Episodios

  • Can Character Be Taught? with William Inboden

    Can Character Be Taught? with William Inboden
    Nov 4 2025

    Does character matter? In the last century, our society shifted away from teaching character in schools in order to focus on different forms of learning. How has that change shaped the world we live in now? Should cultivating character be a focus of education, and can character even be effectively taught in a pluralistic society?


    Our guest on today’s podcast is Dr. William Inboden, provost of the University of Texas, and one of our Senior Fellows here at the Trinity Forum. He’ll be our guide as we explore the roles of education, community, and faith in forming people of wisdom and integrity.


    What does it mean to be in community? What are the implications of your character for that? Loyalty, honesty. Those are fundamental to building friendships. Integrity, self sacrifice. Those are also fundamental to living for something greater than yourself.


    This episode is drawn from an Online Conversation held in 2025. It’ll give you a sense of what the Trinity Forum is about: a community of people renewing our culture by applying wisdom from the Christian tradition, and nurturing its growth.

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    58 m
  • Blaise Pascal as a Modern Guide with Graham Tomlin

    Blaise Pascal as a Modern Guide with Graham Tomlin
    Oct 21 2025

    In this episode, we explore the life and mind of whom historian Tom Holland calls “17th century Europe’s supreme polymath": Blaise Pascal.


    Our guide is Graham Tomlin, a former bishop in the Church of England.


    Drawing from his book, Blaise Pascal, the Man Who Made the Modern World, Graham brings us on a journey through Pascal’s life, his conversion to Christianity, and his famous argument for belief in God known as “the Wager.”


    Together, we’ll explore the ways in which Pascal himself can still be a guide for us today.


    "What else does [man's] craving and helplessness proclaim—but that there was once in man a true happiness of which all that remains is the empty print and trace. This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there, the help that he cannot find in those that are. Though none can help. Because this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object. In other words, by God himself."


    This conversation was recorded in August 2025. You can find the original video and transcript here.

    Thank you for joining us in exploring timeless wisdom together, to help you gain clarity and courage for your own life, and to help nurture a culture of renewed hope.
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    1 h y 3 m
  • Leading for the Kingdom with Nicole Massie Martin

    Leading for the Kingdom with Nicole Massie Martin
    Oct 7 2025

    What does redemptive leadership mean? As Christians, we have a unique calling: not just to lead, but to serve. What does this look like in today’s culture, and how can we serve as leaders and foster an environment of abundant grace and joy wherever we are?


    Christianity Today’s Dr. Nicole Massie Martin helps us to understand how we can nail outdated models of leadership to the cross, and what it will take to replace them with Biblical ones:


    “We need to nail to the cross what is a very secular understanding … of [power, ego, and performance], so that what is resurrected through Christ might be redemptive and bring glory to God and good to the people that we lead.”


    This conversation is from an Online Conversation recorded in May 2025. We hope this conversation will inspire you to identify the ways you lead, and how you can step further into leading with grace, humility, and joy.


    Authors and books mentioned in the conversation:

    • Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, Peter Scazzero
    • Killing Comparison: Reject the Lie You Aren’t Good Enough and Live Confident in Who God Made You To Be, Nona Jones


    Go deeper into the issues discussed in this episode with these Trinity Forum Readings:

    • How Much Land Does a Man Need?; Leo Tolstoy
    • A Man Who Changed His Times; William Wilberforce
    • Letter from Birmingham Jail; Martin Luther King, Jr.
    • Who Stands Fast?; Dietrich Bonhoeffer
    • Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; Frederick Douglass
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    56 m
  • Walking as a Spiritual Practice with Mark Buchanan

    Walking as a Spiritual Practice with Mark Buchanan
    Sep 23 2025
    What does it mean to walk with God? The spiritual life is so often described as a walk, journey, or pilgrimage that it can be easy to dismiss the practice of walking as a mere metaphor.But in God Walk, author, pastor, and professor Mark Buchanan explores the way that the act of walking has profound implications for followers of the Way:“Hurry is the enemy of attentiveness. And so love as attentiveness is listening and caring and noticing, cherishing, savoring, being awestruck, these things that we feel in a relationship. I am deeply loved by this person because they notice me. I think that that’s how God’s built it. And we can’t get that if we’re moving too fast, if we’re in a hurry.”This episode is drawn from an online conversation held in 2023. It’ll give you a sense of what the Trinity Forum is about: a community of people renewing our culture by applying wisdom from the Christian tradition, and nurturing new growth in it, in our time. If that resonates with you, please join the Trinity Forum as a member, at ttf.org.As we ponder the spirituality of walking, our fall Trinity Forum Reading features naturalist Henry David Thoreau’s ruminations on the art of walking, with an introduction by Trinity Forum President Cherie Harder. Stay tuned for pre-ordering later this week, and join our membership to receive a copy mailed directly to you.Authors and books mentioned in the conversation:AristotleSøren KierkegaardJean-Jacques RousseauGod Walk, by Mark BuchananSimone WeilThe Three Mile an Hour God, by Kosaku KoyamaWanderlust: A History of Walking, by Rebecca SolnitKnowing God, J.I. PackerKai MillerRelated Trinity Forum Readings:Pilgrim’s Progress, by John BunyanPilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie DillardGod’s Grandeur, by Gerard Manley HopkinsLong Walk to Freedom, by Nelson MandelaBrave New World, by Alduous HuxleyRelated Conversations:A New Year With The Word with Malcolm GuiteMusic, Creativity & Justice with Ruth Naomi FloydPursuing Humility with Richard Foster and Brenda QuinnReading as a Spiritual Practice with Jessica Hooten WilsonGet tickets for The Rabbit Room's Housemoot.To listen to this or any of our episodes in full, visit ttf.org/podcasts/ and to join the Trinity Forum Society and help make content like this possible, join the Trinity Forum Society.
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    37 m
  • Beth Moore: Untangling Our Knotted-Up Lives

