I Don't Know What Faith Means Anymore: Terminal Illness, Poetic Faith, and Theological Doubt / Miroslav Volf and Christian Wiman
For the Life of the World / Yale Center for Faith & CultureShow Notes
For twenty years, Christian Wiman has lived with a rare, incurable cancer. In the fall of 2022, during a stretch when the illness was especially bad, he wrote to his friend and Yale colleague Miroslav Volf: “I don’t know what faith means anymore. I’m a 56-year-old with a pile of books behind me and an experimental bone marrow transplant ahead of me, and I don’t know what faith means.” That letter became the seed of an extended correspondence between the poet and the theologian, now published as *Glimmerings: Letters on Faith between a Poet and a Theologian*.
In this special collaboration with Arc Magazine, editor Mark Oppenheimer sits down with Volf and Wiman to unpack the letters that grew out of their long friendship and years of walking together through New Haven.
They discuss what it means to love God, why doubt and absence might be constitutive elements of faith and presence rather than its opposite, and how a terminal diagnosis changed what each of them was willing to say and how freely they said it. They also trace the thinkers who shaped their thinking along the way, from Simone Weil’s account of attention to Etty Hillesum’s wartime writing, to Abraham Joshua Heschel’s theology of the prophets, and they wrestle openly with where their understandings of Jesus Christ converge and diverge.
Along the way, Wiman reflects on writing from a hospital room at Massachusetts General, on discovering that his fear was never death itself but the fear of dying without God, and on why grief, not fear, is what remains even after that fear falls away.
Episode Highlights
- I don’t know what faith means anymore. I’m a 56-year-old with a pile of books behind me and an experimental bone marrow transplant ahead of me, and I don’t know what faith means. - I sometimes find it hard to think what it means to love God. I don’t know how to love God. - Faith is what matters. Belief seems to me a matter of the institution and ascending to creeds and things like that. - I think most of my theological thinking is existentially motivated. It’s motivated by the kind of inner logic of the trust in which I’m involved. - Most of the books that I wrote, I’ve written for myself. I’m one of those writers who doesn’t have an audience. - There is grace in my life if I can just keep my eyes open enough to see it. - His mistake in some ways lets him see that the world is right, that there’s a rightness to the world. - What becomes clear is one’s longing for God. Everything is stripped away and very little else seems to matter. - What I want most in my life is the presence of God. And I fear dying without that. Just being alone at the moment of death. - I was worried that he won’t have God in that situation of need because attention might be lacking.
About Miroslav Volf and Christian Wiman
Miroslav Volf is the Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School and founding director of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. He is the author of Exclusion and Embrace, the NYT bestseller Life Worth Living (with Ryan McAnnally-Linz and Matt Croasmun), The Cost of Ambition, and more than twenty other books.
Christian Wiman is the Clement-Muehl Professor of Communication Arts at Yale Divinity School. He has written and edited numerous volumes of poetry. He has lived with a rare blood cancer, Waldenström macroglobulinemia, for more than twenty years, an experience he wrote about in his memoirs *My Bright Abyss* and *Zero at the Bone.*
Helpful Links and Resources
- Glimmerings: Letters on Faith between a Poet and a Theologian, the book discussed in this episode: https://bookshop.org/p/books/glimmerings-letters-on-faith-between-a-poet-and-a-theologian-christian-wiman/1a13ad79a59080d1 - Miroslav Volf, faculty bio at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/people/miroslav-volf - Christian Wiman, faculty bio at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/people/christian-wiman - Arc: Religion, Politics, Et Cetera,
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