In today’s episode, an English professor explores the question of meaning. What compels us to look for meaning? And, is meaning found within ourselves or outside of ourselves?
You’ll hear from Lori Branch, an English professor at the University of Iowa. In this talk, she explores why we seek meaning, how we find meaning in our relationship with others, and how her Christian faith fulfills her search for meaning.
This forum was held at Furman University in March 2024. Thank you to the forums team for making this event possible.
Christianity teaches that the highest form of relationship is love. And, in fact, Christianity teaches that God is love.
God seeking us in spite of our wandering away is called grace.
The truth — the underlying reality of existence and Christian understanding — is personal and relational, loving and non-coercive, linguistic and literary. And for all that, no less reasonable, no less universally true.
For most of us, there is a powerful connection between knowledge and belief, between seeking to know the truth and also hungering for meaning.
Literature can be and, in fact, has been for many Christians — Shakespeare, Austen, Dostoyevsky, Morrison, Erdrich — a potent and even necessary part of the perpetual reorientation that God's infinite love calls us toward. And what we call our "love of literature" often signals our love of the way it challenges us and teaches us to love.
The human experience is such that we yearn to find something lasting and true, something that speaks to our own hearts and has meaning. Meaning, however, whatever its variety, seems to demand faith.
Both empirical observation and logical, mathematical rationality are undeniably and gloriously parts of human experience and making sense of the world. But they are not the only parts.
What's amazing about the biblical account of God's love is not only that he suffers a humiliating and excruciating death on the cross, but that he does so simply out of his desire to be with us. The suffering is part of the cost of his drawing near to us as fallen, imperfect beings — all of which he is willing to endure in order to establish a relationship with all of us.
