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9 . Interview with a Catholic - Connor Wood
52 Plays8 months ago
Here's my conversation with Connor Wood. Connor is, among other things, a writer and an adult convert from atheism to Catholicism.
We had a really interesting and wide ranging conversation, discussing the merits and failings of liberalism, ritual and religion, the story of Connor's conversion, and the question of how we can make sense of miracles in the light of modernity.
I hope you enjoy!
And please consider subscribing to my substack to support this podcast
The Sane & Miraculous substack
Notes
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Transcript
Introduction and Episode Overview
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to the podcast. Today I have a very interesting guest for you, Connor Wood. We're going to be talking about Catholicism. We're going to be talking about the the the benefits and the limitations of liberalism and various details into anthropology, ritual and miracles.
Podcast Support and Engagement
00:00:28
Speaker
I'm going to say more about that in a moment and and kind of properly introduce the episode. But before I do that, I haven't figured out, let me just say, I haven't figured it out how to do this bit of the podcast, which is now necessary.
00:00:46
Speaker
ah telling this story backwards. So let me start by saying I am increasing the amount of time and energy I'm putting into the podcast. So starting from now, the frequency of episodes is going to go up and um and the amount of work that's going into the newsletter and it's the episodes is going up.
00:01:05
Speaker
so Well, that's not might be entirely true about individual episodes. I already put ah just obscene amount of work into editing. It's kind of crazy how much work it is. I might do a little less per episode, but it's going to be way more episodes. We're going to see how it goes. I might do about the same. It might not feel obscene now that I have.
00:01:25
Speaker
allocated more time for it anyway. So whatever, however much editing I do or don't do per episode, the the amount of output is going to increase. The quality is going to stay at least as good, if not better. And so this is taking more of my time and energy and I'm asking for your support. If you're enjoying the podcast, if it's valuable to you, there are a few ways you can support it. So this is the part, I don't know where to put this in the in an episode.
00:01:51
Speaker
Okay, so I have to, you know, the structure of an episode where I'm talking with someone is the beginning. I'm going to introduce the person and then there's going to be the conversation. And that's the end. I don't really know where to put this kind of, you know, how do you help pitch in these episodes? so I'm still figuring it out, but as you can tell right now where I'm putting it is almost at the beginning with just enough before it of explaining what this episode is going to be about that you don't just feel.
00:02:20
Speaker
immediately pitched. Anyway, hello. So here are the ways that you can support this podcast. Number one absolute gold standard amazing way of supporting is subscribe as a paid subscriber on the sub stack. It's currently $5 a month.
00:02:36
Speaker
very ah reasonable and affordable, I would say. And for that subscription, not only do you get the good feeling in your heart of supporting the podcast, you also get some extra content, ah including today, there's going to be a little bit of a debrief reflection on this interview, which is for subscribers only. And that's one of the, that's going to be Comment to anytime I interview someone I'm gonna do a little reflection which is for subscribers only So if you want to hear my behind the scenes thoughts about how this conversation went What I wish I'd said and all that kind of stuff if you subscribe you will get that information today um So that's one way you can support it if you are already doing that. Thank you so much or if you are a Don't want to do that yet. Other ways you can support is whatever podcast player you're using is going to have some kind of rating thing. Or if you go on iTunes and give the, uh, give the podcast a five star review. That's super helpful. Uh, has to be five stars because of the way the algorithms work.
00:03:38
Speaker
It's just incredible star rating inflation in the world. And so five stars is the thing that will make a difference. And a review will also make a difference. So if you want to do that, that's super helpful. And finally, I believe at this point, ah sharing the podcast on social media, sharing with your friends, if you if you you know know someone that would enjoy it, all of that super helpful. So anyway, that's the end of my pitch. Thanks for any way that you choose to but Okay. So now the conversation you're about to listen to with Connor, what's it about? So there were a few different things going on earlier this year, kind of the summer around Christianity. There's like an up swelling of Christianity, right? I don't know if anyone's noticed this, but like it's, it's kind of more, and even just recently, like
00:04:28
Speaker
Russell Brandt just kind of like publicly converted. Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote a post in July. This was kind of one of the big impetuses for this, saying we need to be Christians, like it's going to be good ah for for Western society, right? ah And Jordan Peterson, it's just like, there's a lot of there's a lot of people talking about Christianity and kind of in a new way.
Miracles in Religion and Modernism
00:04:50
Speaker
And the thing for me that has always been just a deal breaker just like nope Christianity doesn't work as a religion unfortunately uh the miracles the uh and you know there are several but let's just say the resurrection
00:05:08
Speaker
It's kind of like the main one, the most important one. And personally, I have not really found a way to reconcile. What's more fair to say is like I haven't had reason enough to try and find a way to reconcile the the account of the resurrection and you know and and a kind of modernist understanding of of reality and of nature. And it just hasn't...
00:05:39
Speaker
the The case has not been compellingly made that I should try and do that. And given that, it's like, well, why would I? like it's it's you know There are any number of accounts of miracles in any number of other traditions, which I don't try and reconcile with modern. you know In Buddhism, for example, there are stories about the Buddha like emitting flames from his arms or ah splitting his body into multiple forms and ah and being in multiple places at the same time.
00:06:08
Speaker
I don't think that happened. Don't think it happened. Love Buddhism. Don't think that stuff happened. But with Christianity, the thing about Buddhism is the the point of Buddhism is not the miracles that the Buddha did or didn't perform.
00:06:20
Speaker
Those are not central. What's central is the teaching of the Buddha, which is which is the Four Noble Truths and you know everything that came out of that. But with Christianity, the miracle is central. The resurrection is central to Christianity. As Connor says in this episode, he quoting Paul, if the resurrection didn't happen, this is all a waste of time. Something like that.
00:06:45
Speaker
he I think he paraphrased Paul. I'm paraphrasing him paraphrasing Paul. Anyway, this is central to Christianity, this belief in the uniquely, mirac and both in the miracle and the resurrection, but also in the unique status of Jesus Christ as as uniquely the Son of God.
00:07:05
Speaker
right And it's just always been implausible to me. And I wanted to find somebody who is intelligent and thoughtful and understands the modernist worldview um and kind of, you know, has integrated those insights. Cause there's a, there's a kind of person who believes this stuff, who just doesn't really understand his not, you know, in, in developmental terms has not kind of integrated.
00:07:32
Speaker
modern thinking. And so just doesn't really understand why there is even a problem here about the resurrection or about any of the miracles and just says, no, well, God did it. That's fine. I don't just believe that. Okay. I'm not interested in talking to that person. It's not going to be intellectually useful because they're just not really working to integrate.
00:07:54
Speaker
they're eliding the problem by not and by not having integrated the modernist worldview, right? And so just to lay it out in case it's not crystal clear, the modernist worldview says that like nature is this physical process that's happening and we understand through science and through observation and the miracles are excluded from the modernist world modernist worldview definitionally.
00:08:21
Speaker
right A miracle is something which is not happening through the process of normal operations of nature. And what the modernist worldview says is there is only what's happening through the normal processes of nature. And so there's no way for something to happen that is distinct than that. Now, I think the modernist worldview you is missing something, but We have to go through modernism and we have to integrate modernism before we can get to the next thing. So this is turning into a long and true. But this is the problem, right? There's modernism and then this is the count of the miracles. How do you reconcile those two things? Well, one way you can do it, which is partly how I do it, is to say there aren't those miracles aren't real. I don't think modernism is the whole picture, but I don't think that the the part of the picture that modernism misses is miracles.
00:09:15
Speaker
don't think that's what modernism gets wrong. I actually think that modernism is right that there are no miracles, not in the sense of events happening outside of the processes of nature. I might be wrong about that, but that's where I live today. So you have to integrate it somehow. And I wanted somebody who had worked to integrate it to talk with on the podcast and a mutual friend of of mine and Connor's suggested Connor. I was kind of like talking to people I know that were ah Christian, and he said, oh, you should talk to Connor. And I'm so glad I did. Connor Wood is amongst other things, a writer on Substack. ah His Substack is Culture Uncurled. There are links to some of his articles in the description of this podcast.
00:10:03
Speaker
I highly recommend you check it out. Really great reads and Connor more than fit the bill of who I was looking for for this conversation. I, you know, I was looking for this kind of abstract idea, like ah a Catholic who was ah informed by modernism, but I got a real human being with amazing insights of his own. And so that was super satisfying.
00:10:26
Speaker
super interesting background, super thoughtful. we We cover a lot of ground. As I said earlier, we talk about liberalism. We talk about we talk about some ideas from anthropology, different religious traditions, Connor's conversion story, which is super interesting. Like he was not raised Catholic, which I think also makes his story more interesting, but he converted later in life, all kinds of things. Had a great time talking with Connor. Now we do.
00:10:53
Speaker
talk about the miracles and specifically the resurrection. And I, you know, I challenge him on this point that that I'm raising. I will leave it to you to decide whether his answer satisfy, he has an answer, whether his answer is satisfying for you in terms of, in terms of the resolution of this seeming conflict. But regardless of what you decide about that particular question, I think it's super interesting conversation and hope you enjoy.
00:11:39
Speaker
In a way, you can think about the cognitive science of religion or just even more broadly, the that the scientific study of religion to be the study of the negative space in modern liberalism. OK.
Science, Religion, and Human Nature
00:11:56
Speaker
Right? Like everything that seems to not make sense about how humans behave, if you take a kind of Lockean, rational, autonomous view of human nature as your framework, that's what I study. and And so that leads you naturally to questions of human nature, because we live in a liberal society, in the United States is the paradigmatic liberal political entity, right? Like we are the standard bearer.
00:12:21
Speaker
of modern liberalism. Currently. Currently, yeah, for better and for worse. yeah And um ah we were founded that way. that's the that you know and And that's the waters we swim in. And so the more deeply I delve into this line of study, the more it occurred to me that we might be on some pretty shaky ground in terms of our our our our premises.
00:12:47
Speaker
Because there is this black there is this negative space. There's a whole lot about human nature that is completely unaccounted for and ah um the the liberal anthropology that we've inherited from the enlightenment um from the American founding fathers from the whole modern turn. And ah so that's where that's that's where I ended up. maybe I think this is this is a really fascinating time to be alive, to be studying this sort of thing, because we can all sense that liberalism is undergoing a crisis.
00:13:27
Speaker
And i would I would say that part of that crisis is epistemological and anthropological. It's just that that the data just don't support some of the basic premises about how humans act and and what we are what we are like. um For example, yeah, ritual is an example, right? where Where ritual only works if you accept some form of authority to determine the form of the ritual.
00:13:56
Speaker
Right. And so yeah there's a there's a kind of a teleological structure to it from the get go. That if you are, I love the example of a Jewish Seder, because it's probably just one of the um it's one of the most complete examples of a human ritual I can I can I can think of. And and then they're also fun. um So I don't know if you know a Seder, the Passover ritual. Remind me. So it's it's, it's a dinner.
00:14:25
Speaker
And you gather in somebody's house, maybe a rabbi's house, but maybe not. And you um you do a series of readings and eating specific foods, not not all of which I'm going to remember, but like bitter herbs and red wine and excuse me, unleavened bread and things like that. and But you have to do it in a set order and you do the same readings. And it's the story of the Jew of the Israelites um passage out of Egypt. Right.
00:14:52
Speaker
right And so you you yeah you ask questions, there's got to be children there, so you can ask them questions like, why did we do this? Why do we say this? What night what makes tonight different from all other nights? well because we and And there's a ritualized response. right So the whole thing is templated. And it's not practical.
00:15:10
Speaker
right it's not ah It's not a normal dinner and that the the function of it is not just to nourish your body. In fact, I've been to maybe half a dozen satyrs. I don't think I've ever come away feeling like full, really. you know' That's not the point. The point is to go through this.
00:15:26
Speaker
um the structure, which is templated by a tradition that you cannot change, basically. I mean, you can, you can mess with it, especially, especially in modern America, people come up with all kinds of different ways to change the seder. But generally, you know, the point is a a ritual like that is structured by some form of collective intentionality that transcends the individual and so is not amenable to rational decision making.
00:15:55
Speaker
you know in ah in a ah an empiricist sense. You can't say to yourself, well, I'm only going to take part in this ritual if I can determine based on my own reason that it makes sense, that it's practical, right that it's it's ah it's a and good thing to do, because that line of reasoning will terminate nowhere. it's It's not the appropriate line of reasoning for that. You have to basically say, either I accept the authority of this culture, this religion, this tradition, or I don't. And if you do, then you do it. And if you don't, then you don't. And so there's a there's a kind of a priori um decision about what authority to trust. And that's the same for almost any sort of, you know, ritual or or or common tradition. And um it's not well accounted for. And I think a lot of the
00:16:51
Speaker
at least the kind of more vulgar versions of the Enlightenment anthropology that we're all heirs to, where, like, for example, Kant says, um sapere aude, right? dare to Basically, dare to use your own reason, you know. And the the motto for the Royal Society is nulias in verbe.
