Is Shame Something to Resist—or to Reconsider? - Lecture 3

What was shame, and why did it shape us so deeply? Shame was a shared human experience, yet many of us struggled to describe it. At times, we sensed that we shouldn’t have felt ashamed, and yet we did. In other moments of moral wrongdoing, a lack of shame—or even the inability to experience it—was often seen as problematic. To be “shameless” was widely viewed as a moral deficiency.

Scripture added further complexity. Across both the First and Second Testaments, the Bible presented the experience of shame as integral to human life—something not simply to resist, but to understand.

In this Friday Night Lecture, Dr. S. J. Parrott explored the dynamics of shame, its contributions to our moral psychologies, and how Scripture could reorient our understanding of identity, human formation, and who gets a say in telling us who we are.

This recording captured one of our Friday Night Lectures on January 30, 2026.

About the Speaker:

Dr. S. J. Parrott completed her DPhil in Theology and Religion at the University of Oxford after earning two master's degrees at Regent College in Vancouver. She specialized in topics of shame, ethics, human formation, rhetoric, prophetic and poetic literature, and more.