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

By: Miroslav Volf Matthew Croasmun Ryan McAnnally-Linz Drew Collins Evan Rosa
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  • Summary

  • Seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. Theological insight, cultural analysis, and practical guidance for personal and communal flourishing. Brought to you by the Yale Center for Faith & Culture.
    2020-2028 Yale Center for Faith & Culture
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Christianity Philosophy Social Sciences Spirituality
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Episodes
  • How to Read Simone Weil, Part 2: The Activist / Cynthia Wallace

    How to Read Simone Weil, Part 2: The Activist / Cynthia Wallace
    Dec 18 2024
    “What are you going through?” This was one of the central animating questions in Simone Weil’s thought that pushed her beyond philosophy into action. Weil believed that genuinely asking this question of the other, particularly the afflicted other, then truly listening and prayerfully attending, would move us toward an enactment of justice and love.Simone Weil believed that any suffering that can be ameliorated, should be.In this episode, Part 2 of our short series on How to Read Simone Weil, Cynthia Wallace (Associate Professor of English at St. Thomas More College at the University of Saskatchewan), and author of The Literary Afterlives of Simone Weil: Feminism, Justice, and the Challenge of Religion and Evan Rosa discuss the risky self-giving way of Simone Weil; her incredible literary influence, particularly on late 20th century feminist writers; the possibility of redemptive suffering; the morally complicated territory of self-sacrificial care and the way that has traditionally fallen to women and minorities; what it means to make room and practicing hospitality for the afflicted other; hunger; the beauty of vulnerability; and that grounding question for Simone Weil political ethics, “What are you going through?”We’re in our second episode of a short series exploring How to Read Simone Weil. She’s the author of Gravity and Grace, The Need for Roots, and Waiting for God—among many other essays, letters, and notes—and a deep and lasting influence that continues today.In this series, we’re exploring Simone Weil the Mystic, Simone Weil the Activist, Simone Weil the Existentialist. And what we’ll see is that so much of her spiritual, political, and philosophical life, are deeply unified in her way of being and living and dying.And on that note, before we go any further, I need to issue a correction from our previous episode in which I erroneously stated that Weil died in France. And I want to thank subscriber and listener Michael for writing and correcting me.Actually she died in England in 1943, having ambivalently fled France in 1942 when it was already under Nazi occupation—first to New York, then to London to work with the Free French movement and be closer to her home.And as I went back to fix my research, I began to realize just how important her place of death was. She died in a nursing home outside London. In Kent, Ashford to be precise. She had become very sick, and in August 1943 was moved to the Grosvenor Sanitorium.The manner and location of her death matter because it’s arguable that her death by heart failure was not a self-starving suicide (as the coroner reported), but rather, her inability to eat was a complication rising from tuberculosis, combined with her practice of eating no more than the meager rations her fellow Frenchmen lived on under Nazi occupation.Her biographer Richard Rees wrote: "As for her death, whatever explanation one may give of it will amount in the end to saying that she died of love.In going back over the details of her death, I found a 1977 New York Times article by Elizabeth Hardwick, and I’ll quote at length, as it offers a very fitting entry into this week’s episode on her life of action, solidarity, and identification with and attention to the affliction of others.“Simone Weil, one of the most brilliant, and original minds of 20th century France, died at the age of 34 in a nursing home near London. The coroner issued a verdict of suicide, due to voluntary starvation—an action undertaken at least in part out of wish not to eat more than the rations given her compatriots in France under the German occupation. The year of her death was 1943.“The willed deprivation of her last period was not new; indeed refusal seems to have been a part of her character since infancy. What sets her apart from our current ascetics with their practice of transcendental meditation, diet, vegetarianism, ashram simplicities, yoga is that with them the deprivations and rigors‐are undergone for the pay‐off—for tranquility, for thinness, for the hope of a long life—or frequently, it seems, to fill the hole of emptiness so painful to the narcissist. With Simone Well it was entirely the opposite.“It was her wish, or her need, to undergo misery, affliction and deprivation because such had been the lot of mankind throughout history. Her wish was not to feel better, but to honor the sufferings of the lowest. Thus around 1935, when she was 25 years old, this woman of transcendent intellectual gifts and the widest learning, already very frail and suffering from severe headaches, was determined to undertake a year of work in a factory. The factories, the assembly lines, were then the modem equivalent of “slavery,” and she survived in her own words as “forever a slave.” What she went through at the factory “marked me in so lasting a manner that still today when any human being, whoever he may be and in whatever circumstances, speaks to me ...
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    1 hr and 11 mins
  • How to Read Simone Weil: The Mystic / Eric O. Springsted

