SAR Snapshot: A Recent Conversation With Interfaith America

My friend and collaborator Eboo Patel engages me in a deeply personal and thoughtful interview

One of the gifts of speaking to broad and diverse audiences is the opportunity to participate in a number of different interviews and podcasts. I always enjoy engaging with good questions and smart prompts.

This past month, Interfaith America released an episode of Eboo Patel’s podcast in which he interviews me. Perhaps because Eboo is both a good friend and an outsider to my faith tradition, he manages to ask especially probing and insightful questions. This was a rich conversation, and I recommend it to anyone who wants a sense of the things I care about.

Our wide-ranging conversation includes a poignant discussion about my dad, my common initiatives with Eboo (including the Newbigin Fellows and some other projects we have in the works), my relationship and partnership with Tim Keller, and my hopes and aspirations for how Christians can live faithfully and neighborly in the university and in our society.

John Inazu and Eboo Patel

On this last topic, my dialogue with Eboo called to mind a reflection from my friend Stanley Hauerwas (read my interview with Hauerwas here). Reflecting on his own complicated relationship with the modern university in The State of the University: Academic Knowledges and the Knowledge of God, Hauerwas writes:

The question is not whether a university might be open to a knowledge shaped by the practice of the church, but rather whether a church exists to produce a knowledge that is formed by the Gospel.

As I think about my own work and its relationship to both the church and the university, that seems like the right question to be asking.