Copy link

https://faith.yale.edu/media/character-as-authority

Information

about

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

Inquiries
→
Related episodes
Made for Relationships

Mari Clements

Tolerating Doubt & Ambiguity

Elizabeth Hall

Angry at God

Julie Exline

listen on
Apple Music
→
Spotify
→
Google Play
→

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

‍

Transcript

Down arrow

Keep Exploring

view all
→
Child reading book with sunflowers emerging

May 31, 2023

Summer Reading List 2023

As summer rolls in, our team has curated a list of recommended books, essays, and prose for your enjoyment. Whether your toes are in the sand or you’re in the backseat on the road trip, we hope these theological and thought-provoking reads will find you wherever you are this summer.

Yale Center for Faith & Culture

Female scientist, holding glass test tube, galaxy

March 8, 2023

The World Does Not Revolve Around You

The Rev. Tish Harrison Warren, Anglican priest, author, and writer for the New York Times, grapples with the nature of patience, and the related questions of humility and control. Why is patience so hard to practice?

Tish Harrison Warren

Lorraine Motel

February 16, 2023

Rebuilding Beloved Community

Lisa Sharon Harper discusses the work of rebuilding beloved community through discovering ancestry and rejecting the title of whiteness.

Lisa Sharon Harper

Women after the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot

February 8, 2023

Healing Racial Injustice Through Memory

Highlights from Dr. Keri Day's 2020 interview with Miroslav Volf on racial inequity, systemic transformation, and Christian community.

Keri Day

The Joy of Humility Book Cover

September 1, 2020

The Joy of Humility

The true meaning of humility persistently drives debate, largely because we cannot agree on the word’s definition. The "correctness" of normative terms matters, and humility carries a distinctive normative weight. How we understand humility is not a matter of mere semantics. It is a pursuit of inquiry with the potential to inform—perhaps even to transform—our lives. The Joy of Humility takes up this task with a view toward the perennial question of what entails a truly flourishing life. Here, philosophers, theologians, ethicists, and psychologists work to frame the debate in such a way that the conversation can move forward.

Drew Collins

The End of Youth Ministry book cover

March 17, 2020

The End of Youth Ministry?

What is youth ministry actually for? And does it have a future? Andrew Root weaves together an innovative first-person fictional narrative to diagnose the challenges facing the church today and to offer a new vision for youth ministry in the 21st century.

Andrew Root

Exclusion and Embrace book cover

August 20, 2019

Exclusion and Embrace

If the healing word of the Gospel is to be heard today, Christian theology must find ways of speaking that address the hatred of the other. Is there any hope of embracing our enemies? Of opening the door to reconciliation?

Miroslav Volf

May 21, 2019

Always On

Angela Gorrell

A grid of black-and-white images of a baby, with a colorful orb in the foreground.

May 30, 2023

Made for Relationships

We tend to take these claims for granted: “Human beings are essentially relational.” “No man is an island.” “We’re created for connection.” “We’re made for relationships.” And testing the limits of this can be pretty much diabolical. Evan Rosa traces two stories of parental deprivation: Harry Harlow's Monkey Love Experiments and the horror of 1990's discovery of Romanian asylums for orphans, documented in the 1990 report "The Shame of a Nation,” on 20/20. Then psychologist Mari Clements (Glenville State College, formerly Fuller School of Psychology) discusses the importance of healthy marriage dynamics for young children’s development and how it provides a secure emotional base; the relational imago Dei; the close emotional bonds that must take place early in life in order to provide the relational stability relational creatures need; we talk about important phases of human development, into adulthood; and the theological backdrop to these questions of the human drive and need for emotional connection.

Mari Clements

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

Lines, dots, house on fire, housefire

May 8, 2023

Angry at God

Have you ever been angry at God? Psychologist Julie Exline (Case Western Reserve University) joins Ryan McAnnally-Linz to discuss the psychology of spiritual struggles and anger at God. She reflects on the meaning of spiritual struggle, as well as the possible outcomes and factors that contribute to a personal sense of healing and growth. She speaks to the anxiety and fear that seem to hover around an expression of anger toward God, dealing with objections and concerns that it’s immoral or presumes God to be guilty of wrongdoing. And she offers practical considerations in light of the psychological research around what happens when people choose to express their anger at God or not—how different responses of disapproval or acceptance can lead to positive growth or a sense of successfully dealing with the anger.

Julie Exline

Colorful object over staircase

April 30, 2023

From Surviving to Thriving

At the bedrock of our being as persons is relationality: our ability to be known, to be loved, and to know and love in return. But what kind of claim is that? Theology or psychology? In this episode, Evan Rosa brings Pamela Ebstyne King (Fuller School of Psychology; Thrive Center for Human Development) on the show to discuss developmental psych as the observational study of human change and plasticity in the midst of a whole complex life; relational attachment for the sake of intimacy and exploration and ultimate purpose or meaning; the proper place of self-love; God’s enabling and loving presence as the ultimate secure attachment figure; the importance of learning, gaining skills, and the pursuit of expertise; the prospects of regaining emotional regulation through relationships; the game changing impact of deliberate psychological and spiritual practices to move us well beyond surviving to a life of thriving.

Pamela Ebstyne King

Deep sea diver, ocean, blue, black and white

May 1, 2021

Pursuit of a Life Worth Living

“What we’re trying to do is offer students an opportunity to think critically about the most important question of their lives across important and enduring lines of difference. That can only be good for them as individuals and as global citizens.”

Matthew Croasmun

July 31, 2018

Gathering Joy

Willie Jennings

April 18, 2017

The Future of Theology

George Marsden

April 1, 2017

Life Worth Living and the University

Jonathan Holloway