Wild faith: The rebirth of belief in God and the search for a better story about life | Nov 2nd
Justin Brierley
Justin Brierley is an author and broadcaster. His Unbelievable podcast has been hosting debates and discussions in good faith for over two decades.
Martin Shaw
Martin Shaw is a writer, mythographer and Christian thinker. He is the author of a number of books as well as a masterful storyteller.
Wild Faith: An afternoon with Martin Shaw & Justin Brierley – Samford University
We’re gathering around a conviction I keep seeing in classrooms, churches, and public life: truth and imagination belong together.
We tend to hollow out our creatives in the Christian world by emphasizing the Left Hemisphere. That’s the pressure—to make faith smaller, tidier, purely propositional. But the gospel breathes in both lungs.
Drawing on Iain McGilchrist’s work on the brain’s hemispheres:
- The left hemisphere gives us analysis, sequencing, and clarity—vital for apologetics and scholarship.
- The right hemisphere orients us to presence, story, symbol, and relationship—the world as lived and loved.
Christian maturity requires a whole-minded faith: rigorous and reverent, analytic and imaginative—never “domesticated.”
Why Shaw & Brierley?
- Dr. Martin Shaw is a mythteller and poet of the wild. He recovers ancient stories that help people feel the world’s depth again—without sentimentality.
- Justin Brierley is a bridge-builder in public conversations about faith, hosting skeptics and believers with candor and charity.
Together they model what we need: conversations where reason doesn’t flatten wonder—and wonder doesn’t dodge reason.
What we’ll explore
Practices for churches, classrooms, and creatives to resist “hollowing out” and nurture wild faith—intellectually serious, imaginatively alive, pastorally humane.
How story, symbol, and ritual can open the room for truth rather than replace it.
How evidence and argument can serve imagination rather than silence it.
Nov 2nd – 3pm – 6pm | Location – Reid Chapel
The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God RSVP
RSVP Date: November 2 Times: 3 PM Location: Samford University, Reid Chapel