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Andrew McGowan: Wake up and Pay Attention. Drink Coffee and Bake Bread. Change the Church, Change the World.
98 Plays2 years ago
Long before lockdowns, The Very Rev. Andrew McGowan was tending a sourdough starter and collecting distinctive books in his personal library.
Andrew talks about Anglican sacramental theology, secularization, negotiating international COVID protocols, and the importance of good coffee.
Plus, a frank chat to Christian clergy about the future of church.
The Very Rev. Andrew McGowan is the Dean and President of Berkeley Divinity School and McFaddin Professor of Anglican Studies and Pastoral Theology at Yale Divinity School.
Content Warning: death of a parent, indirect references to colonialism, indirect references to white privilege, impacts of COVID, Christian hegemony.
Buy Andrew's most recent book: https://amzn.to/3Chq0PY
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Learn more about Berkeley Divinity School at Yale: https://www.berkeleydivinity.yale.edu
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We are creating community that builds relationships across difference by inviting dialogue about the squishy and vulnerable bits of life.
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Transcript
Arrival in the US and Shifts in Religious Landscape
00:00:00
Speaker
Thirty years ago I came to this country and was really struck by how lively and full churches seem to be, how my identity as an ordained person seemed to be something to which people were deferential in daily life. If I went to the supermarket wearing a clergy shirt there would be sort of smiles and how are you father and all this sort of stuff. And it was really like coming to another world. It was a world that was still religious.
00:00:25
Speaker
And across that time, I think the United States has sort of hit a couple of hurdles or walls of secularization. I mean, for me, one of them was the 9-11 experience, and we could say more about that. And then I think the COVID experience will probably have proven to be another one as well, where change doesn't always happen by sort of
00:00:48
Speaker
slow, easy development, but sometimes by quantum steps, as it were, where people start to ask themselves difficult questions about what about this religiosity that we've been assuming is a part of the social fabric of our lives? Is this really going to persist?
Introducing Dean Andrew McGowan and Episode Themes
00:01:15
Speaker
It's Uncommon Good, the podcast where we chat to ordinary people doing uncommon good in service of our common humanity. My name is Paul Eris. Fam, I am delighted to bring you today on the show the very Reverend Dean Andrew McGowan.
00:01:31
Speaker
So many honorifics, so many great cups of coffee, and gently, painstakingly baked loaves of bread. Andrew McGowan is the Dean and President of Berkeley Divinity School and the McFadden Professor of Anglican Studies and Pastoral Theology at Yale Divinity School. Content warning off the top, we talk about the death of a parent, we make indirect references to colonialism,
00:01:59
Speaker
indirect references to white privilege. We talk about some of the impacts of COVID on the world outside of the United States, and we do talk a bit about Christian hegemony. So as always, if these things are not right for you to listen to, feel free and switch this one off and we will catch you in the next one.
Cultural Formality: US vs Australia
00:02:16
Speaker
Going on, we talk about Anglican sacramental theology, secularization,
00:02:22
Speaker
negotiating international COVID protocols, the importance of a good loaf of bread baked well and slow, and a strong cup of coffee. It was such a privilege to sit under this man's tutelage and to catch up a little bit in November 2022. Please enjoy my conversation with Andrew McGowan.
00:02:45
Speaker
I'm not sure what is an appropriate title to call you, given that I've been your student, formerly. So should it be Dean McGowan? Should it be Dr. McGowan? Should it be the Reverend Doctor, very Reverend Doctor? Andrew also works. In fact, this is an interesting cross-cultural reality for me.
00:03:09
Speaker
Australians are sort of by choice and commitment relatively casual and it's very common even in higher education scenes, not so much in secondary but in a higher education scene for a teacher and student to be on first name terms and I would typically encourage my students who have graduated to treat me in that respect but it's also something I'm quite conscious of. I would perhaps naturally just sort of
00:03:33
Speaker
think of students as people who, of course, as adults might think of me as Andrew and them as Jane. But I've come to sort of respect and negotiate the American sensibilities around that as something that I need to be respectful of. And I saw a colleague, an Australian colleague, who's on his way to a big international meeting in this country that I'm going to in a few days.
00:03:57
Speaker
his tweet accompanying this and yes it was still on that other platform you know with something like well now I'm getting ready for a week of being called Dr so-and-so because in his own institution he's always just Mick or whatever it is. So while Andrew is good for these purposes but it also touches on some some interesting questions about how we negotiate even the subtle cultural differences between US society and Australian society quite apart from other differences.
00:04:25
Speaker
I mean, we can lean into that. Would you care to say a bit more? Well, Australia and the United States are so similar in many respects, and yet the points of difference are also interesting. I have likened it more than once in talking to people before to appealing an onion by layer, that one finds layers of similarity or just pure sameness alternating with layers of difference.
00:04:49
Speaker
I think that Australians and people from North America generally find it really generally quite easy to move into each other's circles and enjoy each other in fact in some ways perhaps because there is this hint of difference in the way they approach things and yet enough affinity and similarity that they don't feel it's such hard work to experience what is a bit of the other in the other person.
