Conversing with Mark Labberton

"It is not just that God has a heart for justice," says Sharon Cohn Wu (International Justice Mission), "it is that it is inextricably his character and cannot be otherwise, and that it is so perfectly married with mercy and grace that we somehow survive."
Sharon Cohn Wu has served for more than twenty years with IJM, where she is now regional president of North America. A lawyer (JD, Harvard Law), she has spent her career calling for "loud justice"—that is, visible, swift, community-wide accountability—using the criminal justice system and political will to help IJM achieve its mission to increase freedom and safety for the most vulnerable. She's a key voice in pursuing IJM's stated goal: protection for 300 million people across 46 jurisdictions by 2030, and freedom for more than a million.
With Mark Labberton, she reflects on her calling as a lawyer to stand between vulnerable people and those who would crush them; why we need systems to seek and secure justice for the most vulnerable to violence; the economics of vulnerability and the predators who exploit it; how public accountability changes expectations and what society will tolerate; and what decades of looking at the worst of human behavior have done to Cohn Wu's emotional, moral, and spiritual life.
Episode Highlights
"Hope is as contagious as despair."
"In the early days, let's say I might have accidentally over-indexed on rage from time to time."
"It is not just that God has a heart for justice, it is that it is inextricably his character and cannot be otherwise, and that it is so perfectly married with mercy and grace that we somehow survive."
"There's nothing inevitable about this type of violence."
"We need consistent and loud justice. 'Loud' meaning the whole community knows that someone was held accountable for this crime against this small child."
About Sharon Cohn Wu
Sharon Cohn Wu is regional president of North America for International Justice Mission, where she has served for over two decades. She began in casework, went on to lead all of IJM's field programs, and pioneered its Justice System Strengthening projects. She built anti-trafficking operations across South and Southeast Asia, including IJM's first USAID police training grant in Cambodia, and most recently advised the organization on violence against women and children. She studied at the University of Virginia and Harvard Law School and practiced at Arnold & Porter.
Helpful Links and Resources
International Justice Mission: https://www.ijm.org
Ending violence against women and children: https://www.ijm.org/our-work/violence-women-children
IJM's research library and external program evaluations: https://www.ijm.org/studies
Good News About Injustice, by Gary Haugen: https://www.ivpress.com/good-news-about-injustice
The Locust Effect, by Gary Haugen and Victor Boutros: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-locust-effect-9780190229269
The Prophets, by Abraham Joshua Heschel: https://harpercollins.com.au/products/9780063335363
Become an IJM prayer partner: https://www.ijm.org/get-involved/pray
Show Notes
Sharon Cohn Wu's vocational background: law as a family trade among lawyers, judges, rabbis, and teachers
Experience: DOJ Criminal Division; corporate law
Gary Haugen's Good News About Injustice
Early years at IJM: gratitude for every single person freed from slavery, prostitution, and dire circumstances
Shifting from case volume to public justice system performance: police, prosecutors, courts, social services
"Hope is as contagious as despair," sustained by survivors, staff, and externally audited reductions in violence
Violence against women and children as a distinct crime: economic exposure, family dissolution, and a justice system survivors avoid
Justice made loud and public, with visible, swift accountability as social and moral deterrent, leading to cultural change
IJM's 2030 goal of 300 million protected across 46 jurisdictions and over a million freed—with half a billion as the horizon
Reality over strategy: a night walk to a Guatemalan police station, Ghanaian survivors warning families about Lake Volta recruitment
Rage mitigated by conviction that God cares more, praying for the fear of the Lord, and Heschel's The Prophets on injustice as offense against God
#InternationalJusticeMission #IJM #HumanTrafficking #ModernSlavery #JusticeSystems #ViolenceAgainstWomen #FaithAndJustice #Conversing #CommentMagazine #FullerSeminary
Production Credits
Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment magazine and Fuller Seminary.

In February 2026, Jeanelle Austin filed for Minnesota Senate District 62. She started canvassing her district during a polar vortex, and persisted through triple-digit summer heat. And in August she lost in the Democratic Primary.
In this episode, she sits down with Mark Labberton to reflect on what this experience has taught her about power, democracy, and what citizenship and neighbor-love means in the South Minneapolis neighborhood where she grew up.
The executive director of Rise & Remember—the nonprofit that preserves the memorial at George Floyd Square—Austin followed a conviction, that if running for office meant she could save just one person's life, she would do it.
