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Rita Nakashima Brock and the Role of Church in Troubled Times · Future Christian

0:07
>> Paul: Welcome to the Future Christian Podcast, your
0:10
source for insights and ideas on how to lead your church in
0:12
the 21st century. At the Future Christian
0:16
Podcast, we talk to pastors, authors,
0:19
and other faith leaders for helpful advice and practical
0:21
wisdom to help you and your community of faith
0:24
walk boldly into the future. Whether
0:27
you're a pastor, church leader, or a passionate member
0:30
of your faith community, this podcast is
0:33
designed to challenge, inspire, and equip
0:36
you with the tools you need for impactful ministry.
0:39
And now for a little bit about the guest for this episode.
0:43
>> Martha Tatarnic: Welcome to the Future Christian Podcast. Today,
0:46
Loren Richmond Jr. Welcomes Dr. Rita
0:49
Nakashima Brock. Dr. Brock is a
0:52
renowned theologian, author, and national
0:55
expert on moral injury, currently serving
0:58
as Senior Vice President for Moral Injury
1:01
Recovery Programs at Volunteers of
1:04
America. In this role, she leads
1:06
efforts to advance understanding and
1:09
healing for individuals and communities
1:12
affected by moral injury, particularly
1:15
veterans. She was the founding director of
1:18
the Soul Repair center at Bright Divinity
1:20
School at Texas Christian University,
1:23
where she also served as research professor
1:26
of theology and culture. A
1:29
prolific scholar and speaker, Dr.
1:31
Brock is the co author of Soul
1:34
Recovering from Moral Injury After War
1:37
and Proverbs of Ashes,
1:40
Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and the Search for
1:43
what Saves Us. She has provided
1:46
training for VA mental health professionals,
1:49
chaplains, and veteran families.
1:52
A reminder. Before we start today's conversation,
1:55
please take a moment to subscribe to the podcast,
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leave a review and share Future Christian with
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a friend. Connect with Loren, Martha and
2:04
Future Christian on Instagram. Shoot us
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an email at laurensonate, uh,
2:09
mediapro.com with comments,
2:12
questions or ideas for future episodes.
2:15
We appreciate your voice in how we
2:18
faithfully discern the future of the church.
2:31
>> Loren: All right. Welcome to the Future Christian Podcast. My name is Loren
2:34
Richmond Jr. And I'm actually recording live
2:37
and in person at the Remind and Renew conference
2:40
here at Phillips Seminary in Tulsa,
2:42
Oklahoma. I'm pleased to be joined in
2:45
person by Dr. Rita
2:47
Nakashima. Barack. So thank you so much for being here. Thank
2:50
you so much for your time and, uh, wisdom you're
2:53
sharing at this conference. Take a moment to share
2:56
anything you'd like our listeners to know about you.
2:59
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Oh, thank you for having me. I'm looking forward to the
3:02
conversation. Um,
3:05
I should say that, um, my degree is in
3:08
theology, philosophy, religion and theology.
3:10
Um, and, um, I've been
3:13
interested in, um, the
3:16
progressive end of Christian theology and, and
3:18
movements for social change for all of my adult life.
3:21
I started college in the civil rights
3:24
movement.
3:25
>> Loren: Yeah, right. Uh, what is,
3:28
uh. Share a little bit, if you're
3:31
willing, more about your kind of faith Background and journey,
3:34
what that looked like in the past and what that looks like today.
3:36
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Okay. Uh, um, I was born in
3:39
Fukuoka, Japan, uh, to
3:42
a Puerto Rican birth father that I didn't know I had or meet till
3:45
I was 33. So I was raised for the first
3:48
five years of my life in my
3:50
grandparents home with my mother. And uh, my
3:53
grandfather was a Buddhist priest. So I was raised a
3:56
Buddhist in Japan for five years.
3:58
Uh, and then I transitioned for a year in Okinawa
4:01
at a military basis. My stepfather by that time
4:04
had married my mother and he was in the US Army.