00:17:13
Speaker
um roughly, like, don't take anybody's word for it. Find out yourself, you know, and that's the kind of like macho, you know, like, like yeah call to arms that the whole modern world is based on is I figured it out for yourself, don't trust authority, right? Well, but the, the the modern human sciences, if I modern, I really mean 21st century, this is like, you know, the past couple decades have made massive advances in understanding how our brains work in a social way. And it turns out they are almost literally designed for picking up on cultural authority and and replicating it, basically. That's that's that's what differentiates us almost better than anything else from chimpanzees.
00:17:56
Speaker
to play the other side of that, ah the the Enlightenment people would say, exactly. That's why we had to write these books. That's why we had to have these mottos. That's why we had to make this claim because left to our own devices, human beings will be trapped in these kind of like, you know, these cultural patterns that that are, if not arbitrary, then, you know, kind of not open to evolution and not open to to kind of the rapid Input of new information i mean you like the thing about modernity is they did get a lot of things right like there is a baby in that bath water yeah one hundred percent. um I love plumbing right you know ah well of course which isn't a completely modern mission the roman said plumbing but.
00:18:44
Speaker
We have better plumbing. Yeah, yeah but we have, uh, anesthetics for dentistry. That's like high up on my list. I love that. Yeah. And we have, and we have antibiotics and we have public health, ah you know, knowledge about, um, pathogens and things like that. Um, doesn't always work perfectly as we just experienced, but, um, you know, it's better than, it's better than having typhus like breakout in your cities every couple of years, like it used to. So yeah, there's a lot of, there's a lot of good and, um,
00:19:15
Speaker
that comes out of that ah expansion, I wouldn't have any expansion, like explosion of openness to new information being sort of injected into our and our societies, our ways of seeing the world and so forth. But I guess two things about that. The first is that humans are already quite good at that. We have what's called cumulative cultural evolution.
00:19:45
Speaker
And our ancestors um in the human lineage, for example, for example Neanderthal, homo Neanderthalis, seem to have some of the same cognitive features that we do that are unusual. um One of them is called over imitation. And that's that's very closely related to what I was just talking about in terms of the authority that allows rituals to kind of propagate across generations is that humans seem to have a motivation, a motivational structure that pushes us to replicate non instrumental action sequences when they're performed by somebody who we trust and
00:20:30
Speaker
What I mean is, you know if you see somebody pop open a pop can, a soda can or whatever, and and drink from it, it's like, well, that's that's kind of an instrumental thing. you know There's a physical causal relationship between pushing down the tab and getting the can open, right? Okay, whatever. you know Once you figure that out, you don't need to be ah fastidious about copying exactly how somebody does that. But when it comes to a ritual, like a Seder or like crossing yourself coming into a church, there is there is no there's no physical causal relationship between what what you've just done and any practical outcome.
00:21:01
Speaker
and when the So when the human brain sees somebody do something like that, it tags it with a salience marker, um roughly. Experiments show that when people that when people see non-instrumental action sequences that others are performing, they they experience them as more salient than practical action sequences. Your brain basically says, hey, pay attention. This is important. And then we're motivated to repeat the whole sequence you know, top top to bottom. um Whereas chimpanzees, who are very closely, you know, they're our closest living relative, and in many ways, they're, they are like uncanny valley close to us, you know, if you go to a go to a zoo, and it's just like, it's, it's almost creepy how similar their hands are, some of the facial expressions, right? But they don't do this, they just don't that it's like, they, they will copy things only to get
00:21:58
Speaker
ah a goal accomplished. They want the treat that's in the box, right? They don't want to do all kinds of weird ritualistic things to the box to get the the treat out. But human humans of all kinds of backgrounds all around the world do. If you show ah if you show a treat a box with a treat in it and you show a certain way to open it where you're tapping on it three times and you're doing all these things that you don't need to do, as soon as it's apparent that you don't need to do those things, chimpanzees skip all that crap and go right for the treat. They just pull open the drawer.
00:22:28
Speaker
yum you know humans by and large keep doing the the the unnecessary steps within within that experiment. It's a pretty famous experiment that's been repeated in all kinds of ways. There is something about humans, the motivational structures of our social cognition, of our social reasoning that make us want to repeat things that that we can't figure out necessarily the practical goal of. So why do we do that?
00:22:56
Speaker
Well, one answer is because a lot of technologies require basically bracketing our questions about what the point is when we're in the learning stage. The example that's often used is carving out a canoe. This is an example from Joe Henrich at Harvard who is an influential figure in my field. um ah Carving out a canoe is super hard and complex and it requires a lot of steps.
00:23:25
Speaker
And the steps, you know, I'm out of ah out of a log, right? You know, like something, right. And um and the steps that you start with, if you don't if you've never done it before, and you've never seen anybody carve a continue out of a log, you might not really get why you're doing those first steps. And so it makes sense to if you're if you want to learn how to a technological skill, it makes sense to just copy what you see people doing, even if you don't really know why it's there, why they're doing it. Right. And that's, that's ah important. That is a key mechanism for the transmission of know-how that makes makes human life possible. right i mean that was my first so when you When you were describing this phenomenon, and I thought of the you know the cargo cults at the end of the Second World War. ah have you come of Do you know that story? Yeah, yeah in Polynesia. yeah Yeah, exactly. So just briefly, during the Second World War on these islands, the US military had these kind of established these bases on these islands, and they would build landing strips for their planes, and the planes would fly in, they would bring all this cargo, and the local people would like these cargo would be like this amazing stuff, like this great clothes, food, whatever other supplies. And, and so the local people were like, these planes are really good news. And then war ended, all the planes went back to the US and the local people tried to recreate the process they built,
00:24:42
Speaker
landing strips, they built air control or air traffic control towers, they built like little ah headsets out of ah bamboo and stuff like this, and they would try and summon the planes, they would reenact the, you know, the behaviors that they'd seen the the the US s military doing.
00:24:57
Speaker
to try and summon these planes. Obviously, it doesn't work, but that just reminds me of that. and And yeah, the thought I had as you were saying is like, well, if you don't understand why someone's doing something, doing it is a way to try and figure out why they're doing it. So you don't understand why someone's crossing themselves when they walk into a church. Well, if I do that, maybe I'll learn something. What's interesting is and i that would explain, I think that would explain like repeating rituals that are completely non-utilitarian, like you said, like, you know, the satyr or the going into the church. But the thing with the box where, like, there's a bunch of rituals about opening the box and then you just open the box, I would think that once you'd figured out, wait a second, it seems like the part of this ritual that actually gets the box open is the part where I lift the lid. Like, what happens if I skip this step? Oh, I still get the box open. All right, forget about that step. So there's something like,
00:25:51
Speaker
There's something else interesting in there, right? Like that's the people are maintaining the rituals even when the practical part becomes clear. Studies show this, that when the for practical action, for fraction sequences are actually practical, the adherence to the all of the steps declines over time as people figure it out, right? It does do that. Okay, gotcha.
00:26:16
Speaker
Okay. where whereas Whereas for um sequences that are just it just purely conventional, right? They don't. And the motivations, the study that lots there's a lot of lot of people who study this stuff, mostly in developmental psychology. So you know they'll do do these studies with kids, but it's not just kids. In fact, the tendency to overemitate continues to increase over over childhood into adulthood and peaks in adulthood. know Adults are the most conformist in some ways.
00:26:45
Speaker
um maybe because you over over the course of childhood, you learn that it often pays off to just do what you see and bracket the question of why until later. But the the motivations for the for following the conventional patterns, you know to which just doing for fo for repeating, mimicking a sequence that just is purely conventional seems to be um basically affiliative. It's a way of showing that you belong.
00:27:11
Speaker
the group, right? and Because if you walk into church, and you don't, you Catholic Church, whatever, and you don't cross yourself, and you don't kneel when other people kneel, you're basically saying like, I'm here, but I don't, um I don't buy it, like, I'm not part of this, right? And if you go to a seder, and you just sit there with your arms crossed, you know, same way, it's like, that's your, you're clearly signaling that this is not a convention that you find, ah ah to meet it's not a group that you want to affiliate with right So it's like, why are you there? you know And so the groups that we spend time with are the ones where we say, OK, I trust these people. I want to belong to them. I've got something invested in these relationships. So I will do the weird things that they do, um basically, in order to to signal that commitment. And so this is this is something that actually precedes human Homo sapiens. this And we can tell this because there are tools
00:28:07
Speaker
that we've uncovered going all the way back to, um, I want to say about 1.2 million years ago, um, called, uh, hand, uh, the Aculian age, uh, these hand axes where you you you carve a piece of stone into basically a teardrop shape and you use it for carving, right? You carve out, carve meat off of hide and bone and things like that. Right. It's an all purpose tool.
00:28:37
Speaker
And the as as yeah protohumans developed, you see a ah kind of shift in this stone technology. So first of all, it's kind of cool that there's been technology for longer than there's been homo sapiens, right?
00:28:54
Speaker
There's been fire for longer than there's been homo sapiens. It looks like we probably had the ability to control fire for at least 400,000 years, I think. there's The estimates vary. But that's that's longer ago than we think that modern homo sapiens develop. right So we're we're inheriting a lot of weird, interesting stuff here. But when as you go through the archeological archaeological record, at some point, you come to this point where the hand axes are formed in a way that you could not do without some form of over imitation, right? you're You're learning and closely mimicking a model, a teacher, right? And you're you're making the the tools more symmetrical than they need to be practically. So you're you're you're seeing you're seeing basic basically conventionality developing.
00:29:39
Speaker
where you're making them more beautiful than they need to be your flaking it in ways where if you just picked up a piece of rock on your own and tried to start doing it, you would never do it. So you need some sort of cultural learning. But then this technology, the Akulian hand axe industry remains almost completely static.
00:29:59
Speaker
for something like 700,000 or 800,000 years. That's crazy. right so that's that's what That's what you were just talking about. That's what it looks like to have no openness to change. right right there's These proto that protohumans were so good at... I forget which species exactly we're talking about here. I think it continued into Homo neanderthalis.
00:30:25
Speaker
um We're so good over imitation that they could not really develop what we now call cumulative cultural evolution which is a kind of a ratcheting balance between over imitation and preservation of cultural and conventional practices and.
00:30:41
Speaker
progressive development of those practices, especially in the technological development. And Homo Sapiens seem to have hit a balance there long before the Enlightenment, you know, when we're talking 150,000 years ago, um where we where we're able to build ah build progressively on technology because well well we'll come to master ah you know, will as individuals will come to master the teaching that we've received, and then know it well enough to know where we might be able to innovate, right, where we're going to be able to experiment, isn and and then pass down that new development to the next generation. So, so this is this is, that's one answer to what you what you asked back there about, well, you know, how how would over imitation, um not
00:31:27
Speaker
I forget exactly how you phrased it, but but how would that not lead us to be sort of static and stagnant? And then the other one would be the other answer to that broad question, the but the challenge you brought to this research on over imitation is to say that um essentially my way of looking at it is that the the the hard, um maybe even like straw man version of enlightenment anthropology. I wouldn't say that necessarily any one person holds, but that I would say is ambient in our culture, is that we're is is essentially pushing us to become more like chimpanzees. okay Literally, right? It wants us, chimpanzees figure stuff out on their own. They don't trust authority. They don't copy
00:32:14
Speaker
they don't They don't just do what somebody else tells them. they want They want to get what's right there in front of them right there and and and and in a way that makes sense. So there's a real way. and so There's actually something anthropologically regressive about um the broad version of liberal anthropology that we all seem to be swimming in. Okay there ah there's a lot there's a lot of pieces when you were saying like the 700 800 000 years I had the thought like oh man if they'd only like kept innovating a little earlier where would we be today right but um I think there's like ah almost an anthropic principle working there where it's like well they weren't going to because they weren't going to Or if they had, then we would just be having this conversation, you know, 500,000 years earlier, but we wouldn't know the difference. Like what difference does it make? Anyway, it's kind of a weird philosophical point. There's two threads that I want to pursue with you on this call.
Liberalism and Cultural Exploration
00:33:06
Speaker
And this is super interesting. Like everything you just said, I had no idea what we were going to be talking about. it's Your background is very interesting. And then I think we're kind of coming into these two.
