Evangelization & Culture Podcast

Finding the World's Fullness w/ Robert Cording

23 snips
Nov 11, 2025
Robert Cording, poet and longtime creative writing professor, reflects on embracing mystery and the world’s givenness. He discusses Hamlet, Abraham, Keats’s negative capability, attention as love, sensory beauty as a path to wonder, suffering’s role in coming alive, and how language and poetry hold open the unknown.
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INSIGHT

Mystery Is Intrinsic, Not Ignorance

  • Mystery is not merely missing data to be solved; it is intrinsic to being and cannot be fully rationalized away.
  • Readiness means embracing grief and suffering as part of love and presence in the world.
INSIGHT

The World Is Given And Intelligible

  • The world is given to us gratuitously and is intelligible without being fully knowable.
  • Language and metaphor are our tools to point toward a reality that exceeds precise naming.
ADVICE

Practice Loving Attention

  • Train your attention by loving what you look at and practicing sustained observation.
  • Look long and hard at particulars so you'll see them originally and write or live from that perception.
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