She reflects on what it means to "run for something rather than against someone," the win-win campaign she designed by first answering what she would do with power if she lost, and the democratic machinery most voters never see: caucuses, delegates, conventions, endorsements, and party mailers that carry only the endorsed name. She reveals the shadow side of running against an incumbent in her own party: friends who could not endorse her, the party regular who said challengers to progressive incumbents should be punished, the front-porch conversations, the youth-built platform she carried to a rural Republican youth group, and the value a campaign loss is still worth when first-time voters turn out.
Episode Highlights
"I remember telling myself I would run for office if it meant that I could save somebody's life."
"My dearest friends advised me to not run against someone, but to run for something … this was the first moment where I felt like I would be running for something, and something that really mattered."
"I also understood that my power did not come from this seat. My power came from my community, my family, my cultural identity."
"This is my home. This is where I grew up. This is my neighborhood. These are my people."
"Is it not our responsibility to lift up our best leaders and choose from among them? We are oftentimes choosing between the lesser of two evils."
"What are you willing to give up if you say that you love us as your neighbor?"
"We have the power as people to make this democracy what we need it to be. But we first have to believe in ourselves."
About Jeanelle Austin
Jeanelle Austin is executive director and co-founder of Rise & Remember, the Minneapolis nonprofit that preserves thousands of offerings left at George Floyd Square, where she also serves as lead memorial caretaker. She founded Racial Agency Initiative, a racial justice leadership coaching practice, in 2019. She holds a BA in Christian ministries from Messiah College and an MDiv in ethics and an MA in intercultural studies from Fuller Theological Seminary. In 2026 she ran in the DFL primary for Minnesota Senate District 62. The fourth of seven children, she grew up in Minneapolis's Bryant neighborhood, just blocks from the site of George Floyd's killing at 38th and Chicago Avenue.
Helpful Links and Resources
Jeanelle For The People, Austin's 2026 campaign site: https://jeanelleforthepeople.com/
Rise & Remember, the nonprofit Austin directs: https://riseandremember.org/about/
A timeline of Operation Metro Surge, Minnesota Reformer: https://minnesotareformer.com/2026/02/20/a-chronology-of-operation-metro-surge/
Show Notes
Jeanelle's pilgrimage in Palestine with a Black religious scholars delegation; meeting a father in the West Bank whose fifteen-year-old son was imprisoned for throwing rocks
"Run for something, not against someone."
What it means to a run a "win-win campaign," designed after being advised to decide what she would do with power if she lost
How power is located in community, family, and cultural identity rather than in a state senate seat
What it was like to challenge a beloved incumbent inside your own party
Caucusing for the first time, room to room, learning the process in real time
Jeanelle's campaign backdrop: Operation Metro Surge, polar vortex, No Kings protests
Her journey from caucus to delegate to convention to endorsement to party resources
Pre-recruited delegates and the structural advantage of incumbency; party mailers that carry only the endorsed candidate's name
Section 8 notice periods and the gap that produces homelessness
Youth-built priorities carried an hour west to a Republican youth group
Gun safety, neighbor-love, rural versus urban gun culture
Food shelves versus food stamps, and the question of dignity
Primary night at the People's Way, turn out for first-time local voters
Giving power back by teaching neighbors how to run for political office
#JeanelleAustin #GeorgeFloydSquare #Minneapolis #RunForOffice #Democracy #CivicEngagement #FaithAndPolitics #Conversing
Production Credits
Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment Magazine and Fuller Seminary.

Growing up, Beth Moore was taught that 1 Timothy 2 and 1 Corinthians 14 were the whole of what scripture had to say about women: submissive and silent. The founder of Living Proof Ministries and one of the most widely read Bible teachers in America, Moore objects to a hermeneutic limited to those passages.
In this episode, Mark Labberton revisits his 2018 conversation with Beth Moore, recorded in the months following her viral open letter, "A Letter to My Brothers." Almost 10 years later, debates over women in leadership and whether women are free to use their full gifts in the full service of the church still roil American Christianity. This episode is an invitation to hear Moore's unique journey—discovering what it means to receive women as teachers and instructors of scripture for the building up of the church—and about the faithfulness of God to one woman's story, as she tries simply to be heard. They discuss the cost of speaking up in 2018 and the backlash that came hardest from women, her decision to repent of her own complicity, the way gender gets used abusively in every part of the church, and what it looks like to keep going with Jesus when the way ahead is cloudy.