00:33:14
Speaker
threads. And one is, and do you know, they're related. And I think one is from what I've read of yours, and also the conversations with our mutual friends and moments where he's relayed something that you have said, I get the impression that you have some kind of skepticism about What you're saying skepticpism about liberalism even more like not just like kind of the progressive like extreme kind of version of. ah I don don't know if you wouldn't even call that liberalism because i think it's kind of highly illiberal but like like it's one version of post liberalism post liberalism sure it's one version of like a left post liberalism. Yeah, right. And so, so there's the kind of skepticism of that, which I'm i'm interested to to explore. And then I just want to name the other thread, like the way you're talking about ritual right now is in this very kind of anthropological scientific way that's, you know, your training and your background. But I think that you also have a kind of a mystical
00:34:13
Speaker
relationship with these rituals. I don't know if you if you would describe it as that, but they are at the very least a ah spiritual relationship with certain rituals that's beyond the kind of purely, well, isn't that interesting what human beings do? um And, you know, because I think to kind of give some context for how we ended up on this call together, is I was looking to talk to somebody who happily identifies as a Christian, including the belief in the miracles, specifically the resurrection. So I just kind of want to bring that thread in here and maybe kind of start with, and we can get into the the Christian stuff, but with liberalism kind of wanting to reduce us to this kind of pre-cultural, like that's what I hear you saying. It's like, like that by rejecting cultural authority,
00:35:01
Speaker
then what were then we are no better than chimpanzees. And we're just going to go back to this kind of each each person figures everything out for themselves, just does does things however they want to do, and um and and kind of follows their own impulses. And to me, I do think that there is that in the atmosphere.
00:35:22
Speaker
And that it feels related to me to this experience of ingratitude that I notice in, in the progressive left of this kind of this like aggressive rejection of everything that, that led them to where they are, right? Like the, the kind of God, you know, and especially intensity, these kinds of elite.
00:35:43
Speaker
I leave folks who are doing this and there was something you know i read in one of your articles that ah that actually really moved me um in your essay about your mom which is really great now i'll link these in the show notes tonight i. i ah I really enjoyed that article and one thing that really moved me in that actually so kind of surprisingly was this kind of moment where you where you kind of describe this patriotism that's this kind of like Eclectic, I don't know how I've described it but this patriotism that like includes like the European culture includes the Native American culture includes the African American culture and kind of sees all of these as these kind of foundational pieces of the American puzzle and
00:36:29
Speaker
that i I just found beautiful and kind of moving and and there was like, and you know, I'm a, I'm a transplant. Like I didn't grow up here. And so there's a way that like, I don't have quite the privilege to like sneer at America the way a lot of my contemporaries do because like, you know, it's not everybody's favorite past. Yeah, exactly. But it's not my, I do about England. I will sneer all day long. I'm very cranky about England. But in America, there's just a little bit of like, you know, I'm a guest here to a certain extent, and I want to be a little bit respectful.
00:36:57
Speaker
And I think that allows my, I mean there's many reasons why this is true, but I think that allows my heart to stay open to the country in a way that I think a lot of educated modern Americans, ah especially on the left, or specifically on the left, have lost their sense of what's extraordinary about this country. But to me,
00:37:17
Speaker
part of what's extraordinary about this country is the liberalism. Like, I love the liberalism. For me, the thing that is creepy is the illiberalism which is rising now on both sides of the spectrum. Because what I hear you saying is like human nature just works better if you acknowledge these things and that we actually, it's part of our gift to have this kind of cultural learning over time and accumulation and and that we want to keep that, which I completely agree with. And I do think that there's something about liberalism that that is about a kind of a superhuman ideal. And so it's dangerous because it's about a superhuman ideal and it's dangerous for it to kind of demand that we live up to a superhuman ideal. But I think it's also that there's a that it's inspiring and it's valuable to have something that's like, it's not up to me to decide how anybody else lives.
00:38:14
Speaker
And that there's something, and you know, maybe there's just some kind of anti-authoritarian kind of bent to that, but like that kind of fundamental, like, people should be left to do what they want. Partly because, it's funny, that I just learned that letting a thousand blossoms bloom, I don't know, do you know the origin of that, let a thousand flowers bloom? Do you know where that expression came from? No, I don't think I do, no.
00:38:36
Speaker
it's It sounds like this kind of just like, of course, it's some liberal, right? Like it's just like such a liberal idea. It's Mao Zedong. That comes from the Cultural Revolution, I know, which is so wild. Anyway, whatever. But regardless of the artist, let a thousand flowers bloom and then kill them all. sound Exactly, right? but But let a thousand flowers bloom and and because we'll learn things.
00:38:59
Speaker
right It's great that like you know and the hippies went and did these communes because we figured out like maybe that's not a good idea. right like It's good. Why do we have to keep figuring it out, though? ah Because we do right in the same way. right like why do we have to keep you know Why do we have to keep coming to the brink of authoritarianism and then only to kind of scramble and be like, no, no, no, or even go into it and say, I have to fight back? Because you know because we're flawed. and we do And I think we have to keep figuring these things out. and i think we have to We have to let novelty blossom. For me, like there's this deep ethics of novelty and diversity and the idea that what's good is a lot of different things happening, a lot of difference, because in a lot of difference, it allows us to explore the largest possible landscape of humanity and of, you know, reality and any unnecessary reduction. There's some kinds of difference, which are bad, but I always want to be very cautious about
00:39:58
Speaker
ah too aggressively trying to reduce difference because we don't know. We don't know what spaces there are to discover, right? So anyway, that's a long kind of response to some of what you've said so far. Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's a lot there. Yeah. I mean, I am a Christian. i'm I'm a Catholic actually. And that was not true before I started studying all the stuff that I was just talking about. and There is a there is a real way in which I think coming into a more accurate and scientifically informed picture of human nature led me to to revisit what I think is the foundational anthropology for for our culture, which is the Christian one. In my estimation, that it it ended up being a lot a lot more compatible with with what I had learned from the sciences than the the the liberal modern one. Having said that,
00:40:52
Speaker
I agree, there's a lot of good and and you know like i said in in the role of modernity. and And you coming from the UK, there is something there's something really precious in what they call like the Anglo-American political heritage that I really would like to see us treasure more and and and recommit to to passing down and to and to convincing people. right like I think one of the things we're experiencing, and you mentioned kind of the the some of the excesses of the extreme left, which I'm very familiar with, because I was raised in the extreme left. And I went to, I've spent most of my adult life in research universities, you know, where where it's just crazy. It's like literally crazy. and And I'm very glad to be out of it now. Because I'm not impression professionally in academia anymore. And I don't know how I could be if if it were
00:41:47
Speaker
if it weren't in some sort like you know some sort of a weird like Catholic school or what you know but but like modern secular prestige academy, like they wouldn't hire me at all for the last few years. if you've been If you've checked my demographic boxes, you literally are not going to get hired almost anywhere. There's exceptions, but not going to happen for the most part. yeah i could just It used to drive me crazy. I was right up against it. you know The Boston University School of Theology, where I hung out a lot, is probably one of the most extreme academic environments in the country in terms of the progressivism, that sort of thing. So I've been face to face with that. And I know what you're talking about. There's something really important about liberalism as against that kind of left extremism that I think we we need to we do need to preserve that does come from the Anglo-American tradition of respect for individual rights, a kind of accountability in government and expectation of participation and of competent participation.
00:42:46
Speaker
right, for the citizenry in in ah in a government or in a polity of respect for for property rights. debt and that's not That's not one that I used to care that much about, but but you know and now I see it's like, well, look, every time we try and do something else, you know look at Venezuela right now, you know where you where where property rights become non-inviolable, you just cannot stabilize an economy. you have to i mean This is one area where Locke was right, is that you have to have something invested in the outcome of improving property, of doing something with with what you own, if you want people to actually produce value with it. I wouldn't say I completely buy into his idea that ownership equals possession plus improvement right um with property, but that's exactly what he said. In general, I think there's something important to that combination that that really went its furthest in the Anglo-American sphere
00:43:35
Speaker
But I also think, you know, you mentioned the patriotism angle, and I do think that there's something about that world, that that system that has always produced a higher number of people than is healthy, who just don't feel any connection or responsibility to the the polity.
00:43:57
Speaker
even in 100 years ago, George Orwell was writing about how the English intellectuals in in the interwar period were were but almost completely opposed to everything English. I mean, it was the if you it was just like today, right? It's a late empire um coming probably to the end of its time as ah as the global hegemon filled with intellectuals who hated the country and who and who gained social status by expressing how much they hated the country. It's like we've we've seen this show before and there's something about this particular way of setting things up that we have in in the UK and the United States and Canada and Australia and the Anglosphere in general that just seems to give a greater leeway to this type of person
00:44:40
Speaker
who's who's intellectual and um gain social status by signaling their lack of commitment and their lack of need, ah their lack of dependence on the broader social like organism. it's That's unhealthy. So there's there's there are lots of bugs to work out. And i think that I think that something like a humble rooted patriotism is really what we need to work out those bugs. You need need to just love the land and the people And that doesn't mean blood and soil nationalism is the kind that you you find on the the extreme right wing, you know where it's all about ethnicity and things like that. it's It's really just like when you love America, you need to love all the people. and and that And that includes descendants of slaves and descendants of European settlers and American Indians and more recent immigrants and everything. There is a story going on here and you either need to accept the whole thing or you need to reject the whole thing. And I think there's a kind of humility and and grace that comes with
00:45:38
Speaker
you know, just like learning the folk stories. I think that's something that could really be helpful for people is, is recovering the fact that we actually have folk traditions in this country. We have, I don't know if you've ever come across the rare rabbit stories. Yeah. When I was a kid. Yeah. Yeah. Like that's great stuff. It just roots you in, it roots you in the land and the people and it roots you in Africa and Europe, right. Um, and gives you something, um, to tether to and,
00:46:06
Speaker
anchors you. And so i to to know those stories, to know the Paul Bunyan stories, the Pecos Bill stories, just all the kind of stuff I read when I was a kid, and i but I think a lot of people now are not reading. you know In short, you have to have a folk culture to have the kind of loyalty that I'm talking about.
00:46:21
Speaker
So here's something that's interesting, because in america you know what's what's interesting about America right is that it is this country a of immigrants, like more so than maybe anywhere else in the world. right Is that fair to say? I think so. By percentage, it might not. By percentage, it might be Canada or or Australia at this point. but But yeah, generally. Okay, there are many, many different cultures represented here. And in the UK, that's also true, I think, to a less... degree you know One of the things though that's really interesting about the UK is like, just these thousands of pockets of microcultures that have been there for like, just like centuries. the In the accents are so like, you move from one town to the next and you can hear oh yeah the different accents, right? In America, you don't have that, right?
00:47:01
Speaker
Why I'm saying this is like you know I grew up with Briar Rabbit right like and you know and European folk stories right and Beatrice Potter and and um ah she's great yeah and I didn't know that Briar Rabbit isn't like ah in the cultural lineage of England directly. But it's still, there's a tension, I guess, in me of appreciating the patriotism and also a kind of globalist sensibility that's like, well, I love all the cultures. Why not just take the good from all of the cultures and celebrate them in this kind of cosmopolitan thing? I guess for me, the part where I really resonate with you is like the the political project of the democratic US and of the UK and that
00:47:47
Speaker
being this kind of source of of patriotism and that being the source of like, it's almost like, well, the thing that I love about these countries is so global is is the is the not being exclusively about this kind of lineage and this culture, but of actually including the world. I think there are some problems with that i agree i I find myself, my wife and I like to talk about the fact that it seems it seems to both of us that were we're anywhere people who would like to be somewhere people, who feel called to be somewhere people. you know my My reference frame is very global. I've i've lived in Germany and South Korea. um I've traveled to all the inhabited continents except for Australia.
00:48:34
Speaker
Most of my friends are people who are very, you know, well educated and have traveled a lot. And it's just at Oxford for a conference last week. And that's like a, you know, it's just that that's, that's, which is great, but I've never been there before. Beautiful city. And, um, yeah, that's kind of my reference frame as an adult, you know? Um, but there's a way in which having that kind of globalist mentality where it's like, like, like you said, let's, take why not take the best from all cultures that is necessarily, I think,
00:49:02
Speaker
or or always at least in strong risk of just being consumerist, right? Like taking this consumerist attitude to the whole world. And of course it makes sense for us English and American people to feel that way because we've been in charge of the world for the past 200 years. We've been the global... The future historians will look back on the 1800s and the 1900s and the early 21st century as being one long Anglo-American empire.
00:49:29
Speaker
where it's like we've ruled the seas, you know, and and there's a specific meaning to that. I mean, it's like our first, the British Navy and then almost seamless transition. The American Navy have been the ones that have made it possible for world trade to to spread around the world so easily because you don't have pirates to, you know, and and you can see that it's breaking down now because all of a sudden we're getting pirates again. You know, it's like the British, the British and the Americans kept pirates down to the point where we could develop this global system worldwide trade because pirates introduce and other kinds of instability on the seas introduce all kinds of transaction costs that make it not worth it to do to do globalized trade. But we've made it possible for that to happen. And so we're kind of the center of this globalized world. And so for us, it feels like the whole world is sort of our place. you know it's it's like It's all relevant to us.
00:50:17
Speaker
it's all part of our environment, whereas if you live in Argentina or someplace that's never been on hegemon, it's like, you know, the whole world is not quite the same way, your responsibility. um So there's an imperial attitude, I think, that's inextricable from that globalized expectation of being able to take all of the good from all the world's cultures, but leave the bad. And then there's also the question of what is the good and the bad? what What's good to a Brit? It might not be what's good to a Moroccan. Actually, it won't be, you know? And so if you go to Morocco and you only take the good, then then well, that might mean that you very well leave behind exactly what the Moroccan most loves about this country. ah people right And so so there's there's something, you know, radically intention there.
