Copy link

Information

about

New episodes drop every Saturday. Subscribe anywhere podcasts are found.

Inquiries

Episode Summary

Thanks for your interest in our 2021 Annual Report. Download the report to see what we've been up to in 2021.

Featuring updates on our Christ & Flourishing and Life Worth Living initiatives, grantmaking, teaching, research, and a look back at our 2021 media and public engagement activities.

My friends,

I believe that the good is always more fundamental than evil. To believe that God created the world is to believe that the world’s goodness is primordial. Whatever evil may befall us and whatever evil we may perpetrate cannot undo it; nothing can.

We have lived under a dark cloud for the past two years. Time itself, as some have noted, has taken on a vagueness and indeterminacy that leads to dread. With the threat of war, economic turmoil, a virus that won’t go away, and a polarized political world, it would be easy to simply accept the dark cloud and give up hope for the light of the sun to ever break upon us again.

The basic Christian conviction of primordial goodness can and should sustain us in times such as these. But it is all too easy to lose this perspective. The twisted state of things has a way of eclipsing what we know to be true: that life itself—and the very life with which each of us is alive—is God’s gift.

Even through the dark cloud, small rays of light are shining upon us. Can we see them? How many times do we ignore glistening gems of life—mere inconsequential fire-flies, we think—and instead focus on the darkness that envelopes us? I think of the late-tenth-century Japanese poet Izumi Shikibu’s short verse (translated by Jane Hirshfield):

Although the wind
blows terribly here,
the moonlight also leaks
between the roof planks
of this ruined house.

For the past year, we have been attending to those rays of light, identifying them, appreciating them, drawing attention of others to them. It’s my honor to present an overview of our work at the Yale Center for Faith & Culture in 2021.

Thank you for the light you bring. Thank you for your friendship and support.

Yours,

Keep Exploring

view all
lines, dots, staircase, stairs

May 15, 2023

Tolerating Doubt & Ambiguity

Is your faith a house of cards? If you were wrong about one belief would the whole structure just collapse? If even one injury came to you, one instance of broken trust, would the whole castle fall? If one element was seemingly inconsistent or incompatible—would you burn down the house? This depiction of the psychology of faith is quite fragile. It falls over to even the lightest breath. But what would a flexible faith be? Resilient to even the heaviest gusts of life’s hurricanes. It would adapt and grow as a living, responsive faith. Psychologist Elizabeth Hall joins Evan Rosa to discuss the domains of psychology and theology and what it means for each to “stay in their lane”; she introduces a distinction between implicit and explicit knowledge, and identifies the social- and self-imposed pressure to know everything with certainty; we reflect on the recent trends toward deconversion from faith in light of these pressures; and she offers psychologically grounded guidance for approaching doubt and ambiguity in a secure relational context, seeking to make the unspoken or implicit doubts explicit. Rather than remaining perched upon our individualized, certainty-driven house-of-card faith; she lays out a way to inhabit a flexible, resilient, and relationally grounded faith, tolerant of ambiguity and adaptive and secure amidst all our winds of doubt. This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of Blueprint 1543. For more information, visit Blueprint1543.org.

Elizabeth Hall