Conversing with Mark Labberton invites listeners into transformative encounters with leaders and creators shaping our world at the intersection of Christian faith, culture, and public life.
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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…
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 ten gallons per minute!) In this…
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…
Why are we still "kicking the hornet's nest"? The last time Mark Labberton interviewed Daniel Zoughbie (UC Berkeley/UCSF) for his expertise on international diplomacy in the Middle East, there was not yet an Iran war. Regardless of your geographical distance, this war is imminently important as it escalates and impacts not just Iran but the entire Middle East and the entire world economy. "War is…
What is it that actually forms our inner reality? Our values, our perspective, our judgment, our understanding of wisdom about the issues that really matter? What difference does that make in Christian character formation? The American church consistently produces fruit that many of its own leaders either don't recognize, don't want, or disapprove of. Under- and malformed Christian people reflect…
Can technology be leveraged for the human good? Or will AI technology and its explosive expansion bring about the opposite—a culture that reduces our magnificent humanity to means for technocratic ends? "We can either create the Tower of Babel or we can rebuild the walls of the New Jerusalem." Brian Patrick Green has spent his career asking these difficult questions and seeking to apply ethical…
American history is riddled with collisions between legally defensible rulings and morally costly outcomes. Still, "the purpose of law in any society is to embody a moral framework in practice," says Yuval Levin, who joins Mark Labberton to explore the moral architecture in the foundation of the American legal system, as they review the most recent rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court has…
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:…
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…
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…
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,…