00:05:13
Speaker
I mean, it's
Feeling Like an Outsider in the US
00:05:15
Speaker
always more interesting to be an Australian in the United States than to be in Australia. Let's put it that way. There is just this hint of exoticism that I'm sure that I managed to dine out on in one way or another. But also those moments where I sort of scratch my head and think, really? I don't understand that very well. And you might well imagine. I mean, this perhaps also changes topics.
00:05:39
Speaker
I've found of course that there are increasingly many of my US friends and colleagues have found themselves experiencing forms of otherness in the development of political and social culture over the last five years or whatever it has been. So I'm not the only person that I deal with who sometimes feels like a stranger in a strange land as I look at
00:05:59
Speaker
some of the weirdness of our contemporary discourses and conversations. But being someone who is not a citizen, there are some ways that affects me from day to day. I think I also tweeted recently, because we're speaking close to an election season,
00:06:15
Speaker
Don't mind me, I'm just here over here being taxed and not represented. So I sit in this curious fashion to these processes of the wider political and social sphere. And in the political ones, I don't have a direct stake by definition as a non-citizen.
00:06:33
Speaker
And yet, of course, I have so many of the privileges that are recorded to citizens in this country, and of course, in particular, to citizens who have the sort of demography and appearance that I have. There are other American citizens who don't have the privileges I have. And when people think of the ways that non-citizens struggle in the US, they're usually dealing with things which I don't have to confront quite so directly.
00:06:56
Speaker
I have had my experiences with US immigration processes that haven't been particularly
Non-Glutenous Grains in Eucharist
00:07:00
Speaker
life-giving and edifying, too. That makes me more sympathetic to those who don't have some of the other privileges that help me to negotiate those, I guess. You're essentially Washington DC or Puerto Rico. Yes, that's right. Exactly. And perhaps I can choose between the two, depending on the kind of activity I want to take part in. The music and the cuisine are going to be more interesting in Puerto Rico. Oh, yes. Yes, yes.
00:07:26
Speaker
Do you have a favorite flavor of arepa since we're talking about Puerto Rico? Oh, interesting. Arepas are of course something one finds even on the streets of New Haven, which is not a bad sort of street cuisine. I'm actually the sort of person that finds it difficult to make decisions like that. If I'm standing at the food truck with the arepas on sale, or if I'm in a restaurant with a physical menu,
00:07:48
Speaker
The problem for me is more that I will have changed my mind by the time the person takes my order from whatever I started with because I'm almost fervently omnivorous, I guess to say. I usually want to try something, not unlike many people, I want to try something I wouldn't cook at home.
00:08:06
Speaker
But but even more perhaps than some of the people I want to try something I've never had before something that I wouldn't do otherwise, but I I find you know any and all of the sort of flavors are likely to fill an orapo with Likely likely to tempt me on a given day
00:08:22
Speaker
would you ever find, you're well known in many circles. I uncovered, I was chagrined to learn that I was not the inauguration of your podcast career, but that you taped an episode of The Joycast back in 2019 about breads and about connections to ancient ways of being and ancient grains and anyone should go and check it. Would the thought of ever doing,
00:08:51
Speaker
primarily masa and corn-based breads ever be a line of inquiry or has ever been a line of inquiry for you? Yes it has and a little more generally again although not not to avoid those ones because they are particularly interesting especially in this environment where they're they're sort of more closer to being indigenous. I do have an interest that I haven't really barely begun to explore about
00:09:17
Speaker
non-glutenous grains and their uses more generally because there were two or three angles which I think are very interesting for those materials. One is I think perhaps the one you were hinting at from the fact that these are potentially the foods of indigenous groups in this part of the world and in some others.
00:09:37
Speaker
But also, I'm working now on a project for an academic lecture next year, which will actually be part of a conference that the ISM, the Institute of Sacred Music here at Yale, is sponsoring in June next year about the economics and the materiality of liturgy. And the topic that I'm wanting to sort of pursue is the question of glutinous and non-glutenous breads and the Eucharist.
00:10:01
Speaker
There's a particular controversy that Roman Catholics are most caught up in, but which I think is of interest to all of us, where the Roman Catholic Church insists that the bread of the Eucharist must contain gluten, even if in microscopic quantities. They're sort of trying to thread a needle here between the fact that they know that there are people who can't or shouldn't eat glutinous foods.
00:10:23
Speaker
and the fact that they want, I think, to maintain a sort of fidelity to the historical tradition of Jesus at the Last Supper being a faithful Jew who would have eaten matzah that would have been made from wheat. But I actually think we don't know whether or not it was made from wheat, and so one of the things that I'm going to explore in this is
00:10:45
Speaker
the grains that rabbis reflected about, about what was allowable for Passover and what wasn't, and the relationship between those grains and the quality of fermentation, which is getting us a little bit away from masa and from flat breads, if we can use that generic term to think about the things we're likely to produce with non-glutenous grains.
