What's Happening in America?, with David Brooks
Conversing with Mark Labberton
Release Date: 06/30/2026
Spiritual Formation at Global Scale, with Gary Haugen and Kevin Jenkins
Conversing with Mark Labberton
How can a Christian humanitarian organization keep Christ at the center of its mission while working in the world’s most difficult places, with thousands of staff spread across dozens of countries and cultures? Gary Haugen, founder and CEO of International Justice Mission, and Kevin Jenkins, former president and CEO of World Vision International, both understand their organizations to be foundationally Christian. But even in ministries where you would expect spiritual formation to be at the center, it takes work to help large global teams live up to their mission. Speaking with Mark...
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Permanent Questions: Celebrating Ten Years of Conversing, with David Brooks
Conversing with Mark Labberton
What if the deepest problems in American life were pre-political? It’s often said that “culture is upstream from politics”—meaning that what we see in political news, speeches, ads, debates, and elections is symptomatic of a deeper cause. The conflicts, troubles, injustices, and sufferings that many people experience as political are more likely rooted in moral and spiritual crises. This week’s episode marks ten years of Conversing, which launched on October 8, 2016. To celebrate, Mark Labberton is joined by David Brooks, a staff writer at The Atlantic and presidential fellow...
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A Ukrainian Pastor on Faith, Hope, and the Terror of War, with Fyodor Raichynets
Conversing with Mark Labberton
War has wracked Ukraine for 1,678 days—outlasting both World Wars. In this conversation with Mark Labberton, Fyodor Raichynets—a theologian at Ukrainian Evangelical Theological Seminary, pastor of a church in Bucha, and a military chaplain serving on the front lines in Kyiv—explains what it is like to be under near-constant drone and ballistic attack and how that has affected his faith, memory, and experience of time. War has reshaped the way he loves, forgives, and serves; it has induced a fear even to hope. Together, they discuss trauma as a national condition and the temptation...
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Attention, Agency, and Power, with David French
Conversing with Mark Labberton
In a country splitting apart over so much, three words point toward a better way to live: attention, agency, and power. David French returns to Conversing to take up all three. A New York Times opinion writer since January 2023, French writes from a conservative theological background about law, culture, religion, and armed conflict, and has found himself writing directly into the middle of divided hostilities. French comments on how attention, agency, and power took shape in him, and how each gets distorted by partisan fundamentalisms (on both the right and left) built to shut conversation...
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Reclaiming Civic Agency, with Michael Wear
Conversing with Mark Labberton
Underneath all the political polarization, rage-baiting, punditry, and aggression, there is a crisis of civic agency. American citizens feel politically disempowered and undermined. And the effect, over time, will be that we lose our ability to self-govern. What is needed is a path between belligerence and withdrawal. In this episode, Michael Wear (Center for Christianity and Public Life, author of The Spirit of Our Politics) joins Mark Labberton to discuss provocation and political effectiveness; the value of gentleness in public life; concrete signs of hope in local political action; the...
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Loud Justice, with Sharon Cohn Wu
Conversing with Mark Labberton
“It is not just that God has a heart for justice,” says Sharon Cohn Wu (International Justice Mission), “it is that it is inextricably his character and cannot be otherwise, and that it is so perfectly married with mercy and grace that we somehow survive.” Sharon Cohn Wu has served for more than twenty years with IJM, where she is now regional president of North America. A lawyer (JD, Harvard Law), she has spent her career calling for “loud justice”—that is, visible, swift, community-wide accountability—using the criminal justice system and political will to help IJM achieve...
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Win or Lose, Run for Something, with Jeanelle Austin
Conversing with Mark Labberton
In February 2026, Jeanelle Austin filed for Minnesota Senate District 62. She started canvassing her district during a polar vortex, and persisted through triple-digit summer heat. And in August she lost in the Democratic Primary. In this episode, she sits down with Mark Labberton to reflect on what this experience has taught her about power, democracy, and what citizenship and neighbor-love means in the South Minneapolis neighborhood where she grew up. The executive director of Rise & Remember—the nonprofit that preserves the memorial at George Floyd Square—Austin followed a...
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Women, Misogyny, and the Bible, with Beth Moore
Conversing with Mark Labberton
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 the months following her viral open letter, “A Letter to My Brothers.” Almost 10 years later, debates over women in leadership and whether women are free to use their full gifts in the full...
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The Human Heart, with David Anderson
Conversing with Mark Labberton
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 10 gallons per minute!) In this episode, Mark Labberton discusses matters of the heart with his close friend Dr. David Anderson, a cardiologist of four decades who trained at Johns Hopkins and helped launch one of the first...
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The God of the Unfinished, with Walter Brueggemann
Conversing with Mark Labberton
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 conversation Mark Labberton hosted with Brueggemann at Fuller Seminary for the 2015 Fuller Forum “Justice, Grace, and Law in the Mission of God.” Brueggemann was an Old Testament scholar for...
info_outlineAs 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 Trump's second term and all the events that have unfolded since.