00:51:08
Speaker
and i And overall, I think that empire is not great for the
Historical Context of Empires
00:51:13
Speaker
empire builders themselves. That's my main it's not I'm not so much of a bleeding heart when it's like, like, I don't know. We were like, Oh, the British Empire was so terrible. It was exploitation is everything. Well, it's like you go back and you look at history. It's the reason the British Empire expanded so rapidly in Africa was because they kept they kept finding that they they the next tribe over was the one that was selling slaves and they were trying to eradicate slavery. And so there was this strong pressure from educated women back home in England. Does this sound familiar? To do good and and fixed and and end slavery. And so the military kept pushing further and further into the African interior, finding the fight finding the the the the kingdoms and tribes that were just the centers for the slave trade on the interior of Africa. and until
00:52:02
Speaker
they ended up controlling half of it. it's I'm not saying it was all good. I'm not saying there wasn't a lot of selfishness involved, but there are, there's a lot of, and I think moral ambivalence and ambiguity to the British and the American empires. We've done a lot of good as well as a lot of bad, but I don't think that being Imperial hegemon is good for us in some important way. Like you need some sort of humility and you need to, I think an important step in just growing up, becoming a mature,
00:52:31
Speaker
member of homo ah Homo sapiens is learning that you can't be everywhere all the time. It's just saying, but look, i like I have to delimit my options.
00:52:43
Speaker
And there's all kinds of ways that happens. You choose a career, and and and you you have sunk costs. it's very it's you know it's once you've Once you've picked an engineering major in college, it's going to be pretty hard to ever become as good at literature as somebody who's picked an English major. right like you You do cut off your options, and and it's a necessary part of growing up. And samely, you get married, maybe to this person, but not that person. And you just say, OK, that's you know all these other people are no longer options. You move to this city, you put your kids in this school, et cetera. There's a way in which you just have to accept that the whole world actually is not your oyster if you want to really put down roots and know what it's like to live a real human life. And I think that collectively in the West and especially the Anglo-American world, we're being confronted with a
00:53:36
Speaker
big need to read so just to learn that lesson and say like, look, I like the idea of being global. I like the idea of appreciating all these cultures. But frankly, I don't know a damn thing about most of them. You know, I can't really appreciate them. It's maybe I should just learn about my own and then be able to have good boundaries you know so that when I encounter somebody from Sri Lanka or someplace,
00:53:57
Speaker
I will I will not inappropriately assume that she's going to be just like me and have the same attitudes. Right. Because she probably won't. Right. You know, there's a kind of projection that the psychological projection that the globalized attitude makes possible and even encourages. And you see that, you know, with the disasters like the Iraq invasion in the 2000s, where the leaders of our country assumed that inside of every Iraqi was basically a ah little liberal Democrat waiting to just be freed from oppression. And it's like, well,
00:54:25
Speaker
No, like people have different values and different commitments and and you can't just project your own values onto the world. It it leads to disaster. I didn't expect to be accused of being an imperialist on the call, but i it's an interesting it's interesting. It's really interesting. To be fair, I accuse myself of the same thing. Sure, sure, sure. I'm not taking offense. Yeah, I like that. i It's an interesting perspective. I'm going to have to chew on that. There's a lot of geopolitics that I'm kind of interested, like, or pulled into in this conversation, but i I want to make sure that we make time for the conversation about Christianity and
Personal Religious Journey
00:55:03
Speaker
Catholicism. yeah
00:55:04
Speaker
And so I would love to start with just if you're willing to share just something about your conversion and like what led you there, having this background in the sciences and then the humanities and not having a ah background in Christianity. I think maybe you did like as part of your family, but you weren't raised in it. Yeah. I mean, that like most Americans, my grandparents were Christian, but my, you know.
00:55:27
Speaker
But that had not that was not passed down to my parents, really. Yeah. Well, I think you know in it's relevant that we were just talking about this whole globalization thing, because I think that was that's that's an important part of this of that process for me. When I was in grad school, first in grad school, I just wanted to take classes on all the cool religions, you know all the different ones, Taoism, Hinduism,
00:55:53
Speaker
um because I felt an obligation to know about the world, to be informed. you know And then there comes a point where it's like, okay, I know i know a dab a dab of the Puranas and you know the Ramayana, and I know I've read the Daodejing in multiple translations and I can talk about the Laozi, which is the other sort of foundational text of Taoism. The Zhuangzi. Sorry, the Zhuangzi. Yeah, Laozi is the Tao Te Ching. Thank you. Right. But it's like, it just felt like scattering, scattering the seed too broadly. You know, it's like, well, let's, yeah, but like, I don't know anything about the tradition that my grandparents were were born. In a way, like, maybe I should just look at that and and not assume that
00:56:39
Speaker
some a tradition from far away must necessarily be better just because it's from far away. I think the real catalyst for my conversion came when I was in, I actually was in Turkey. I was there for a conference in Istanbul in grad school right as I was writing my dissertation. So I was close to the end of my PhD and with ah another friend who was attending, going to the same conference we from from my PhD program at BU. we We arrived a little early and we we went and explored around Turkey a bit. So we went to Konya, which is a city where Rumi is buried.
00:57:17
Speaker
and that was That was a really a meaningful place for me because the fellowship that my dad was part of, the Sufi fellowship, was very involved in in some of the... The guy who trans who create who wrote the most influential translation of Rumi in america in the English-speaking world now is a member of that fellowship. And so there's ah a strong connection with Sufi. Is that comanba Coleman Barks? Coleman Barks, yeah. And so the you know visiting that shrine, Rumi's mausoleum and shrine, but so as you know that was special in saying there's a little statue or not a statue, a marker on the street corner where he supposedly met Shams. Oh, wow. First time, you know, and and then we went on to Cappadocia, where these vast underground cities and caves were dug out by Christians in the early centuries, maybe for protection, for retreat into the desert.
00:58:06
Speaker
And you can go, there's there's an open-air museum where you can go and you can see the the most beautiful of the beautiful of these chapels and caves that were carved out literally like with chisels, you know, out of the stone in what they call fairy chimneys, which are these basically large, what we call in ah in the West, hoodoos, like large pillars of sandstone that were all that's left out of erosion. erosion So you can go to these chapels and you see this beautiful iconography that's, you know, 1500 years old and you start to get this feeling like, wow, these guys really meant this. They were willing to live out in the desert, carve their homes out of stone, you know, live in this pretty inhospitable environment and write these amazing treatises. This is where so I don't know if you've yet but these guys might be obscure outside the Christian world, but inside their their central St. Basil, the great um Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory, I think Gregory Nazias also.
00:59:02
Speaker
were what they call the Cappadocian Fathers. um there're Some of the most influential theologians, and especially in the Eastern Church, and they all lived here. and You can also just go wandering out into the desert on your own on footpaths, it's such as National Park, and you just you'll you'll be wandering up and you'll see a cave far up in a cliff and you'll climb up to it and you'll find a chapel that somebody carved out more than a thousand years ago with iconography still on the on the walls. you know something Something that you find a lot is wine presses. They carve wine presses into the walls because if you're Christian, you need you need wine, you know? and so That was really cool. And in in the more I saw it, the more, and then and then the more I thought that, gosh, this is this is a pattern that has been repeating itself in time for a lot longer than I've realized. A, and B, this version of Christianity is so much more beautiful than the crap version that we have in in the States where like you can't tell whether a church is, and there's a fun game, drive around Houston and tell and and try to identify ah church, um Ikea, or high school.
01:00:08
Speaker
it's just ah just a big block, a rectangular squat hulking building behind an acre of grass. acres of grass It's like therere there's just an ugliness to to a lot of American Christianity that i I would never have converted to Christianity if that were my only reference point. I had to see something that was more beautiful and deeper. And then we we went back to Istanbul and we you know did our conference and then we stuck around for a couple of days and I visited the Ecumenical Patriarchate um and in Constantinople, which is the and rough, rough equivalent to the Vatican for the Eastern Orthodox Church. Very rough, because it's not, it's not, example but it's that it's the mother church for the Eastern Orthodox world. And they sing great vespers every Saturday night. So you can go and we did that. Yeah, and just like standing in this chapel, hearing and these monks chant for like an hour with candle and gold and shadows and incense and
01:01:03
Speaker
it was like, you know, I was like, I'm a hippie by background and this I can I can I can grok this like I recognize this. This is all this is all the same kind of stuff. It's like incense and candles, you know, but it's somehow feels deeper and and and it's it's there's a there's a willingness to confront the dark that I i think a lot of new age religion doesn't have religion, whatever the new, you know, that that kind of world in America does not have because of essentially, it's consumerist aspects, it's literally dark in the church. um There's a sense of somberness, they're not afraid of somberness, like, like American culture often is. And i I thought to myself, whatever these guys have, I want it, you know, this is this is better than what I have, it's older, it's rooted, it says something meaningful about what humans are. And it calls it calls you to
01:01:54
Speaker
a deeper challenge. You're going to have to change your life, you know, you can't really commit to this way of life and still go out and party, you know, like all the time. I mean, I'm not a teetotaler now, you know, I will have friends over and have a glass of wine or whatever. But like, if you're getting drunk regularly, or really at all, you know, then you're probably not that's that's not super compatible with the Christian life.
01:02:16
Speaker
in a serious Christian life. And I found that that was good because my parents, my mom that stepda mom and dad had been very serious alcoholics and that was the kind of environment I was raised in. So I was already predisposed to drink too much. And you know so there were there were ways in which the call to discipline was needed and and helpful. And so I just sort of started moving more towards Christianity and then eventually got baptized. you know and and then eventually moved into the Catholic Church, which is sort of just like a fulfillment of um the rest of that movement, I think. it's not It's not discontinuous. It's not like, you know, it's not like, I think, Protestants or somehow, like, lesser or whatever. It's just more just a, it's where the path led. Well, if you're if you're reaching for that kind of numinous, like, mystical, i it seems to me from the outside that, yeah, that the Catholic and the Orthodox traditions
01:03:12
Speaker
do that better than the Protestants. even you know And I don't know that's high church Protestantism, which I don't know that well, but definitely, you know aesthetically, Catholicism seems more attractive. So to the degree that like you were moved by an aesthetic experience, which it seems like is in there, it makes sense that you would be drawn in that direction rather than like some Lutheran kind of like like blank walls and just like a simple, yeah. yeah Yeah, I mean, and there's also, you know, to reconnect to my academic journey, um there's a sense of which I'm like, an and I am an anthropologist, I'm not a, I'm not a cultural anthropologist, my my degree is not an anthropology, there are a lot of skills that anthropologists that are trained have that I don't have. But that's the world I was interested in. And one of my dissertation readers was anthropologists, a lot of the
01:04:00
Speaker
the work that I cite in my writings is anthropology. So something interesting there is there was, there's, I don't know of an anthropologist who's ever converted to Protestantism. You know, it's a very secular, it's a very secular discipline, very left wing these days, ah very left wing, but it has always been very secular. And, but there's a couple of examples of major conversions, especially in the mid 20th century, E.E. Evans Pritchard and Victor Turner being two examples, British social anthropologists of the mid century tradition.
01:04:30
Speaker
who, through their experience, found themselves just being drawn to Catholicism. I mean, Victor Turner was an expert in, I think, the Nindemu people in Africa and spent his career really studying the what he called the ritual process. And so it's not just rituals, but the way that ritual kind of cycles between periods of stability and order and transition, right? That was his expertise in this culture and how well this culture orchestrated these transitions.
01:04:58
Speaker
you know, initiation rites, new consecrations for kings, sorry, coronations for kings, things like that, right? Anything where you have a transition. And and i think that he came I think that when he started feeling called to faith, it was like, well, you know Catholicism is like that. It has It has a mastery of the ritual disciplines that that I think all cultures need embedded in its institutional memory, it's its institutional structure. So that there are these transitions, there there that you know you you ritualize events like marriages, like funerals, like first comedians, things like that in a way that that makes them marked and kind of makes it feel like the transition is
01:05:41
Speaker
stable solid So it reduces ambiguity in a way, which is a um very important feature function of ritual in human culture is to is to take essentially analog um data that's that's messy and ambiguous and and snap it into digital. right like It's like youre you know you you move to get married in layers of times where you love each other, is times where you feel like not as great about each other, especially when you're planning a wedding, when it's all frustrating and everything. and like all that so so The actual flow in time of feelings is all wavy and up and down, it's analog and messy, red but like the wedding itself is just, right you're not married, and then you are married it clarifies, so it's a digitization in a way.
01:06:23
Speaker
almost like an action potential in a neuron. That's a fun analogy. Yeah. Well, I get that from Roy Rappaport, another fantastic anthropologist who's very influential on me. And and he he actually describes it that way because just like an action potential,
01:06:37
Speaker
um gates the information transmission downstream from its axon, a wedding gates information downstream socially. Socially, it's not relevant what your kind of fluctuations of how you're feeling about each other are. What's relevant is that legally you're married, right? And so it just reduces the amount of data that other people have to process.
