Conversing with Mark Labberton

Against persistent fear of death, mortality avoidance, and the vices that emerge from terror management, this episode offers a personal testimony of a Christian experience of dying.
With scientific precision, disarming honesty, and immense gratitude for life, biologist Jeff Schloss offers an intimate, firsthand account of his recent diagnosis of an extremely rare terminal neurological disease: multiple system atrophy (MSA).
His doctors put the prognosis plainly: "It is terminal, it is incurable, and it's rapidly progressive."
A longtime and beloved Westmont College biology professor and senior scholar at BioLogos, Schloss offers speaks directly to the experience of dying—as he encounters each new week of this rapidly progressive disease.
He reconsiders the meaning of a "good death": increased gratitude and awareness of gift, the reality of pain, the loss of surfing and guitar-playing, the sacredness of family, and the surprising nearness of Christ as everything else falls away.
A profound witness to Christian attitudes about life and death, Schloss seeks not a hero's death, but a daily, humble life-giving commerce with Christ.
Schloss revisits a life that began in a nonreligious Jewish refugee family and pivoted through a dramatic conversion as a college-dropout surf bum in Hawaii. He traces what has changed, and what hasn't, now that death is no longer an abstraction but a daily fact in his body.
With pastoral care and hope, Mark Labberton explores with Schloss what it means to experience dying rather than simply anticipate it, the grief of losing fifty years of surfing and guitar-playing to pain and paralysis, the gift of Simone Weil's writing on suffering, the Heidelberg Catechism's opening words on "our only comfort in life and in death," and the difference between the thrill of surfing and the sacredness of family and commerce with Christ.
Episode Highlights
I knew from the second grade that I wanted to be a scientist. I was out collecting butterflies and dragonflies and looking through microscopes at all sorts of things that I couldn't believe were there.
As we were talking, it just occurred to me ... he either had what I wanted, or he was clinically crazy.
It is terminal, it is incurable, and it's rapidly progressive ... the process of dying I find it fascinating ... It's not fun, but it is fascinating.
She wasn't sad just for herself, I'm gonna lose you. And she wasn't sad empathetically just for me, so sorry for you. It was a joint sadness that the life we had hoped to share together, we are not gonna have.
The things that are most life giving are out of reach ... I've come to see it's actually not true. The things that have been delightful are out of reach ... the thing that is most life giving, and that is commerce with Christ.
I think it was the single most thrilling day of my entire life ... I said, no, those weren't thrilling, those were sacred.
I don't want to market this season. I'm not looking for a hero's death, or any kind of publicly attended death.
I would have never guessed that in this home stretch, my son and wife could carry me up the slopes of Yosemite Valley.
About Jeff Schloss
Jeff Schloss has spent four decades at the intersection of evolutionary biology and Christian theology. Now retired as Distinguished Professor of Biology at Westmont College, he continues as senior scholar at BioLogos, working alongside Francis Collins for more than fifteen years. He co-edited "The Believing Primate: Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Reflections on the Origin of Religion" and "Evolution and Ethics: Human Morality in Biological and Religious Perspective," a Templeton Science-Religion Book of Distinction winner. He has lectured at Cambridge, Oxford, and Harvard.
