# Hope Podcast: Featuring Austin Ball, MDiv Candidate This week we're joined by MDiv candidate Austin Ball. We talk about the difficulty learning and growing that comes with leaving home, about navigating multiple religious belongings, about the unexpected intersections of intellectual and spiritual life, and more. December 11, 2025 ![Austin Ball headshot](/sites/g/files/omnuum5526/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/2025-12/Austin%20Ball%20Hope%20Pod.jpeg?h=646d6420&itok=MftQ4crK) Austin Ball, MDiv Candidate HIATT O'CONNOR: Welcome to the Hope Podcast. I'm Hiatt O'Connor. JORDAN AHMED: And I'm Jordan Ahmed. HIATT O'CONNOR: This podcast is offered by the Harvard Divinity School Office of Religious and Spiritual Life. JORDAN AHMED: Where we talk to HDS students about their spiritual lives, what hope means to them, and how they practice hope daily. HIATT O'CONNOR: Today I'm joined by first year master of divinity candidate, Austin Ball. He and I talk about the difficult learning and growth that comes with leaving home. We talk about navigating multiple religious belongings and the surprising intersections of intellectual and spiritual life, and more, of course. Harvard Divinity School ยท Hope Podcast: Featuring Austin Ball, MDiv Candidate AUSTIN BALL: Hi. How's it going? HIATT O'CONNOR: Pretty good. How are you? AUSTIN BALL: I'm good. HIATT O'CONNOR: Well, thanks for coming on. I appreciate it. AUSTIN BALL: Yeah, it's a serendipitous day to do it. We had our LDS noon service today. HIATT O'CONNOR: And I was there and it went tremendously, I would say. AUSTIN BALL: Good. I'm glad that it went well. HIATT O'CONNOR: An episode I recorded not too long ago with Rob Anderson, he brought up-- it was last year's HDS Mormonism's noon service as the thing that turned the last key for him to decide to come here. AUSTIN BALL: That's awesome. HIATT O'CONNOR: I know. AUSTIN BALL: Well, I do-- is he also a Buddhist practicing? HIATT O'CONNOR: Yes. Yeah, that's the one. AUSTIN BALL: That's him. HIATT O'CONNOR: Yeah. AUSTIN BALL: Perfect. HIATT O'CONNOR: For our listeners, you can listen to that other episode too. Yeah, yeah. But anyway, back to you. Can you just tell everybody a little bit about where home is for you, where you feel like home is for you, and maybe in that, a little bit of a spiritual autobiography? AUSTIN BALL: Yeah. So I was born in Southern Alberta, Canada. That's in the West. It's just above Montana. And I grew up in the Latter-day Saint Faith tradition, really small community called Raymond. There was maybe about 4,000 people in town. We have 11 congregations there right now. HIATT O'CONNOR: In a 4,000 person town? AUSTIN BALL: Yeah. And I think those are around 250 people apiece. HIATT O'CONNOR: Wow. AUSTIN BALL: So active church attending members, there are obviously a lot more who just don't come every week. But yeah, I a pretty active and involved childhood through the church, had some leaders who would take us out to the wilderness, all sorts of outings. We had a lot of fun. A very tight knit community. A radical amount of trust, I would say, does not exist outside of a scenario like that in today's society. We never locked our house or our cars, very little parental supervision. Me and my friends would run from yard to yard. All the parents knew us. So that is a heritage or something that I feel lucky to have participated in. And I miss it. I went on my mission right after high school. We serve a two year proselytizing mission. It's not mandatory, but it's expected. And I went to Eastern Canada, by the way. Stayed low-- HIATT O'CONNOR: For your mission? AUSTIN BALL: Yeah. I served in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. HIATT O'CONNOR: In the more rural parts of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland or cities? AUSTIN BALL: Yeah. Actually, I could have served in the cities, but you get assigned to different locales. And I was always in small towns, fishing coves or old logging towns. There's really an interesting experience there that taught me a little bit about the people on the other side of things to be honest. Like, Alberta is quite affluent. We have a lot of oil and business is booming, but lumber and fish got halted altogether back in the '90s. And ever since-- HIATT O'CONNOR: For conservation? AUSTIN BALL: Conservation particularly, yeah. I think they just overfished and over logged, over mined. And as a result, nobody there really has jobs. Similar to maybe like an Appalachia situation, where there's been some environmental injustice and people are just not super well off. So most of them come out West anyway if they're young and ambitious, where I'm from. But yeah, when I did that, I got home and went to school. And I think back to the point I just missed the belonging and tightness that I felt with my people. HIATT O'CONNOR: And you said you