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

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

Technology, Aaron Cline Hanbury suggests, is never a purely neutral tool. But the history of ethical thinking about technology shows that as long as there's been technology, there's been anxiety about it. Or perhaps more accurately, anxiety about what we might do with it. And increasingly, what it might do to us.
A journalist, founding editor of Common Good magazine, and author of Wired for Wonder, Hanbury came of age as the internet entered the home and has spent his career reporting from the places where technology, faith, and everyday life collide. Rather than offering another list of screen-time tips, he asks a deeper question: How do we relate to the things we make?
In this conversation with Evan Rosa, Hanbury wrestles with what it means to be human when the machines we’ve made can do more and more. He criticizes the seduction that we should embrace technology simply because it is inevitable. He explores how connection, efficiency, and unrestrained technological freedom quietly became unquestioned goods, why our powers of attention are eroding in real time, and wonders what it might take—personally, communally, and structurally—to reclaim our humanity through presence, and the rough ground of embodied life.
About Aaron Cline Hanbury
Aaron Cline Hanbury is a writer and editor whose essays and profiles have appeared in The Atlantic and elsewhere. He is the founding editor of the award-winning magazine Common Good and a past editor of RELEVANT. He writes about the places where technology, faith, and ordinary life meet. His book, Wired for Wonder: Dispatches on Technology, Culture, God, and Self, breaks open the tired binary between tech optimists and Luddites in the context of memoir, ethics, journalism, and theology.
Helpful Links and Resources
Wired for Wonder: Dispatches on Technology, Culture, God, and Self, by Aaron Cline Hanbury: https://www.broadleafbooks.com/store/product/9798889833451/Wired-for-Wonder
Aaron Cline Hanbury's website: https://aaronclinehanbury.com/
Aaron Cline Hanbury's Substack: https://aaronclinehanbury.substack.com
Aaron Cline Hanbury on X: https://x.com/achanbury
Common Good magazine: https://commongoodmag.com/author/aaron-cline-hanbury/
Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, Albert Borgmann: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/T/bo23186480.html
The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt: https://www.anxiousgeneration.com/book
Hannah Coulter, Wendell Berry's novel: https://www.counterpointpress.com/books/hannah-coulter/
Show Notes
Anxiety and technology
Patient zero for life online—coming of age as the internet entered the home
Low-church tradition, quick to adopt and ask questions later
Journalism as a front-row seat to three decades of change
Early adopter or Luddite? Rejecting the spectrum's false ends
The device paradigm—technology as pattern, not neutral tool
A hammer's telos, and why misuse cuts against a tool's design
Made things have a maker—intentions baked into what we build
The inevitability argument—get on board or get run over
Resistance is futile? The Borg, Cannes, and defeatism
Progress as reversion—tobacco bans, ocean dumping, processed-food rollbacks
Family Guy, satire, and pulling tech ethics out of the esoteric
The class and income divide the internet promised to erase
Online radicalization vs the promise of mass education
Children as the guinea pigs of early adoption
Chromebooks, daycares, and offloading discomfort onto kids
Testing tech on the vulnerable—Jonathan Haidt on teen mental health
Social media vs attention media—commodifying human focus
The plug-in drug—parents, screens, and pacified kids
Focused attention and the feeling of being fully alive
Connection, efficiency, freedom—goods we stopped questioning
Dunbar's number and the real limits of friendship
Online ties without public accountability, and bad formation
Embodiment, particularity, and getting back to the rough ground
Wendell Berry's Hannah Coulter and attention that lasts: https://www.counterpointpress.com/books/hannah-coulter/
Skepticism of individual fixes—structure, policy, and church
Elementary-school parenting and “the bevy of required apps”
#WiredForWonder #AaronClineHanbury #ForTheLifeOfTheWorld #TechnologyAndFaith #AttentionMedia #DigitalMinimalism #ChristianEthics #AIandHumanity #DeviceParadigm
Production Notes
This podcast featured Aaron Cline Hanbury
Edited and Produced 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

Civic friendship is not a nicety. For self-governing people, it is a necessity. What happens to a democracy when citizens stop seeing each other as citizens at all?

Robert P. George is Princeton’s McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions (and known for his enduring friendship with Cornel West) argues that “the collapse of civic friendship is a catastrophic threat to public life.”