Episode Highlights
"I very much am a big believer in the harbor of the church, that when it functions well … it's such a safe place for me. It was safer than my home, Mark."
"Where I have been part of this and complicit in this, I will repent. So here is what I'm fighting for. I am fighting for us, and I don't just mean women. I mean women and men, brothers and sisters."
"There is absolutely no world in which I would not have spoken up. … It would've been like expecting a dog not to bark at a burglar."
"Where our Christianity … departs Christ-likeness, don't call it Christianity. … So if it is not like Him, it is not of Him."
"I may not get it right, but I can no longer lay down to what I know is wrong."
About Beth Moore
Beth Moore is an evangelist, author, and Bible teacher who founded Living Proof Ministries in Houston in 1994 to teach women the scriptures. Her books and studies, including Breaking Free and So Long, Insecurity, have been translated into more than twenty languages. Her 2018 open letter "A Letter to My Brothers" named the misogyny she had absorbed in conservative evangelical life. She left the Southern Baptist Convention in 2021 and now worships as an Anglican. Her memoir, All My Knotted-Up Life, won the 2024 ECPA Book of the Year. She teaches now on the podcast Living Proof with Beth Moore.
Helpful Links and Resources
Living Proof Ministries, the organization Beth Moore founded in 1994: https://www.lproof.org
"A Letter to My Brothers," May 2018 open letter: https://www.lproof.org/blog/a-letter-to-my-brothers
All My Knotted-Up Life, Beth Moore's 2023 memoir: https://www.tyndale.com/p/all-my-knotted-up-life/9781496472670
Show Notes
Moore's three-generation household; instability at home; the church as a harbor
Receiving her calling at eighteen, off a pre-law political science track
The surprise of discovering that theologically orthodox, scripture-loving people read women's ministry differently than her
Passion drawn from pain; early trauma and a pattern she couldn't break
Hypocrisy, pretense, and dreaming of fulfilled desires
Strongholds and sexual sin: what her early context named but never taught people how to fight
First Baptist Church Houston as a place safe enough to be corrected and still loved
Pastor John Bisagno (1934–2018) asking her to speak on a Sunday night, and her own objection that she was a woman
Palpable disesteem for a woman in ministry without academic credentials
Playing by rules that others were not keeping
Scripture as reason versus scripture as excuse
Repenting of her own complicity
Luke 8, the women at the resurrection, Paul's fellow workers at the end of Romans
Backlash to Moore came hardest from women, including readers who abandoned her studies
Asking questions on behalf of women without a microphone
Affirming women formally while gender bias persists structurally
The Samaritan woman at the well, and a Savior who gives dignity
Obedience over clarity when the way ahead is cloudy
#BethMoore #WomenInMinistry #Conversing #MarkLabberton #WomenInLeadership #Evangelicalism #BibleTeaching #ChurchToo #Complementarianism
Production Credits
Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment Magazine and Fuller Seminary.

Our hearts are restless, says Saint Augustine, until they find their rest in God. The biological science and the spiritual metaphor are in agreement here. Over the course of billions of beats, our hearts never stop to rest.  Your magnificent heart exchanges or pumps your entire blood volume, just over a gallon, every single minute. (Athlete hearts can pump up to 10 gallons per minute!)
In this episode, Mark Labberton discusses matters of the heart with his close friend Dr. David Anderson, a cardiologist of four decades who trained at Johns Hopkins and helped launch one of the first interventional cardiology programs in San Francisco.
Anderson reflects on the medical science of cardiology, the profound life-saving medical advances over the past forty years, heart disease versus coronary artery disease, how the brain and the heart communicate, and what happens during a heart attack.
In the second half of their conversation, they move from physiology to spirituality of the heart: Pharaoh's hardened heart, "out of the heart the mouth speaks," and the human need to find somewhere to locate the self.
Anderson closes with what a cardiologist would tell anyone worried about their own heart, and with a case for medicine as a noble profession.
Episode Highlights
"When I first began in cardiology, if your heart was damaged, imagining that the heart could actually improve its function was like imagining someone could grow back a new arm."
"One of the distinctive things about the heart is unlike other muscles, it doesn't have a time to rest. When it gets insufficient blood supply, it can't just say, 'Whoa, I'm gonna stop here.' It asks you to slow down because it starts hurting."
