Conversing with Mark Labberton

What if the deepest problems in American life were pre-political? It's often said that "culture is upstream from politics"—meaning that what we see in political news, speeches, ads, debates, and elections is symptomatic of a deeper cause. The conflicts, troubles, injustices, and sufferings that many people experience as political are more likely rooted in moral and spiritual crises. 
This week's episode marks ten years of Conversing, which launched on October 8, 2016. To celebrate, Mark Labberton is joined by David Brooks, a staff writer at The Atlantic and presidential fellow at Yale's Jackson School of Global Affairs. He is also the host of a brand-new podcast, The Permanent Questions.
In this episode, Mark and David wrestle with what asking questions actually does to a person and discuss the styles of great interviewers, why schools seem to train curiosity out of children, the human urge to control, how AI hollows us out and dehumanizes the people around us, and what moral formation looks like in a classroom—and a podcast.
Episode Highlights
"I felt over that time that the problems in our life were pre-political. They were in our culture. They're in our spiritual core."

"I've asked millions of people millions of questions. How many times has anybody ever said, 'None of your damn business'? And the answer is zero. No one has ever said that to me."

"My style has always been student. Teach me … I just treat people as teachers who can tell me something I don't know … People like to be treated as sages, it turns out, including me."

"One of the dumbest pieces of advice we give to people is to come up with your own values. Come up with your own philosophy of life. Unless your name is Aristotle, you probably can't do that."

"If there were settled answers to these biggest questions, we could just read one book and it would be over."

On AI: "For those who like to think, we will use it to think more. … The rest of us will use it to think less."

"The problem is that as we think more highly of AI, we think less highly of humans."

"Morality is about love."

 
About David Brooks
 
David Brooks is a writer at The Atlantic, a presidential fellow at Yale's Jackson School of Global Affairs, and the host of the weekly video podcast The Permanent Questions. He spent twenty-two years as a columnist at The New York Times and has long been a commentator on PBS NewsHour. His books include The Road to Character, The Second Mountain, and How to Know a Person. His first real job in journalism was as a police reporter for the City News Bureau of Chicago.
 
Helpful Links and Resources
 
The Permanent Questions podcast: https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/the-permanent-questions

David Brooks at The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/author/david-brooks

How to Know a Person, David Brooks's 2023 book, Penguin Random House: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/652822/how-to-know-a-person-by-david-brooks

Comment magazine's fall 2026 issue on control, built around Hartmut Rosa's thought: https://comment.org/product/the-paradoxes-of-control-44-3-fall-2026

Hartmut Rosa's The Uncontrollability of the World, reviewed in the Los Angeles Review of Books: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/control-everything-on-hartmut-rosas-the-uncontrollability-of-the-world

 
Show Notes
Ten years of Conversing and thanks to those behind it

A new podcast: The Permanent Questions

Hosting is harder than expected; twenty-five pages of notes

Meghan Sullivan's "God and the Good Life" course at Notre Dame

Confessional writing assignment that moved bereaved families

Leaving the Times; problems that are pre-political, rooted in culture and the spiritual core

The Great Conversation

Belonging versus autonomy, spirit versus mind, equality versus achievement

Police reporting in Chicago, asking questions on the worst day

Questions as generosity and an act of seeing

Genesis: the two opening questions, self-examination and communion

Interviewing styles: transaction, seduction, charm, and the student

Why permanent questions stay unsettled: souls, moderation versus speed

The garden of Eden: Eve, the tree, and the limits of curiosity

Who defines urgency, and which question is most urgent now

Resonance, control, and the fading of love in American life

Declining marriage, fertility, observance, and patriotism

Questions per hour: toddlers, first graders, fifth graders

The scale story: experimenting versus covering content

Frankenstein versus Faust: Will AI kill us or hollow us out?

