·S11 E120

Words Against Despair with Christian Wiman

August 12

32 mins

Episode Description

Our Summer 2025 series, Beside Still Waters, focuses on the places where creativity brings life into a world fatigued by brokenness and division. From jazz to Jane Austen and in between, this season we’ll focus on the ways literature and the arts can refresh and challenge our inner lives—and connect us with the Creator of the good, the true, and the beautiful.

Our guest this episode is the poet Christian Wiman, a master of the written – and spoken – word. After long wandering, he returned to the Christian faith in which he’d been raised, in part because of a terminal cancer diagnosis – one he has now long outlived. Both before and after his diagnosis, and his return to faith, his experience of despair has fueled his powerful poetry. In grappling with it, Christian uses words in ways that are a tonic against despair.

“I deal with despair because…I don’t know how not to, and it would be an evasion not to. And I think if you don’t feel it, then you’re not paying attention.”

This podcast is drawn from an online conversation from 2024. We hope this conversation will resonate with you as you explore the good, the true, and the beautiful in your own corner of creation.

If it does, please consider joining the Trinity Forum community as a member, at ttf.org. You can find the full video of this conversation there too. And while you’re here, please subscribe to this podcast on your chosen platform.

Authors and books mentioned in the conversation:

Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair, by Christian Wiman

Marilynne Robinson

Danielle Chapman

William Bronk

William Wordsworth

Every Riven Thing, by Christian Wiman

My Bright Abyss: Meditations of a Modern Believer, by Christian Wiman

Prayer, by Carol Ann Duffy

The Bible and Poetry, by Michael Edwards

Augustine of Hippo

Bittersweet, by George Herbert