Were we led all this way for birth or death?: Advent 2022

In the last episode of season three, Grace talks with Dr. Michael Lamb on the great African bishop and theologian, St. Augustine of Hippo, and the virtue of hope.  Michael Lamb is the F. M. Kirby Foundation Chair of Leadership and Character, Executive Director of the Program for Leadership and Character, and Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities at Wake Forest University. He is also a Research Fellow with the Oxford Character Project. He holds a Ph.D. in politics from Princeton University, a B.A. in political science from Rhodes College, and a second B.A. in philosophy and theology from the University of Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. An award-winning teacher, his research and teaching focus on leadership, character, and the role of virtues in public life. He is the author of A Commonwealth of Hope: Augustine’s Political Thought (2022), which offers a bold new interpretation of Augustine’s virtue of hope and its relevance for politics. His work has been published in leading academic journals across numerous disciplines. With the close of this season, if you'd like to support this podcast, please leave a review, share with a friend, or go to https://www.buymeacoffee.com/gracehamman to help keep OBWG ad-free and with a working microphone and website! Thank you for listening this season!

It's a magical confluence of Mother's Day week, Grace's actual birthday, and the 650th anniversary of Julian's experience with God, so Grace had to mark it in a special way herself. Yes, that's right, Grace is her own guest this week, and she even answers her own get-to-know you literary questions. The main star of the show, however, is the wondrous fourteenth-century contemplative writer, Julian of Norwich, and her beautiful vision of Christ as our Mother. Preorder Jesus Through Medieval Eyes: Amazon Barnes & Noble Thriftbooks IndieBound  

Normally, obviously, Grace talks about old books. But every now and then, OBWG presents an episode on old art. Because encountering old art is just as much about reading, interpretation, and attention as reading old books is! Today, Grace is delighted to welcome Dr. Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt as a guest. Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt (Ph.D., Washington University in St. Louis) is an associate professor of art and art history at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia and author of Redeeming Vision: A Christian Guide to Looking at and Learning from Art. As a biracial Japanese-white woman, she has navigated the joys and tensions of a hybrid identity. Dr. Weichbrodt has published on topics ranging from contemporary Black photographers to the patronage of Hawaiian landscape paintings to documentary photographs of Japanese Americans during World War II. She also enjoys writing for general audiences on the intersection of art history, politics, and pop culture. An artwork we discuss, Margaretha Haverman's A Vase of Flowers: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436634  

In this episode, Grace chats with Dr. Scott Newstok on William Shakespeare (whose birthday is this week!) and the principles of a renaissance education.  Scott Newstok is Professor of English and founding director of the Pearce Shakespeare Endowment at Rhodes College. A parent and an award-winning teacher, he is the author of How to Think Like Shakespeare, as well as Quoting Death in Early Modern England, and the editor of several other books, including a forthcoming edition of Michel de Montaigne’s educational writings. 

This year’s Old Books with Grace Lent series, called “A Book that Changed Me,” offers four different conversations with guests on a book of their choice that changed them, made them think deeply about transformation, brought them closer to truth. Books can be mirrors—they can help us to consider ourselves in new light. Books invite us into conversation and reflection we would not have known to participate in without their guidance. Each of the guests in this series has chosen a book that invited them into reflection, remembrance, and self-knowledge. Each conversation is quite different—some more personal, others less—and the books span from the Middle Ages to the 1960s. The last guest of the series is Claude Atcho, who has chosen to talk about the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray by the witty, wonderful Oscar Wilde.  Claude Atcho resides in Charlottesville, VA where he lives with his family, serves as a pastor of Church of the Resurrection, and enjoys coaching his kids in basketball and soccer. In addition to his preaching and pastoral work, Claude speaks and writes about literature, film, music, and culture from a theological perspective. His writing has been featured at The Witness: A Black Christian Collective, Think Christian, and Christ and Pop Culture. His writing often lives at the intersection of theology, culture, and African American experience. He is the author of Reading Black Books: How African American Literature Can Make Our Faith More Whole and Just.

Welcome to the third episode of the Lent series on Old Books with Grace, exploring literature, self-knowledge, and transformation. In today’s A Book that Changed Me, Grace chats with Kaitlyn Schiess about Madeleine L’Engle’s marvelous young adult novel, A Wrinkle in Time. Kaitlyn Schiess is the author of The Ballot and the Bible: How Scripture has been Used and Abused in American Politics and Where We Go from Here (Brazos, 2023) and The Liturgy of Politics: Spiritual Formation for the Sake of Our Neighbor (IVP, 2020). Her writing has appeared at Christianity Today, The New York Times, Christ and Pop Culture, RELEVANT, and Sojourner. She has a ThM in systematic theology from Dallas Theological Seminary and is currently a doctoral student in political theology at Duke Divinity School. 

Welcome to the second offering in this year's Old Books with Grace Lent series. “A Book that Changed Me” offers four different conversations with guests on a book of their choice that changed them, made them think deeply about transformation, brought them closer to truth. Today, Jason Baxter is the special guest, and Dante's Inferno is the special book.  Jason Baxter is a college professor, speaker, and author of five books, including A Beginner's Guide to Dante's  Comedy and, most recently, The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis. He now lives in South Bend, where he is teaching great books at Notre Dame.

Welcome to the first offering in this year's Old Books with Grace Lent series. “A Book that Changed Me” offers four different conversations with guests on a book of their choice that changed them, made them think deeply about transformation, brought them closer to truth. Today, Joy Clarkson is the special guest, and George Eliot's Silas Marner is the special book.  Dr. Joy Clarkson is the author of Aggressively Happy: A Realist’s Guide to Believing in the Goodness of Life, and a research associate in theology and literature at King’s College, London. She received her doctorate in theology from St Andrews University, where she researched the ways we can use art to prepare ourselves for a good death. She hosts a podcast, Speaking with Joy, and is the Books & Culture editor at Plough Quarterly.

Have you heard of the midcentury fiction writer, Elizabeth Goudge, author of classics like The Little White Horse or The Scent of Water? Julie Witmer, founder of the Elizabeth Goudge Book Club, comes on Old Books with Grace to talk about Goudge's life and writings, from her talent for writing children, to her love for her characters, to her mischaracterization as a romance writer!

Grace welcomes Dr. Anthony Domestico, author of Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period and chair of the literature department at Purchase SUNY, to Old Books with Grace today to chat about modernist poetry including my favorite twentieth-century poet, T.S. Eliot. Warning: this episode is slightly longer than usual episodes because Grace lost track of time in her excitement about Eliot!