Helpful Links and Resources
Jeff Schloss's page at BioLogos, where he serves as senior scholar: https://biologos.org/people/jeffrey-schloss
Finding Faith: An Evolutionary Biologist Shares His Story, Schloss's own video testimony for BioLogos: https://biologos.org/resources/finding-faith-an-evolutionary-biologist-shares-his-story
Tackling the Divide Between Science and Faith, Westmont Magazine's profile of Schloss's career: https://www.westmont.edu/magazine/spring-2025/tackling-divide-between-science-and-faith
The Believing Primate: Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Reflections on the Origin of Religion, Schloss's co-edited volume: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-believing-primate-9780199597086
Evolution and Ethics: Human Morality in Biological and Religious Perspective, Schloss's Templeton Award-winning co-edited volume: https://www.eerdmans.com/9780802826954/evolution-and-ethics/
Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism, source of the Augustinian science concept Schloss references: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/where-the-conflict-really-lies-9780199812097
Heidelberg Catechism, Lord's Day 1, the confession Labberton reads to close the episode: https://www.heidelberg-catechism.com/en/lords-days/1.html
Multiple System Atrophy overview, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke: https://www.ninds.nih.gov/health-information/disorders/multiple-system-atrophy
Show Notes
Childhood in a nonreligious German Jewish refugee family
Grandfather taken by the Gestapo, relatives lost in the Holocaust
Early love of butterflies, dragonflies, and microscopes
A sixth-grade encounter with Confucius sparks a love of philosophy
College philosophy major searching for purpose and for God
Dropping out, becoming a surf bum in Hawaii
A stranger's dinner invitation becomes a turning point
A late-night prayer of surrender met by an unmistakable presence
Grad school pairing biology, philosophy, and the study of altruism
Alvin Plantinga's Augustinian science and reading creation with a map
Decades as senior scholar at BioLogos alongside Francis Collins
Why church and science drifted apart over vaccines and politics
Science as a reliable path to facts, not truth itself
A new diagnosis: rare, terminal, rapidly progressive neurological disease—multiple systems atrophy (MSA)
Doctors estimate an average of three years, with wide variation
The difference between studying death as a biologist versus the real-time experience of dying
A spouse's grief for a shared future that will not happen
Losing surfing and guitar-playing as an unplanned kind of fasting
Pain described as systemic, exhausting, disorienting
Cognitive decline and dark humor about it
Distinguishing what is thrilling from what is truly sacred
The ache of no longer being able to research and create
A flicker of despair met by a choice not to despair
Wanting a real death, not a hero's death
A wish to thank former students and colleagues before the end
Not wanting to become a burden to family
Giving God all of one's heart, without earning salvation by it
Bonhoeffer's costly grace versus cheap grace
Gratitude over entitlement as the ground of faith
Simone Weil on suffering as a place grace can work
A closing blessing and the Heidelberg Catechism's opening words
Carried up the slopes of Yosemite by a son and a wife
#ConversingPodcast #MarkLabberton #JeffSchloss #FaithAndScience #BioLogos #MultipleSystemAtrophy #Mortality #ChristianFaith #Westmont #Gratitude
Production Credits
Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment Magazine and Fuller Seminary.

As we come to the 250th celebration of America's founding, what is happening in our country? Pundits, writers, historians, political scientists, and average citizens are all trying to take stock of where we are as a nation. In this episode, we seek perspective by returning to the conversation between Mark Labberton and David Brooks immediately following the 2024 election, before the beginning of Trump's second term and all the events that have unfolded since.
Whether you come to the 250th celebrating our national life, or questioning our national life; whether you're in support of what's happening currently in America, or whether you're overwhelmed by so much that you wish was different, may we give thanks.
Thanks be to God for the place that we get to live, even as it's a place that is struggling to reach its ideals, and may we continue to pray and seek its welfare, its justice, its purpose, its fairness, and its equity.
In this episode, Mark Labberton welcomes David Brooks (The Atlantic, formerly of The New York Times) for reflections about the 2024 General Election, the state of American politics, and how we got here.
Together they discuss the multi-generational class divide; sources of alienation and distrust; how loss of faith and meaning influences political life; intellectual virtues of courage, firmness, humility, and flexibility; what it means to be a Republican in exile; the capacity for self-awareness and self-critique; and much more.
Episode Highlights
"In my opinion, Donald Trump is the wrong answer to the right question."
"The flow of status and respect in this country has gone to people with elite credentials."
"If you tell 51% of the country 'Your voices don't matter,' people are going to get upset."
"Jesus was more a badass revolutionary than an Oxford don."
"The world just loves a human being that's trying to act like Jesus."
Helpful Links and Resources
"Confessions of a Republican Exile" (The Atlantic): https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/10/trumpism-republican-party-exile-david-brooks/680243/
How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen, by David Brooks: https://www.amazon.com/How-Know-Person-Seeing-Others/dp/059323006X
My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer, by Christian Wiman: https://www.amazon.com/My-Bright-Abyss-Meditation-Believer/dp/0374534373
David Brooks's current writing at The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/author/david-brooks/
Brooks and Capehart, PBS NewsHour: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/tag/brooks-and-capehart
About David Brooks
David Brooks is staff writer for The Atlantic and is Presidential Senior Fellow at Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs. Prior to that he wrote for The New York Times for 22 years*.* He is author of How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen; The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life; Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There; The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement, and is founder of Weave: The Social Fabric Project.
Show Notes
A spiritual or emotional crisis we're working out in American politics
Should we blame inflation and economic factors? (Biden's Covid-19 overstimulation)
Class divide is a generational thing
High-school-educated voters are increasingly alienated from the Democratic Party
Alienation and distrust is a multi-decade process
Loss of Faith, Loss of Meaning, and the "Death of God"
An exiled Republican
"Confessions of a Republican Exile" (via The Atlantic): "A longtime conservative, alienated by Trumpism, tries to come to terms with life on the moderate edge of the Democratic Party."