"I think that's part of the intrigue of the heart, that it is inside us … but in some ways it's apart from us. It's responding to environmental things that we're not really even aware of. … I think it's this sense of detachment of the heart from us—but yet its centrality—that has led people to posit the soul or the will or the passions or almost anything that you would think was the real you.
"Atherosclerosis … I would describe as it's like having a pimple inside your artery."
"First of all, know yourself. That is, it's not a time to be fatalistic because your father had a heart attack in his fifties or your brother just had a heart attack. It's a time to be proactive."
About David Anderson
David Anderson is a cardiologist who practiced for more than four decades before retiring. He studied at Stanford as an undergraduate and earned his medical degree at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He stayed at Hopkins for residency, then trained in San Francisco at the dawn of interventional cardiology, helping to build an angioplasty program in the early 1980s.
Helpful Links and Resources
Alta Bates Summit Medical Center, Sutter Health, the Oakland hospital Anderson thanks by name: https://www.sutterhealth.org/about-us/our-hospitals/alta-bates-summit-medical-center
DeWood et al., "Prevalence of Total Coronary Occlusion during the Early Hours of Transmural Myocardial Infarction," the 1980 study that identified clot as the cause of heart attack: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM198010163031601
Waagstein et al., "Effect of chronic beta-adrenergic receptor blockade in congestive cardiomyopathy," the Swedish beta-blocker work behind the recovery he describes: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1191416/
What Is Atherosclerosis, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute: https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/atherosclerosis
Warning Signs of a Heart Attack, American Heart Association: https://www.heart.org/en/health-topics/heart-attack/warning-signs-of-a-heart-attack
Angina (Chest Pain), American Heart Association, on the exertional pain he describes at the close: https://www.heart.org/en/health-topics/heart-attack/angina-chest-pain
Show Notes
The impact of family gene pool, lifelong heart awareness
How David Anderson got into medicine, and cardiology in particular
A Hopkins autopsy elective, a teenager dead in a parking lot, a mentor who followed
From internists interested in the heart to interventionists inside it
Catheters, pressures, and the arrival of echocardiography
Seeing a beating heart inside a living body for the first time, as a senior resident
A colleague's heart attack in 1979
The 1980 angiography study that identified clot as the trigger
Spring 1983: an artery occludes, the cath lab opens it, pain gone in fifteen minutes
Bypass surgery before that: elective, scheduled, never mid-attack
Prevention running under the technology: blood pressure, smoking, the lipid theory
Fixing one artery and never having to fix another
Coronary artery disease versus disease of the muscle itself
Plasticity, not regeneration
Adrenaline as an emergency system built for days, not decades
Moving from technological advances to molecular-based understanding of heart problems
Understanding of the pathophysiology of atherosclerosis and its prevention
Beta blockers, ejection fraction, and hearts that came back
The heart as a muscle with no rest
The heart's own electrical center, and the backup pacemakers below it
Your heart doesn't rely on you or your consciousness to beat
Why the ancients may have located the self in the heart organ
Jeremiah's pounding heart, Pharaoh's hardened one
Pascal, the soul, and needing somewhere to put "the real you"
Maintaining an appropriate degree of separation from the patient and their family in order to care properly and effectively
The difficulty of delivering bad news to patients and their familes
Digging for a shared history to call on in a crisis
"Medicine is a noble profession."
Heart care advice from a cardiologist: First, know yourself.
Heart health checklist: cholesterol, blood pressure, weight, knowing your own history
The pain that warrants a phone call
#Conversing #MarkLabberton #Cardiology #Heart #MedicalScience #HeartHealth #Biology #ChristianHumanism
Production Credits
Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment magazine and Fuller Seminary.

The Old Testament, Walter Brueggemann said, is an old text that simply refuses to stay old. "It reads like it was written yesterday." For him, God offers no artificial closure, but is active in the meantime, and at peace with the "unfinished."
Walter Brueggemann died on June 5, 2025, at the age of ninety-two, and his own influence is unfinished. This episode is from the Conversing archives: a conversation Mark Labberton hosted with Brueggemann at Fuller Seminary for the 2015 Fuller Forum "Justice, Grace, and Law in the Mission of God."
Brueggemann was an Old Testament scholar for the sake of the church, the author of over one hundred books including The Prophetic Imagination, and came to the Bible as a text-wrestler, "comfortable with collisions," taking the Hebrew text and his own life as an artist with equal and total seriousness. He describes his method of exegesis written longhand, "at the end of his pen," catching himself speaking the words as he writes them.