4:07
So uh, I landed in Fort Riley, Kansas at the
4:10
age of six and transitioned to
4:13
military life. Uh, grew up military
4:16
dependent so I went to military
4:18
schools and to chapel, Protestant
4:21
services. My stepfather was from Amory,
4:24
Mississippi so he was a Southern
4:27
Protestant. And so we went to Protestant
4:29
services. Uh, and in the
4:32
military um, chaplains are
4:35
not allowed to proselytize. So I was
4:38
never asked about baptism or anything and, but I
4:41
did attend Sunday school and I remember
4:44
in about fifth grade or
4:47
so the teacher said something about we should read the Bible cover
4:50
to cover. So I did.
4:51
>> Loren: Wow.
4:52
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: And uh, a lot of it didn't make any sense to
4:55
me. Um, but all the things I was being told about
4:57
Jesus as this kind and
5:00
nice Savior did not comport with
5:03
the confrontational, argument, argumentative
5:06
person I saw in the New Testament. And as a
5:08
Japanese person that kind of behavior is very
5:11
antisocial. So I didn't really understand
5:13
Christianity exactly. I knew what it
5:16
was saying and claiming but it didn't
5:19
interest me actually that much. I did do
5:22
particip youth things and stuff with the chapel
5:25
programs because that was expected. And I
5:28
think I even learned to sound like a Christian. But it wasn't clear
5:31
to me what um, exactly what that
5:33
meant. And I really did
5:36
not want to align myself
5:39
with anything that would prohibit me from
5:42
being reunited with my Japanese grandparents.
5:45
And all those years I was
5:48
subjected to racism because it was in the 50s, after
5:51
World War II. And so I kept wanting
5:54
to go home and for me home was Japan.
5:57
But I didn't speak the language anymore. And I remember
6:01
as a kid wanting my mother to reteach me
6:03
Japanese and she was always too busy, she wouldn't do
6:06
it. And I didn't realize until much later that the
6:09
reason she didn't do it I think had to do with my
6:11
birth father and all kinds of things she didn't want me to know.
6:15
So I grew up in the US military, uh, but
6:18
when I was 16 my father went to Vietnam for
6:21
two years, um, on two
6:24
tours. And, uh, I had a friend in high
6:27
school whose father was a Baptist
6:29
minister. And so she invited me to church one day. And this was a
6:32
fundamentalist conservative Baptist church. And I believed
6:35
in evolution and other things like that.
6:38
Uh, but her father was just a
6:41
good minister.
6:41
>> Speaker E: Yeah.
6:42
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: And so he actually, I think
6:45
sort of took. Took over helping my
6:48
family because my dad was gone for two years. So I sort
6:51
of was semi adopted into, you know, like whenever they would take
6:54
trips, my friend would invite me to go with them. So I
6:57
was going to the beach and surfing in the
6:59
summertime and doing a lot of fun stuff with
7:02
his family and attending
7:05
his church. And
7:07
uh, at some point in that process,
7:10
pretty early, I realized that,
7:12
um, to be sort of fully
7:15
inside that circle of care that he had, I should
7:18
join the church. So I asked him to baptize me.
7:21
And I, when he asked me if I believed that Jesus Christ was my
7:23
personal Lord and savior, I said yes, even though I had no idea what that
7:26
meant. Um, I mean, I did, but
7:29
I didn't believe it in the sense of me going to heaven and my
7:32
grandparents going to hell. And
7:34
so. But that, but really the reason I
7:38
got baptized was so I could be a full fledged member of his church.
7:41
In particular because he was such a great minister.
7:44
Um, and he knew I believed in evolution and he baptized
7:47
me anyway. Or a fundamentalist that was kind of
7:50
made. But he was like that. He was in trouble with
7:53
some of the other ministers in his conservative
7:55
denomination because he allowed Alcoholics
7:58
Anonymous to use the church for meetings. And they were
8:01
really upset. They disagreed with that because
8:04
you need to require people to be saved first before they can use
8:07
the church. And his reply was, well, until they get sober,
8:10
they can't get saved. So this, you know, so he had,
8:13
he was just very compassionate and
8:15
sensible that way. And he was a really good minister
8:18
to me and my family. So I got baptized
8:21
a Baptist. But when I went to
8:24
college, uh, I didn't. I stopped going to
8:27
church because I tried one Baptist church in the town of
8:30
Orange and it freaked me out. It was so weird.