    How to Read Simone Weil: The Mystic / Eric O. Springsted
    Dec 12 2024
    This episode is the first of a short series exploring How to Read Simone Weil. The author of Gravity and Grace, The Need for Roots, and Waiting for God—among many other essays, letters, and notes, Weil has been an inspiration to philosophers, poets, priests, and politicians for the last century—almost all of it after her untimely death. She understood, perhaps more than many other armchair philosophers from the same period, the risk of philosophy—the demands it made on a human life.In this series, we’ll feature three guests who look at this magnificent and mysterious thinker in interesting and refreshing, and theologically and morally challenging ways.We’ll look at Simone Weil the Mystic, Simone Weil the Activist, Simone Weil the Existentialist.First we’ll be hearing from Eric Springsted, a co-founder of the American Weil Society and its long-time president—who wrote Simone Weil: Late Philosophical Writings and Simone Weil for the Twenty-First Century.In this conversation, Eric O. Springsted and Evan Rosa discuss Simone Weil’s personal biography, intellectual life, and the nature of her spiritual and religious and moral ideas; pursuing philosophy as a way of life; her encounter with Christ, affliction, and mystery; her views on attention and prayer; her concept of the void, and the call to self-emptying; and much more.About Simone WeilSimone Weil (1909–1943) was a French philosopher, mystic, and political activist. She’s the author of Gravity and Grace, The Need for Roots, and Waiting for God—among many other essays, letters, and notes.About Eric O. SpringstedEric O. Springsted is the co-founder of the American Weil Society and served as its president for thirty-three years. After a career as a teacher, scholar, and pastor, he is retired and lives in Santa Fe, NM. He is the author and editor of a dozen previous books, including Simone Weil: Late Philosophical Writings and Simone Weil for the Twenty-First Century.Show NotesEric O. Springsted’s Simone Weil for the Twenty-First CenturyHow to get hooked on Simone Weil“All poets are exiles.”Andre WeilEmile ChartierTaking ideas seriously enough to impact your lifeWeil’s critique of Marxism: “Reflections on the Cause of Liberty and Social Oppression”:  ”an attempt to try and figure out how there can be freedom and dignity in human labor and action”“Unfortunately she found affliction.”Ludwig Wittgenstein: “Philosophy is a matter of working on yourself.”Philosophy “isn’t simply objective. It’s a matter of personal morality as well.””Not only is the unexamined life not worth living, but virtue and intellect go hand in hand. Yeah. You don't have one without the other.”An experiment in how work and labor is doneThe demeaning and inherently degrading nature of factory workChristianity as “the religion of slaves.”Christianity can’t take away suffering; but it can take away the meaninglessness.George Herbert: “Love bade me welcome / But my soul drew back guilty of dust and sin”Weil’s vision/visit of Christ during Holy Week in Solemn, France: “It was like the smile on a beloved face.”The role of mysteryWeil’s definition of mystery:  ”What she felt mystery was, and she gets a definition of it, it's when two necessary lines of thought cross and are irreconcilable, yet if you suppress one of them, somehow light is lost.”Her point is that whatever good comes out of this personal contact with Christ, does not erase the evil of the suffering.What is “involvement in contradiction”“She thought contradiction was an inescapable mark of truth.”Contradictions that shed light on life.Why mysticism is important for Weil: “The universe cannot be put into a box with techniques or tricks or our own scientific methods or philosophical methods. … Mystery instills humility and it takes the question of the knowing ego out of the picture. … And it challenges modern society to resist the idea that faith could be reduced to a dogmatic system.”“Faith is not a matter of the intellect.”“Intellect is not the highest faculty. Love is.”“The Right Use of School Studies”“Muscular effort of attention”She wanted to convert her Dominican priest friend into the universality of grace—that Plato was a pre-Chrisitan.” (e.g., her essay, “ Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks”)“Grace is universal.”How school studies contribute to the love of GodPrayer as attentionWeil on Attention: “Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object. It means holding in our minds within the reach of this thought, but on the lower level and not in contact with it. The diverse knowledge we have acquired. Which we are forced to make use of. Above all our thought should be empty waiting, not seeking anything but ready to receive in its naked truth. The object that is to penetrate it.”Not “detached,” but “...
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    59 mins
  • Open the Gates: Immigration & the Book of Revelation / Yii-Jan Lin

