Perfectly Human with Amy Julia Becker

We live in a time when our value is often assessed and affirmed largely in terms of our productivity. Entire industries are built around pushing us to optimize our output, maximize our results, unlock our potential, break barriers and records, and perform perpetually at peak. 

Often drowned out by the din of such appeals is the simple truth that to be human is to be limited, vulnerable, and mortal. And for many of us, such limitations are impossible to ignore.

Today’s episode features our recent conversation with award winning writer and speaker, Amy Julia Becker, who addresses questions about what it means to be perfectly human, and what understanding disability reveals to us:

To see disability in terms of brokenness is to really misunderstand, I think, this idea of human limitation. [And] also to misunderstand ourselves as beloved, as ones who do not need to produce or perform in order to be acceptable to God, for certain, but even to one another. But instead to be able to actually start from a place of belovedness and move into the world from that place with our limitations but also with an assumption that we have gifts to offer, which might look really, really different from one person to the next.” – Amy Julia Becker

We hope this conversation helps you wrestle with questions of human limitations, perfection, and our belovedness before God, as we consider anew what constitutes the good life.

This podcast is an edited version of an online conversation recorded in March of 2024. Watch the full video of the conversation here, and learn more about Amy Julia Becker.

Authors and books mentioned in the conversation:
To Be Made Well: An Invitation to Wholeness, Healing, and Hope, by Amy Julia Becker

Related Trinity Forum Readings:
Babette’s Feast by Isak Dinesen
Bright Evening Star by Madeleine L’Engle
Wrestling with God by Simone Weil
Bulletins from Immortality poems by Emily Dickinson
Letters from Vincent Van Gogh

Related Conversations:
A Life Worth Living with Miroslav Volf
What Really Matters with Charlie Peacock and Andi Ashworth
Life, Death, Poetry & Peace with Philip Yancey
Words Against Despair with Christian Wiman

To listen to this or any of our episodes in full, visit ttf.org/podcast and to help make content like this possible, join the Trinity Forum Society

Special thanks to Ned Bustard for our podcast artwork.