Skills lost: writing, radiology, navigating Anaheim freeways

Anthropomorphizing bots and devaluing human workers

Moral reasoning among AI agents: pure consequentialism, no love

Moral gestures versus real change: reading scores in Mississippi and California

Two civil rights movements: one with no concept of sin, one prophetic

Nonviolence as a strategy for justice

Moral formation in the classroom: exemplars, traditions, and the teacher herself

Regret and risk, and what hospice workers hear when people are at the end of their lives

Why young people are the heroes of the story

#ConversingPodcast #DavidBrooks #ThePermanentQuestions #Curiosity #AI #Humanity #Resonance #MoralFormation #FaithAndCulture #GreatConversation #Humanities

War has wracked Ukraine for 1,678 days—outlasting both World Wars. In this conversation with Mark Labberton, Fyodor Raichynets—a theologian at Ukrainian Evangelical Theological Seminary, pastor of a church in Bucha, and a military chaplain serving on the front lines in Kyiv—explains what it is like to be under near-constant drone and ballistic attack and how that has affected his faith, memory, and experience of time. 
War has reshaped the way he loves, forgives, and serves; it has induced a fear even to hope. Together, they discuss trauma as a national condition and the temptation to despair when God seems not to intervene. They also consider the moral wounds soldiers carry from killing, the competing prayers of two mothers inside one congregation, and what it means to see God in the face of the needy—even when the needy include one's enemies.
Episode Highlights
"'Into your hands I commit my spirit'—and with these words on my lips I go to bed every night ... I go to bed with the thought that I may not wake up in the morning, so I just make sure that my spirit is in his hand."

"If I have something to share and there is a person that needs it, well, I would share anyway ... Probably that's what the love for the enemies is all about."

"I jokingly put it that I have this 'planophobia' in the recent years, so I'm even afraid to plan my life, but you know that you cannot do it without any planning."

"Trauma emerges in a place where you find rescue and where instead of security you find insecurity."

"I was just thinking how blessed we are that we don't know the future. And this not knowing what is ahead of us keeps us going, in fact."

"We have fear to hope, because whatever we hoped for over these four years, it just gets worse, not better."

"Those whom they have killed ... they come to them in their dreams, in their sleep, and they said that they physically sense it. They even sense it that someone is grabbing their hand."

"One wife would pray ... that God would protect her son not to be drafted. But in the same group there is a mother who asked to pray that God would protect her son on the front line. So what should we pray for?"

"War creates such a basic need ... you need water, you don't need luxury things. ... So when we see the needy people and we minister to them, that is what makes us a people of a pure heart."

About Fyodor Raichynets
Fyodor Raichynets is a theologian, pastor, and military chaplain in Kyiv, Ukraine. He heads the department of theology at Ukrainian Evangelical Theological Seminary, where he teaches leadership and biblical studies, particularly the Gospel of Matthew, and directs its master's program in transformative leadership. A former student of Miroslav Volf in Osijek, Croatia, he ministered for years across the Balkans. He pastors Bethany Church in Bucha and wrote the chapter on the pure in heart for Beatitudes and Terror: A Ukrainian Theological Response to Russian Aggression. Since the 2022 invasion, he has led relief work among Kyiv's most vulnerable, feeding the elderly and the displaced.
Helpful Links and Resources
Beatitudes and Terror: A Ukrainian Theological Response to Russian Aggression, the volume with Fyodor Raichynets's chapter on the pure in heart: https://langhamliterature.org/books/beatitudes-and-terror

Ukrainian Evangelical Theological Seminary: https://uets.edu.ua/en/about-us

Ways to support UETS relief ministry and the training of ministers: https://uets.edu.ua/en/ways-to-support

Fyodor Raichynets on Facebook, where he posts daily wartime reflections: https://www.facebook.com/fyodor.Raichynets

"A Voice from Kyiv," Raichynets's earlier conversation with Miroslav Volf: https://faith.yale.edu/media/a-voice-from-kyiv-fyodor-Raichynets

Man's Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl, referenced on who survived the camps: https://www.beacon.org/Mans-Search-for-Meaning-P602.aspx

Show Notes
Kyiv under fire

A rough night of combined ballistic and drone attack

Waking to explosions, then morning news of the aftermath

Two-tier alerts now: yellow for drones, red for ballistic strikes

Reactive drones flying higher and faster, harder to track or down

Lecturing to students while watching drone paths on a phone

A nightly prayer, and sleeping unsure of waking

"Planophobia," losing the ability to plan anything ahead of time

No place and no time that feels secure; a wearying insecurity

The abnormal becoming normal; an average day in Kyiv

War as trauma

Trauma as rescue turned insecurity

The strange grace of not knowing how long war would last

When prolonged tribulation curdles into temptation

Wrestling with why God does not simply stop one man's cruelty

The fear to hope after four years of worsening, not relief

Frontline confessions, soldiers haunted by those they killed

A Bucha church tending wives, mothers, and children of soldiers

Two mothers, one prayer group, opposite prayers over the draft

Victor Frankl on who survived the camps: Man's Search for Meaning

A theological perception of time; only the present is given

War compressing time into loving, forgiving, blessing without delay

Wisdom as God's truth and character lived in context

The pure in heart, and seeing God in the needy (Beatitudes and Terror)

