You Tube Theology

Miroslav Volf is back, and this time he brought his friend — poet and theologian Christian Wiman — and their book Glimmerings, collection of letters exchanged over years of friendship that moves from the problem of religious language to the hiddenness of God to what it means to trust without being able to specify what you're trusting toward. It's one of the more unusual and quietly devastating books I've read in a while, and the conversation was every bit as good. In it we discuss…

• The origin of their friendship and the letter exchange that became Glimmerings
• Why big words like faith, grace, and redemption slip free from meaning — and why that's a theological problem, not just a poetic one
• Attention, divine agency, and the debate between active receptivity and God's ontological priority
• Christian writing letters from a hospital room during an experimental bone marrow transplant — and what he felt, and didn't feel, about God's presence
• The hiddenness of God versus Christ hidden in the faces of non-Christian friends
• The cross, the resurrection, and why one is visceral and the other remains mostly imagination
• The risk of faith, William James's mountain climber, and why Wallace Stevens kept pointing toward a further leap
• The "masters of suspicion" and why intellectual culture rewards doubt more than hope
• The hard sayings of Jesus — the passages that act like shards of glass, and what it means to park them rather than tame them
• Where two or three are gathered — and whether that was always a warning about what happens at five hundred