8:32
>> Loren: Yeah.
8:32
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Um, so I stopped going to church. But, uh, I
8:35
went to Chapman now university. It was Chapman
8:38
College at the time, which is related to the Disciples, which
8:41
is Phillips Seminary denomination also. And
8:44
I, uh, got him. I was
8:47
actually pre med. I
8:50
had high grades in math and science. I was going to be a brain
8:53
surgeon. That was my goal, was to become a surgeon of
8:55
some kind. And, um, but the civil
8:58
rights movement broke out. My first Semester in
9:01
college in a really dramatic way
9:04
on campus. And it was really clear you had
9:07
to step up. And so I got
9:09
immediately involved in activist civil
9:12
rights work because it made a big difference. And,
9:15
um, so that, uh,
9:18
made my science classes seem really boring.
9:21
>> Loren: Mhm.
9:22
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Um, I just lost interest in the
9:25
science and math and I got more interested in the civil
9:28
rights movement. I was close. I had a scholarship from the state
9:31
of California for tuition for four years. And I was
9:34
close to losing it because I was so bored of my science classes. And
9:37
I asked some of the student leaders in the civil rights
9:39
movement what I could take that was interesting.
9:42
And I thought they might send me to political science or
9:45
something. No, they sent me to all of them
9:48
that I asked. Uh, three people I asked. They were all juniors
9:51
and seniors. Um, and I said, what can I take? And
9:54
they said, take Willis Fisher's Old Testament class. It'll be the hardest
9:57
and best class you take in college.
9:59
>> Loren: Oh, interesting.
10:00
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: And I'm like, why Bible? That's
10:02
so weird, right? And I couldn't figure
10:05
that one out, especially as a Baptist who
10:08
elapsed Baptist, as it were.
10:11
Um, but I, you know, three people said it. So I signed
10:14
up for it the first semester of my sophomore year
10:17
and it was the best class I
10:20
had in college. It was the hardest. I mean, I,
10:23
um. It was taught by a professor
10:25
who had retired from Claremont Seminary in Old
10:28
Testament and was in his retirement teaching at
10:31
this undergraduate college. And he
10:34
was a really wonderful professor.
10:37
He. His lectures were
10:40
compelling and dazzling, not in a kind of
10:43
charismatic way, but just because you were just
10:46
riveted by what he was saying. Um,
10:50
and then to find out that the Bible wasn't literally true,
10:53
that there are all these different historical things and
10:55
all of this stuff you study when you actually dig
10:58
into the Bible, an original language and,
11:01
you know, all of that and the history and the archeology in it and
11:04
all that. And I was fascinated.
11:07
So I took every class he taught. And by the
11:10
end of my sophomore year, I had, I had taken everything.
11:13
And he called me into his office and he. And he
11:16
said to me at the end of my sophomore year, what are you
11:19
majoring in? And I said, well, I'm in pre
11:22
med, but I don't really like my science classes. And he said,
11:25
well, have you thought about
11:27
religion as a major? I said, no. And he said,
11:30
well, you know, you made A's in all your classes with me. And
11:33
I said, yeah, I'm interested. He said, well, you could keep doing
11:36
that. And he talked me into a Religion
11:39
major. And so I. Then, of course,
11:42
I made. I did fine grade wise. Um,
11:45
but when I'd taken everything he
11:47
taught, I was bereft because
11:50
what was I going to. You know. So I actually took
11:53
another independent study with him at one point to learn
11:56
biblical Hebrew.
11:57
>> Speaker E: Wow.