00:11:08
Speaker
It circles back again, as you can probably hear, and I am interested in the questions that arise, for instance, for peoples of different cultures who are thinking not just about
00:11:20
Speaker
For instance, if we're talking about Christian contexts in which people want to engage in Eucharistic celebration, there is this concern which the Roman Catholic controversy is reflecting, a proper concern to my mind about how we connect historically, diachronically with the meal of Jesus and the Last Supper and His food ways, and then how we connect with the food ways of
00:11:42
Speaker
more recent and even current realities.
Church Relevance in Secular Societies
00:11:45
Speaker
There are parts of the world where wheat bread is not a staple food and some parts of the world where it's even quite difficult to find. And what does the Eucharist constitute in those settings? I don't have a glib answers to that. I will never
00:12:04
Speaker
condemn people who take decisions that might be different from the ones I would choose myself. But I think how to find a place where we can acknowledge both fidelity to a historical tradition and some acknowledgment of the fact that we always contextualize those things. I mean, if you look at
00:12:21
Speaker
the things that we eat and drink in most modern Western or particularly North American Eucharistic contexts today, they don't really look all that much like stuff I imagine Jesus has at the Last Supper in first century Judea. They're very much contextualized through medieval and then further modern developments and that applies whether you're sort of doing something that looks very
00:12:44
Speaker
high church Catholic and pious or whether you do something that looks very low church with little glasses and grape juice because you know Mr. Welch hadn't invented the pasteurization of grape juice in the first century either. So that's that stuff. And ironically speaking of North American cuisines though the wonder in wonder bread seem seems to be perhaps the most artificially
00:13:05
Speaker
produce that one could consider? Yes, it's absolutely as much a sort of attenuated artifact as the medieval wafer that, you know, Robert Catholic and many Episcopalian contexts would find used for the Eucharist, which is the point at which I have to mention the old joke around here that our
00:13:23
Speaker
lamented former liturgy professor Aidan Cavanaugh, who was here through much of the 70s and 80s, had an inimitable style and was apparently wont to say, you know, students
00:13:37
Speaker
The problem with the Eucharistic bread of the moment is not believing that it's the body of Christ. It's believing that it's bread. I mean, there are so many things believing that you could say the same of chocolate or coffee. Well, yes. So compared to the sort of earlier versions of products made from the same substances, you mean? Is that what you think of there? Yeah. Because when you read historic accounts of how
00:14:04
Speaker
indigenous American peoples produce chocolate products, for instance. They don't look like something you would get in Starbucks today. Coffee, unless you knew with what the earliest forms of brewing and generation would have been. Me too. My best exposure to the long histories and traditions of coffee come from behind the green apron, so I virtually have it.
00:14:31
Speaker
You have this incredible thread weaving through so much of your work of juxtaposing the old and the new, finding ways of holding the two in tension, how appropriate, we're Anglicans. I wonder in spaces like that,
00:14:55
Speaker
I've been doing a lot of thinking most recently about the slowly dwindling physical footprint and perhaps even moral authority of the Anglican Church in the northern provinces. I wonder if we can chat a bit about, for the rector at home, the rector of a small typical parish,
00:15:24
Speaker
who's living in the reality of our world today, whether that's the North American Episcopal Church, whether that's the Church of England, I know much less about the Anglican Church in New Zealand and Australia, but where we see
00:15:41
Speaker
these old and new questions being very uncannily reflected in the physical reality of numbers and ties and crumbling buildings. I wonder if we can think a little bit about that together. I don't have a specific question. You just seem like one of my colleagues who has done some thinking.
00:16:05
Speaker
Yeah, it's true. And I think, by the way, we could easily lump the Australian and New Zealand churches in with the phenomenon you're referring to. In some ways, perhaps a bit closer to the Church of England version of this than to the US Episcopal churches. But there are certainly commonalities across all of them. But you're right that I've thought about it. And one thing I've said once or twice in the past to people in North America when we're thinking about the future of the church and where it's going, I say, I come from the future.
00:16:32
Speaker
Because the Australian church, I think of all of those, perhaps the New Zealand church as well, is in some ways
COVID's Impact on Life and Mobility
00:16:40
Speaker
further along that path of dealing with what it's going to be to exist in the realm of a much more secular society than the one in the United States. Britain, the Church of England and the United States are different from one another.
00:16:53
Speaker
But they have in common a sort of patrimony of religious affiliation and cultural deference towards religion, which is going to take longer to diffuse. But it's still going to diffuse. So I'm confident of that. The Australia I grew up in had some big churches on the corners of the big city blocks and so forth. But I found myself as a schoolboy, even, scratching my head about the fact that how come I was the only person in my class who went to church?
00:17:21
Speaker
My own upbringing was devout, my father was a priest, and so the church has always been a part of my own identity. But that identity was even from my youth in the 60s and 70s, one which looked as if it belonged to a world which had already passed away.