    Open the Gates: Immigration & the Book of Revelation / Yii-Jan Lin
    Dec 4 2024
    Why do we have countries? Why do we mark this land and these people as distinct from that land and those people? What are countries for? Yii-Jan Lin (Associate Professor of New Testament, Yale Divinity School) joins Matt Croasmun to discuss her new book, Immigration and Apocalypse, which traces the development of distinctly American ideas about the meaning of a country, its borders, and crossing those borders through immigration—exploring how the biblical book of Revelation has influenced our modern geopolitical map.Together they discuss the eschatological vision of Christopher Columbus; the Puritanical founding of New Haven, Connecticut to be the New Jerusalem; Ronald Reagan’s America as “City on a Hill”; the politics of COVID; the experience of Asian American immigrants in the 19th century; and how scripture shapes the American imagination in surprising and sometimes troubling ways.About Yii-Jan LinYii-Jan Lin is Associate Professor of New Testament at Yale Divinity School. She specializes in immigration, textual criticism, the Revelation of John, critical race theory, and gender and sexuality. Her book *Immigration and Apocalypse: How the Book of Revelation Shaped American Immigration* (Yale University Press 2024), focuses on the use of Revelation in political discourse surrounding American immigration—in conceptions of America as the New Jerusalem and of unwanted immigrants as the filthy, idolatrous horde outside the city walls.Her book The Erotic Life of Manuscripts (Oxford 2016), examines how metaphors of race, family, evolution, and genetic inheritance have shaped the goals and assumptions of New Testament textual criticism from the eighteenth century to the present.Professor Lin has been published in journals such as the Journal of Biblical Literature, Early Christianity, and TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism. She is co-chair of the Minoritized Criticism and Biblical Interpretation section of the Society of Biblical Literature, on the steering committee for the Ethnic Chinese Biblical Colloquium, and on the steering committees for the New Testament Textual Criticism and the Bible in America sections of SBL. She also serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Biblical Literature. Professor Lin is a member of the Society of Asian Biblical Studies, the European Association of Biblical Studies, and an elected member of Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas.Show NotesGet your copy of *Immigration and Apocalypse: How the Book of Revelation Shaped American Immigration, by* Yii-Jan LinIllustration: “John of Patmos watches the descent of New Jerusalem from God in a 14th-century tapestry”—modified and collaged by Evan RosaChristopher Columbus’s eschatological visionThe Book of Revelation and the heavenly cityThe meaning of “apocalypse”New Haven as New JerusalemJohn Davenport (April 9, 1597 – May 30, 1670) was an English Puritan clergyman and co-founder of the American colony of New Haven.Ronald Reagan and America as a “shining city on a hill”America as God’s cityRevelation 21, The New Jerusalem“A door that’s always open”1983 as the “Year of the Bible”Exclusion, open gates, and America’s immigration policyHospitalityOutside the gates“For some reason, the seer doesn't see just an open  landscape. He sees these definite walls and definite  gates, even though they're open.”The book of deeds and the book of lifeBureaucracy, and entry and exclusion into heavenThe Good PlaceWhat was immigration like in the Greco-Roman world?Citizenship lists, registrations, and ways of keeping people out“If Heaven Has a Gate, a Wall, and Extreme Vetting, Why Can't America?“Steve King's tweet in  2019, “Heaven Has a Wall, a Gate, and Strict Immigration Policy, Hell Has Open Borders.”Disease and exclusion (COVID-19)Disease came from colonizers“Disease as a divine act to clear the land”Chinese exclusion from AmericaMexican exclusion from AmericaICE was created to enforce laws explicitly excluding Chinese immigrantsFilm: An American Tail“The British Invasion”China, Enemy of the West, and the Dragon of Revelation 12Buddha and the dragon vs the whore of Babylon riding a beast“Do American political ideas about immigration start to frame American theological imaginations about the world to come?”God’s kingdom and “Empire”Fears that feed from theological to political registers“What should a Christian posture towards contemporary questions of immigration be?”Xenophobia and fear of the strangerFinality and satisfactionThe theological error of identifying America with the New JerusalemProduction NotesThis podcast featured Yii-Jan LinEdited and Produced by Evan RosaHosted by Evan RosaProduction Assistance by Alexa Rollow, Emily Brookfield, Zoë Halaban, and Kacie BarrettA Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/aboutSupport For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale ...
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    43 mins

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