews Eric McLuhan about his recent book "Sensus Communis, Synesthesia, and the Soul."
Nathan Gilmour welcomes N.T. Wright back to the show to talk about his recent book "The Paul Debate."
David Grubbs interviews Joe Loconte about his recent book "A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War."
Nathan Gilmour interviews Michael Lawson about his recent book "The Professor's Puzzle."
To honor the life and work of Wheaton Professor of English Roger Lundin, who died on Thursday, 12 November 2015, Christian Humanist Profiles presents Michial Farmer's 2014 interview with him on his book "Beginning with the Word."
Nathan Gilmour interviews Stanley Hauerwas about his recent book "The Work of Theology."
David Grubbs interviews Chris Tilling about his recent book "Paul's Divine Christology."
David Grubbs interviews Kevin Vanhoozer about his recent book "The Pastor as Public Theologian."
Michial Farmer interviews David Crowe about his book "Cosmic Defiance: Updike’s Kierkegaard and the Maples Stories."
David Grubbs interviews Leland Ryken about his book "A Christian Guide to the Classics."
Nathan Gilmour interviews Gordon Teskey about his new book "The Poetry of John Milton."
Nathan Gilmour interviews Charlie Camosy about his new book "Beyond the Abortion Wars."
Nathan Gilmour interviews Scot McKnight about his new book "A Fellowship of Differents."
Michial Farmer interviews Michael P. Foley about his new book "Drinking with the Saints."
Michial Farmer interviews Claude le Fustec about her new book "Northrop Frye and American Fiction."
Nathan Gilmour interviews Rod Dreher about his new book "How Dante Can Save your Life".
David Grubbs interviews Simon Gathercole about his new book "Defending Substitution: An Essay on Atonement in Paul".
Nathan Gilmour interviews Christopher Celenza about "Machiavelli: A Portrait," Celenza's recent biography of the revolutionary Florentine political thinker.
Todd Pedlar interviews Dr. Owen Gingerich, author of "God's Planet," published by Harvard University Press in 2014, on issues of science and religious belief.
David Grubbs interviews Craig Bernthal about his recent book "Tolkien's Sacramental Vision."
Nathan Gilmour talks with Homebrewed Christianity's Tripp Fuller about the Netflix series "House of Cards."
Todd Pedlar talks with Richard Mouw about his recent book, "Called to the Life of the Mind."
David Grubbs talks with Michael Allen about his recent book (with Scott Swain), "Reformed Catholicity."
Nathan Gilmour talks with Mats Wahlberg about his recent book "Revelation as Testimony: A Philosophical-Theological Study."
David Grubbs interviews Kevin Vanhoozer about his new book "Faith Speaking Understanding."
Nathan Gilmour interviews Walter Brueggemann about his 2014 book "Ice Axes for Frozen Seas."
Nathan Gilmour interviews Chris Gehrz about the recent book "The Pietist Vision of Christian Education," which Chris edited.
Marie Hause interviews Dianna Anderson about her recent book "Damaged Goods: New Perspectives in Christian Purity."
Heather Ordover and Nathan Gilmour, in another Craft Lit/Christian Humanist Profiles crossover, interview Bryan Doerries about Theater of War and his other projects bringing ancient dramatic texts to modern American trauma.
Michial Farmer interviews Graeme Hunter about his latest book, "Pascal the Philosopher: An Introduction."
Victoria Reynolds Farmer interviews Dr. Paula Trimble Familetti about her recent book "Prostitutes, Virgins, and Mothers."
In a special crossover event with Craft Lit, Nathan Gilmour and Heather Ordover interview Elizabeth Green on her recent book "Building a Better Teacher."
David Grubbs interviews Daniel Gabelman on his recent book "George MacDonald: Divine Carelessness and Fairytale Levity."
Nathan Gilmour interviews interviews Ed Cyzewski on his recent book "A Christian Survival Guide."
Nathan Gilmour interviews John Dadosky on his recent book "The Eclipse and Recovery of Beauty: A Lonergan Approach."
Nathan Gilmour interviews S.J. McGrath on his recent book "Heidegger: A (Very) Critical Introduction."
Michial Farmer interviews Roger Lundin about his recent book "Beginning with the Word."
Danny Anderson interviews Marvin Wilson about his 2014 book "Exploring our Hebraic Heritage."
Nathan Gilmour interviews Nicholas Healy about his 2014 book "Hauerwas: A (Very) Critical Introduction."
Michial Farmer interviews Merold Westphal about his 2014 book "Kierkegaard's Concept of Faith."
Michial Farmer interviews Christina Bieber Lake about her recent book "Prophets of the Posthuman: American Fiction, Biotechnology, and the Ethics of Personhood."
Nathan Gilmour interviews Ed Cyzewski about his recent books "UnFollowers" and "The Good News of Revelation."
Nathan Gilmour interviews Matthew Lee Anderson about his 2013 book "The End of Our Exploring."
Nathan Gilmour interviews Charles Hackney about his 2010 book "Martial Virtues: Lessons in Wisdom, Courage, and Compassion from the World's Greatest Warriors."
David Grubbs interviews Fred Sanders on his 2013 book, "Wesley on the Christian Life: The Heart Renewed in Love."
Michial Farmer interviews Timothy Basselin on his 2013 book, "Flannery O'connor: Writing a Theology of Disabled Humanity."