00:17:40
Speaker
And so the process of secularization, I think, in Australia and New Zealand, and to some extent also in Europe, including the UK, I think is more advanced than in the United States. When I first came to this country, which was 30 years ago, to start. Sorry. Can we cut that? The microphone's cut out there for a moment. That's right. Congratulations on your associate professor position.
00:18:10
Speaker
Thirty years ago I came to this country and was really struck by how lively and full churches seem to be, how my identity as an ordained person seemed to be something to which people were deferential in daily life. If I went to the supermarket wearing a clergy shirt, there would be sort of smiles and how are you father and all this sort of stuff. And it was really like coming to another world. It was a world that was still religious.
00:18:35
Speaker
And across that time, I think the United States has sort of hit a couple of hurdles or walls of secularization. I mean, for me, one of them was the 9-11 experience, and we could say more about that. And then I think the COVID experience will probably have proven to be another one as well, where change doesn't always happen by sort of
00:18:58
Speaker
slow, easy development, but sometimes by quantum steps, as it were, where people start to ask themselves difficult questions about what about this religiosity that we've been assuming is a part of the social fabric of our lives? Is this really going to persist?
00:19:12
Speaker
I've just been teaching this semester the class on the history of the prayer book, which is now part of my role as things have shifted around and our esteemed colleague Brian Spinks has retired. And so grateful for his many years of service and the brilliance of his scholarship. A person of great erudition and I sort of, of course this is one of the moments where even somewhat of my relative age, you know, can
00:19:37
Speaker
dig deep and find imposter syndrome returning back to haunt me. But one of the things that I've been exploring with the students of the class this year is how the origins of the movement for liturgical change in the 20th century were in some respects fueled by recognition at the end of the First World War in Europe that maybe the gig was up. That in England you see people coming back from the trenches after the First World War and the horror.
00:20:04
Speaker
that had been experienced there and quite a number of quite significant Anglican theologians of the period realizing that Christendom had in effect broken, that the experiences that so many of the people they had shared cigarettes with in the trenches and so forth had broken the remaining facade of a sense that
00:20:26
Speaker
you know, the church and the nobility, aristocracy, you know, sort of things people can see going on if they watch Downton Abbey, for instance, sort of in a gentle, historical, soapy kind of fashion. You can see that world starting to come apart at the seams. And while that particular TV series didn't deal so much with the religious dimension, that was very much a part of the experience of the Church of England during the 20s and 30s.
00:20:50
Speaker
And there's a long conceptual loop to prescribe here, but I'll try and come to it in a nutshell. I think that one of the reasons that we began revising our liturgies in the 20th century was because of a recognition earlier in the 20th century that the game had changed and that the church needed liturgies not for an established reality in which religiosity and churchgoing were simply a part of the fabric of everybody's lives.
00:21:17
Speaker
but for a world in which Christian identity would start to become something which was unusual again. Now that process of recognition was I think interrupted by the second war and by the baby boomer generation and the fact that
00:21:32
Speaker
everybody in the 1950s seemed to want to do everything. So the bowling leagues as well as churches got a great boost out of the ways in which there was a swing back towards association with religion. Not so much, I think, because of a profound growth in religious understanding and belief, but because there was this upsurge of the need to connect and to create social bonds among people.
00:21:53
Speaker
But I think that kind of insulated the Episcopal Church and other US religious institutions from the bigger trajectory that was still on the march through that period. Because the secular is now basically shaking us by the shoulders and saying, hey, you know it's over, don't you? And yet I find that many clergy and many laity haven't really
00:22:13
Speaker
got to the point of thinking that that's something that they need to deal with or have to accept. I'm not quite sure of the right way to frame that because it's not easy news. But the writing has been on the wall for a hundred years. It's just that we've had these interim periods when it seemed that things were going
00:22:30
Speaker
sufficiently well that we could just sort of hold them at arm's length. So to come back to your original question, the thing that I would say to the rector watching the podcast is to say, how are we going to think about what authentic Christian discipleship means in a world that probably doesn't care that much anymore?
00:22:50
Speaker
I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. And in fact, one of the reasons that I took myself into the realm of patristic studies back as a doctoral student 30 years ago. Patristic, just to define our terms for folks outside of an academic theological context, we're probably talking about some of the early
00:23:09
Speaker
theologians, writers. The early Christian period of that sort of, well, you know, let's lay anything from the second through to the fifth or sixth centuries. The thing that made me think that this was an area that I wanted to spend some time in studying was effectively this, that we now stand at the time
00:23:29
Speaker
When the bonds between church and society that were being constructed during the course of the fourth century in particular, when Constantine becomes the emperor of Rome, when Theodosius, his successor at the end of the fourth century, decides that Christianity is the official religion of the empire, and even though we've been talking negatively about Constantine for a few decades now because he was a bit of a rascal,
00:23:51
Speaker
We haven't yet really come to terms with the ways in which Christian identity is now going backwards. So I think we're dealing with the possibility of a church that's more like that of the second and third centuries than a church like that of the fourth and following centuries, which is what we've all gotten used to.