11:58
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: So I did my undergraduate work in. Mostly in Bible, but
12:01
also the, uh, you know, to do the major, I had to do all these
12:03
courses, but I also took biblical Hebrew on
12:06
the side just because that was a way to
12:09
stay. I could go in and talk to him about stuff.
12:12
>> Speaker E: Yeah.
12:12
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: So that's how I wound up in religion. And because I was
12:15
in a religion major, the chaplain's office,
12:18
which was disciple run, uh, invited to be
12:21
part of a student group called the Chaplain's Council. So it was all
12:24
the religion majors. So I got involved with
12:27
that. And that's how I found out about the denomination that didn't
12:30
have creeds and thought you should read the Bible for yourself. I thought
12:33
I could deal with that, you know. So I wound up a
12:35
disciple that way. So then I got a job my
12:38
junior year teaching Sunday school to junior high kids.
12:41
M. Um. Or no, my scene. My senior year. It was my senior year
12:44
because I only got to do a semester. And then I went on world camp as a
12:47
float. But, um, but I discovered I
12:49
loved teaching. I. I was really good with junior
12:52
high kids and Bible right there. Yeah. Oh, yeah.
12:55
No, in fact, when I went on the ship, they got me a gift box
12:58
of things to take. I mean, it was. I really love that.
13:01
So, um. But somewhere in the end
13:04
of my junior year, the same professor
13:07
called. His name was Willis Fisher. We all called him Dr.
13:10
Fisher. Nobody. We were a little reticent to call
13:13
him Willis. He preferred Willis. He called
13:15
me in and said, what are you.
13:18
Have you thought about graduate school? And
13:21
I said, no. And he said, well,
13:24
you really can't do a huge amount with an
13:27
undergraduate religion major. But if you went and did a master's
13:29
degree, you could write curriculum for churches or
13:32
you could become a minister. I said, no, I'm not becoming a minister. So
13:35
he had all these other options if I got a master's
13:38
degree. And I said, well, I guess I would think about it. He
13:41
said, well, if you do decide you want to go,
13:44
we have a grant arrangement with the
13:46
Lane foundation where we can
13:49
recommend you for a tuition, uh,
13:52
scholarship if you go to a master's degree.
13:55
So I finally decided that I didn't have any other
13:58
better plans with a religion major. And
14:00
so I wound up with a tuition Scholarship to Claremont, to
14:03
any seminary. And I picked Claremont because all
14:06
the, all those straight A students went there.
14:10
And I went there, um, and
14:13
continued to find religion fascinating. And I did a
14:16
master's, um, and I was
14:18
pretty clear ministry was not my calling. So
14:21
I didn't do a masters, um, of
14:24
divinity. I did a master's in religion
14:27
in preparation for. By then I was pretty sure I wanted to
14:30
teach it and be a professor. So that's.
14:32
Anyway, that's how I wound up getting a doctorate in
14:35
theology. And I thought it was going to be Bible
14:38
because he was a biblical studies
14:40
professor. But in between
14:42
college and that master's degree in
14:45
seminary, the feminist movement
14:48
exploded and Ms. Magazine published its first edition
14:51
that summer and all this stuff. And so
14:53
by the time I was in graduate school for my master's,
14:56
the Bible seemed so damned patriarchal
14:59
that I did not want to spend my time studying it.
15:02
I wanted to do theology because M. Rosemary Ruther, Mary
15:05
Daly, these feminists were putting this stuff out there and it was
15:08
like, oh, yeah, that's what I want to do. Um,
15:11
so my sort of civil rights activist
15:14
energies then flipped over into feminist work
15:17
and religion. Um, I didn't lose the civil rights
15:20
and anti racism piece, but I added,
15:23
uh, both the uh, feminist movement and the first Earth
15:26
Day happened while I was in college.
15:27
So environmental issues, feminist, it just sort of piled
15:30
on to a whole bunch of other things. So that's how I
15:33
wound up in religion at all.