went to school. You meant you went away to college? AUSTIN BALL: Yeah, I went actually down to Brigham Young University. It's the flagship LDS private school. And I would have thought, that it would have been quite a bit easier than it was. There was like 40,000 undergrads there. HIATT O'CONNOR: That's a huge school. AUSTIN BALL: Yeah. So I just dissolved into this sea of homogeneity and striving. I think everybody is trying to do their best. But that was a challenging experience for my identity. So yeah, I missed home a lot. I would go I would drive up like every couple of months for the first year. HIATT O'CONNOR: How long are those drives? AUSTIN BALL: Those are like 11 to 12 hour drives. So it's not horrible. It could be done in a weekend if you're pushing it. And I would do that to go see my friends. And I thought a lot about coming back. But the opportunities academically were good at BYU. So that's what kept me around. HIATT O'CONNOR: And you said it challenged your identity. Did it challenge your identity within Mormonism, within the LDS faith tradition, or just your sense of personhood? AUSTIN BALL: Yes, it did, but not in the way that maybe you'd expect. I started to think pretty-- I'd say critically in scare quotes, because I started to think reflexively about my tradition, where it came from, what constituted it, and some of the rational justifications for the culture and theology of Mormonism, specifically the institution of the Latter-day Saints. I think that was challenging in a very productive and fruitful way. It deepened a lot of my devotion, but also called into question quite a bit of what I'd just grown up assuming, taught me how to think a little bit more methodically and rigorously. And there's been a period of retrenchment there, actually a lot more wary of that. HIATT O'CONNOR: They being BYU or-- AUSTIN BALL: The educational administration. HIATT O'CONNOR: Oh, OK. AUSTIN BALL: Yeah, so they've been clamping down on freedom of thought or press a fair bit. The institution goes through these cycles where they'll lay off and then they'll be like, oh, wait, we've reached a cultural crisis. So, it loosely maps on to these social movements like civil rights, feminism. And then there's a lull and it gets a lot more-- HIATT O'CONNOR: Institutions are self conserving. AUSTIN BALL: Yeah, exactly. So it's just self conserving. We're in a pretty intense and polarized and critical moment. And I think that the church is very self-aware and very worried about where things are going for its own membership and for its youth. So sometimes the reaction may not be the most skillful. HIATT O'CONNOR: You mentioned-- well, actually you didn't mention this, but I was hoping you would mention it. I know you are a Buddhist practitioner in some respect. I was curious if you could tell me a little bit about how that happened. AUSTIN BALL: Yeah, I didn't actually bring that up in my attempt at a spiritual autobiography. HIATT O'CONNOR: There are no easy things to do. AUSTIN BALL: The way that I frame this is through William James, actually. He comes up with this distinction between the six old religions and those that are healthy sold. And you can fact check me, but-- HIATT O'CONNOR: I'm no James expert, so it won't happen here. AUSTIN BALL: He basically says that a six-fold perspective of life is preoccupied with suffering, the problem of evil, essentially, or the fact that it just hurts so much to be alive. And I think that there are strains of Christianity with which emphasize that. I just didn't encounter them in my strain of Christianity. But I had gone through some intense personal losses and just quite a bit of dissatisfaction have very high expectations as an idealist Mormon boy wanting things to go certain ways. And they didn't. And I was very sensitive to these disappointments and frustrations, and Buddhism normalizes that in a way. It's like, of course it's going to happen. Suffering is constitutive of existing. Like, it's unavoidable. In fact, it's like the problem that we're trying to address directly. And so it allowed me to reorient my spiritual vision from the glory of God to the salience of my own suffering and then the suffering of other people in the world. It was like I kind of woke up to wow, there's a lot of people that just are not having a good time as beings on this orb. HIATT O'CONNOR: It seems like that could be related to what you were saying earlier when you went East, and what I think you said, you saw people on the other side of the line, I think it was. I don't remember-- \[INTERPOSING VOICES\] AUSTIN BALL: Yeah, we make a lot of fun of the maritimers in Alberta. It's like, oh, they're the uneducated, poor, dumb people. HIATT O'CONNOR: Like we do for Appalachians in America. AUSTIN BALL: Yeah, yeah. So being proximate with them was awakening, and then through my own suffering. And I also