I Don't Know What Faith Means Anymore: Terminal Illness, Poetic Faith, and Theological Doubt / Miroslav Volf and Christian Wiman

For twenty years, Christian Wiman has lived with a rare, incurable cancer. In the fall of 2022, during a stretch when the illness was especially bad, he wrote to his friend and Yale colleague Miroslav Volf: “I don’t know what faith means anymore. I’m a 56-year-old with a pile of books behind me and an experimental bone marrow transplant ahead of me, and I don’t know what faith means.” That letter became the seed of an extended correspondence between the poet and the theologian, now published as *Glimmerings: Letters on Faith between a Poet and a Theologian*.

In this special collaboration with Arc Magazine, editor Mark Oppenheimer sits down with Volf and Wiman to unpack the letters that grew out of their long friendship and years of walking together through New Haven.

They discuss what it means to love God, why doubt and absence might be constitutive elements of faith and presence rather than its opposite, and how a terminal diagnosis changed what each of them was willing to say and how freely they said it. They also trace the thinkers who shaped their thinking along the way, from Simone Weil’s account of attention to Etty Hillesum’s wartime writing, to Abraham Joshua Heschel’s theology of the prophets, and they wrestle openly with where their understandings of Jesus Christ converge and diverge.

Along the way, Wiman reflects on writing from a hospital room at Massachusetts General, on discovering that his fear was never death itself but the fear of dying without God, and on why grief, not fear, is what remains even after that fear falls away.

Episode Highlights

- I don’t know what faith means anymore. I’m a 56-year-old with a pile of books behind me and an experimental bone marrow transplant ahead of me, and I don’t know what faith means.

- I sometimes find it hard to think what it means to love God. I don’t know how to love God.

- Faith is what matters. Belief seems to me a matter of the institution and ascending to creeds and things like that.

- I think most of my theological thinking is existentially motivated. It’s motivated by the kind of inner logic of the trust in which I’m involved.

- Most of the books that I wrote, I’ve written for myself. I’m one of those writers who doesn’t have an audience.

- There is grace in my life if I can just keep my eyes open enough to see it.

- His mistake in some ways lets him see that the world is right, that there’s a rightness to the world.