The Table Audio w/ Evan Rosa

Jessica Hooten Wilson on her love for the saints and the concept of writing and reading saints lives as a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic task. Includes discussion of martyrdom, art, and the reverence due to great books and sacred texts (and of course, a little bit of Flannery O'Connor).

A Christmas Podcast: Evan Rosa interviews analytic theologian Oliver Crisp on the Incarnation of Christ, and how we can learn from the Incarnation about what it is to be human.

Dr. J. Todd Billings is the Gordon H. Girod research professor of reformed theology at Western Theological Seminary and an ordained minister in the Reformed Church in America. His life changed in 2012 when he was diagnosed with an incurable blood cancer. In this podcast episode, we speak frankly about his diagnosis and illness, his thoughts and feeling about death, and the broader theological and cultural implications about dying.

Acclaimed author and speaker Os Guinness on the timeless topics of covenantal love, evil, suffering, political life in modern America, public discourse, death, legacy, and the character of God.

Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung, "Queen of the Vices" (we mean that in the best way possible), discusses soul care and excavating the heart of vainglory, pride, and other glittering vices.

Psychologist Robert Emmons on the positive effects of gratitude on subjective well-being (that is, happiness). A special Thanksgiving episode.

What is love? For something so familiar to the human experience, love is notoriously difficult to define, explain, and articulate, and even harder to embody. Our guest Thomas J. Oord has spent the last two decades thinking about the theology, science, and philosophy of love.

On living and finding meaning in the "in-between"—featuring Diane Glancy, an American poet, author, and playwright of Cherokee descent on embracing liminality.

Flannery O'Connor is an American novelist, essayist, and short-story writer known for her sardonic Southern Gothic style with grotesque characters and violent scenes. Our guest today, Jessica Hooten Wilson, is a Flannery O'Connor expert and is currently preparing O'Connor's unfinished novel Why Do the Heathen Rage? for publication. Dr. Hooten Wilson shares her intimate knowledge of O'Connor and how the Gospel scandalously emerges from the pages of her dark and twisted stories.

In this episode, we interview theologian and Washington influence-maker Dr. Russell Moore on love, humility and power in American political life.

How shall we approach seemingly opposing virtues of humility and magnanimity? What happens when our view of self is too low or too high? Professor of Christian Ethics Jennifer Herdt discusses the balancing act between what St. Thomas Aquinas penned the "Twin Virtues": humility and magnanimity.

Renowned philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff talks to us about his only non-philosophical published work, Lament for a Son—an expression of profound grief written in the wake of his son Eric's untimely death in 1983.

Sister Helen Prejean on her work as an advocate for the abolishment of the death penalty in the United States. Sr. Helen talks about grace, justice, life, and death.

A spiritual riddle to the modern mind: A desert monk burns all of his baskets as a means of fighting off the so-called “Noonday Demon.” Evan Rosa interviews celebrated writer Kathleen Norris, author of The Cloisterwalk, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, and the Quotidian Mysteries, about her 2008 book, Acedia & me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life—discussing ancient Christian spirituality and the deadly vice of acedia, with commentary from theologian Jerry Sittser. Acedia was taken off the list of deadly vices in the 6th century, only to rear its ugly head in contemporary technological life. Has the noonday demon been haunting you? Well, now you’ll know its name.

What is love's response to suffering? Easy, mediated solidarity? Social media lowers the bar for what counts as activism. These days, we’re all activists. But as Tyler Wigg-Stevenson suggests, the danger of lowering that bar is to cut out the costliness of such work for good. This is part 2 of 2 in Evan Rosa’s interview with Catholic priest and theologian Emmanuel Katongole about the ethics of love in response to global suffering, also featuring commentary by Wigg-Stevenson on “mediated solidarity" and the story of a local Ugandan woman—Angelina Atyam—who was faithfully working locally against the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) while we were all watching KONY 2012 and staring at our screens.