01:06:55
Speaker
And same with the baptism, same with the rite of passage. Exactly. The rites of passage are a great example, especially for boys, because the transition from boy to man is so biologically ambiguous and long and met and it's just like there's no one clear point. You know, at least with girls, it's like you've menstruate and it's culturally a lot of cultures say like, okay, that's the moment, right? But for men, it's like, I don't know, what what is it? you know and then And so you have these rituals that kind of say like, yeah, we're not listening to biology here, we're we're actually imposing a structure on it. right so So I think Catholicism in its in it functional forms, when it's functioning well, has a lot of that kind of wisdom built into it. And and ultimately, you know there's also the part that you wanted to talk about the miracle, where it's just like, I started to just think it was true.
01:07:41
Speaker
you know that is you cant You can't keep doing the rituals forever if you're just doing them for you know stabilizing your life or whatever. you know if you if you If you just got some sort of like function you want to get out of them, it's difficult to keep doing that forever. Eventually, you have to kind of decide, am I in or out? Do I believe this stuff? Or do I think do i think it's a nice fiction? And if you if you really think it's a nice fiction,
01:08:03
Speaker
and maybe you can hang on for, you know, going to church and doing the rituals, but it's not as easy. So so there is a way in which I kind of had this parallel intellectual journey where from like, ah from like a anthropological perspective, I came to see that this is something that is needed, these these structuring, meaning creating, attention shaping, ritual influences on my mind and body right and and my relationships with the social world. But also there's a an intellectual journey and a spiritual journey and an epistemic journey um that led me to kind of think that there's something to it. isn It's not just nice rituals. I want to go there before I do. so There's a couple things you that that kind of distinction like when you're talking about um someone believing it versus just someone doing the rituals because they think it's
01:08:59
Speaker
good idea culturally it's good for their you know it reminds me of the recent I'm sure you came across this ah I and Hershey Ali is that her name to yeah that article where she says we should all be Christians like and she has this like here's why I'm converted to Christianity and this long list of like just kind of completely utilitarian, like, well, this is good for the culture, it's good to combat, you know, i she's kind of very anti-Islam, and so it's good to combat this kind of other way, and like, this completely, like, yeah, but that's not what it means to be a Christian, like, you can't, like, it was, it maddened me to the point, you know, of not being a Christian, but but just feeling like,
01:09:39
Speaker
no that's like but that's not what being a christian means it doesn't mean thinking it's a good idea it means believing something right and actually this was kind of in a way the the the seed of this my what part of one of the inputs to me wanting to have a conversation with someone who is a christian so that's you know that's one data point um and then just to go back it's funny you talked about the doubting like the two You know the doubting is an enormous influence on me. It's like my favorite religious book I mean, I just think it's an extraordinary beautiful piece of writing and true Like and you know and it just transit like it's true like what it says and you know in a way it's kind of it it has like aspects of it that are incredible that that I would describe as post-modern almost right like in the kind of
01:10:27
Speaker
in the in its relationship between language and reality and all the stuff, right? I just think it's it's extraordinary. and you know And it doesn't within it have any kind of claim of miracles, although there are miracles in the tradition. There's a lot of kind of you know magical stuff in in the tradition. And then the other the other kind of huge influence for me is Zen Buddhism, which is very related to Taoism. It's kind of like it's yeah Taoist-flavored Buddhism, right? yeahp Which also, for the most part, Zen Buddhism does not take on the kind of miraculous trappings of other forms of right. days in in In other forms of Buddhism, there's a kind of, you know, it's it's much more traditionally religious and Zen is like very skeptical of all of that and Zen is very practical and it's very kind of like, and that the kind of epistemic
01:11:16
Speaker
stance of Zen is you don't know shit, and you're never going to know shit, just sit down, shut up, and see what happens, right? More or less. And I'm, of course, digesting a very westernized version of Zen. it's not you know I did not grow up in Japan and study in those monasteries. So you know take take all of this with a grain of salt that this is American Zen.
01:11:35
Speaker
what I'll say about like it's a very attractive to me and you know with both of these traditions which I i i love and to greater or lesser degree of practice in of my life but never kind of like I've never taken refuge for example like I'm still you know flailing around in samsara right it's attractive to me and Christianity is attracted to me and preparing for this call I've never read the Bible like I mean I don't think many people have read the Bible cover's cover to cover so I bought I bought a Bible To read preparing for this call i didn't think out you know i wasn't gonna get through it but i thought well let me let me i would i press it yeah i mean yeah let me let me have a crack at it and you know and and so and i and there was a moment like i opened the you know i open it up it's genesis and you know i kind of know that you know i know and i know the first part pretty well and i started reading it it just crossed my mind like.
01:12:21
Speaker
What if I'm just converted like what if I read this book and like my heart is moved and I just go oh this is it right and I have this moment of like, you know, kind of excitement and hope of like, well, wouldn't that be really nice? Wouldn't it be really nice? And then, you know, within, I don't know, a few pages I was like,
01:12:39
Speaker
oh no wait a second this is dumb and and just kind of you know just had my my typical falling out with it which is that i it there there is not that much about it personally that i find beautiful when i compare it with the dao de jing or or even when i compare it with some of the the the the sutras like it it just feels um you know part of what i love about buddhism and General and you know what is in the general and and then is is the kind of the practicality and the the sense it just seems True to me and and you know and then more recently the other one and super kind of rattling off religions But I I recently came across Kashmir Shaivism. This is amazing book. It's called tantra illuminated by an American guy ah Christopher Wallace he called a hoorish
01:13:31
Speaker
And that's ah about Kashmir Shaivism. And I was reading that book and I had this experience of like, oh, wait, this one is true. Like I thought that there was just a piece of truth in all the religious. I read that, had a very powerful response to that. But again, like the claims that these things are making are kind of fundamentally metaphysical claims. Yeah. And that that it's easy to resonate with these metaphysical claims.
01:13:58
Speaker
in a way that, you know i i you know, I wish and it's, you know, the thing about Christianity is to be Christian in America is kind of convenient because like it's ah it's available, right? And it's, it's so it's you know, you're youre you were kind of part of the cultural thing. I mean, talk about belonging. And so this is just me kind of revealing my own like wrestling with this thing that like, wow, it'd be great. Like i I would have been delighted in a way. I mean, it would have been baffling. But if I'd read the, you know, started of reading the Bible and like, you know, had this kind of, you know,
01:14:26
Speaker
Moment I would that would have been delightful yet that the things the two things that I find kind of fundamentally objectionable and I'm you have not claimed the one right so this first one and I'd be curious where you said is the kind of the the idea that Christianity is somehow like the true religion and that the others are ah Relatively false right that that this is the one and that you know Everybody else has got it wrong and I'm not claiming that but maybe you would that it's just kind of just seems like so clearly to me like well This is just you know ah It took accident of your birth that you are a Christian and not a Muslim and not a you know for most people I mean, you know, even for you probably right you would say that right so that piece is
01:15:12
Speaker
Is the objectional to me but then the other piece is the the claims of the miracles where it it just feels like well. it it it I mean to to say something that kind of probably sounds like completely like inane but like.
01:15:25
Speaker
nature doesn't work like that. Like, to look at how nature kind of repeats itself. Nature does the same kinds of things over and over again. And it's it's easy for me to, you know, I think that there are, I think it's it's very plausible to me to say that there are people that are more or less holy, right? That are more or less kind of in touch with the sacred or in touch with the divine, however you want to say it. And that we have these characters like Lao Tzu, like the Buddha, like Jesus, you know,
01:15:53
Speaker
Moses and i was probably wasn't a real guy Abraham i don't know if Abraham was it was a real guy but you know that these that there are these characters through history that have been as exceptionally holy. And so to say jesus was an exceptionally holy man is one thing but to say that jesus uniquely of every human being that's ever lived was the son of god.
01:16:13
Speaker
in a way that nobody else was and nobody else will be. It just, again, it doesn't feel like nature doesn't do that. Nature does repeats itself. Nature does variations on themes. And it it, you know, and it and it explores the same ideas over and over again. ah With, you know, maybe the two exceptions being that there is something rather than nothing is like a unique thing. And maybe life, we don't know about that, right? But maybe like that life is this unique thing.
01:16:39
Speaker
But that Jesus would be a unique man amongst all humans feels it just it doesn't pass some smell test to me and it just seems more like a cult of personality than it does like a description of something that reality would do.
01:16:54
Speaker
So there you go. Yeah. Let me start with saying, yeah, I mean, I understand a lot of the, you know, what you're saying about the different books and and that you've picked up in the journey and also reading the Bible. The Bible is not an especially welcoming text in a lot of ways. It's not like reading Lao Tzu, where you're kind of swept away immediately that by the poetry and the simplicity and and almost, the I mean, to import a Zen term back into Lao Tzu, like these Satori moments where you you just kind of have this moment of of feeling like, oh, this is this is unspeakably true, what Lao Tzu is saying here. um The Bible is rarely like that. It is it is a cliff's notes.
01:17:35
Speaker
for a very complex, often bloody, very difficult story. And I think the only way to appreciate it is to is so is to read it like a lot. And and for me, it's the appreciation has come from actually practicing faith and and learning about it. And you end up hanging out with people who know more about it than you do. And it can explain, well, this is why you know this is when Jesus tells us the fig tree to wither. yeah There's a scene.
01:18:04
Speaker
where Jesus is coming in the Gospel, where Jesus is coming into Jerusalem to be crucified, um although only He knows that. And um there's a fig tree that He tells one of His followers to go and get figs, and there's no figs on the tree, and so He curses it. He says,
01:18:19
Speaker
You never bear fruit again. The tree withers. it' if You're like, what the hell? That's the action of it some sort of spiritual leader. You know what I mean? And then, you know, there are many ways, basically, in a lot of ways, the the fig tree is a representation of Israel. The fig tree is a symbolic type of Israel throughout the Bible. And what Jesus is saying is that Israel has been unfaithful.
01:18:42
Speaker
um which is to God, which is the resounding theme of what we call the Old Testament or the Hebrew Scriptures is is this back and forth between God choosing the Israelite people and the Israelite people, sort of being faithful for a little while and then like going off and following other gods and sacrificing their children, stuff like that. And God being like, hey, I told you not to do that.
01:19:03
Speaker
you know, maybe you shouldn't and then they keep doing it and then some disasters happen. It's just this back and forth. so So Jesus is referring in a way to that story. So there's just all these intricate nested stories and symbols throughout the whole Bible that you like. Yeah, it's it's a challenge. um For me, it does reward continuing with it over but were years, um but it's not an easy entry.
01:19:29
Speaker
And um yeah, Shaivai, Shaivai, you know, if I were going to be a Hindu, 100% would be a Shaivai. Shiva is awesome. ah I mean, I think that just as a character, i'm I'm a little bit more hesitant to say that, you know, now that I think that Hinduism is just as good as Christianity, to go to your point, yeah, I think that Christianity is is better. It's more true. But um there is something true, I think, in a way about the Shaivai picture of like the Shiva Nataraja, right? You know, that image, right, where he's dancing. that He's got the Tandava drum, which is the drum with which he beats out the the rhythm of existence, right? He's like stamping on a demon, which is a very common iconographic motif in Christianity. Also, there's a lot of
01:20:16
Speaker
The two most common are St. Michael, the Archangel, like stabbing the demon, stabbing the devil, basically, in the form of a dragon at his feet, and then Mary crushing the serpent under her heel, which is a reference. Yeah, she's often represented that way because she is the new Eve, right? that There's the part in Genesis where God says after the ah fall that he's eaten the fruit, and God says, you know, I'll put enmity between you and the serpent, and he will strike at you, and you will cry and and and you will crush him he will strike at your heel and you will crush him under your feet.
01:20:47
Speaker
And so eve is the ah Eve is the one who receives that, and not really prophecy, but that almost consequence, that that that that word from God. and And Mary is the one that fulfills it because she crushes Satan under her feet by giving birth to Christ. So this is ah this is a motif that is common, not just in Christianity, but also in Hinduism. and um There's something true, I think, about the image of God beating out the the pattern of existence in a great drama, in a timeless way, and it' in this ah space out of time, where um the thing I love about the Nataraja iconography is that it's scary. It's a little bit scary to imagine this great God just pounding out the rhythms of existence, right? Death and life, like eternally.
01:21:36
Speaker
resonating through all of matter. And yeah, that's true. That is that is an accurate, I think, iconographic representation of of ah a real aspect of God. Something interesting about that image or that that's statue, at least in some versions of Hinduism, you are not supposed to put that in your house.
01:21:56
Speaker
yeah Like that that particular image, you can have other images of Shiva, but that image of Shiva is not supposed to go in your house because it's ah it's the destroyer as well. Like he he has these different aspects, but one of them is the destroyer. You put that in your house, it destabilizes your house. And I don't think everybody believes that, but that's definitely, I have not, that's my favorite. I mean, i I love that image and I have not acquired one to put in my house out of a superstitious feeling that like, well, I don't, you know, just on the safe side, yeah.
