How the Light Gets In: Restlessness, Christ, & Belonging / Graham Ward

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

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How does the light get in? Leonard Cohen suggests, "There's a crack in everything / That's how..." Whether from our restlessness, our fear, or our trauma, to see the world rightly might start with the need to acknowledge the crack in everything.

Only then can we see a new world of understanding and belonging and well-being.

Graham Ward (University of Oxford) joins Ryan McAnnally-Linz to reflect on the purpose of theology, Christology as the place where the divine and the human come together, trauma, restlessness, fear, the human capacity for creativity and destruction (and which will we choose?), and how the Gospels offer a new sense of belonging.

About Graham Ward

Graham Ward is Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford and is author of several books, including How the Light Gets In and Another Kind of Normal.

Show Notes

• Graham Ward’s Ethical Life books under discussion in this episode: How the Light Gets In and Another Kind of Normal
• Creating inner coherence through a systematic theology
• Scripture as the common text all Christians return to
• Reading with a sense of original language
• “We do believe God speaks to us through the scriptures.”
• Writing titles that invite non-Christians to the books
• “There’s a lot of the church who are not in church on Sunday.”
• “I always think that, one, theology lost in a sense when it became professionalized. And two…theology has got to be pastoral.”
• “Good writing can find the phrasing which unlocks experiences that other people have had.”
• Theology as speaking more to being human than being divine
• Dogma (Matt Damon and Ben Affleck) and the problem with “Buddy Jesus”
• Theology that defamiliarizes Christ
• The strangeness of Christ as drawing out
• Balancing defamiliarization with the glory of Creation
• None of us actually know what the resurrection truly means
• Trauma in the early church
• “What is it we're looking for in our restlessness?”
• Restlessness as fundamentally connected to our fear
• The conflict between losing control in Christ, and being a predatory creature
• Grace breaking through in the rubbish heap, like sunlight on a violet
• “This is the hard love which demanded God's sacrifice, but also demands my sacrifice of what I think love should be.”
• Julian of Norwich
• “I was just playing with the phrase ‘because the devil is in the detail’, and it's not, it's God that's in the detail.”
• Will you be creative or will you be destructive?
• The role of the church in people who are discerning
• Mystagogy, living what you worship
• The role of liturgy in community
• Fragmentation and non-belonging within our contemporary relationships
• The gospels as incorporating a new type of belonging

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Graham Ward
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge
• 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