00:24:07
Speaker
And for me, to recover some of the aspects of Christian authenticity and Christian distinctiveness is one of the challenges that we face in this current moment. That was a long answer to that question. But a wonderful one. I think we can spend the rest of our time just sort of picking apart little bits. First and foremost, rascal is the nicest term that I've ever heard the behavior of constant time put.
00:24:34
Speaker
Believe me, as an Australian, I could come up with much worse words, but I'm not sure whether they fall within the style guide or the podcast. We are. So in deference both to your work and to the listeners, I will just say on record that we have earned our explicit rating because we've talked to a lot of comedians as well. But so feel no impetus towards censure on the side of the listening audience. Well, yeah.
00:25:04
Speaker
Never mind. So I love that. I'm going to remember that. Number one, I would like to lean in a little bit more about the thoughts of COVID because I happen to follow you on Instagram and Facebook. I know that even in some of the stricter seasons of lockdown,
00:25:26
Speaker
even to just be able to do your work, to get back into the country, as prestigious an institution as Yale and the Divinity School, and you having had such a career here, that that was not...
00:25:42
Speaker
easy. No, it wasn't. And I'm sure everyone's going to have their COVID story. I mean, I guess it's a little more diffuse than the 9-11, but you know, everyone has a 9-11 story and everyone's going to have a COVID story. Well, my version was that I with my spouse was on sabbatical in Oxford during the time when COVID came down in March of 2020. And
00:26:01
Speaker
my sort of sabbatical got cut in half because at the same time the United States said well we're not going to welcome non-U.S. citizens coming from European ports that included me and at the same time Australia my home on the other side of the world basically sent out the call to the wild geese saying come home now because we're going to close our borders and at the very same time my father had fallen ill and so we decamped from Oxford and we went to Australia and spent
00:26:26
Speaker
the next five months or so there, which was a really interesting, if difficult time in many respects. For me, what happened was that, another way of putting this is that both of us got to unlock
00:26:43
Speaker
Every middle-aged person's dream, you go back and live with their parents for five months. Is that an ambition? Are you listeners? But in my case, it was a hidden blessing because my father had fallen ill. I was able to go and be with my relatively aged parents for that period of time.
00:27:01
Speaker
And my father died after the time I was with them, but I'd had a period of intimate domestic connection with them, unlike anything I'd had since my 20s.
00:27:16
Speaker
It was a great gift when about a year after that, a bit more than a year after that period that he died, that I had been able to engage closely with him and with my mother in a way that still strikes me as, well, not without its struggles was absolutely a gift. I didn't get to write the book my sabbatical was supposed to come up with.
00:27:40
Speaker
I did write a smaller book on the seven last words of Jesus from the cross, which was based on some sermons I'd done a few years earlier, but I wrote seven new sermons that were sort of, what shall I say, fictive sermons, sermons that I'd never delivered, but which were kind of a second set from the cross. And I suppose living with my father's obvious impending mortality, you know, as a part of my daily life, made that a kind of a potent
00:28:06
Speaker
potent exercise and then yes it wasn't the easiest thing to get back not so much because of what the United States was doing in that instance but because Australia had closed its borders in a quite radical way and managed COVID for a year and a half effectively by just sort of stopping movement in and out of the country. There were occasional flights we did get one back in August of 2020 just in time to pick up the threads of resuming the deanship here at that time but
00:28:35
Speaker
It was quite challenging to be someone who needed to move to different parts of the world when listeners will remember how challenging it sometimes was to move around the block or go to the grocery store and all that kind of thing. When I came back from my enforced exile in Australia in 2020, we began a year that was completely on Zoom. The university was very clear-cut about how this was going to work for us. We simply didn't meet.
00:29:01
Speaker
I didn't go into my office a few steps from here more than once in that year. Locks were changed. It was quite radical.
Culinary Discoveries and Preferences
00:29:10
Speaker
Our existence became virtual. And so the students who arrived during that year had a completely online experience, many of them not having met one another, some of them still remaining in whatever
00:29:23
Speaker
geographical location they'd been prior to theoretically becoming Yale students. That year was a very challenging one for them and for all of us, just as I'm sure that others who are not involved in education had experiences of exhaustion as well as, in many cases of course, of illness and other struggles. But I was sitting with
00:29:47
Speaker
The third year group of students of the current moment, who are the people who came in as that entering cohort in the 2020 year, just a few weeks ago, one of them said in a very thoughtful and reflective conversation, look how far we've come. We used to be just Zoom squares.