In this bonus segment from his November 2020 conversation with Evan Rosa, Robert George presents the difference between civility and mere ‘politesse; the habit of wrapping our emotions so tightly around our convictions that we assume a posture of infallibility; and the intellectual humility it takes to consider that a political enemy might have something to teach us as a civic friend. They also discuss the courage required to break ranks—George recounts how he and West, from opposite political poles, each found themselves treated as heretics in 2016 for declining to back their respective party’s nominee—and why he urges his students and his own children to cultivate humility, open-mindedness, and courage, knowing exactly what it can cost to stand by a conscientious belief.

Episode Highlights

”Civic friendship is actually important for all sorts of policies, but for a self-governing people, for a democratic people, civic friendship is really critically important.”

”But if we do, as we are prone to do, wrap our emotions too tightly around our convictions, then we become dogmatists. Then we become unwilling to consider the possibility that we might be wrong and that a critic might be right.”

”This is hard, but it takes humility to recognize that I might be wrong, not merely about the less important superficial and more trivial things of life, but I might be wrong even about the most important things.”

”Civic friendship, civility is not just politesse … Civility is something deeper. It is genuinely listening to the guy who disagrees with you … listening with an openness to learning, considering whether in fact he might be right.”

”You can’t have an open mind unless you have intellectual humility.”

”You can become a heretic very fast by breaking ranks, even on a single issue, if the issue was even moderately important.”

”So I really encourage my young people … to try to develop the virtues of intellectual humility, open-mindedness, and courage, because sometimes courage is going to be needed.”

About Robert P. George

Robert P. George is the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. A legal philosopher and public intellectual, he has chaired the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and served on the President’s Council on Bioethics and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. His books include ”Making Men Moral,” ”In Defense of Natural Law,” and ”Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth,” and, with Cornel West, ”Truth Matters,” a dialogue on fruitful disagreement. A West Virginia native, he plays bluegrass banjo and guitar.

Helpful Links and Resources

Civic Friendship, Courageous Humility, and Seeking Truth Together, Episode 38 and the full interview for this clip: https://faith.yale.edu/media/civic-friendship-courageous-humility-and-seeking-truth-together

Robert P. George’s website: https://robertpgeorge.com/

Robert P. George on X: https://twitter.com/McCormickProf

Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth: Law and Morality in Our Cultural Moment, George’s most recent book: https://www.encounterbooks.com/books/seeking-truth-speaking-truth/

Truth Matters: A Dialogue on Fruitful Disagreement in an Age of Division, by Robert P. George and Cornel West: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Truth-Matters/Robert-P-George/9798888451700

Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality, George’s best-known scholarly book: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/making-men-moral-9780198260240

Election of 1800, from the Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia at Monticello: https://www.monticello.org/encyclopedia/election-1800

Show Notes

Civic friendship: indispensable and necessary for a self-governing people

Fellow citizens recast as enemies to be defeated and destroyed

Are elections as existential contests?—with the losing side expecting retaliation, the winning side claiming the norms

Breakdown near the founding of the Republic

The election of 1800, incumbent John Adams against Thomas Jefferson: https://www.monticello.org/encyclopedia/election-1800

Federalists seeing Jeffersonians as carriers of the French Revolution; Jeffersonians seeing Federalists as would-be British monarchists

Antebellum America: North and South unable to imagine sharing one republic

Is our identity constructed around belief?

Emotional investment in conviction as a good thing in itself

Wrapping emotions too tightly, and the slide into dogmatism

A practical posture of infallibility

Disagreement recoded as moral defect, and friendship ruled out

Intellectual humility as the missing virtue

Being wrong about the most important things, not just the trivial ones

Civility as more than politesse

Listening with an openness to learning, not waiting for a turn to speak

Honoring the other as a rational creature with something to teach

Open-mindedness without paralysis

A conservative and a democratic socialist as frequent interlocutors: https://www.cornelwest.com/about/

Courage as a civic virtue

Tribalism in formal institutions and informal friend circles alike

Becoming a heretic by breaking ranks on a single issue

Excommunication, suspicion, and the social cost of independent thought

Two friends at opposite poles, both out of step in 2016

Counsel to students and to his own children: humility, open-mindedness, courage

#CivicFriendship #IntellectualHumility #Civility #Polarization #RobertPGeorge #CornelWest #FaithAndCulture #ForTheLifeOfTheWorld

Production Notes

This podcast featured Robert George

Hosted and Produced by Evan Rosa

Production assistance and editing by Noah Senthil

A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about

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