"I'm a Whig." ("Abraham Lincoln was a Whig.")
Edmund Burke and epistemological modesty—"don't revolutionize something you don't understand."
You should operate on society in the way you operate on your father, with care.
Alexander Hamilton
Whig tradition is unrepresented in contemporary American politics
How David Brooks waffles between Democrat and Republican
Isaiah Berlin: "At the rightward edge of the leftward tendency."
"The capacity for self-critique"
Matt Yglesias
Humble, introspective, and "how did we get so out of touch?"
Racism and sexism are not what's driving Trump voters
"In my opinion, Donald Trump is the wrong answer to the right question."
Mark Noll and America's use of the Bible: un-self-aware and un-self-critical
Why is there more capacity for self-critique on the Democratic side?
Jonathan Rauch and "Epistemic Regime": includes media, universities, scientific research, review process, etc.
"There's still a core of people who believe 'if the evidence says x, you should say y.'"
"The greatest victory in the history of the world."
Intellectual Virtues: Courage, Firmness, Flexibility
"Reality is constantly going to surprise you."
1980s Republicanism was more intellectually sophisticated
Conservative book publishing
*Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Change* by Jonah Goldberg
How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen by David Brooks
"The Stacking Stereotype"
"A redistribution of respect" (away from large swaths of America and to elites)
"The flow of status and respect in this country has gone to people with elite credentials."
"… almost no Trump supporters."
"If you tell 51% of the country 'Your voices don't matter,' people are going to get upset."
America changing beneath us
High level of spiritual and moral authority and low level of intellectual confidence
The moral teaching of the New Testament
"People are unitary wholes."
"I became a Christian around 2013."
"Jesus was more a badass revolutionary than an Oxford don."
C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien's Christianity
"What it's like to be in the claustrophobic mind of a narcissist."
Aggression: a joyless way to see the faith
What is needed?
"I was a 50-year-old atheist."
Christian Wiman (My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer): materialistic categories couldn't explain the world
"If they made me pope of the evangelicals, which is a job that makes me shudder…"
"Be not afraid."
"The world just loves a human being that's trying to act like Jesus."
David Brooks's teaching at Yale
The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist by Dorothy Day
#Conversing #DavidBrooks #MarkLabberton #FaithAndPolitics #AmericanPolitics #HowToKnowAPerson #ChristianHumanism #Election2024
Production Credits
Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment magazine and Fuller Seminary.

Tim Shriver has spent a lifetime learning to see the people the rest of us are socialized to look past. The chairman of Special Olympics, co-creator of the Dignity Index, and son of Eunice Kennedy Shriver and Sargent Shriver, he argues that what's tearing America apart isn't how much we differ, but how we treat one another when we do.
"We're not being torn apart by difference. We're being torn apart by the way we treat each other when we differ."
In this episode with Mark Labberton, Shriver reflects on the teachers who shaped him—students and athletes who taught him a different way of seeing. They discuss the Dignity Index, contempt, toxic empathy that gives way to excusing harm, the role of "self-purification" in Martin Luther King Jr.'s non-violent campaigns, his Catholic faith, and embracing the Eucharist as self-giving love.
Episode Highlights
"We're not being torn apart by difference. We're being torn apart by the way we treat each other when we differ."
"Empathy is knowing and understanding. Dignity is valuing and seeing."
"You will have a superpower if you fight for your principles with all the passion you've got and add one principle: treat the other human being with dignity at the same time."
"They're not crying because they're sad for the athlete. They're crying because something is coming out of them."
"Concretely, you may hold, you may touch, you may drink of the face of God."
About Tim Shriver
Timothy Shriver has chaired Special Olympics International since 1996, growing the movement to over four million athletes worldwide. The third child of Eunice Kennedy Shriver and Sargent Shriver, he taught for years in New Haven public schools and helped launch the field of social and emotional learning, co-founding and chairing CASEL. In 2018 he founded UNITE to bridge America's political divides and co-created the Dignity Index, an eight-point scale from contempt to respect. He is the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir Fully Alive: Discovering What Matters Most, and holds degrees from Yale and Catholic University and a doctorate from the University of Connecticut.