00:30:04
Speaker
And now here we are. Did you ever get your Zoom background to the perfect look? What does Andrew McGowan's Zoom background look like? That was interesting. I had a few different approaches. I don't think I ever quite got satisfied. After I left Oxford, when my sabbatical came tumbling down, from that period through August, when I was sort of taking meetings back on this side of the world before I could be here,
00:30:29
Speaker
I sort of wistfully had a slide up that was the Bodleian Library at Oxford. I was still sort of trying to sort of do the wistful thing about all those books, all those books, you know, letting me read. And then when I came back, I have a study, I'm blessed with a comfortable and capacious Deanery apartment at the Berkeley Center, not far from here, but I've had a study there, which honestly, up to that point, for six years, I had
00:30:57
Speaker
barely inhabited except as a place to store things. I got it set up properly and I went to IKEA, you know, I bought one of those sort of sets of bookshelves that I could actually sort of put one next to another, next to another, sort of almost up to the ceiling and sort of bolt them carefully and arrange books so that when I had an appointment that had some
00:31:20
Speaker
particular need for me to project decanal and professorial sort of persona, I would sit in front of those books on a stool with a computer in front of me. Then I had another one which was slightly lower when I was speaking to people. And then I had the desk, which was just looking out on a few different books. So I actually moved around the room depending on who I was speaking to and what mood I was in. You were this close. You were this close to becoming a YouTuber.
00:31:47
Speaker
Almost, almost. Another missed vocation, along with that of Breadbaker. But those were interesting times.
00:31:59
Speaker
I think I can now say that I'm grateful for them in certain respects but I feel myself sort of digging deep to have to say that. I know that there are things that I learned from that time for which I should be grateful but it was very taxing. It was taxing for everyone of course. In the educational environment when you're a teacher
00:32:24
Speaker
you, you know, not every student may feel this, but the teacher relies on a certain degree of empathy and care for the student, which in a theological context is also a prayerful one, and you know, you are in some respects seeking to share the burdens of students as well, and so that is something for which
00:32:45
Speaker
resilience and faith are important and it taught me things that I would rather not have had to learn but nevertheless it taught me things so I acknowledge my gratitude without thereby implying that I would like to go back and do it again.
00:33:00
Speaker
among other things, the keyboard shortcuts for the mute function. That's right. Did anyone actually publish the liturgy that said, you know, the Lord be with you answered, John, you're on mute, you know, something like that? There were so many little rituals like that weren't there, the keystrokes and the button pressing and so forth, yeah.
00:33:26
Speaker
I was waiting, I was waiting for Almi, your holy rude, to come out with a Dalmatic that had just on the back, on the front and the back. You're on mute. Yeah. Turn your video on. Right, right. And of course, it would only have had to come down to the waist.
00:33:43
Speaker
Because that was one of the glories of that time was not having to get dressed beyond what people would see. So there were these sort of small advantages you had to look for. And another advantage, I'll say, since food is one of our themes, is that
00:34:00
Speaker
I got to the point where I realized that since I had to find different ways of doing grocery shopping, that I decided I would find different ways of doing grocery shopping. That is to say, I identified three or four online sources of ingredients that I was not going to find in stop and shop and decided that I would not restrict myself to whatever stop and shop had because I couldn't really use them properly anyway. The local big box store.
00:34:25
Speaker
Right. Well, so I now have two suppliers of Japanese ingredients, for instance, which are just wonderful, two others that have sort of specialist from different European sources and so forth. And my pantry is better stocked than it has ever been because rather than, oh, well, I've got that particular
00:34:46
Speaker
Bean or pulse or grain because I happen to go to the right store two weeks ago. I just have them all so this is this there's a curious and interesting byproduct of that that I've Decided not to make myself quite so much of a victim to whatever Middle America is telling me that I should be able to buy you know here in here in Connecticut then yes Food is
00:35:13
Speaker
The ways that we eat are less determined by our personal choices than we might think. I'd love to do a quick sort of either or speed round. Coffee or tea? No coffee.
00:35:31
Speaker
This might be an insensitive question, but regular or decaf? Oh, regular. I mean, in each case, by the way, there's a footnote about the T and the decaf and when and how and under what circumstances. And yet I can still be quite, if you'll pardon me, doing Myers-Briggs for a minute, I'm quite J about most of these things. I know where I stand.
00:35:51
Speaker
Very, very good. Drilling down a little bit more on coffee when you're not making it home. Blue State or fussy coffee? Oh, interesting. Fussy for sure. But, you know, Blue State is a Connecticut institution, but we've just had the devastating news that they're closing three of the four New Haven venues. So Blue State, when you say that, even though I don't think they're quite in the same category as fussy or the coffee peddler over on State Street. Those are my two favorites, by the way.
00:36:17
Speaker
But Blue State I regard as a solid citizen of the coffee world. You know what you're going to get. It's reliable and so forth. And I'm not a coffee snob. I know the things I prefer. But my coffee preferences work more by way of a hierarchy of values rather than by a refusal of things that are further down. I will drink Dunkin' Donuts coffee.