01:22:27
Speaker
probably, probably, probably good. Yeah, I'm not, I'm not gonna put one up.
Christianity and Nature
01:22:31
Speaker
I mean, obviously, I have different kinds of icons in my house. But yeah, yeah, there is something scary about it. And there's something a little dangerous about it. I think it's it's you ah one really crystal clear aspect of Christian teaching is that you are, you're not to worship nature. You don't worship nature, you Appreciate it. You respect it. And I'm talking nature in a very broad sense. I don't just mean like Yellowstone, you know? Like manifestation. Yeah. You you don't worship that that which is conditional or contingent to creation instead of the creator.
01:23:09
Speaker
um and And there's a way in which i i I think, and I'm not going to go to bat for this necessarily in in this conversation, but there's a way in which there are aspects of Hinduism where the the divine becomes mingled with the created, I think, in the iconography and the stories where when the worship For me, i wouldn't I wouldn't do it because it would be at risk of of committing that kind of idolatry. And that's not to say I don't have, obviously, I think it probably came through that I have a ton of respect for for Hinduism and the and and the stories. I love reading the Puranas, great stories, you know. But there's there's a way in which I feel that Christianity is the the faith that has helped me
01:23:48
Speaker
most to stop worshiping nature, which is an unending, self-consuming loop, best symbolized, I think, by the Ouroboros, right? The snake eating its own tail. Like, that's what nature is. It's just you know, to put it vulgarly, it's just, you know, eating, shitting, screwing, giving your, you know, dying, doing it all over again for it, you know, just that fighting for resources, resisting entropy. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's this entropic world where all order tends to disorder. And for a few short minutes, few short wings of the eye, you are, you are an ordered pattern within this entropic cosmos struggling against all hope to
01:24:35
Speaker
to carve out a bit of order that can last, but you never can. And and and that that that push to secure your bit of order and to get the resources resources you need to keep your own pattern replicating itself auto-poetically through time is the reason for all the bad stuff we do. It's why we it's why you know it's why we take over each other's tribes and enslave each other and you know all the bad stuff that we do. It's it's in order to to stave off death in that way. Sure.
01:25:04
Speaker
But so let me just to I'm interested in a couple of things because you know you quote that you have the CS Lewis quote a couple times. You know God loves matter. He invented it. I think you quote that a couple times and you know, and yeah, I would I mean I would agree with you with my you know, very limited. I'm not like a a scholar of this stuff at all. But my my limited understanding of Shaivism and.
01:25:25
Speaker
And I understand, I would not speak for other kind of branches of Hinduism because I don't know them that well, but is that, yes, that there is a worship that, you know, it's it's a tantric tradition, meaning that you are recognizing the divinity of of everyday life. You're recognizing the divinity of of eating and shitting and fucking and, you know,
01:25:47
Speaker
all of that stuff as much as the divinity of the of the the absolute as much and you know i i think that the images of shiva and shakti right like that that shiva is the creator shiva is the kind of is the yeah i'll just say the absolute this kind of space and is this is the the the ground from which everything arises like and then shakti is the stuff is the happening is the energy is the life and that you and that you love them both and that you love the space and the kind of the the yeah like you said like the non-contingent but you also love the stuff and that it just is nice i just why not like i of course to love the stuff is beautiful to love only the stuff is dangerous like that makes total sense to me that's consumerism that's materialism i mean that's the problem with modernity is all modernity loves is the stuff and that there is this there's there's also the beyond and you have to
01:26:45
Speaker
love the beyond as well. But if all you love is the beyond, I mean, you you know, you in your essay, you talk about this, that like, well, that's the kind of disembodied Christianity that's like, that's so gross and destructive that we that we have in America, or constant branches of it in America. So i to me, there's like, well, yeah I think you can just have both. And why not love nature? Like, why not worship nature?
01:27:09
Speaker
as as being, you know, this incredible production and also worship the ground that is, you know, that you you might call God, that's like, that that is the producer. Yeah, I think it's it's sort of like asking why not love your wife and the woman next door?
01:27:29
Speaker
You know, it's like, well, in a sense, yes. I guess as a Christian, i'm at you know I'm actually commanded to love my neighbor in a way. you know So I got to do that. But you know there's love and there's love. right There's a way in which I love everyone. There's agape. That's the Greek you know translation of of charity, basically, karitas, the the love that is selfless and that seeks the good of the other in ah in a disinterested way.
01:27:57
Speaker
And then there's Eros, which is the love that it isn't, yeah you know, you're penetrated with desire, right, where you're you are seeking something for yourself. And, um you know, you better be clear on which one of those you're you're addressing to your neighbor if you're married, you know. um And that the point of that is not that to actually analogize Eros or Agape to one of the other of the unconditioned or the conditioned or you know God or mad or whatever. um It's to say that you have to order your loves. At some point, you do have to hierarchicalize you know you have to have a hierarchy of like what you're going to prioritize first and foremost. If you're not if you're married and you're not prioriti prioritizing your spouse over your neighbor, then there's there's and that's a problem. you know If you're worshiping God,
01:28:43
Speaker
you're you're you're not only like allowed to, but you're supposed to love nature. i mean i love that you know like i'm I'm from Colorado and I'm the child of hippies. you know like i you know i love being I love camping. i I calibrate my political donations depending on who's in office. you know I'll give if it's ah if it's a if it's Democrat in office that I'm giving to all these religious freedom organizations and when it's when it's a Republican in an office that I'm doing it to the NRDC, you know, just to balance it out because i care about um I care about the natural world, but God comes first. And and there's and there's it's a way in which and if you don't
01:29:20
Speaker
the Christian teaching is that if you don't order your love such that God becomes before everything, that any other thing that you put at the peak, the pinnacle of your hierarchy of values will end up destroying. isn it could Because it will point back down to you that meaningless cycle that we just talked about, the Ouroboros, and that always leads to death. It it is death. It is a cycle of death. And so for nature, I think an important facet of the Christian teaching, which is not well taught and not well understood, is the redemption of nature. It is that nature actually is this beautiful thing. It's this creation, you know, and it and there's and that there's something wrong with it. They're clearly anybody. And Chike Chesterton called original sin the single Christian doctrine that can be empirically proved.
01:30:12
Speaker
you know, in that you just walk out in the world and you see how people are and and what we do to each other. And it's like, well, clearly something is wrong here. And it it doesn't even just have to be people. I mean, right now at this moment, there are all these beautiful animals all around the world with with consciousness, I believe, you know, i think this this Cartesian idea that animals don't have conscious has never been credible at all. um It's just common sense. If you look at a squirrel and it gives you facial expressions, they signal they signal something interior. and And the best explanation for that is that there actually is something interior. right yeah And so these these beautiful animals all around the world right now as we speak are being devoured alive. but You know what I mean? And and that's what nature is. So something something is beautiful and also broken. And that's the core question of the Christian approach to life. It's like, how can this be? And the answer is um essentially that that nature is not fully itself yet.
01:31:08
Speaker
that the version we're living in is a broken version that is still, so as paul St. Paul said, is is groaning in creation. is is struggling still to become the the full version of itself that God envisioned. And we have a role in that as the creations of God that most fully reflect God's image, which is of of the power of creation out of love. So God, and it's a very important difference between Abrahamic creation stories and the ah other creation stories that were ambient in the Near East um in that era, are that, you know, um
01:31:47
Speaker
God creates the world out of nothing and out of love. It's completely because he just wants to. That's it. There's no there's no compulsion. ah There's no God being torn apart in violence to create the different parts of reality, which is a very common thing. You see that in the Rig Veda in Hinduism. You see that in um Babylonian um and Samarian. I don't know Near Eastern religion very well. I shouldn't even pretend like I do. but in Near Eastern religion, there's a lot of those motifs of like Tiamat, right? Basically, there's a lot of stories where the the world is created through some sort of conflict, through some sort of like the gods fight each other, they tear each other apart, or there's an original man like Purusha in Rig Veda is like torn apart, and that becomes the substance of the world, right? And so there's this, there's this what
01:32:36
Speaker
One British theologian, John Wilbank, calls that ontology of violence that's sort of like foundational to a lot of these stories where it were the the the basic nature of reality is strife, as Heraclitus would have put it also. There's something about this the nature of reality where you but you drill all the way down to the bottom and what you find is struggle. And that's where Nietzsche comes from.
Freedom and Transformation in Christianity
01:33:00
Speaker
That's where I think the modern worldview honestly comes from, that we do see that. we see and the institutions, the liberal institutions we've built that are designed to basically reconcile our strife with one another to create um a common good out of our selfish impulses is a direct consequence of that worldview that that you can't get to a point where we'rere we're we're actually going to act in love to each other. So let's build institutions that at least cancel out our selfishness and cause us to create economic value out of it. The Christian worldview is diametrically opposed to that. It says no
01:33:33
Speaker
the creation of the world is love. It's not violence. It's not imposing a form on pre-existent ambiguous matter. There was nothing before. There was no time. There was no space. august and Augustine said points out that God creates time and space together. So they they're you know there is no before.
01:33:57
Speaker
basically, the whole the whole show is couched within God and God does it because his nature is to love and to love means to have something to love. You know, so you you you have to let something else be what it is. And so so God gives birth to not birth. that's ah That's not quite the right phrase, but God gives breath speaks creation into existence in order to allow creation to become lovable in a sense. And in a sense that you know that actually ties back to what you were saying earlier about the need for the need for diversity in life, you know that there is something very important about letting people do what they want to do, not just diversity that you you were talking about, but also the kind of liberal allowance for people to make their own decisions about things. That that is that is a really important, that that's something that
01:34:46
Speaker
we inherit from christianity in a way because you cannot force someone to love. You can force somebody to do all kinds of things. You can put shackles on their feet and force them to work the fields. You can you can force somebody in a jail. you know But you cannot force them to love. So there's there's a really important way and in which any healthy society needs to be able to allow for the intrinsic freedom of people. So you can't coerce people completely into following a certain way of life, because that's not that's that's not loving, and it doesn't allow them to love. I think we're past that part of the conversation. Maybe we can have a different talk some other time about how to reconcile that with the need to have a stable society where people are stabbing each other and stuff. But you know you you do need that. you need You need to recognize the other as being intrinsically free in a way. And so that's that's that's the on law that's that's the metaphysical
01:35:36
Speaker
root of God's decision to create reality, to create the world, the universe that we live in. So it requires us then to to live into that. you know And that's that's the difficult thing about Christianity is that it says, okay, well, if you're going to believe this, then what you need to do is to is to actually act like the image of God. you can't You can't just pay lip service to it. You have to learn how to love people. And it turns out that's very difficult because people are obnoxious.
01:36:00
Speaker
and you're selfish. you know sure i'm ah i'm I've got an artsy kind of personality. you know Clearly, I come from a bohemian kind of background. um And I'm a poet. you know I was a creative writing major in undergrad. you know So I've got the scientific side, but I've also got this artsy side. And artsy people are self-absorbed. I hate to say it so politely, but it's just true. We are. It's because there's stuff going on inside of our heads that is more interesting, frankly, most of the time than what's going on out there. Sure.
01:36:29
Speaker
And I love attention, you know, I'm good on stage. And there are ways in which those are all gifts, like ah having poets in the world who are good at be putting words together and making beauty out of that is good.
01:36:40
Speaker
But you know I really have to struggle with the fact that I tend to really want more attention. I tend to just think about myself. And that's that something that I was not able to really acknowledge before I came to Christ and and and so and where Christ says, look, work you're all like this. you're all You're all this bad. And you really are bad. But there there is forgiveness. and And all creation is groaning. All the world is groaning in creation. And you're part of that. so accept, accept the fact that you're unfinished and let me fill you. You know, so you become conformed to the shape of Christ, which doesn't mean like losing your individuality. It doesn't mean becoming something that you're not. It actually means everybody becoming more themselves. And I do feel, I felt that pretty strongly as I've grown in the faith that this is like, but like the things about me that I think are the most me have become more
01:37:39
Speaker
full, more fully expressed, maybe. And the things that actually weren't me have been rounded off a little bit, I think. And that doesn't get that somehow, I don't know how it works exactly, but it doesn't make me more like the next Christian. It makes me more different in some So there's something, there's something beautiful about that process.
01:38:01
Speaker
Have you come across Ken Wilber at all? Have you read any Ken Wilber? Yeah. oh i I know that you were, you and a lot of the folks you've talked to on the show are influenced by Ken. I've only read a little bit of him. Okay. Yeah. I mean, I, yeah, I mean, I, I, I've strongly recommended. I think he's a, you know, I, I disagree. You know, i'm i he, he's somebody I've been having an ah intellectual argument in my head with for, you know,
01:38:24
Speaker
15 years or something so there's a lot you know he has a lot to say and he says it very with a lot of convictions there's a lot of things that i disagree with him about but he also i just think he he just lays out like maybe 10 or 12 just like absolutely like jaw-droppingly brilliant ideas in his work that's just like oh my god how was i able to think about the world without this tool uh so anyway this is my recommendation for ken but one of the things he talks about you know he he has these kind of stages of development right It borrows from spiral dynamics and also some other kind of people that came before that. And so one of the things, and so they're colored, right? So you have these colored stages like, you so I might talk about red, blue, orange, and green are some of the stages, right? um And I won't go into the details that you may already know them. My audience more or less knows them. But one of the things he talks about is like, well, you have a red Christ.