    Beth Moore: Untangling Our Knotted-Up Lives
    Sep 9 2025

    Our theme for this episode is “Untangling Our Knotted-Up Lives,” and our guest is the author and speaker Beth Moore.

    Drawing from her bestselling memoir, Beth helps us work through a challenge we all may face at various times: maintaining resilience — and faithfulness to our vocations — in the face of hardship:

    “I’d come to a point where I thought, oh my goodness, I see this. I get what Jesus is doing here, whatever it might be. I had this compelling to share it, and I have throughout my whole adult life.”


    This episode is drawn from an online conversation held in 2025. It’ll give you a sense of what the Trinity Forum is about: a community of people renewing our culture by applying wisdom from the Christian tradition, and nurturing new growth in it, in our time.


    If that resonates with you, please join the Trinity Forum as a member, at ttf.org.

    Go deeper into the topics discussed in this conversation with these Trinity Forum Readings:

    • Pilgrim's Progress; John Bunyan
    • The Long Loneliness; Dorothy Day
    • A Spiritual Pilgrimage; Malcolm Muggeridge
    • Confessions; St. Augustine
    • The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness; Reinhold Niebuhr
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    59 m
  • Story, Culture, & the Common Good with Marilynne Robinson

    Story, Culture, & the Common Good with Marilynne Robinson
    Aug 26 2025
    Our Summer 2025 series, Beside Still Waters, focuses on the places where creativity brings life into a world fatigued by brokenness and division. From jazz to Jane Austen and in between, this season we’re focusing on the ways literature and the arts can refresh and challenge our inner lives—and connect us with the Creator of the good, the true, and the beautiful.Today’s episode concludes our summer series. Our guide today is the acclaimed writer Marilynne Robinson, author of the Gilead series, and much else. In this episode, originally an Online Conversation recorded in 2020, Marilynne reflects on the art of writing as a means of exploring truth and engaging questions around learning to live well, to love others, and to create a home and community, in our fractious world:“The unique brilliance of a human being … is something that we tend utterly to disparage, demean, utterly fail to notice … every person lives out a [life] beautiful, complicated, inaccessible to other consciousnesses. And it is sacred.”And if this conversation resonates with you, consider joining the Trinity Forum community as a member, at ttf.org. You can find the full video of this conversation there too. Marilynne Robinson's Novels | Housekeeping, Gilead, Home, Lila, Jack, Reading GenesisArticle in Breaking Ground from our event.Authors and books mentioned in the conversation:Marcel ProustRalph Waldo EmmersonPaul HardingWalt WitmanWilliam FaulknerJohn CalvinJonathan EdwardsMoby Dick, by Herman MellvillePiers Plowman, by William LanglandRelated Trinity Forum Readings:Sacred and Profane Love | A Trinity Forum Reading by John Donne Bulletins from Immortality | A Trinity Forum Reading by Emily Dickinson Confessions | A Trinity Forum Reading by Saint Augustine Brave New World | A Trinity Forum Reading by Aldous Huxley Marilynne Robinson is a novelist, essayist, and teacher, one of the most renowned and revered of living writers. Her novels Housekeeping, Gilead, Lila, and Home have been variously honored with the Pulitzer Prize, National Books Critics Circle Award (twice), a Hemingway Foundation Award, an Orange Prize, The Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, and the Ambassador Book Award. She's also the author of many essays and non-fiction works, including her work, “Mother Country”, and her essay collections, “Death of Adam,” “Absence of Mind,” “When I was a Child I Read Books,” “The Givenness of Things,” and “What Are We Doing Here?”. She's the recipient of the National Humanities Medal and an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In addition to her writing has spent over 20 years teaching at the Iowa Writers Workshop, as well as several universities.
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    38 m
  • Creativity, Reconciliation, and Flourishing

    Creativity, Reconciliation, and Flourishing
    Aug 19 2025

    Our Summer 2025 series, Beside Still Waters, focuses on the places where creativity brings life into a world fatigued by brokenness and division. From jazz to Jane Austen and in between, this season we’ll focus on the ways literature and the arts can refresh and challenge our inner lives—and connect us with the Creator of the good, the true, and the beautiful.


    Guided by theologian and musician David Bailey and concert pianist and chamber musician Mia Chung, this episode explores the concept that music involves mutual support, balance, and give and take among musicians to create a cohesive experience.