Jesus in the midst of suffering, unlike the pharaohs who cause it

Adopting soldiers' families; medicine carried to a mother at the front

Serving civilians who await the Russians, love of enemies in practice

How to support relief and minister training: Ukrainian Evangelical Theological Seminary

#UkraineWar #Ukraine #Kyiv #Theology #Hope #Trauma #FaithAndWar #Beatitudes #MarkLabberton #Christianity

In a country splitting apart over so much, three words point toward a better way to live: attention, agency, and power. David French returns to Conversing to take up all three. A New York Times opinion writer since January 2023, French writes from a conservative theological background about law, culture, religion, and armed conflict, and has found himself writing directly into the middle of divided hostilities.
French comments on how attention, agency, and power took shape in him, and how each gets distorted by partisan fundamentalisms (on both the right and left) built to shut conversation down rather than open it up. He and Mark discuss the courage required to seek out the strongest version of an opposing view, the ways we extend ourselves grace we deny to everyone else,  the spiritual danger of believing you must hold power before you can do any good, and the Civil Rights Movement's commitment to "reconciliation over victory" as a promising model for Christian public life today.
Episode Highlights
"One of the things that was so damaging … was that humility was often seen as inconsistent with conviction."

"A lot of life is … embracing agency and … becoming more and more aware of the tidal forces that brought us to a particular point."

"Curiosity and openness requires courage because you're told what to think about everybody, and if you … question that, you can be thrown out of your tribe. You can lose your community."

"We must pursue justice, but when we think we have to have power to pursue justice, then we're on the road to perdition."

About David French
David French is an opinion columnist for The New York Times writing on law, faith, and politics. A graduate of Harvard Law School, he spent much of his career as a constitutional litigator and once led the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. He grew up in the Churches of Christ in Kentucky, studied at Lipscomb University—where he now teaches—and served in Iraq as a US Army judge advocate, earning a Bronze Star. With Russell Moore and Curtis Chang, he created The After Party, a curriculum for Christian political engagement. His most recent book is Divided We Fall.
Helpful Links and Resources
David French's New York Times column, where he writes on law, faith, and politics: https://www.nytimes.com/by/david-french

David French on X: https://x.com/DavidAFrench

The After Party, the Redeeming Babel curriculum for Christian political engagement French made with Russell Moore and Curtis Chang: https://redeemingbabel.org/the-after-party/free-course

Divided We Fall: America's Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation, French's book on American polarization: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250836731/dividedwefall

Habits of the Heart by Robert Bellah, a study of American individualism: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520254190/habits-of-the-heart-with-a-new-preface

Show Notes
Three words to guide public life: attention, agency, power

A born contrarian shaped by a fundamentalism: "collectively contrarian" yet "individually very conformist"

Harvard Law exposed how "contingent and place-based my own beliefs are"; experiencing a pull toward "the story behind the story"

Attention as discipline—seeking "the best expression of opposing views," never the other side's worst

Partisans slander rather than engage: "language designed to shut off conversation, not to invite it"

Reading the Bible cover to cover in sixth grade, arriving at the lesson that "we're way too dogmatic about stuff"

How to embody a faith that can hold conviction and humility side by side

Agency according to Gandalf: "It's not up to us to determine the times in which we live," only how we respond

Curiosity requires courage, since dissent threatens loss of community

Power's real peril—"the spiritually corrupting power of power" and fooling yourself into virtue

The undermining of justice by seeking to hold and maintain power; examples in Rosa Parks and Jim Crow segregation / Jesus and the Roman Empire

Christian nationalism as "for the nation to be good, Christians must rule"

Restoring the Civil Rights Movement's commitment to the way of Jesus: reconciliation, not victory

#DavidFrench #Conversing #FaithAndPolitics #ChristianNationalism #Attention #Agency #Power #Curiosity #CivilRights