01:39:13
Speaker
And you have a blue christ and you have an orange christ and you have a green christ like that the you know and the same is true for all these different traditions and you know what i hear you describing when you say like.
01:39:24
Speaker
your experience of Christianity and being kind of, you know, that it you have become more yourself ah through this process feels like that is a developmentally, a very sophisticated experience of Christianity compared to, and I'm not going to criticize like all of Christianity based on some of these lower things, but just to say, there's a lot of people who I would say the reason that they were That they turned away from christianities because it felt that their experience of christianity was so they couldn't be themselves right like. If you're gay and you're in the south and you're you know just as like ah an obvious example i think there are a lot of them so yeah just to kind of name that.
01:40:07
Speaker
That there are you know with all religions there, you know, there are there are christianities and they're christianities and and then There's the problem of evil. We're not going to do that because we're we're already running long and It's like that's another big one But you know when when you know the problem of evil shows up when you say like that I've not heard this thing of of nature is groaning or you know this idea that original sin is this like is that is all of the suffering in the world and that's kind of caused by the fact that, yeah, that it's limited and finite and and the and that that is what the salvation is. All of this is kind of new to me, so it's very interesting. And it does bring up the problem of evil. We're not going to do
Belief and Interpretation in Christianity
01:40:47
Speaker
that. Unless you have like a one-liner. If you do, then great, but i probably not. But I think, you know, what I want to just get to just as ah just because it's like how we got here is, okay, so there you are in Jerusalem.
01:40:58
Speaker
In 33 AD or yeah, they wouldn't they wouldn't probably be calling it that yet But and and the everybody in Rome was really confused when in the year zero all the calendars at're like what who This is yours. What does this mean? Yeah, and you know and and you go To the tomb three days after the crucifixion and you you stake it out that you know Or let's say you go there two days you you stay overnight and you stake it out There is the corpse of a physical human being in that tomb on day two. What happens on day three? Like what, like physically do the biological processes of life resume? Does the blood in that same same body start pumping again? You know, does it does does does that physical body get up?
01:41:52
Speaker
and start walking around ah exactly the way that if it happened today, everybody would be freaking out about, oh my God, this is a miracle. Or is there or is that too literal an understanding of that story? No, I don't think it's too literal. Paul also says that if if Christ didn't rise again, um then then we're basically wasting our time. ah In true Catholic form, I'm actually terrible at memorizing Scripture, so I never get the quotes quite right.
01:42:19
Speaker
oh let the Protestants are way better at that, God bless them. But ah that that is what he says. And I think there's something to that. Like, ultimately, if Christ didn't rise from the dead, then then this is um baloney.
01:42:33
Speaker
um So I'm willing to say that, you know, and that that's, I think, to answer your more detailed questions, I don't I mean, nobody knows what would happen. But the gospels are very clear in a couple of things. They're clear that he ate.
01:42:47
Speaker
that they make the the gospels are very, you know, four gospels, right? Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, each one very short. And like I said before, sort of like cliffs notes, like they're very unsatisfying to read as a literature as a literature major, you know, because it's the characters aren't fleshed out, you can't figure out what the, you know, there's all these references that you have to be a first century Jew or a biblical scholar to really get, you know. One of the things though about that is that there is not a single detail included in any of the gospels that isn't there for some reason, right? They're they're being very parsimonious with their words. And so when each of the gospels makes clear to point out that Jesus met with the disciples in eight, like he specifically breaks bread with them and shows them that he he can eat,
01:43:31
Speaker
There's something ah important about that. it' saying It's saying that they believe that Jesus was in some way like not just not an apparition, not a projection, but a physical walking body. Yeah. Was his heart beating and blood pumping and all that stuff? i you know Who knows, because he was stabbed through the heart. that the the The spear in the side probably would would have gone into his into his heart. And if you believe,
01:43:57
Speaker
um Thomas' experience where St. Thomas is the one who says, i don't like I won't believe this until I can stick my fingers in the wound, right? and And Jesus says, okay, you know do it, right? and And Thomas says, holy shit, you're real. They didn't know about microbiology in those days. They didn't, no. But but you know Thomas did know that when he stuck his fingers in the hole in Jesus' side, his hands, that that um it was at least the same guy that was on the cross.
01:44:25
Speaker
I don't know whether that means that, you know, if your blood starts pumping again, but it's but it's all the wounds are still there. I'm not sure how that, you know, and and I don't care, to be honest, that much. You know, there's a point where you say there's no chance of ever knowing that. Sure. You know, and what's what's relevant is what Christ was teaching through his through his appearance to the gospel to to the the apostles and to others. Even secular biblical scholars talk about something they call the resurrection event.
01:44:55
Speaker
which means that it's difficult to interpret why these stories would be so widely shared and detailed in the way that they are and believed if there hadn't been something. So even people who are totally atheist and don't believe know do not believe that Christ was raised from the dead or whatever, a lot of at least this is what was taught to me in grad school and seminary. I haven't kept up with like critical biblical studies since then.
01:45:22
Speaker
But at that time, they were teaching that, yeah, there was something like there was some sort of a resurrection event, something happened that made all these people believe that Jesus was alive and made such a strong impression that it was transmitted down through across people and through generations. So, you know, I think one of the questions implicit in and your questions is sort of like, well, how could how could you believe it? like Like you were saying, like nature doesn't work like that. Nature works in regularities. And so C.S. Lewis, in his book on miracles, says basically that, you know, that's the same question as whether or not miracles happen. That the question when you ask whether or not miracles can happen, what you're asking basically is, is nature all there is?
01:46:07
Speaker
And if you think that nature is all there is, well, then first you have to decide what counts as nature. But let's say that we decide, let's say that we just kind of agree that nature means the total system of causally closed events interlocked through physical law in time and space. yeah right So there's no such thing as an event from outside that can manipulate that because there is no outside.
01:46:30
Speaker
Well, you've already said earlier that there there there is some sense of an outside because it came from somewhere and you can't get all the axioms for any logical system from within the system by definition, right? Like, you know, the the the system of cause and effect that create that is nature has to have some rules that you cannot derive from within nature because it's a logical system by assumption. Yeah. So already the fact that the universe exists suggests that something outside the universe exists, whether or not that's whether that's God or just like, you know, the multiverse or whatever, you know, you were already suggesting that at least there's a possibility of something outside of nature. And the question then becomes like, well, if there is something outside nature, can it relate to us? Does it make any sense? Is it intentional? Is it an agent?
01:47:20
Speaker
None of these questions I think are are like, clearly none of these questions are like empirically demonstrable or impure. They're not, that's not what I meant. They're not amenable to empirical inquiry. I mean, unless you were there AD 33 outside the tomb, right? Like, well, no, okay. So that's, that's okay. yeahp you You caught me there. I think that's actually a good point. Yeah. If you have a miracle that seems like it comes from that it breaches the normal laws of how things work, then maybe that's, I think that's, that is evidence that there's nothing out there.
01:47:49
Speaker
You don't have to be in Jerusalem in 8033 to encounter miracles. The Catholic Church still keeps a record of miracles today, right? and And they're relatively rigorous in the sense that a lot of people, a lot of miracles get turned down. So at least, right, like the the church will send people and they'll check it out and they'll be like, this is a hoax or, you know, this is this is times a totally natural explanation. But then every once in a while they get something where it's like,
01:48:13
Speaker
you know, a host, a consecrated <unk> community wafer will start bleeding and they'll be and they'll send somebody or like scientists will examine it and they'll be like, this is a b positive blood from cardiac tissue. And it's from inside the wafer. Like it didn't come. It was not placed on it outside. That's happening. You know, that that happens not regularly, but it does happen. And the church then will say like, OK, this is a real miracle. Or, you know, saints, the canonization process requires two verified miracles, which sounds silly. I mean, this is part of where my questions about liberalism comes from, because even saying these things sounds so ridiculous within the liberal paradigm, right? Like, oh, well, we have a process for figuring out whether a miracle is happening. Well, yeah, but but but what's great about liberalism is is real liberalism says, cool, OK. Like, you know, I'm over here like, yeah, you guys, I mean, I used to live in a place called St. Wirburg's and I looked up her miracles, St. Wirburg. She was a woman and
01:49:12
Speaker
one of her miracles I forget I don't remember the if there were two but the one I remember is that she could talk with ducks that that was her miracles she could that's super cute yeah yeah which is you know she did amazing and I'm like great she can talk with ducks like do they talk back you know or she just like she's just chatting with them anyway so I I'm gonna go look up these wafers bleeding story because it It's kind of implausible to me on the face of it, you know, I mean there' there's a whole conversation right by cessation of
Suffering, Evil, and Salvation
01:49:43
Speaker
miracles, right? There's a whole branch of Christianity. Yeah Yeah, yeah Which you know, so ah but I guess the question that this all raises for me is like well if God will make the wafers bleed as some kind of
01:50:03
Speaker
demonstration or illustration of the truth of the doctrine that this is the flesh of Christ or something like that really that's what's happening there like why and not just do it in every church on the planet so that we can all just like get it right like but we can all just go okay cool like no this is yeah I mean I think you could take that a step farther and say that if God does that well then why does why didn't he heal all the sick kids and cancer wards around the world right why doesn't he why does doesn't he put a stop to the you know the wars that are going on right now in Ukraine and Palestine and Israel and Myanmar and Kenya and there's like weird stuff going on in Kenya now. and you know war War happens. Why doesn't he put a stop to that? why doesn't he if he can if he can like What's more important about
01:50:44
Speaker
making a host in some nun's hand suddenly drenched in AB positive blood. if or a I don't know if AB comes in negative or positive, but AB blood, what's more important about that than healing kids and cancer wards? And I think that there's there there's there's there's a real question that in a way there isn't an answer to, but not because Not in the same way that there's no answer to like an unresolvable mathematical question, but in the same way that there's no answer when you're a kid to the question of why your mom tells you that you you need to you need to go to bed now, or you need to um you need to not walk. like like you want to You want to do something and your mom says, no, you actually can't do that, and you've never seen her act that way before, and you're like, why would she tell me that? It's because she knows that walking down that alley will lead you into something.
01:51:28
Speaker
Bad, but you don't know that and there's no there's no real way to explain that. So that's not i'm not trying to Minimize the suffering that the world faces that people face i'm not trying to i'm not trying to to To put some sort of happy face on it and say like oh everything happens for a reason I don't think everything happens for a reason. I think suffering is real and evil is real and I think that evil Loves to destroy. I mean god is the creator And evil is the principle that loves to destroy what God has created and will find any way it can to do that. um and And I think that the the fact the big fact that there is a struggle between these
01:52:13
Speaker
is not is not is not some sort of equivalent to the Manichaean idea that there's an equally poised good and evil in the world. and that you know the the question is that the the The question is an open one, which one will prevail? It's that God allows creation to make up its mind, basically. And that's and that goes back to your question about good about the just the question of evil, you know the theodicy question.
01:52:37
Speaker
i I've known people who that question is just eaten alive, you know, yeah, um driven them out of the church, made them atheists, you know, that it doesn't do that for me. And I've, I've seen a lot of evil in my life. I mean, I've got multiple suicides in my own family. I've, I've seen grotesquely dead bodies and yeah, just suffer. I've seen a lot of suffering, you know, so it's not because I'm some privileged person who who's insulated from the suffering the world. I've, I've,
01:53:06
Speaker
actually experienced quite a lot of it. and And I actually find that it's almost inverse. It is the people who have not allowed suffering to such them who are most vulnerable to this question of the Odyssey. It's um it's it's in a sense, it's ah it's a question of control. It's and it's a desire to feel that you you can find some way out of suffering.
01:53:27
Speaker
through your through your your mastery of the world, through your intellect, right? You you you want that. And the fact that so that not everybody is able to do that makes you question the goodness of creation. But suffering is going to come for you too. And we all have to deal with it. And I think that the nature of God's gift to us of freedom necessarily leads to the certainty of suffering. like we're gonna like if if if If God wanted to create perfect autonom ah automatons who would who would just love Him, then He could have done that, but it wouldn't have been real love. right You have to let the creation choose whether or not to respond to love of the Creator.
01:54:07
Speaker
Yeah, but so and yeah and this is why i kinda talked about like not kind of going into the the the the Children with cancer and and that whole side of things right like there's a world where god just like removes all of the suffering but to say it Reminds me of being a relationship with somebody with a personality disorder to say you know to say like well No, you have to you have to love me like if you you know um or like that line like if you don't love me at my worst You can't have me at my best or I don't know who'd may west or someone like that said that right like you know You know like an internet meme for a long time
01:54:43
Speaker
I'm fine with the idea that God doesn't want to like program all of humanity to just kind of like automatons to worship, but to...
