Permanent Questions: Celebrating Ten Years of Conversing, with David Brooks
Conversing with Mark Labberton
Release Date: 10/06/2026
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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...
info_outline
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_outlineWhat 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 at Yale’s Jackson School of Global Affairs. He is also the host of a brand-new podcast, The Permanent Questions.
In this episode, Mark and David wrestle with what asking questions actually does to a person and discuss the styles of great interviewers, why schools seem to train curiosity out of children, the human urge to control, how AI hollows us out and dehumanizes the people around us, and what moral formation looks like in a classroom—and a podcast.
Episode Highlights
-
“I felt over that time that the problems in our life were pre-political. They were in our culture. They’re in our spiritual core.”
-
“I’ve asked millions of people millions of questions. How many times has anybody ever said, ‘None of your damn business’? And the answer is zero. No one has ever said that to me.”
-
“My style has always been student. Teach me … I just treat people as teachers who can tell me something I don’t know … People like to be treated as sages, it turns out, including me.”
-
“One of the dumbest pieces of advice we give to people is to come up with your own values. Come up with your own philosophy of life. Unless your name is Aristotle, you probably can’t do that.”
-
“If there were settled answers to these biggest questions, we could just read one book and it would be over.”
-
On AI: “For those who like to think, we will use it to think more. … The rest of us will use it to think less.”
-
“The problem is that as we think more highly of AI, we think less highly of humans.”
-
“Morality is about love.”
About David Brooks
David Brooks is a writer at The Atlantic, a presidential fellow at Yale’s Jackson School of Global Affairs, and the host of the weekly video podcast The Permanent Questions. He spent twenty-two years as a columnist at The New York Times and has long been a commentator on PBS NewsHour. His books include The Road to Character, The Second Mountain, and How to Know a Person. His first real job in journalism was as a police reporter for the City News Bureau of Chicago.
Helpful Links and Resources
-
The Permanent Questions podcast: https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/the-permanent-questions
-
David Brooks at The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/author/david-brooks
-
How to Know a Person, David Brooks’s 2023 book, Penguin Random House: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/652822/how-to-know-a-person-by-david-brooks
-
Comment magazine’s fall 2026 issue on control, built around Hartmut Rosa’s thought: https://comment.org/product/the-paradoxes-of-control-44-3-fall-2026
-
Hartmut Rosa’s The Uncontrollability of the World, reviewed in the Los Angeles Review of Books: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/control-everything-on-hartmut-rosas-the-uncontrollability-of-the-world
Show Notes
-
Ten years of Conversing and thanks to those behind it
-
A new podcast: The Permanent Questions
-
Hosting is harder than expected; twenty-five pages of notes
-
Meghan Sullivan’s “God and the Good Life” course at Notre Dame
-
Confessional writing assignment that moved bereaved families
-
Leaving the Times; problems that are pre-political, rooted in culture and the spiritual core
-
The Great Conversation
-
Belonging versus autonomy, spirit versus mind, equality versus achievement
-
Police reporting in Chicago, asking questions on the worst day
-
Questions as generosity and an act of seeing
-
Genesis: the two opening questions, self-examination and communion
-
Interviewing styles: transaction, seduction, charm, and the student
-
Why permanent questions stay unsettled: souls, moderation versus speed
-
The garden of Eden: Eve, the tree, and the limits of curiosity
-
Who defines urgency, and which question is most urgent now
-
Resonance, control, and the fading of love in American life
-
Declining marriage, fertility, observance, and patriotism
-
Questions per hour: toddlers, first graders, fifth graders
-
The scale story: experimenting versus covering content
-
Frankenstein versus Faust: Will AI kill us or hollow us out?
-
Skills lost: writing, radiology, navigating Anaheim freeways
-
Anthropomorphizing bots and devaluing human workers
-
Moral reasoning among AI agents: pure consequentialism, no love
-
Moral gestures versus real change: reading scores in Mississippi and California
-
Two civil rights movements: one with no concept of sin, one prophetic
-
Nonviolence as a strategy for justice
-
Moral formation in the classroom: exemplars, traditions, and the teacher herself
-
Regret and risk, and what hospice workers hear when people are at the end of their lives
-
Why young people are the heroes of the story
#ConversingPodcast #DavidBrooks #ThePermanentQuestions #Curiosity #AI #Humanity #Resonance #MoralFormation #FaithAndCulture #GreatConversation #Humanities