Underneath all the political polarization, rage-baiting, punditry, and aggression, there is a crisis of civic agency. American citizens feel politically disempowered and undermined. And the effect, over time, will be that we lose our ability to self-govern. What is needed is a path between belligerence and withdrawal.
In this episode, Michael Wear (Center for Christianity and Public Life, author of The Spirit of Our Politics) joins Mark Labberton to discuss provocation and political effectiveness; the value of gentleness in public life; concrete signs of hope in local political action; the open horizon of the 2028 primaries; and what it would take to reset America's political "agency quotient."
Episode Highlights
"Checks and balances is just a longer way of saying agency."
"I think gentleness is profoundly underappreciated. I think that people are on guard for being taken advantage of, for being imposed upon, for being manipulated, for being used."
"In parenting and in politics … we could really, especially in the moment, delude ourselves into thinking that to get a reaction and to be effective are synonymous."
"Christians have an alternative imagination that our politics desperately needs, and we're actually robbing the public of that."
"We continue down this crisis of … both a real and perceived lack of agency, in such a way that the project of self governance is made incoherent."
About Michael Wear
Michael Wear is the founder, president, and CEO of the Center for Christianity and Public Life, a nonpartisan Washington nonprofit that contends for the credibility of Christian resources in public life, for the public good. He directed faith outreach for President Obama's 2012 re-election campaign and served in the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, among the youngest White House staffers in modern history. He is the author of The Spirit of Our Politics and Reclaiming Hope, and co-author of Compassion and Conviction.
Helpful Links and Resources
Michael Wear's website, with his writing, speaking, and social channels: https://www.michaelwear.com/
The Spirit of Our Politics, Wear's most recent book: https://www.michaelwear.com/spirit-of-our-politics
Reclaiming Hope, Wear's first book: https://www.michaelwear.com/reclaiming-hope
The Center for Christianity and Public Life: https://www.ccpubliclife.org/
"Politics should not just happen to you": https://theheartofthepublic.substack.com/p/politics-should-not-just-happen-to
For the Good of the Public Summit, October 5–7, 2026, Washington, DC: https://www.ccpubliclife.org/summit
Settled, the Minnesota nonprofit building church-based Sacred Settlements: https://www.settled.org/
Civic Trust, Matt Harder's participatory budgeting organization: https://www.civictrust.us/
Michael Wear on X: https://twitter.com/MichaelRWear
Show Notes
Contending for the credibility of Christian resources in public life
CCPL turns four this October; the For the Good of the Public summit, Oct 5–7 in DC
Why pairing a think tank with intensive leadership formation is personally sustaining, not just strategic
Gentleness as an underrated public virtue; bodies relaxing once people sense they won't be imposed upon
Parker Palmer on a politics made of brokenhearted people
Getting a reaction versus being effective; the diminishing returns of provocation, until the mission's telos shifts unnamed
Jesus writing in the sand as an interruption at a moment primed for violence
Dallas Willard on formation: not the practices but who you are, on the spot
Pope Leo fielding American-frame questions and answering in ways that break the frame's logic
The pastor who mistook refreshing RealClearPolitics five times a day for civic involvement
A caution against a posture toward the church more dour than reality calls for
Settled's church-hosted Sacred Settlements in Minnesota, built on bipartisan zoning reform: https://www.settled.org/
Leaving the Obama White House more hopeful than arriving
A decade that stripped ordinary agency: contested elections, COVID isolation, AGI moguls, social media reversals
San Francisco AI planning, where "top-down imposition" meant opposite things to technologists and theologians
Congress's dereliction—Yuval Levin's institutionalism, plus the Chevron and unitary-executive critiques
Abdication that disempowers not just 435 House members but the voters who sent them
East-West contrast: California's robber-baron drive and agency reserved for the wealthiest
Resetting the agency quotient; participatory budgeting via Civic Trust: https://www.civictrust.us/
Open 2028 primaries in both parties as a possible reopening of the horizon
Christian agency surrendered through alignment versus exercised through accountable loyalty
Checks and balances as another name for agency
#CivicAgency #SpiritOfOurPolitics #FaithAndPolitics #Gentleness #ParticipatoryBudgeting #CivicRenewal #ChristianityAndPublicLife #MichaelWear
Production Credits
Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment magazine and Fuller Seminary.

"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.