studied the Middle East in my undergraduate. And so I started encountering all these forms of suffering. And I was like, maybe this is-- we should be focusing more on this, investing more thought and attention on this, the problem of suffering. So yeah, there was like a Sangha that was meeting every Sunday in Provo. And I started going to that and found some very influential mentors. And it never really supplanted or replaced my devotion in the LDS faith, but it just definitely answered and resonated with these areas that the LDS faith didn't quite. And so that was the burgeoning of this multi-faith identity that I'm navigating. HIATT O'CONNOR: It seems so authentic not to pick one up and throw the other out, which usually the idea is you have to be one or the other. That's the implicit idea around anybody's religiosity. AUSTIN BALL: Well, an existential commitment should be exclusive-- HIATT O'CONNOR: Yeah, scare quotes around should be. I have a saying that beware of all the shoulds that you carry around with you because some of them might have helped before and they might be helpful in certain circumstances, but when you say something like, you should only have one commitment to one tradition, it often doesn't work. AUSTIN BALL: Yeah. And that's a should that kind of operates in the background. I always try to resolve the question of who I am once and for all by making some grandiose commitment that is always just a little bit foolhardy and maybe misguided. And so I wouldn't say that it's always been as integrated as it is now for a bit there. I was like, no, I'm going to renounce my Christianity and be a Buddhist monk. And then I was like, well, maybe that's a bit extreme. And then I was like, I can't go to Sangha anymore. And anyway, it's just been a process. HIATT O'CONNOR: It's a pendulum. AUSTIN BALL: Yeah. HIATT O'CONNOR: I've been there before too. When I first started sitting myself, I thought, OK, I guess I got to be a monastic. AUSTIN BALL: It's the only option. HIATT O'CONNOR: Yeah, I have to. And then I took a step back from myself and looked around and went, OK, that's not exactly realistic. What are you actually trying to say when you express that desire? And I think it is a kind of commitment. But it might, like you said, be a little misplaced. But that's part of the navigation, like you were saying earlier, just trying to navigate this dual belonging. AUSTIN BALL: Yeah, integration maybe. We talk a lot about integration at HDS. HIATT O'CONNOR: Yeah. Well, I could either ask you how that's going for you or how you got to HDS. AUSTIN BALL: I'll say how I got here. Towards the end of my undergraduate career, I became enamored by psychoanalysis and psychodynamic theories of relationality and switched-- HIATT O'CONNOR: From Middle Eastern studies? AUSTIN BALL: Yeah, I had actually already gotten the credits that I needed to graduate, but I had a scholarship that I was privileged to have received and had an extra year of classes to take, so I did-- HIATT O'CONNOR: That was fantastic. AUSTIN BALL: Yeah, it was awesome. I just did psychology, prepped for going into clinical psych or MFT. I had gotten into a couple programs in that field through an application at Harvard as well for the Divinity School. It's something that I'd been involved with. I mean, extracurricularly I worked at this Institute for religious studies, and that's what I was mentioning earlier about what opened my mind. There were people there who kind of baptized my intellect. HIATT O'CONNOR: Wow. That's a strong phrase. AUSTIN BALL: That's Lewis. He says that GK Chesterton baptized his intellect. George MacDonald baptized his imagination. And that always that always stuck with me. But yeah, I had these options. Those programs in psychology would not let me defer, and I wanted to defer to try to get married, actually. And Harvard would. So I was like, I could go here and then pick up the therapy route again if I need. So yeah, that's how I'm here. The integration is probably more disintegration right now. There's just a lot of people and ideas that I'm encountering. It's just a flurry. And maybe after I'll be able to look at the pool of data and connect the dots in a way that makes sense. HIATT O'CONNOR: It's a lot of stirring and churning when you first get here. Well, I'm on my third year and I'm about to start my last semester. And I will say, it doesn't quite stop, the stirring, the churning. AUSTIN BALL: I don't have a sense that it will. I mean, as long as taking the classes that I'm taking with new professors who are coming from different backgrounds, it's just always going to be. Yeah. HIATT O'CONNOR: And what are you interested in studying while you're here if anything specifically? AUSTIN BALL: Yeah, I'm interested in studying spiritual care. So some of the more practical classes that are being offered are good for me. But