If a tree falls by an axe, the stump will, given enough time, grow back. Human beings who fall violently have no such hope–we never rise again. With that image, from Job 17, the book’s title character indicts the violence of the LORD and the finality of that violence. But many centuries later, in a very different book, Philip S. Thomas enlists that image to do very different rhetorical work, and that’s what we’re here to investigate. Dr. Thomas’s new book Hope for a Tree: Artistic Afterlives of Job examines films and poetry and literary nonfiction and other artifacts that take up Job’s lines and do other things with them. The investigation leads to persistently interesting questions that arise from traditions whose books are holy, and Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome Dr. Thomas to Christian Humanist Profiles.

Do not think any man happy until he has died, free from suffering. That line, or something like it depending on the translator, ends the grand tragedy Oedipus Tyrannous, Oedipus the King. Such meditations on death give us memorable aphorisms, and they come to us not only from the Greeks or the Egyptians but from the teachers of Israel as well. Among the troubling texts of Israel’s wisdom tradition is Qohelet, whose title in English Bibles is often the transliterated Greek word Ecclesiastes and among whose questions one can find this one: what makes a life worthwhile if succeeding generations undo the good that one has done? Scholars and preachers and readers have disputed for centuries where the intellectual center of the book resides, how the author relates to the persona who seems to be Solomon, and a dozen other questions from and about and related in other ways to this puzzling book of the Bible. Today Menachem Fisch, a philosopher, and Debra Band, an artist, will be helping me ask new questions of Qohelet and talking about their book from Baylor University Press titled Qohelet: Searching for a Life Worth Living. Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome both to the show.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Growing up under that Constitutional law, even as an amendment, gave me the idea that there were two things, one called religion and the other called government, and that they existed in nature separate from each other. A working knowledge of history shatters that separation, and Philip Jenkins, in his recent book Kingdoms of this World: How Empires Have Made and Remade Religions, shows just how varied and how complicated the interactions between crowns and churches and technology and pilgrimages have been. Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to talk about politics and religion today with Dr. Jenkins.

When I got serious about Christian discipleship in the early nineties, Christian worldview was in the air. The menace of secular humanism loomed large, and when I enrolled at Milligan College (now Milligan University), a Christian liberal arts college, several people in my life were quite pleased precisely because there, I might emerge with something called a Christian worldview and do battle against something called secular humanism. That was more than thirty years ago, and Simon P. Kennedy has some questions for the folks who promoted that vision of Christian education. His recent book Against Worldview from Lexham Press proposes not an abolition of Christian worldview but new postulates, namely wisdom and cultivation, as alternatives to the old war-metaphors. Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome Dr. Kennedy to the show.

In 1917 four seismic shocks rocked the human species: in Russia, the Bolshevik Revolution brought a specter from Europe into the center of the world’s most expansive land empire. In Europe, an armistice ended the Great War. Around the world, a pandemic virus began to kill its millions. And in America, the first jazz recording became available. Communism and viruses and jazz had been around before then, of course, but history tells stories with sources, so here we are. A hundred and eight years later, the span between Chicago Cubs World Series wins, the Reverend William Carter is here to join us and talk about the spirituality of it all. Okay, mainly of jazz. His book Thriving on a Riff from Broadleaf Books meditates on spiritual matters with one hand on the Bible and the other on the piano keys, and Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome him to the show.

With the obvious exception of Plato’s Phaedrus, really old books don’t spend much time on technology. Perhaps the tools didn’t change fast enough. Perhaps their writing materials were expensive enough that they didn’t want to spend time on instrumental matters. Perhaps the questions just never occurred to them. But some time in the modern era, folks started to write about the ways that our tools change and the ways that new sets of tools shape our souls for good and for ill. And one of the moments when those changes were doing the most–the most harm or the most benefit we’ll talk about as the hour rolls along–was the nineteenth century. Jeff Bilbro’s new book Words for Conviviality explores some of the writers engaging with those changes and invites us to hold up those nineteenth-century moments as mirrors to our own, and Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to invite him back on the show.

Liberty has always carried tricky questions with it. Most folks in 2025 would agree that human beings should have liberty, but how one becomes free persists as a debate. Do we spring fully free into this world? Does participation in certain kinds of communities make us free? Can education of this or that sort develop freedom? This last question leads a conversation into the possibility of liberal arts, and Richard Detweiler’s book The Evidence Liberal Arts Needs takes up not only a discussion of what makes an education a liberal-arts education but also why and how people in our moment still should make the case for liberal arts. Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome Dr. Detweiler to the show.