01:54:54
Speaker
But to give so little to go on, and also to to have, if there's this path to redemption from suffering, there's this problem of suffering, and then there's this is path to redemption, the path to redemption is to let Christ into your heart, or however you know, and that that's the way out, and that there aren't equally the valid ways out of this problem of suffering ah outside of Christianity.
01:55:22
Speaker
then to only expose, you know, one eighth of the world or maybe two eighths of the world's population to Christiana, I don't know how, you know, and to and to have the evidence be so scanty and so kind of impenetrable and to have this shitty book that's like, you know, maybe it's beautiful if you like read deeply into it and you really get the notes and you take a class on it. Right. But that it's not like, ah you know, more than one class. Yeah, right. It's one class won't do it. Right, exactly. you It's not a page stoner, right? And and like yeah why like just some why make it so difficult? It it feels like while you're punishing you know you're punishing the people that lived in China for 100,000 years and did not
01:56:07
Speaker
and, you know, and and and did not ever, or I guess ah everything prior to 2000 years ago doesn't count, but for, you know, for 1500 years, I don't know when Christianity, when the missionaries first reached China, but there's a period of time. ah Okay, well, China's a bad example, and Australia, okay, like that. Okay, Australia is one of the few good examples, yeah. Great, so Australia, is so you have these people in Australia for for a couple thousand years that are what, are just doomed to suffer because they accidentally were not born within, you know, easy sailing distance of of the West. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think those are those are all good questions. And Christians have had different answers to them. I mean, I think some of the harshest example, the harshest answers are found maybe in the Calvinist traditions of Protestantism, where where they basically say, like, yes, and so is almost everybody else. Like, yes, they are damned. If so fact, they've never heard of Christ. And so but so is almost everybody else. Right.
01:57:06
Speaker
but Because there's double pre-destination where God chooses not only who will be saved, but who will be damned from eternity. So this is ah this is a version of Christianity where free the free will I've been talking about is not central. right It's not not a central part of theology because it emerges out of a theological tradition of volunteerism, um more or less.
01:57:27
Speaker
this isn't yeah i'm not I'm not a theologian, but we're definitely not a historian of theology, but but it emerges out of this medieval tradition where theologians really started to want to emphasize God's total, total sovereignty. god has got and In a way, you could think of about it and partly it as a reaction to the kind of magical aspects of Christianity that were becoming too um embedded in Catholic practice where it's like, oh, I just pay this money for this indulgence and that automatically gets me my sin removed. Or the difference between faith and magic, maybe you could say something like magic is transactional. You just do the right thing. They're both mystical. They're both non-physical causal, right? But one of them is like a guaranteed in and out, input-output relation.
01:58:11
Speaker
The other one is a relationship, and and there were aspects of Catholic practice that were becoming too magical and superstitious in that way. And so theologians, that was one reason why theologians started to want to really emphasize God's sovereignty, that he has total control, he can't be bought off, right? And after the Reformation, that developed into the into you know reformed versions of Krishna of Calvinist faith, right? that um that really emphasize God's total control to the point where the universe becomes a clockwork again, right? They're not interested in it. Yeah, there's something outside the game. It's God. But everything inside the game is totally determined because God has created it from eternity in a certain way. And he knows what he's doing. And if you're damned, then you should just accept that because he knows what he's doing and he's in charge. like I don't find that version of Christian faith to be particularly compelling as you might
01:59:03
Speaker
um as you might and might might into it, my guest, but um but it is out there. um I think that's something one of the things that's drawn me to Catholicism is that they have a pretty, they have a pretty humble and well worked out theology of non Christians, where it is not Catholic doctrine that non Christians are automatically damned. It is it is, it is, you are actually not allowed to believe that. um But there there is also the teaching of extra ecclesium nullus adus,
01:59:34
Speaker
which is that outside of the church, there is no salvation. So how do you reconcile those things? Well, basically you say God knows what he's doing and he might choose to save whoever he wants and it's not my business. And so you you do say like, yeah, like there are way people who have no no access to the gospel through their through their desire to know God can be saved, even if it's through an idiom that doesn't seem Christian. It doesn't seem that it might be polytheistic. might be you know there Who knows how many people there were in Australia and all these different cultures.
02:00:03
Speaker
which there are a lot, you know, there are a lot of different cultures in Australia. It's not just one Aboriginal, you know, they're like, kind like 12 different language groups, I think. It's crazy. um So so it's very diverse place. Lots of different religious beliefs, and lots of different traditions and languages. And who knows how many people before Europeans showed up had in their hearts the desire to know what was behind behind the the the things that they could see ah see and feel and touch and wanted to align themselves with that. but the the The Catholic teaching is that that's right's that's up to God. like that's between that's but Every salvation story is between the soul and God, and it's not your business. You might know the worst person in the world who might be a Catholic. A good example is like Evelyn Waugh, the British novelist, was a Catholic and a terrible person, and he knew he was a terrible person. He was he was racist, he was
02:00:56
Speaker
just a grump he was nasty to people and somebody said once to him like how can you be a Catholic or a Christian and and be so unpleasant and he was like ah but you don't know how much worse I would be if I weren't a Christian and and so it's like yeah could so is somebody like that potentially saved well yeah if he's that's between him and God basically so I appreciate the kind of, you know, that that there is like a, it feels like a Catholic kind of move there to to say both the two, that that kind of contradictory, the the paradox that you brought up. You know, I would say there was a little bit of a modern Bailey in what you said where, you know, you said, well, who knows how many, you know, indigenous Australians had in their heart to know something like what was behind the, like, well, that's very different. yeah Sure, I mean of course those people that but that's not the teaching Christ didn't say
02:01:48
Speaker
Hey, if you want to know, if in your heart you, you have desire to know what's behind the physical world and the deeper thing, then you're safe. That's not the teaching, right? The teaching is I am the way and like only through me. Yeah. I'm not going to press you on this point because, you know, cause again, we're, we're, we're very over time, but if you want to respond to that, you can. Yeah. I'll just respond quickly. I don't think it was a Martin Bailey because it is, it is the teaching that, that Christ said, I am the truth, the light of the way no one comes ah And so in a way, if somebody is somebody is saved outside the Christian faith, either because they never found it compelling or because they you know weren't or because they just were never exposed to it, then there is Christ is still involved. theyre they are They are part of the church, which is the mystical body of Christ. That's that's an that's a really key teaching.
02:02:38
Speaker
in that you you almost feel, you almost have to envision it as you are a cell in a body. And that, you know, as as you become part of the church, you are engrafted into the body of Christ, which is a mystical body. And and I mean that in the sense that it extends through space.
02:02:54
Speaker
through time, right? that You can't see all of it at once, but but but but it's all there. And this is why Christ had to ascend. This is that in another miracle it's probably that's equally implausible to the eyes of a natural and somebody who has a naturalist view on the world is the ascension, right? Where Christ is like hanging out with his his buddies for six weeks after the resurrection. And then one day he's like, okay, like, it's been real, you know, peace and and it rises up into a cloud and then it's gone. Okay. Like when was the last time you saw somebody do that? Not plausible through a natural view, but ah through a natural lens. But it is, it makes narrative sense in the fact in that he had to, he had to disappear
02:03:36
Speaker
bodily to allow that expansion of the mystical body to take place like he couldn't be a focal we couldn't be have this focal unity and just one person anymore but yeah so the teaching is that that there's there's something very physical that we are part of a physical body it extends through space and time just like any other body and just like a cell can't see all of the body it's part of we can't see all the bodies that we're part of and just like the body has parts that seem More or less, I don't know the analogy breaks down but like basically
02:04:10
Speaker
if i'm If I'm part of the body here in the 21st century in America, I have no idea what it's like to be a body, part of the body from the 14th century before Christ in Australia. But if there is somebody saved from that time, which I believe there are, they are still part of the body. um and And so that you do have both and there in a way that I don't think is wishy-washy. And where it becomes wishywash where it becomes not wishy-washy, where you can see it, is that if you do become convinced in the in the truth of the Catholic Church, and then you don't join it if you still keep refusing after you have seen what you think is the truth.
02:04:49
Speaker
then you are in peril of your soul. isn there is't There is a requirement, there is something incumbent on you to respond to that and to to be an active member. Okay. Any last closing thoughts as we wrap up here? I'll i'll give you a ah little prompt, but feel free to ignore the prompts and just or anything kind of last thought you want to share, but the prompt would just be something about the reconciliation of modernity and enchantment, which is the
Living in an Enchanted World
02:05:14
Speaker
theme of the podcast. so Yeah, so take that, ignore it, incorporate it, anything you want to close it to. I live in an enchanted world. I would just say that. um The Catholic Church is enchanting. If you go to adoration, you know, there's the host, you know, and usually a pretty very beautiful gold monstrance on the altar and there's incense and there's candles and you do that, you know, and you pray and you do that at enough times and it starts to just shape your imagination.
02:05:44
Speaker
And I was in, like I said, I was in Oxford last week and I went to, we went to mass at the Oxford oratory, which is the, um, the church out ain't a lotia of Olosius of Gonzaga. I can't remember exactly, but it's the church that Tolkien went to. Tolkien was a committee committed Catholic and lived in Oxford and that was his parish.
02:06:05
Speaker
And it was in Latin, um which not a Latin mass, but a modern mass in Latin, a different thing. and but But just to do that, as a pre-Vatican II Catholic, he spent most of his life going to mass in Latin. And there was some sort of connection there where I just, I've been to a couple of masses lately, where I'm looking at the altar and there's these beautiful things going on and there's this solemnity. And I just, I get this sharp impression nobody who was not shaped by this in their imagination could have written the Lord of the Rings. This is where the Lord of the Rings comes from. These colors, this beauty, this structure. And for me to go deeper into this faith, it's just like I just, I just find myself not fighting the same battles anymore. Against against disenchantment. It's like, yeah, I'm aware that I know like modernity is still kind of
02:06:56
Speaker
like shallow and disappointing. I mean, like strip malls, you know, it's just like ah but the kind of thing I was just talking about, you're at mass and you're kind of understanding where Tolkien got his worldview of the beauty and the and the grandeur of it and the hum and the humility at the same time. And then take that and just 100% opposite side of the spectrum is a strip mall, you know, it's as far away as you can get. right And unfortunately, our world is comprised much more of strip malls than of masses.
02:07:22
Speaker
And so I know that there's a lot of disenchantment, there's the materialism, there's there's the kind of dispersion of units of meaning. across the landscape so that they're no longer coherent and and nobody knows exactly where the ground is. Nobody knows, you know, I talked earlier about the hierarchy of values and every organism has to have a hierarchy of values just to be able to navigate the world. But a difficult thing about living in modern liberal democracy is that we we actually have a hard time figuring that out. but Nobody really knows what the center is supposed to be. We're a society without a center. You can see that even in our towns and our villages, which are no longer built around centers. They're not built around churches. culture on mosques as as they are elsewhere. So there's a centralistness that i I used to feel so burdened by. And now it's like I'm aware of it. But it's just not my reality. Like I kind of do have a center, I guess. And my world feels more like it's touching whatever kind of
02:08:24
Speaker
third rail of power that I used to feel called to when I would read the Lord of the Rings as a kid or play knights in shining armor or whatever, all that like cool magic magical stuff. you know There's a desire for that. like It's kind of kind of fulfilled in a way. And I think now my question now my big question is, like how do i how do I reorient my my approach to like scholarship, teaching, outreach? it's like I used to write a blog post a week because I was so burning with this unsettled you know, desire to figure out reality and then, you know, I was working out my stuff, you know, and now it's like I have a harder time writing because it's almost like I don't know how to connect to the disenchanted world. You know, so there there is a there is a really important way in which majority is disenchanting. And I don't think I don't think it's good. I don't think it's right to think about
02:09:18
Speaker
looking to Christianity as the solution to that as a move backwards. I'm not going back to the medieval church. That's gone. and you know the church that i go to The Catholic church in the 21st century is not the medieval church. You cannot go backward in time, but you can you can grow wood around a scar to create a burl. You know what I mean? like you You have to deal with what modernity has done, both good and bad. But if you want to create a meaningful world, you have to go you have to go forward in time. But I think that for me, experiencing kind of um reconnecting with the the unending cycle of the Christian life has been a way to step out of that
02:10:02
Speaker
kind of anomie and meaninglessness to heal it. And I, and I don't know what it looks like to kind of retain the best of modernity and also this enchanted Christian worldview. That's something I still want to work out, but i I do think that's what I envision. That's what I hope for Connor. Thank you so much for taking time with me today. Super interesting. Yeah. You've left me with a lot to chew on. So I appreciate that. Yeah. Well, thank you. Thank you for having me. It's been a really fun, wide ranging conversation and I hope we get to connect again.