Helpful links and Resources
Fully Alive: Discovering What Matters Most, by Tim Shriver https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374535827/fullyalive/
The Call to Unite: Voices of Hope and Awakening, edited by Tim Shriver https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/671260/the-call-to-unite-by-edited-by-tim-shriver-and-tom-rosshirt/
The Dignity Index: https://www.dignity.us
Special Olympics: https://www.specialolympics.org
"Letter from Birmingham Jail": https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/letter-birmingham-jail
Show Notes
Living and teaching in New Haven, Connecticut; learning to see dignity
Born 1959; family moves to D.C. after JFK's 1960 election
Sargent Shriver, the Peace Corps, and a faith that demanded more
Living "eye to eye" in the village
Aunt Rosemary and the camp that became Special Olympics
"An unapologetic conviction that if we worked together, we could change the world."
Choosing teaching over law; a hunger to go deep, not fast
The high school visit that changed everything
The student who dreamed of waking without braces
"They cussed me out... but somehow they also love me"
"There is some moment in our lives where being broken leads to freedom."
Learning how to see; the blind man and "what do you want?"
"They're crying because something is coming out of them."
A culture that applauds cutting people off
The Dignity Index: contempt to "I love you no matter what"; https://www.dignity.us
Gov. Spencer Cox and leading without demonizing
Toxic empathy
Empathy is not excusing
The superpower of human dignity
Fighting for your principles and add one: dignity
Thomas Merton's "pure glory of God in us"
Martin Luther King Jr.'s "self-purification" as a component of non-violent resistance (see "Letter from a Birmingham Jail")
The Eucharist: "You may hold, you may touch, you may drink of the face of God"
#TimShriver #ConversingPodcast #MarkLabberton #DignityIndex #SpecialOlympics #HumanDignity #Empathy #FaithAndPublicLife

A poet who has lived two decades with incurable cancer on what faith sounds like when God feels more absent than present. Christian Wiman joins Mark Labberton to talk poetry, suffering, and friendship.
"The presence of God, less so. I experience the absence more than the presence."
In this episode with Mark Labberton, Wiman reflects on writing "Every Riven Thing" after a single church service, surviving a last-resort clinical trial, and the friendship behind his new book with Miroslav Volf. Together they discuss the paradox at the heart of poetry, grief that explodes into joy, and why joy asks something of us. They also weigh Heschel and Lewis's clarity, the friendless American male, and chance turned into destiny by constant choice.
Episode Highlights
"The presence of God, less so. I experience the absence more than the presence."
"I would not let go of my despair, even though the poems were showing me something else."
"Joy asks something of us on the other side."
"The relief came from the communion between people."
"I think that that was quite a shock to me to realize that we were each envying what the other had."
About Christian Wiman
Christian Wiman is a poet, essayist, editor, and translator, and the Clement-Muehl Professor of Communication Arts at Yale Divinity School, where he teaches religion and literature with the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. From 2003 to 2013 he edited Poetry, the oldest magazine of verse in the English-speaking world, tripling its circulation and earning two National Magazine Awards. He is the author, editor, or translator of more than a dozen books, including Every Riven Thing, the memoirs My Bright Abyss and He Held Radical Light, and the genre-blending Zero at the Bone. A former Guggenheim Fellow with two honorary doctorates, he has written candidly about faith and a long struggle with incurable cancer.
Helpful Links and Resources
Glimmerings: Letters on Faith Between a Poet and a Theologian
https://bookshop.org/p/books/glimmerings-letters-on-faith-between-a-poet-and-a-theologian-christian-wiman/1a13ad79a59080d1
My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
https://bookshop.org/p/books/my-bright-abyss-meditation-of-a-modern-believer-christian-wiman/dcebbe4f049250d8
Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair
https://penguinbookshop.com/book/9780374603458
Show Notes
Author, editor, translator of a dozen-plus books
Twenty years living with an incurable cancer diagnosis
Editing Poetry magazine amid Ruth Lilly's $200 million gift
From editor to Yale Divinity School on one bold letter
A last-resort clinical trial: "I definitely thought it was over"
"Every Riven Thing" written in under an hour after a first church service
Inventing a new poetic form on the spot
Compression and paradox: "a great poem is irreducible"
"Bittersweet": "all my sour sweet days I will lament and love"
Simone Weil's Gravity and Grace and Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping
Absence and presence: "I experience the absence more than the presence"
My Bright Abyss and the chapter "God's Truth is Life"
"From a Window": grief that suddenly explodes into birds and joy
"I would not let go of my despair, even though the poems were showing me something else"
Zadie Smith and C.S. Lewis on joy too destabilizing to want
"joy asks something of us on the other side"
The rare clarity of Heschel and Lewis, marrying reason and imagination
Glimmerings: eighteen months of letters with Miroslav Volf
"After angels" and a transforming walk near the Div School
"the relief came from the communion between people"
Friendship and the friendless American male
"we were each envying what the other had"
West Texas: an expanse "wide open and annihilating, crushing"
Ricoeur: chance turned into a destiny by virtue of a constant choice
#ChristianWiman #MarkLabberton #Conversing #PoetryAndFaith #Glimmerings #MyBrightAbyss #FaithAndDoubt #MiroslavVolf
Production Credits
Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment Magazine and Fuller Seminary.

