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Episode Summary

"Somewhere is better than anywhere." (Flannery O'Connor, as quoted by Wendell Berry in Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community) Today, Christian ethicist Adam Eitel (Yale Divinity School) sits with Matt Croasmun for a conversation on ethics and theology. Eitel is Assistant Professor of Christian Ethics at Yale Divinity School. Together, he and Matt discuss the demands of teaching and learning theology on personal character—holiness even; the relationship between ethics and theology; the locatedness and situatedness and particularity of Christian ethics; and the rooted, framing question, that animates Adam Eitel's writing and teaching: "What sort of life does the Gospel enjoin?"

Episode Notes

"Somewhere is better than anywhere." (Flannery O'Connor, as quoted by Wendell Berry in Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community) Today, Christian ethicist Adam Eitel (Yale Divinity School) sits with Matt Croasmun for a conversation on ethics and theology. Eitel is Assistant Professor of Christian Ethics at Yale Divinity School. Together, he and Matt discuss the demands of teaching and learning theology on personal character—holiness even; the relationship between ethics and theology; the locatedness and situatedness and particularity of Christian ethics; and the rooted, framing question, that animates Adam Eitel's writing and teaching: "What sort of life does the Gospel enjoin?"

About Adam Eitel

Adam Eitel is Assistant Professor of Christian Ethics at Yale Divinity School.

Show Notes

  • Teaching theology as a vocation
  • "Authority is linked to character"
  • Instruction in holiness
  • The millennial demand for personal character to matter in academic authority
  • Formation
  • "I see my work as a professor of Christian ethics as a theological vocation."
  • Millennial entitlement, juxtaposed with vulnerability
  • Theology as a lived, embodied enterprise
  • The lines between the personal and the pedagogical
  • Problems for Christian ethics
  • It's hard for Christian ethics to stay theological
  • Can Christian ethics appropriately express social criticism?
  • "The temptation for Christian ethics to bracket the theological commitments, that fund a specifically Christian moral imaginary."
  • Dichotomy between tradition and critique
  • "So we end up sawing off the branch that we're sitting on..."
  • Declaration of Independence's "All men are created equal." as both the impetus for reform and the object of reform.
  • "When we're doing theology, when we're doing ethics, we are always looking backwards in some respect, concatenating texts, bringing their different manners of speaking together and to, in order to see what can now be said on the basis of what's been said, that doesn't require an uncritical attitude toward the text or the social arrangements they endorse."
  • Locatedness and situatedness and particularity of Christian ethics
  • "What sort of life does the Gospel enjoin?"

Production Notes

  • This podcast featured Adam Eitel and Matt Croasmun
  • Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
  • Hosted by Evan Rosa
  • 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

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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