00:36:39
Speaker
You raised it, so I'll ask, what are the circumstances under which Duncan is the right choice? It's funny, sometimes it's the day of the week or the place where one is, if you're on the road for instance. And then I have to say that just as context determines a lot of how
00:36:55
Speaker
flavor works I think. I'm using flavor obviously in a somewhat loose sense. But the same food can taste good under one set of circumstances and less good under another I think. Necessity is a driver of taste. Gandhi said the mind is the seat of taste and I think that's an interesting insight.
00:37:14
Speaker
that to have a Dunkin Donuts coffee when you're on a road trip to somewhere you want to go to is an enjoyable addition to the experience for me. Or even if it's in a place you don't want to go to, it can be a kind of solace on the journey because some of the associations are things that I find sort of comforting and encouraging, even though a coffee in some sort of very specific, isolated sense would not necessarily be what I'd choose. So there are other foods like that, aren't there? I think, you know, foods that have associations from childhood, for instance,
00:37:43
Speaker
are not always the things that we would choose from a menu, and yet the associations that we have with them can make them things that we can learn to be thankful for again. And I think learning to be thankful for foods, whether or not they're necessarily the top of the sort of gourmet exoticism tree, it's not a bad thing to be thankful for things.
00:38:01
Speaker
This is a three-part question. Is there a difference between brunch and brekkie? So what is it and which would you prefer? Oh interesting, yeah. I was reading some stuff in, I think even though it might have been in the New York Times recently, but certainly in some media source about brunch and
00:38:19
Speaker
Both the
Daily Routines and Personal Stability
00:38:20
Speaker
way restaurant critics and servers and cooks are all frustrated and hate the idea of brunch I must admit brunch is still a bit of a mystery to me You know when I go to places and I realize it's the brunch menu which must mean what it's a weekend morning But before two o'clock or something and usually involved in vodka
00:38:36
Speaker
It's right. These sort of very particular alcoholic drinks, so a mimosa or a Bloody Mary. Am I right in thinking those are the two most obvious things? I think that's right. The fact that I'm asking you the question back indicates that I feel that it's not really one of the culinary sort of
00:38:52
Speaker
spheres of influence that I've quite penetrated in a way that gives me any sort of expertise. I feel that I'm trying to tiptoe around the edges of brunch and not make some sort of error of etiquette when I make the choice. Now, I like some of the things on offer. We were talking about Holland days earlier. I do like an eggs benedict and some of those things.
00:39:12
Speaker
But part of your question was, is it the same as brekkie? And the answer is no for me. Now, this doesn't mean to say that one couldn't identify objectively certain points of overlap. In fact, you and I were talking, I think, before we came online about the breakfast I enjoy cooking on Saturdays, which involves poached eggs and my own bread turned into toast.
00:39:33
Speaker
That's definitely brekkie. And of course poached eggs on toast could be part of a brunch menu as well, but there are no mimosas at my place at that time in the morning. We're still hard into the coffee at that stage. Yes, indeed. So partly it's the time of day you have it, but partly there is some sort of, clearly some sort of mindset around brunch that I feel still lies somewhat beyond my ken. Very good.
00:39:58
Speaker
Thank you for thank you for for indulging me in the speed round. We've got just time for a couple more questions. One of the common themes of of the show is the work of of keeping going, keeping on. Certainly it seems like for
00:40:16
Speaker
for you, given the international challenges you've experienced, giving the readaptations to teaching, and how I imagine students' experiences are different, and the general psyche of the experience of working at higher ed is different, and certainly what I imagine must have been a challenging domestic time among family. That seems like a lot to bear.
00:40:43
Speaker
I wonder what sorts of little things help keep the spirit buoyed, help tend the wellspring, or as former guest Shane Claiborne says, what helps tend the garden? Yeah, yeah. I'll give you two examples. Sure. One is that I have the privilege as part of a seminary community of the daily officers. And I don't think I've ever felt more clearly in a personal and experiential and existential sense the value of the rhythm of daily communal prayer.
00:41:14
Speaker
And, of course, there are many former seminarians out there, some of them may be listening to this, who
00:41:20
Speaker
probably have that experience where, you know, I really hated it at the time but I came to appreciate it after I left because, you know, getting up at 7.30 and different people have different experiences of that. I, of course, am always having to be the chief booster, the cheerleader of the daily office because I'm the dean. But I think that my personal experience of just knowing that there was that group of people, even when it was online, that group of people to do this with at the same time of day and that they would all be praying and that I would be there
00:41:49
Speaker
even in the moments when I was being distracted by what went on in the chat or by what was going on on the other side of the world, that I would still be a part of this structural community of prayer. So it took on a new kind of structural significance for me and we could interpret that probably at at least two levels. You know, one is just the level of the theology of prayer and community and the body of Christ doing its thing.
00:42:12
Speaker
The other that's more prosaic but not trivial is the fact that I think routine is one of the things that does help with some of those things. At least routines that you feel that you've signed on for, routines that you've chosen. I'm not sure that inflicted routines are necessarily so helpful for resilience. But I do think that some people learn more about how structure is something that helps. You know, you're not sure how you get through the day, that's okay, just look for the next landmark, you know, the next thing you're headed towards. That's one example.