I'm also interested in deepening my intellectual and theoretical understanding of Buddhism, historical understanding. So that's what I'm trying to work on mainly. I'm taking classes, I mean, primarily with Janet Gyatso this semester and then Charles Hallisey next semester. They're the two that are in my orbit that I know of right now. HIATT O'CONNOR: I've taken many classes with Charlie Hallisey. AUSTIN BALL: He teaches on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. There's a critical philosophy class that's being offered at the same time on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. HIATT O'CONNOR: Next semester? AUSTIN BALL: Yeah, with a big shot over at the College. So I'm like-- HIATT O'CONNOR: What is it? AUSTIN BALL: It's just critical theory and philosophy coming from the Frankfurt School being offered by Peter Gordon. Yes, we're going to do like Horkheimer and-- well, I'm saying this as-- HIATT O'CONNOR: as if you're going to take the class. Yeah. AUSTIN BALL: Adorno, Benjamin, thinkers like this. HIATT O'CONNOR: And that's-- I'm not to turn this into a sales pitch for the Divinity School, but that's part of the allure of being here, is that you can take classes at the college or at any other of the Harvard schools with really no red tape. AUSTIN BALL: Yeah. I've been looking at philosophy-- I mean, yeah got Sean Kelly here. Big people in continental philosophy. Yeah this next semester, I'm going to take a class called the markers and mechanisms of psychopathology. That's over at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in the psychology department. So-- HIATT O'CONNOR: Wow. AUSTIN BALL: --yeah, really interesting. HIATT O'CONNOR: It's interesting too, that you say when you got here were interested in studying the really practical aspects of spiritual care, and yet you can still do all of these other things that check all of your other interests-- intellectual, spiritual. AUSTIN BALL: And I think that mental care and spiritual care are-- I mean, there's maybe an arbitrary divide between those, people have different opinions about it. But taking a class on psychopathology, I think will be very germane to my education and spiritual care. HIATT O'CONNOR: Yeah. I absolutely agree. I had a really interesting experience where I took a class on Wittgenstein's philosophical investigations, letter of Wittgenstein, which I had always wanted to read. Well, not always, and I didn't want to read it when I was a baby. But after college, I really wanted to read it because the way I had heard people speaking about it is that it would solve a lot of philosophical puzzlements that were introduced by the Platonists and so on. Anyway, we're getting into the weeds. But it ended up doing that and more. And it ended up being a ricochet point for all of my interests. And I keep coming back to that class, keep coming back to the book, Philosophical Investigations, which is an impossible book to read or finish or start in any way, and keep coming back to the essays I wrote. There's so much there that keeps coming up. I'm left without words for it. AUSTIN BALL: Well, he has that quote about not being able to speak. HIATT O'CONNOR: Yeah, that's the end of the tractatus, "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." AUSTIN BALL: Exactly. HIATT O'CONNOR: But then I would say in response, beware of those musts and shoulds. And even though I do agree with them. AUSTIN BALL: Yeah. Again into the weeds. But I just wrote an essay about the Parable of the burning house and-- HIATT O'CONNOR: The Lotus Sutra. AUSTIN BALL: And the dilemma of language and truth that gets faced when you're trying to bridge the ultimate and the conventional dimensions. What can you say that isn't a lie? Budha asks-- sorry, Sutra, is the father guilty of falsehood? He offers some reasons that I don't think are quite what the Buddha wants him to offer. I kind treat those and then look at the problem of language and truth more generally. That's something I might come back to as well and try to expand. HIATT O'CONNOR: It's funny, these questions that come up that seem rather philosophical and abstract in-- well, granted Mahayana sutras like the Lotus Sutra are pretty philosophical and pretty abstract, but they show up everywhere, and that was part of the inflection that was happening in the Wittgenstein course. It's all these questions that I didn't think would actually be implicated were and keep being implicated and keep showing up, all of these questions, and it makes me ask questions differently now. You don't really realize how deep that root runs until somebody tugs on it. I feel like we're really in the weeds now, and I'm taking over the conversation. So I'm going to back up a little bit. Are there any insights or practices from any tradition that you've had for a long time, any new tradition or any tradition that might