Interviews, conversations, podcasts, and other media exploring theology, aesthetics, architecture, music, and the arts.
Interview with C. M. Howell
U.S. Catholic · August 2026
A wide-ranging conversation about Too Sick to Pray, outlaw country, and the religious imagination of artists including Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings, Townes Van Zandt, and Billy Joe Shaver. The interview explores the book’s central idea of theological play: how artists on the margins of institutional religion appropriate, rearrange, and experiment with inherited Christian language without simply turning songs into informal theology. It also considers the outlaw as an American cultural archetype, the religious landscape of the South, suffering and existential struggle, and the possibility of grace reaching beyond the boundaries of formal belief.
An Outlaw Country Musician, Architect, and Theologian…
The Artistic Vision Podcast · 2025
A conversation about the unlikely path connecting music, architectural practice, and systematic theology. The discussion considers how these different forms of making and thinking inform one another, and how a background outside conventional academic theology has shaped Howell’s approach to aesthetics, culture, and the arts.
Discerning the Forms · 2023
A conversation about the relationship between theology and the built environment, including sacred space, architectural meaning, human making, and the possibilities that emerge when architecture is treated as a serious interlocutor for theological thought.
THEOLOGY · ARCHITECTURE · AESTHETICS
Discerning the Forms · 2022
A discussion of post-metaphysical theology and the renewed attention to trinitarian doctrine in modern and contemporary theology. The conversation considers what is at stake in moving beyond classical metaphysical frameworks and how the doctrine of God is reformulated in their wake.
SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY · TRINITY · MODERN THEOLOGY
Discerning the Forms · 2022
An introduction to dialectical theology and the theological revolution associated with Karl Barth and his contemporaries. The conversation explores the movement’s historical setting, its insistence upon the distinction between God and humanity, and its continuing importance for twentieth-century theology.
SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY · BARTH · MODERN THEOLOGY
Discerning the Forms · 2022
A conversation introducing the theology of Eberhard Jüngel and the questions that make his work distinctive. The episode considers Jüngel’s accounts of God, language, metaphor, revelation, and the relationship between divine presence and absence—questions that would become central to Howell’s subsequent research.
JÜNGEL · HERMENEUTICS · SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY
Discerning the Forms · 2021
A conversation about aesthetics as a philosophical and theological discipline: what it means to perceive something aesthetically, how beauty relates to knowledge, and why aesthetics matters for theology beyond the narrower question of what Christians should think about art.
AESTHETICS · THEOLOGY & THE ARTS · PERCEPTION