Christian Humanist Profiles

In this engaging discussion, Philip Thomas, author of 'Hope for a Tree,' delves into the artistic afterlives of the Book of Job across various mediums. He explores the evolution of Job's representation from early Christian writings to modern interpretations, including Terrence Malick's 'The Tree of Life.' Thomas connects Joni Mitchell's 'Sire of Sorrow' to Job's laments, examining emotional expression in art. He also reflects on nature's unpredictability, the intersection of fate and agency in literature, and the importance of humility in biblical interpretation.

Do not think any man happy until he has died, free from suffering.  That line, or something like it depending on the translator, ends the grand tragedy Oedipus Tyrannous, Oedipus the King.  Such meditations on death give us memorable aphorisms, and they come to us not only from the Greeks or the Egyptians but from the teachers of Israel as well.  Among the troubling texts of Israel’s wisdom tradition is Qohelet, whose title in English Bibles is often the transliterated Greek word Ecclesiastes and among whose questions one can find this one: what makes a life worthwhile if succeeding generations undo the good that one has done?  Scholars and preachers and readers have disputed for centuries where the intellectual center of the book resides, how the author relates to the persona who seems to be Solomon, and a dozen other questions from and about and related in other ways to this puzzling book of the Bible.  Today Menachem Fisch, a philosopher, and Debra Band, an artist, will be helping me ask new questions of Qohelet and talking about their book from Baylor University Press titled Qohelet: Searching for a Life Worth Living.  Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome both to the show.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”  Growing up under that Constitutional law, even as an amendment, gave me the idea that there were two things, one called religion and the other called government, and that they existed in nature separate from each other.  A working knowledge of history shatters that separation, and Philip Jenkins, in his recent book Kingdoms of this World: How Empires Have Made and Remade Religions, shows just how varied and how complicated the interactions between crowns and churches and technology and pilgrimages have been.  Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to talk about politics and religion today with Dr. Jenkins.

When I got serious about Christian discipleship in the early nineties, Christian worldview was in the air.  The menace of secular humanism loomed large, and when I enrolled at Milligan College (now Milligan University), a Christian liberal arts college, several people in my life were quite pleased precisely because there, I might emerge with something called a Christian worldview and do battle against something called secular humanism.  That was more than thirty years ago, and Simon P. Kennedy has some questions for the folks who promoted that vision of Christian education.  His recent book Against Worldview from Lexham Press proposes not an abolition of Christian worldview but new postulates, namely wisdom and cultivation, as alternatives to the old war-metaphors.  Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome Dr. Kennedy to the show.

In 1917 four seismic shocks rocked the human species: in Russia, the Bolshevik Revolution brought a specter from Europe into the center of the world’s most expansive land empire.   In Europe, an armistice ended the Great War.  Around the world, a pandemic virus began to kill its millions.  And in America, the first jazz recording became available.  Communism and viruses and jazz had been around before then, of course, but history tells stories with sources, so here we are.  A hundred and eight years later, the span between Chicago Cubs World Series wins, the Reverend William Carter is here to join us and talk about the spirituality of it all.  Okay, mainly of jazz.  His book Thriving on a Riff from Broadleaf Books meditates on spiritual matters with one hand on the Bible and the other on the piano keys, and Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome him to the show.

With the obvious exception of Plato’s Phaedrus, really old books don’t spend much time on technology.  Perhaps the tools didn’t change fast enough.  Perhaps their writing materials were expensive enough that they didn’t want to spend time on instrumental matters.  Perhaps the questions just never occurred to them.  But some time in the modern era, folks started to write about the ways that our tools change and the ways that new sets of tools shape our souls for good and for ill.  And one of the moments when those changes were doing the most–the most harm or the most benefit we’ll talk about as the hour rolls along–was the nineteenth century.  Jeff Bilbro’s new book Words for Conviviality explores some of the writers engaging with those changes and invites us to hold up those nineteenth-century moments as mirrors to our own, and Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to invite him back on the show.

Liberty has always carried tricky questions with it.   Most folks in 2025 would agree that human beings should have liberty, but how one becomes free persists as a debate.  Do we spring fully free into this world?  Does participation in certain kinds of communities make us free?  Can education of this or that sort develop freedom?  This last question leads a conversation into the possibility of liberal arts, and Richard Detweiler’s book The Evidence Liberal Arts Needs takes up not only a discussion of what makes an education a liberal-arts education but also why and how people in our moment still should make the case for liberal arts.  Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome Dr. Detweiler to the show.

My own tradition within the Church was an early adopter of the motto “No creed but Christ.”  For what intentions are worth, my forerunners seem to have had good ones: in the historical moment, confessions and catechisms and boundary-documents of all sorts were proliferating among Protestant communities, and one way for a unity movement to make progress might be to pare away the documents that some but not all Christian communities took to be central.  That was the nineteenth century; now we’re in the twenty-first, and Dr. Phillip Cary has other work for the Nicene Creed to do: we need to learn how to ask Christian questions.  That’s what his recent book The Nicene Creed: An Introduction sets out to accomplish, and Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome him to the show.

Among education writers, the phrase “critical thinking” can run from nebulous notions to utter ciphers.  Few will disagree that critical thinking is good and needed, but relatively few will agree about what it is in the first place.  Colin Seale has not only written about critical thinking in more precise language but established institutions for developing critical thinking as a group of practices that teachers in different places can deploy for students of all kinds of ability levels.  His recent book Thinking Like a Lawyer, soon to be released in a new edition, proposes a core set of classroom sessions that develop flexibility and power in thinking, and Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome Seale to the show.

When I was a novice in Biblical Studies Hans Frei’s book The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative invited me to consider not only the world that gave us the Bible but also the world that the Bible gives us, to read the canonical text as world-generating as well as world-contingent.  As I continued in the discipline, another world emerged, namely the world that teaches us to pose certain questions and attend to certain realities within the text.  And so I learned to understand the interplay of Torah and creation and wisdom and prophecy in these texts not only as emerging from their moments of composition–that never goes away–but also from the intellectual and cultural and military struggles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  The stories of the Bible’s readers stand just as important as the stories of the Bible’s writers.  Katherine Dell’s book The Lord by Wisdom Founded the Earth: Creation and Covenant in Old Testament Theology renews our inquiries into all of these worlds, and Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome her to the show.