Music, Creativity, and Justice with Ruth Naomi Floyd
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Our Summer 2025 series, Beside Still Waters, focuses on the places where art, creation, and Creator meet to bring restoration and life into a world fatigued by division, brokenness, and hurt. From Jazz to Jane Austen and between, this season we’ll be focusing on the ways the arts answer the questions of what can enrich, refresh, and challenge our inner lives—and hand us the keys to the Good Life from within the heart.
How should we live faithfully within a world created to be good and beautiful, and yet everywhere is marred by ugliness and injustice?
Jazz vocalist and composer Ruth Naomi Floyd joins our podcast to discuss the intersection of music, creativity, and justice, and to help us think deeply about our role in repairing, re-envisioning, and creating new places of beauty, justice, and flourishing:
We know that art shapes and reshapes us and that it’s there in the cross of Jesus, I believe, where beauty and violence collided and beauty won. And so that act of loving someone…purposely trying to love someone, especially those that seem or are viewed or deemed unlovable, is…directly connected and intrinsically connected to our art making.
We hope you enjoy and are encouraged by Floyd’s artistic journey, how she finds beauty in the midst of suffering, and her vision for the role of love in creativity.
This podcast is an edited version of an online conversation recorded in 2021. Watch the full video of the conversation here, and learn more about Ruth Naomi Floyd.
Podcast Pairing
Listen to the episode with a refreshing recipe handpicked by our staff.
Adapted from @themindfulmocktail via Instagram.
Authors and books mentioned in the conversation:
The Frederick Douglass Jazz Works
It Was Good, Making Music to the Glory of God, by Ruth Naomi Floyd
The Problem of Good, by Ruth Naomi Floyd
Dr. John Nunez
Toni Morrison
Martin Luther King Jr.
Vincent van Gogh
Hans Christian Andersen
Miles Davis
Francis Schaeffer
Joshua Stamper
Related Trinity Forum Readings:
A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Letters from Vincent van Gogh
Letter from Birmingham Jail, by Martin Luther King Jr.
Revelation, by Flannery O’Connor
Bulletins from Immortality, by Emily Dickinson
Related Conversations:
A New Year With The Word with Malcolm Guite
To listen to this or any of our episodes in full, visit ttf.org/podcast and to join the Trinity Forum Society and help make content like this possible, join the Trinity Forum Society