not even be yours? Are there any insights or practices that you engage with regularly that support you and give you hope? AUSTIN BALL: Yeah, two come to mind. I mean, the first one is close reading, close reading scripture. I think that scriptures are these interesting religious phenomena because they're so baked into people's understanding of things, but they're also kind of resistant to interpretation and obscure. They grow up with these interpretations. And close reading for me, is a way to challenge maybe something that I've always understood to be the case, maybe isn't the case, maybe this thing, whether it's the Book of Mormon or the Bible or the Lotus Sutra, is trying to say something beyond what I thought it did, which has been generative in the possibilities for faith. I think people sometimes look at a canon or a tradition as a constraint, or it's too constrictive. But close reading shows us that it's actually like a way to liberation or seeing new things, envisioning new futures. So close reading is a valuable practice in my toolkit of practices. The other one, which is very basic, awareness of the body, meditation on the body. There are these four foundations of mindfulness that the Buddha talks about. You start at the body and then you think you go to the emotions and then mental formations and then something. HIATT O'CONNOR: I don't know off the top of my head either. We both don't look very good Buddhists if we don't know I suppose. AUSTIN BALL: But the body is what it comes for me most of the time when I'm meditating, I'm just being very attentive to my proprioception, things that I feel inside my own skin and everything that I can perceive as well. Bringing really careful attention to that is just so surprising a lot of the time. Reality is just like, way weirder than we take it to be. HIATT O'CONNOR: Yeah, both of those, they seems like surprise or the opening of what was thought to be narrow. AUSTIN BALL: Yes. HIATT O'CONNOR: Is the hopeful thing, things are not as narrow, as dim, as limited as you'd think they are. AUSTIN BALL: I often feel trapped by my body. I feel like I'm chafing against its limitations. But mindfulness of the body helps me to feel free in my body. It's the same with texts in scripture and tradition. HIATT O'CONNOR: You can feel trapped by a canon as it were, but close reading helps you slip out from under it. AUSTIN BALL: Or you can feel liberated by the canon. HIATT O'CONNOR: And that seems to tie directly back to something you mentioned earlier about navigating having multiple traditions that inform each other and you. They're all liberated by each other and so are you in the process. AUSTIN BALL: Yeah, yeah. HIATT O'CONNOR: And that's a very powerful thing. And it's a wonderful way to not only be open to surprise, but almost have surprise be so forced upon you. AUSTIN BALL: Yeah. I mean, if that's not a contradiction, ritualized, surprise, you kind of-- HIATT O'CONNOR: No, it doesn't seem like one. AUSTIN BALL: Yeah. I mean, keep getting surprised and you come to expect surprise. HIATT O'CONNOR: And then you get surprised in new ways because it comes in a way you didn't expect. Ritualized, surprise. AUSTIN BALL: It even rhymes. Yeah, there you go. HIATT O'CONNOR: You should copyright it. Well, thanks for sharing I appreciate, it. And before I let you go, do you have a podcast, a book, a movie, a poem, anything else that you would want to recommend to people, that gives you a little hope? AUSTIN BALL: Yeah. I'm going to watch a movie tonight. It's called The Holdovers. It does a really good job of portraying some of the disappointments and unfulfilled of life across different characters whether it's you wake up and you're older than you want it to be and you haven't felt like you've done much, or you feel like you've lost the things that really gave you verve and excitement. These people get trapped together, and they find new life in each other's company over what would otherwise be a rather bleak winter break in Western Massachusetts. HIATT O'CONNOR: And it's a beautifully shot movie as well. Like, cinematography. It's just gorgeous. AUSTIN BALL: Yeah, it's great. And lovely soundtrack. HIATT O'CONNOR: Paul Giamatti, is he? AUSTIN BALL: I think so, yeah. HIATT O'CONNOR: It's a great Christmas movie. AUSTIN BALL: And I might be watching it prematurely since it's, I don't know, I guess it's November, the middle of November right now. HIATT O'CONNOR: No, if you walk in any target, they're playing Christmas music, so it's not premature. AUSTIN BALL: Yeah. HIATT O'CONNOR: Well, thanks I appreciate. Is there anything else you want to share before we close up? AUSTIN BALL: That's all for me. HIATT O'CONNOR: All right, well, then that's all, folks. Thanks for listening. See also:- [ Student Activities and Interviews ](/discover-stories-about/student-activities-and-interviews)