In today’s episode, our speakers explore some core questions about what it means to be human: What are we made for? What is the role of suffering in our lives? And is there something beyond ourselves that can give us purpose?
You’ll hear from Rowan Williams, a theologian and the former Archbishop of Canterbury, and Chigozie Obioma, a novelist and professor at the University of Georgia. Their conversation is moderated by Mia Chung-Yee, a former concert pianist and executive director of the Octet Collaborative at MIT. In this discussion, both speakers share how their Christian faith impacts their view of what it means to be human, and what it means to live “fully alive” in a dehumanizing world.
This forum was put on in partnership with the Duke Initiative on Theology and the Arts and was held at the Carolina Theater of Durham in September 2025.
Saint Augustine famously said in his Confessions, "I became a question to myself." Part of his conversion is finding himself a problem, a puzzle. Not a puzzle that has to be solved and dismantled rationally, but just an understanding that I haven't gotten to the bottom of myself.
Discovering the gospel as "new"— it seems to me that's almost how the Bible itself works. The things people think are familiar have to be uncovered as strange to be discovered all over again.
God doesn't want us to be happy. God surely wants joy for us. But joy is something rather different from happiness. Joy is something which can rumble along underneath, while on the surface there's any amount of struggle and tension.
The interaction between your desire and an obstacle is what we call conflict, which is resolved hopefully in some sort of epiphany or change. That is the skeletal sketch of a story. But in Christian faith, God demands that to be fully alive, your desire has to be suppressed in service to a higher purpose.
Whether we're looking at another human being or the material world we live in, it's God's before it's mine. And therefore my attitude towards it is both grateful appreciation of a gift, and the appreciation of a mystery.
