Conversing with Mark Labberton

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.

When a faith built to bless the nation gets quietly diverted into power, the most dangerous act left to the church may be refusing to whitewash the story and choosing instead to become a communion of genuinely unlike people.
On the eve of a national prayer rally rededicating America to God, Mark Labberton joined The Jim Wallis Podcast to ask whether Christians who invoke the nation's name are following Jesus or drifting from him.
Together with Jim Wallis, Mark reflects on what it means to choose Christ alone, love the neighbour, and refuse a faith fused to national power. They discuss the evangel versus "evangelicalism," the church as a communion of unlike people, worship in a black church, American exceptionalism as theological crisis, and racial gerrymandering after recent court rulings.
Episode Highlights
"I want to be evangel-centric and not be caught up in the icalisms of a history, a pattern, a habit, a sociology that has often been diverted from the evangel into power—political, social, economic, racial power."
"Paul's giving us a vision of the church that's a communion of unlike people. We know a lot about a communion of like people. But a communion of unlike people is meant to be one of the hallmarks of the church."
"I can't be a Christian alone, but I also can't be a Christian that matures if I'm a Christian only with people who are like me."
"Worship of our country, or the exceptionalism of leaders of our country—these are completely foreign to the body of Christ and to the theology of the kingdom."
"It's really like subverting reality by renaming it in a way that's euphemistic, that's literally whitewashing."
Helpful Links and Resources
The Dangerous Act of Loving Your Neighbor, by Mark Labberton https://www.ivpress.com/the-dangerous-act-of-loving-your-neighbor
Called, by Mark Labberton https://www.ivpress.com/called
The False White Gospel, by Jim Wallis https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250291899/thefalsewhitegospel/
Jim Wallis, Center on Faith and Justice https://faithandjustice.georgetown.edu/about-jim-wallis/
God's Politics with Jim Wallis (Substack): https://jimwallis.substack.com/
Show Notes
Recorded on the eve of the Rededicate 250 prayer rally
Loving your neighbour as a dangerous, costly act
Gratitude for America alongside a "far more complicated story" of suffering
"Christ alone"—Jesus, not any nation, party, or president, is Lord
"The evangel is the good news of Jesus Christ"; nothing can rival it
"A communion of unlike people is meant to be one of the hallmarks of the church."
White allies, Black solidarity, and Supreme Court rulings on Louisiana and Alabama
A friend's anniversary in African garb—living fully "on good days, maybe two-thirds"
Detroit, Black churches, and faith as joyous rediscovery
Worshiping at Allen Temple Baptist Church in Oakland every Sunday
Saying yes to the evangel, no to the "icalism" of evangelicalism
John Stott as mentor; the Lausanne Covenant and Global South
Stott's wartime pacifism; a father who stopped speaking for four years
American exceptionalism as a theological crisis, not just left-versus-right
"America's original sin," erasing history, and "literally whitewashing"
First citizenship in the kingdom; the moral arc bends toward justice
#MarkLabberton #JimWallis #Conversing #ChristianNationalism #ChristAlone #LoveYourNeighbor #PublicTheology #FaithAndPolitics
Production Credits
Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment magazine and Fuller Seminary.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Jim Wallis and Paul Woodhull.