Miroslav Volf is back, and this time he brought his friend — poet and theologian Christian Wiman — and their book Glimmerings, collection of letters exchanged over years of friendship that moves from the problem of religious language to the hiddenness of God to what it means to trust without being able to specify what you’re trusting toward. It’s one of the more unusual and quietly devastating books I’ve read in a while, and the conversation was every bit as good. In it we discuss…

The origin of their friendship and the letter exchange that became Glimmerings
Why big words like faith, grace, and redemption slip free from meaning — and why that’s a theological problem, not just a poetic one
Attention, divine agency, and the debate between active receptivity and God’s ontological priority
Christian writing letters from a hospital room during an experimental bone marrow transplant — and what he felt, and didn’t feel, about God’s presence
The hiddenness of God versus Christ hidden in the faces of non-Christian friends
The cross, the resurrection, and why one is visceral and the other remains mostly imagination
The risk of faith, William James’s mountain climber, and why Wallace Stevens kept pointing toward a further leap
The “masters of suspicion” and why intellectual culture rewards doubt more than hope
The hard sayings of Jesus — the passages that act like shards of glass, and what it means to park them rather than tame them
Where two or three are gathered — and whether that was always a warning about what happens at five hundred

Miroslav Volf is the Henry B. Wright Professor of Systematic Theology at Yale Divinity School and founder of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Born in Croatia and shaped by the former Yugoslavia, his theology has always been grounded in lived encounter with violence, nationalism, and the misuse of religious language.

Previous podcasts with Miroslav

Christian Wiman is a poet, essayist, and editor widely regarded as one of the most important American religious writers of his generation. He is the author of My Bright Abyss — a memoir of faith written in the shadow of a rare blood cancer diagnosis — and multiple acclaimed poetry collections. He edited Poetry magazine for a decade and now teaches at the Yale Institute for Sacred Music and Yale Divinity School.

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