    And we reflect on how Christian communities can apply these principles of collaboration and harmony to create faith communities that are transformative:

    To the extent that the arts can actually cultivate that practice of incorporating the right hemisphere and in communication with the left, it's always together, you know, they're, complimentary. I think we can benefit each other in terms of community formation, but even benefit our own intellectual lives and the amount of joy we experience living in this world. - Mia Chung

    If this work resonates with you, please consider joining the Trinity Forum community as a society member.


    This podcast is an edited version of our Online Conversation recorded in June, 2024. You can access the full conversation with transcript here.

    Learn more about Mia Chung and David Bailey.

    Episode Outline

    00:00 Introduction to Trinity Forum Conversations

    00:34 Exploring Music and Christian Community

    01:36 Cherie Harder on Cultural Challenges

    02:55 Welcoming David Bailey and Mia Chung

    04:41 David Bailey's Musical Journey

    06:56 Mia Chung's Musical Formation

    10:44 The Role of Arts in Reconciliation

    13:19 The Power of Music in Community Building

    23:17 Reintegration and Reconciliation at MIT

    28:52 Challenges and Practices for Reconciliation

    30:10 Digital Discipleship and Secular Influence

    30:44 The Importance of Fasting and Listening

    32:33 Engaging Differently as Followers of Jesus

    33:28 The Role of Technology in Information Consumption

    34:18 Post-COVID Convening and Empathetic Listening

    37:25 The Power of Music and Emotional Expression

    40:04 Silence and Contemplative Practices

    44:43 Artistic Collaboration and Reconciliation

    51:19 Final Thoughts and Encouragement


    Authors and books mentioned in the conversation:

    Arrabon: Learning Reconciliation Through Community & Worship Music, by David Bailey


    Related Trinity Forum Readings:
    Hannah and Nathan, by Wendell Berry
    Painting as a Pastime, by Winston Churchill
    The Four Quartets, by TS Eliot
    Letters from Vincent Van Gogh
    Spirit and Imagination, selections from Samuel Taylor Coleridge
    Why Work?, by Dorothy Sayers
    The Loss of the University, featuring the works of Wendell Berry and Jacques Maritain

    To listen to this or any of our episodes in full, visit ttf.org/podcast and to join the Trinity Forum Society and help make content like this possible, join the Trinity Forum Society.
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    53 m
  • Words Against Despair with Christian Wiman

    Words Against Despair with Christian Wiman
    Aug 12 2025
    Our Summer 2025 series, Beside Still Waters, focuses on the places where creativity brings life into a world fatigued by brokenness and division. From jazz to Jane Austen and in between, this season we’ll focus on the ways literature and the arts can refresh and challenge our inner lives—and connect us with the Creator of the good, the true, and the beautiful.Our guest this episode is the poet Christian Wiman, a master of the written – and spoken – word. After long wandering, he returned to the Christian faith in which he’d been raised, in part because of a terminal cancer diagnosis – one he has now long outlived. Both before and after his diagnosis, and his return to faith, his experience of despair has fueled his powerful poetry. In grappling with it, Christian uses words in ways that are a tonic against despair.“I deal with despair because…I don’t know how not to, and it would be an evasion not to. And I think if you don’t feel it, then you’re not paying attention.”This podcast is drawn from an online conversation from 2024. We hope this conversation will resonate with you as you explore the good, the true, and the beautiful in your own corner of creation. If it does, please consider joining the Trinity Forum community as a member, at ttf.org. You can find the full video of this conversation there too. And while you’re here, please subscribe to this podcast on your chosen platform. Authors and books mentioned in the conversation:Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair, by Christian WimanMarilynne RobinsonDanielle ChapmanWilliam BronkWilliam WordsworthEvery Riven Thing, by Christian WimanMy Bright Abyss: Meditations of a Modern Believer, by Christian WimanPrayer, by Carol Ann DuffyThe Bible and Poetry, by Michael Edwards Augustine of HippoBittersweet, by George HerbertSurprised by Joy, by C.S. LewisRichard WilburJürgen MoltmannWhen the Time’s Toxins, by Christian WimanRelated Trinity Forum Readings:Augustine’s ConfessionsDevotions by John Donne, paraphrased by Philip YanceyGod’s Grandeur: the Poems of Gerard Manley HopkinsBulletins from Immortality, by Emily DickinsonWrestling with God, by Simone WeilRelated Conversations:Connecting Spiritual Formation & Public Life with Michael WearThe Kingdom, the Power & The Glory with Tim AlbertaA Life Worth Living with Miroslav VolfTowards a Better Christian PoliticsChristian Pluralism: Living Faithfully in a World of DifferenceWhat Really Matters with Charlie Peacock and Andi AshworthScripture and the Public SquareHow to be a Patriotic ChristianLife, Death, Poetry & Peace with Philip YanceyThe Fall, the Founding, and the Future of American DemocracyFear and Conspiracy with David FrenchTo listen to this or any of our episodes in full, visit ttf.org/podcast and to help make content like this possible, join the Trinity Forum Society.
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    33 m