Together they discuss the artistry of biblical language and why art is inherently subversive; Abraham Joshua Heschel on the suffering of God in Jeremiah; the pastor as scribe rather than prophet; the violence of God in the Old Testament and what it means to call it recovery; and justice as the "willingness to be inconvenienced." Brueggemann closes with Psalm 73: " Whom have I in heaven, and who do I desire on Earth but you?"
Walter Brueggemann was the McPheeters Professor Emeritus of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary.
Episode Highlights
A Scholar for the Church: "It took me a while to figure out that I wanted to be a scholar for the church and not for the academy … you wanna maintain your credibility in the academy, but it's not where you live."
On the Old Testament: "It's so Jewish, and Jewishness means that it's conflicted and multi-vocal and multilayered and complex, and that's the nature of the text, and I think that's the nature of the God who indwells the text."
The Everlasting Text: "It is an old text, but I always said to my students, it reads like it was written yesterday … it is an old text that refuses to stay old."
On Subversiveness: "Art is inherently subversive because it wants to show us reality in a way that we have never before seen it … what we always wanna do with art or with the Bible is that we wanna cram it into the categories of the familiar."
On Unfinishedness: "This is a God who stays faithful in the unfinishedness … in some ways, God isn't finished becoming God yet. So there is more light to break forth yet in our midst."
On Fixing Everything: "Our society is about to forget what it means to be human in a technological, capitalist environment … The dominant value system of our society believes that everything can be fixed."
Justice as Inconvenience: "I don't mind dying for Christ, but I don't wanna be inconvenienced … so much of justice work is just being inconvenienced."
About Walter Brueggemann
Walter Brueggemann (1933–2025) was among the most widely read Old Testament scholars of the past century, author of more than one hundred books, including The Prophetic Imagination and Theology of the Old Testament. Born in Tilden, Nebraska, to a German Evangelical pastor, he studied at Elmhurst College, Eden Theological Seminary, Union Theological Seminary, and Saint Louis University. He taught at Eden from 1961 to 1986 and at Columbia Theological Seminary from 1986 until his retirement in 2003, holding the William Marcellus McPheeters chair in Old Testament. His final book, God of All Promises, was published posthumously in 2026.
Helpful Links and Resources
Walter Brueggemann's official website: https://www.walterbrueggemann.com/
In memoriam and Celebration of Life service webpage: https://www.walterbrueggemann.com/2025/06/05/in-memory/
Brueggemann on X: https://twitter.com/waltbrueggemann
The Prophetic Imagination, 40th Anniversary Edition, Fortress Press: https://www.fortresspress.com/store/product/9781506449302/The-Prophetic-Imagination
Show Notes
In memoriam: Walter Brueggemann, 1933–2025; died June 5, 2025 at 92
Recorded at the 2015 Fuller Forum: "Justice, Grace, and Law in the Mission of God"
A rural pastor father, plain in the pulpit and unmistakable in his passion
Doctoral study at Union under James Muilenburg, a close friend of Abraham Joshua Heschel
Choosing the church over the academy, and what that vocational choice cost
Historical criticism as necessary but never sufficient
Multivocal Scripture
The Old Testament's Jewishness as conflict, layering, complexity
An ancient text that reads like it was written yesterday
Biblical exegesis in longhand
Micah 4: beating swords into plowshares
Ecumenism that doesn't coerce
Particularity over universal generalization; the scandal of incarnation
Heschel on the pathos of God
Jeremiah 8 and 9:  "Oh, that I had bigger tear ducts because I must cry more than my eyes will permit me."
Why aiming at a doctrinal or moral outcome turns interpretation coercive
Wendell Berry, and the discovery that combinations of words do things
Art as a refusal of the familiar
Unfinishedness
Congregations that want closure, and the anxiety of leaving things open
Biblical literacy
The violence of God read as recovery rather than projection
Justice as planned inconvenience: meetings, showing up, critical mass
Psalm 73, and coming to oneself in a world of commodity
Why the pastoral task feels urgent in a society sure everything can be fixed
#WalterBrueggemann #PropheticImagination #OldTestament #Conversing #MarkLabberton #Preaching #Theology
Production Credits
Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment magazine and Fuller Seminary.