Fully Alive - A Conversation with Elizabeth Oldfield

Faith Matters

Today, we’re sharing a beautiful conversation between writer and thinker Elizabeth Oldfield and Zachary Davis. Elizabeth is the author of Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times and host of the podcast, “Sacred”.

Elizabeth grew up in a faintly Christian home that rarely if ever spoke of God; But as a young teen she had a powerful and unmistakable answer to prayer that made her a believer. She then turned to the Bible to learn more about her newfound christian faith and was blindsided by ideas in the text that she found troubling.

So in this conversation, Elizabeth talks about her complex faith- how she learned to lean into the messy paradoxes of life since then. She explores the concept of sin and the 7 deadly sins. She asks, what can envy teach us about having a stable sense of self especially in this age of social media? And isn't acedia or sloth, the 8th deadly sin, really about attention? How can we continually recall our attention to the things we hope will shape our souls?

She points out that at the end of the day, the 7 deadly sins aren't a legalistic list of ways to be in debt to go, but a loving guide for how to be in right relationship with the people around us, and should always be inseparably connected to ideas like compassion, forgiveness, and restoration.

We hope you enjoy listening to this episode as much as we did. And, we have exciting news to share– Elizabeth Oldfied will be coming to Utah as one of our featured speakers at Restore! So go to faithmatters/org/restore for tickets and we’ll see you on September 5-7 at Mountain America Expo in Sandy, Utah. And with that, we’ll jump right in.