What does it take to rehumanize our common life in a moment of cultural fragility, institutional collapse, and crisis of trust?
Recorded at the Washington National Cathedral for Comment magazine's inaugural Understory Festival, this roundtable asks how culture, beauty, and faith might rehumanize a fractured public life. Mark Labberton is joined by Comment editor-in-chief Anne Snyder, The Sacred host Elizabeth Oldfield, Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid, and Cardus co-founder Ray Pennings.
"It is actually possible to have deep roots and wide open arms."
In this episode, the panel reflects on building a gathering rooted in hope and Christian humanism rather than argument alone. They discuss why and how politics is downstream from culture, the role of religion in the public square, the limits of purely cerebral ways of knowing, toxic positivity versus honest hope, pluralism with deep roots, the beauty of "groaning," and learning to die well.
Episode Highlights
"It is actually possible to have deep roots and wide open arms."—Anne Snyder
"Naturally as a Muslim, I don't agree with Christianity's truth claims, but that doesn't mean that I can't appreciate the beauty of Christianity."—Shadi Hamid
"The word that's been coming to me this whole festival is and."—Elizabeth Oldfield
"Politics is downstream from culture."—Ray Pennings
"We're all made to worship, it's just a question of what we worship."—Shadi Hamid
About the Guests
Anne Snyder is editor-in-chief of Comment, a magazine published by Cardus, and convener of the Understory Festival. She hosts The Whole Person Revolution podcast and wrote The Fabric of Character. Elizabeth Oldfield hosts The Sacred podcast, is a former director of UK think tank Theos, and author of Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times. Shadi Hamid is a Washington Post columnist, senior fellow at Georgetown's Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, co-host of Zealots at the Gate, and author of The Case for American Power. Ray Pennings co-founded Cardus in 2000 and serves as its executive vice president and Comment's publisher.
Helpful Links and Resources
The Understory Festival: https://comment.org/understory/ Comment magazine: https://comment.org Cardus: https://www.cardus.ca The Understory, by Lore Ferguson Wilbert (the book behind the name): https://www.amazon.com/dp/1587435705 Elizabeth Oldfield, Fully Alive: https://www.elizabetholdfield.com The Sacred podcast: https://linktr.ee/sacredpodcast Zealots at the Gate: https://comment.org/podcasts/zealots-at-the-gate/ Shadi Hamid, The Case for American Power: https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/shadi-hamid/
Show Notes
Understory Festival, National Cathedral
Local hope, national despair
Naming the festival: the Lore Ferguson Wilbert book
Festival, not conference—body, mind, heart, soul
Cardus, a faith-based think tank
"Politics is downstream from culture."—Ray Pennings
Ways of knowing as the "secret sauce"
A Muslim observer among his favorite Christians
"I don't agree with Christianity's truth claims, but that doesn't mean that I can't appreciate the beauty of Christianity."—Shadi Hamid
Culture as the path out of despair
Weeping beside someone rolling their eyes
Groaning beauty and Romans 8
Dying well—euthanasia, deathbeds, Ben Sasse
The secular paradigm at a dead end
"We're all made to worship, it's just a question of what we worship."—Shadi Hamid
Madeleine Albright's "theophany" on faith in diplomacy
Moral ambition and the power of "and"
"The word that's been coming to me this whole festival is and."—Elizabeth Oldfield
Christian humanism—rights endowed by a Creator
Luke Bretherton—start with the neighbor's need
Hospitality—a guest, not an enemy
"It is actually possible to have deep roots and wide open arms."—Anne Snyder
Surface versus depth—showing what's underneath
#UnderstoryFestival #Comment #ChristianHumanism #PublicTheology #ShadiHamid #ElizabethOldfield #AnneSnyder #Cardus #Pluralism #Hope
Production Credits
Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment Magazine and Fuller Seminary.