Choose Hard for Body, Mind, & Soul
A ROOM FOR ATTENTIVE LISTENING
The Listening Room
Music, lectures, and conversations for a life of attention.
Some things should be heard more than once. A song stays with us. A lecture changes how we see. A conversation awakens a question we hadn’t thought to ask.
The Listening Room gathers music, lectures, podcasts, and videos worth your attention, including conversations and reflections of my own. Subjects range from theology and books to health, fitness, nutrition, and the work of everyday life, with room for whatever invites a closer look at this strange and wonderful world.
Listen with curiosity. Return to what matters. Put something you hear into practice.
FEATURED MUSICIAN
Learning to Listen with Rich Mullins
Rich Mullins opens the Listening Room. His songs did more than accompany parts of my life; they helped teach me how to listen, believe, and live.
Begin with the strange journey of “Creed” into our wedding, then ask with “Elijah” the question that governs this room: Does it rise?
Rich Mullins's hammered dulcimer in place for our wedding ceremony at Old Town Farm & Art Market Plaza in Wichita, KS.
RICH MULLINS · CREED
The Creed at Our Wedding
Rich Mullins was supposed to play “Creed” at our wedding. After his death, that plan seemed impossible. Yet through Scott Brummer, Rich’s hammered dulcimer, and Steve Brummer’s voice, the song still found its way into the ceremony and became part of the beginning of our marriage.
It's a story about friendship, grief, providence, and the strange way a song can outlive the moment that first gave it to us. “Creed” was more than music at our wedding. It was the faith of the Church sung aloud as Christiane and I began a life together.
RICH MULLINS · ELIJAH
Does It Rise?
What makes a song worth returning to? Rich Mullins’s “Elijah” gives the Listening Room its governing question: Does it rise? The question asks more than whether music is skillful, beautiful, or moving. It asks where the music directs our attention and what kind of person it helps us become.
Drawing together Mullins, Gregory Wolfe, and Simone Weil, this reflection considers listening as a practice of attention. The best music does more than stir emotion. It lifts our eyes beyond ourselves toward gratitude, truth, love, and praise.
Rich Mullins’s Songs beside Gregory Wolfe’s Intruding Upon the Timeless and Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Truth Is Symphonic—three voices behind the question, “Does it rise?”
FEATURED LECTURE
Everything Is a Book
Fr. Maximos Constas on St. Maximus the Confessor
Fr. Maximos Constas lecturing beside an icon of Christ at the 2024 Eighth Day Symposium
Beginning with Origen’s insight that both Scripture and creation may be read as books, St. Maximus develops a vision in which the written word and the created world illuminate one another.
In this passage, Fr. Maximos Constas guides listeners through Ambiguum 10.29–32. Visible things, biblical words, garments, and symbols disclose meanings that lead the attentive reader toward the Logos. The lecture comes from The Life and Teaching of St. Maximus the Confessor, an eight-part series produced by Patristic Nectar Publications.
From The Life and Teaching of St. Maximus the Confessor • Patristic Nectar Publications • Hosted by The Golden Thread on YouTube
The Labor of Reading
MORE FROM FR. MAXIMOS CONSTAS
On translating St. Maximus the Confessor
What should a translator preserve when the original is difficult? Fr. Maximos Constas explains why fidelity to St. Maximus the Confessor includes his style. The effort of following a sentence, returning, and rereading can itself become a spiritual exercise.
I didn’t make it easy, but it is readable.
~Fr. Maximos Constas
Difficulty alone does not make writing worthwhile. Here, the question is whether making a text easier might remove something valuable from the reader’s encounter. Choose Hard becomes a practice of patient attention.
Fr. Maximos Constas on translating St. Maximus the Confessor.
Approximately six minutes (3:49:33–3:55:43).
Continue the Journey
Read “Faithful to the Difficulty,” this week’s Commonplace, on translation, difficult reading, and the attention a worthwhile text can ask of us.
THE FATHERS · FEATURED CONVERSATION
The Genius of St. Irenaeus
Bishop Robert Barron and Brandon Vogt on a Church Father for East & West
What makes a second-century bishop a teacher for our own time? Bishop Robert Barron and Brandon Vogt explore Irenaeus’s response to Gnosticism, his vision of all things gathered up in Christ, and the relationship between God’s glory and human life. Recorded after the announcement that Pope Francis intended to name Irenaeus a Doctor of the Church, this conversation offers an accessible introduction to his enduring significance.
Listen here, then enter the Irenaeus Room to continue with his words, his icon, and opportunities for practice.
Bishop Robert Barron and Brandon Vogt · The Word on Fire Show · Episode 306 · October 18, 2021
THE BODY · FEATURED PODCAST
How to Optimize Your Water Quality
Hydration, filtration, and the health of the body
Some conversations belong in more than one room. In this episode, neuroscientist and podcast host Andrew Huberman examines water from the body’s perspective—from hydration and performance to tap-water testing, filtration, hard water, and reverse osmosis.
Listen here for the body. Then enter the Water Room to consider the water that serves both the person and the home.
Andrew Huberman, Ph.D. · Huberman Lab Podcast, Episode 114