15:36
Um, and um, it took me a long
15:39
time after I got my doctorate to find
15:42
a tenure track position because feminists
15:45
and women of color were like, not
15:48
popular. And so I went
15:50
from ah, like sabbatical
15:53
replacement to one year appointments for a
15:56
long time in my career. So the first, this
15:59
is odd, but the first and
16:02
last job I held as a professor
16:05
was, uh, an endowed chair.
16:08
I got an endowed chair a year after I finished my
16:11
doctorate and that's where I got tenure. And
16:14
I did that for seven years. And then I was tired of teaching, so
16:17
I quit and I became an administrator for
16:20
a while and then a sort of independent activist. And
16:23
then I just. And part of that was anti war because of the
16:26
Vietnam thing. Um, and in that
16:29
process I discovered this concept, moral injury,
16:32
which is now just, I'm obsessed with it.
16:35
Right. Um, so that, that's how I got here,
16:38
uh, um, to where I am now at Volunteers of
16:41
America, running moral injury programming.
16:43
And I've been doing that for seven years. And I did five years at
16:46
Bright Divinity School doing that also. So I've been
16:49
doing. Working in the moral injury space for almost 15
16:52
years.
16:52
>> Speaker E: Yeah.
16:53
>> Loren: So I imagine a lot of our, uh, listeners will be familiar with
16:56
you from the topic of moral injury. I remember, uh, reading
16:59
your book when I was in seminary here. You
17:02
know, moral Injury. And what was the title?
17:04
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Soul Repair.
17:05
>> Loren: Soul repair, that's right. I should remember. I remember the COVID Right,
17:08
right. With the.
17:09
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Oh, isn't that a beautiful cover? I love the COVID of that book. Yeah,
17:12
yeah, yeah.
17:13
>> Loren: Usually I have them right in front of me, but because of circumstances
17:16
I don't. So here we are, we're
17:18
recording at Phillips Seminary for the Reminder Renew
17:21
conference. And the theme of this conference is Seeking wisdom
17:24
and understanding in Troubling Times.
17:26
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Yeah.
17:26
>> Loren: And I'm hoping we can mix into this
17:28
conversation your broader work and
17:31
moral injury.
17:33
But let's begin with this.
17:36
Let's just start. Let's just start talking about
17:39
these troubling times.
17:43
I've read this in a couple different
17:46
sources of late. This term polycrisis.
17:49
Are you familiar with the term M? Do you want to define it for our
17:52
listeners?
17:52
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Well, it's just where these massive things accumulate
17:55
and they're all happening simultaneously and they seem
17:58
overwhelming. That's how I would understand it.
18:01
I think the biggest overwhelming one is
18:04
climate change. It's so big that people try to ignore it.
18:07
>> Speaker E: Yeah.
18:08
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Uh, there's that there is a hot war in
18:11
Europe. Uh, there's Israel and
18:14
they supposedly have an accord now, but.
18:16
>> Loren: Right.
18:17
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: But Palestine is gone. I
18:19
mean, now they have an accord now that they've just. It's been
18:22
destroyed. Right. So there's, there
18:25
are wars going on. Um, and a hot war
18:28
in Europe is very concerning. Right, right. Um,
18:31
we have nuclear weapons, um,
18:34
and then we have, from my perspective,
18:37
an incompetent government coming in. That
18:39
is,
18:40
ah, when your
18:43
commander in chief is a convicted sexual assaulter
18:46
and an adulterer and a bad financial
18:49
manager and he wants to put in the
18:52
head of the Department of Defense, somebody worse than that
18:54
who's also an alcoholic. I
18:57
mean, they're very serious. Similar
19:00
in that regard to who's never
19:03
run an organization bigger than a hundred employees
19:06
running the Department of Defense. M.
19:09
This is just a whole. That's another layer of poly crisis. And
19:12
the fires are, you know, this is all climate change.
19:14
>> Loren: California.
19:14
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Uh, right.
19:15
>> Loren: As we're recording.
