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Episode Summary

Jemar Tisby, author of the NYT bestseller The Color of Compromise, explains the complicity and compromise of American Christians; the narrative war that confederate monuments wage (and how they were erected much later than you might think); the ugly theological justifications of racism and the shameful history of Christian white supremacy; the fraught project of selectively naming heroes and villains and then memorializing them; and the practical problem of how to go forward rightly from this moment of increased attention to racial injustice.

Episode Notes

Jemar Tisby, author of the NYT bestseller The Color of Compromise, explains the complicity and compromise of American Christians; the narrative war that confederate monuments wage (and how they were erected much later than you might think); the ugly theological justifications of racism and the shameful history of Christian white supremacy; the fraught project of selectively naming heroes and villains and then memorializing them; and the practical problem of how to go forward rightly from this moment of increased attention to racial injustice.

Get Jemar Tisby's book! The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

Show Notes

  • "the North won the Civil War, but the south won the narrative war." - Bryan Stevenson
  • The birth of Jim Crow in the Redemption Era – white people taking back the South
  • Monuments as reassertion of white supremacy
  • The theological significance of the 'Redemption Era'
  • Separation of Church and State as a disguise for racism
  • The Bible as justification text
  • Matthew 6:24 and“You can't serve God and money”
  • Problematic historical heroes and the desire for heroes today
  • Should we be putting slave holders on pedestals?
  • Can we instead honor those who held America to its noble ideals?
  • What kind of future can we hope for?
  • What confession can look like in communities
  • Theologically unpacking repair
  • Creative repair
  • 2020 and what happened with voting rights
  • Christians and reluctance to vote
  • What do we do now? Awareness, Relationships, Commitment
  • Jesus Christ and relationality
  • Relationships as necessary but not sufficient
  • Commitment to stand up to racial inequalities

Production Notes

  • This podcast featured author and historian Jemar Tisby
  • Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
  • Hosted by Evan Rosa
  • Editorial and Production Assistance by Annie Trowbridge
  • 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