Sophia Snyder shares her experience as podcast producer for the Faith and Imagination Institute.
Here at BYU, students sometimes lack opportunities to interact with people from other faiths and spiritual traditions, but Sophia Snyder (English ’24) is working to change that by producing Faith and Imagination: A BYU Humanities Center Podcast. The podcast, hosted by Professor Matthew Wickman (Literature and Spiritual Experience), engages with guests from diverse religious backgrounds to discuss how faith and spirituality influence their lives and their work in the humanities. Snyder, now in her second year with the podcast, records and edits these scholarly conversations every week, expanding interfaith discourse and sharing new perspectives with listeners.
The podcast serves as an excellent place to find new perspectives about the humanities and religion because of the way it connects people across broad traditions and fields who are thinking about spirituality, theology, and the humanities. In Snyder’s words, “It’s important for us to allow what they say to touch us even if we’re not coming from the same places.”
Snyder’s main responsibilities as producer involve participating in the technical side of recording and editing podcast episodes, but she also appeared as the final guest of the podcast’s third season, where she shared two of her favorite clips from previous episodes. The clips she shared came from Daniel Train of Duke Divinity School and Joshua Hren of Wiseblood Books and the University of St. Thomas, Houston. Snyder also shared that one of her favorite themes for the season involved contemplation and the value of sitting silently with contradictions.
Snyder believes in studying the connection between spirituality and the humanities because many humanities disciplines began as religious disciplines. Literature, for example, evolved from religious texts. Snyder says, “Monks were the people who were literate and so literature in English was started from a standpoint of religious thinking.”
Last season’s podcast episodes discussed the role of spirituality, faith, and religion in humanities, as well as topics such as American cultural history, literature, poetry, art, music, philosophy, and more. Guests included scholars from other universities around the country including Yale, Duke, and Harvard, as well as authors, artists, and a Presbyterian pastor. Snyder explained that episode content is designed to appeal not only to members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but also to an interfaith audience in a way that promotes faith and spirituality in all its forms.
The Faith and Imagination podcast can be found on all major podcast locations and on the BYU Humanities Center website. The podcast’s fourth season began on September 11, 2023, and airs on Mondays.