00:42:42
Speaker
Another I use sort of both lightheartedly but with a certain profundity is my bread making practice, which I continue to work on. I did a great course in the UK in June this year.
00:42:55
Speaker
I continue to see myself as an advanced beginner, even though the people upon whom I thrust my extra loaves sort of look at it and say, wow, you're an amazing baker. But when it's something you care about, you spend more time thinking about how little you know and how much you have to learn than about whether or not things are right.
00:43:13
Speaker
But the thing I was going to say about bread baking is that in contrast to education or even perhaps to the life of the spirit,
Hopes for Future Human Interdependence
00:43:20
Speaker
it is a rare thing with education that you really get to say in the course of a day or a week or even a year, wow, we've sort of done something which has been transformative for somebody's life. I think that education is a difficult thing to measure because it's actually
00:43:36
Speaker
the long le duet, you know it's years that it takes for whatever the seeds you sow in the field of educational work take a long time to prosper. It is often so moving and I'll just say moving when a student circles back and says you know there was something you said or something you did or an experience I had here that has really made a difference to me and I just wanted to tell you so you know those are the things that
00:44:01
Speaker
that move you to tears but you know something about a loaf of bread that's different you can get it done within about a day and in a day you know and you look at something you say I did this I achieved this so that the bread on the one hand is light-heartedly here's something that I managed to achieve yes but it's also a kind of a sacrament of the fact that things take
00:44:20
Speaker
effort to achieve. And the sort of sourdough baking I do is a bit less instant than some other forms of bread making. It really does take me more than a day to produce something that I want. And so there's both a reminder of the fact that yes, things do get created and things do emerge as gift from the effort that one puts in. And sometimes you need small things where you can see the achievement.
00:44:43
Speaker
more immediately to deal with the fact that the rest of what you're doing, even though you go ahead in faith, is not always the thing that you're going to see the harvest of. I will never ever begrudge someone a good savoury scone or a soda loaf. No, absolutely. Because they're the instant gratification of the bread world. But no, absolutely. Things that work a bit faster, but things which have
00:45:12
Speaker
inherent virtue, absolutely. We're coming to the end of our time, so I have just one question left for you, the question that we ask all of our guests to wrap up the time. What do you want the world to look like when you're done with it? Wow, yeah.
00:45:26
Speaker
Well, in the moment that we live, the first thing we want to say is that I'd still like it to be here. Because these feel we're in the sort of season of the year when we're speaking when apocalyptic things appear in the lectionary and so forth. And chats are happening right now at COP 27 back in Egypt. Right, right. So like many others who you're talking to, I'm concerned about climate crisis in a way that isn't just one of, you know,
00:45:55
Speaker
moral indignation. I'm perplexed and concerned that we're sort of getting past the point that we can really sort of hold off some of the terrible things that are going to be consequences for climate change. We seem, if anything, to be less politically well equipped to deal with them than we were
00:46:11
Speaker
10 years ago when we could have done more. But the world towards which I look, which may honestly be another case of what I was saying about education, something that other people get to harvest rather than me, will of course be one in which there is a deeper realization of human interdependence and a deeper realization of human interdependence with the rest of our natural environment.
00:46:38
Speaker
in which we would think about our future as something that we share or something that we're kind of trying to steward for the people who will be here to harvest things we plant.
00:46:50
Speaker
Our new cycle and our obsession with entertaining ourselves and distracting ourselves turns us away from the possibility that there are things worth doing that take longer than a day or a year or a four-year electoral cycle to achieve. I'd love to leave a world where I doubt that I will have harvested the things I want to, but where some of the things that I've sown will give rise to people who will continue that work of sowing and planting and harvesting.
00:47:19
Speaker
Well said. Thank you so much for chatting to me today. Paulie, it's been great to see you and thank you for the conversation.
00:47:25
Speaker
My thanks to the very Reverend Dean Andrew McGowan. To learn more about his work at Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, you can check out their website, you can follow him on Instagram, you can check out his sub-stack, and you can follow Berkeley Divinity School on Instagram. Thank you so much for tuning in to Uncommon Good with Paulie Rees. This program is produced in Southwest Philadelphia on the unceded land of the Lenny Lenape Tribe and the Black Bottom community.
00:47:54
Speaker
Our associate producers are Willa Jaffe and Kia Watkins. If you enjoyed listening to the show, please support us by leaving us a five-star review and a comment, and subscribing wherever you listen to podcasts. It really does help people find us.
00:48:09
Speaker
Uncommon Good is also available on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram at UncommonGoodPod. Follow us there for closed caption video content and more goodies. We love questions and feedback. You can send us a DM on social media or an email at uncommongoodpod at gmail.com.
00:48:30
Speaker
Thank you so much for listening. Until next time, wishing you every uncommon good to do your uncommon good to be the uncommon good.