Whether you come to the 250th celebrating our national life, or questioning our national life; whether you're in support of what's happening currently in America, or whether you're overwhelmed by so much that you wish was different, may we give thanks.
Thanks be to God for the place that we get to live, even as it's a place that is struggling to reach its ideals, and may we continue to pray and seek its welfare, its justice, its purpose, its fairness, and its equity.
In this episode, Mark Labberton welcomes David Brooks (The Atlantic, formerly of The New York Times) for reflections about the 2024 General Election, the state of American politics, and how we got here.
Together they discuss the multi-generational class divide; sources of alienation and distrust; how loss of faith and meaning influences political life; intellectual virtues of courage, firmness, humility, and flexibility; what it means to be a Republican in exile; the capacity for self-awareness and self-critique; and much more.
Episode Highlights
“In my opinion, Donald Trump is the wrong answer to the right question.”
”The flow of status and respect in this country has gone to people with elite credentials.”
”If you tell 51% of the country ‘Your voices don't matter,’ people are going to get upset.”
”Jesus was more a badass revolutionary than an Oxford don.”
”The world just loves a human being that's trying to act like Jesus.”
Helpful Links and Resources
"Confessions of a Republican Exile" (The Atlantic): https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/10/trumpism-republican-party-exile-david-brooks/680243/
How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen, by David Brooks: https://www.amazon.com/How-Know-Person-Seeing-Others/dp/059323006X
My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer, by Christian Wiman: https://www.amazon.com/My-Bright-Abyss-Meditation-Believer/dp/0374534373
David Brooks's current writing at The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/author/david-brooks/
Brooks and Capehart, PBS NewsHour: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/tag/brooks-and-capehart
About David Brooks
David Brooks is staff writer for The Atlantic and is Presidential Senior Fellow at Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs. Prior to that he wrote for The New York Times for 22 years*.* He is author of How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen; The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life; Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There; The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement, and is founder of Weave: The Social Fabric Project.
Show Notes
- A spiritual or emotional crisis we’re working out in American politics
- Should we blame inflation and economic factors? (Biden’s Covid-19 overstimulation)
- Class divide is a generational thing
- High-school-educated voters are increasingly alienated from the Democratic Party
- Alienation and distrust is a multi-decade process
- Loss of Faith, Loss of Meaning, and the “Death of God”
- An exiled Republican
- “Confessions of a Republican Exile” (via The Atlantic): ”A longtime conservative, alienated by Trumpism, tries to come to terms with life on the moderate edge of the Democratic Party.”
- “I’m a Whig.” (”Abraham Lincoln was a Whig.”)
- Edmund Burke and epistemological modesty—”don’t revolutionize something you don’t understand.”
- You should operate on society in the way you operate on your father, with care.
- Alexander Hamilton
- Whig tradition is unrepresented in contemporary American politics
- How David Brooks waffles between Democrat and Republican
- Isaiah Berlin: “At the rightward edge of the leftward tendency.”
- “The capacity for self-critique”
- Matt Yglesias
- Humble, introspective, and “how did we get so out of touch?”
- Racism and sexism are not what’s driving Trump voters
- “In my opinion, Donald Trump is the wrong answer to the right question.”
- Mark Noll and America’s use of the Bible: un-self-aware and un-self-critical
- Why is there more capacity for self-critique on the Democratic side?
- Jonathan Rauch and “Epistemic Regime”: includes media, universities, scientific research, review process, etc.
- “There’s still a core of people who believe ‘if the evidence says x, you should say y.’”
- “The greatest victory in the history of the world.”
- Intellectual Virtues: Courage, Firmness, Flexibility
- “Reality is constantly going to surprise you.”
- 1980s Republicanism was more intellectually sophisticated
- Conservative book publishing
- *Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Change* by Jonah Goldberg
- How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen by David Brooks
- “The Stacking Stereotype”
- “A redistribution of respect” (away from large swaths of America and to elites)
- “The flow of status and respect in this country has gone to people with elite credentials.”
- “… almost no Trump supporters.”
- “If you tell 51% of the country ‘Your voices don’t matter,’ people are going to get upset.”
- America changing beneath us
- High level of spiritual and moral authority and low level of intellectual confidence
- The moral teaching of the New Testament
- “People are unitary wholes.”
- “I became a Christian around 2013.”
- “Jesus was more a badass revolutionary than an Oxford don.”
- C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Christianity
- “What it’s like to be in the claustrophobic mind of a narcissist.”
- Aggression: a joyless way to see the faith
- What is needed?
- “I was a 50-year-old atheist.”
- Christian Wiman (My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer): materialistic categories couldn’t explain the world
- “If they made me pope of the evangelicals, which is a job that makes me shudder…”
- “Be not afraid.”
- “The world just loves a human being that’s trying to act like Jesus.”
- David Brooks’s teaching at Yale
- The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist by Dorothy Day
#Conversing #DavidBrooks #MarkLabberton #FaithAndPolitics #AmericanPolitics #HowToKnowAPerson #ChristianHumanism #Election2024
Production Credits
Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment magazine and Fuller Seminary.