19:16
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Yeah, it's. It's what, um, Naomi Klein
19:19
called disaster capitalism. The way, ah, it works is
19:22
that it keeps having these poly
19:24
crises going on to distract people from really what's
19:27
going on in other places where they want you to look.
19:30
>> Loren: Mhm.
19:31
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: And so I think that that's part of the world we're living in.
19:34
>> Loren: I'm glad you mentioned that idea of disaster
19:37
capitalism and distraction. What
19:39
as I'm thinking too, like,
19:43
I think what in a couple days, supposedly TikTok is
19:46
or may not go away. Which I think we could
19:49
debate the merits of TikTok. But it certainly,
19:53
I guess a cynical view would be it does
19:56
serve to somewhat distract us from what's going on. But also
19:59
obviously there's some.
19:59
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: It's also information about what's going on.
20:01
>> Loren: It also is about what's going on.
20:03
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Well, this is the other piece of, I think the
20:06
polycrisis that's. I have no
20:09
solution for is the collapse
20:12
of a reliable media.
20:13
>> Speaker E: Yeah.
20:14
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: So information is completely
20:17
random. Um, and faux
20:19
facts are everywhere and you have to
20:22
really be, you have to do your own work to figure
20:25
out what's true and not true and, and that's even
20:28
difficult. Um, but
20:31
uh, it used to be a few reliable
20:34
mainstream sources of media information were where
20:37
people got their information. Now it's everywhere. Social
20:40
media, email
20:43
blasts. I mean, it's. So there's that
20:47
um, and that process of getting information
20:51
is not collective. Ah,
20:54
it used to be that there were three networks. So you knew that your people
20:57
at school had watched one of those three networks. Works
21:00
right now. It's stuff on phones, it's stuff
21:02
on cable, it's everywhere.
21:05
And so there's a sort
21:08
of saturation, ah, point where
21:11
people are just too overloaded to sort it all
21:13
out. Um,
21:16
there was a study once done about, you know, when you, in a supermarket,
21:19
if you have 10 choices.
21:21
>> Loren: Right.
21:22
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Jelly. Yeah. And then you have three. If you
21:25
have three, people will buy one, but if you have 10, they look at it and walk
21:28
out because they can't decide. Right. And so it's sort of like
21:31
that with the media.
21:32
>> Speaker E: Yeah.
21:33
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: You know, so I actually myself limit
21:35
myself to a few places where I'm pretty
21:38
sure it's reliable information. Um,
21:41
and then um, I look at stuff that I'm skeptical
21:44
of just to see what kind of crap is out
21:47
there. Um, but, uh, but it's
21:50
hard to have a democracy when there, it's when the
21:53
things are so fragmented that there's almost no consensus
21:56
about anything.
21:57
>> Speaker E: Yeah.
21:58
>> Loren: So this topic of seeking wisdom. Because I'm thinking about like
22:01
what you said about the many,
22:04
many voices and distractions we have from
22:07
uh, different media sources. I don't know if you. I didn't,
22:10
I didn't watch the movie Just because I found it so over the top.
22:12
But, um, there's the movie Don't look
22:15
up, which speaking of climate change.
22:17
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Yes.
22:18
>> Loren: Like, I found it, like, just too much. I was just like, okay, I get what they're trying to
22:21
do, but it's too much for me.
22:22
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: But it's like that.
22:23
>> Loren: But yeah, certainly there's kind of that, like that where,
22:26
you know, there's so much distraction, so much
22:29
silliness. And I think
22:31
that's, I feel like that's almost the hardest thing
22:34
because it's not that we lack information. Like there's,
22:37
it's too much. There's too much information. How then
22:40
do we seek wisdom?
22:42
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Well, I think the thing
22:45
that's compounding the problem
22:48
is that these media, forms
22:51
of media are highly individualized.
22:54
So we have an epidemic of loneliness and a
22:56
saturation of too much stuff.
22:59
Um, and there's no lonely. There's no
23:02
wisdom and loneliness. I mean, wisdom comes
23:05
from experience.
23:06
>> Loren: That's good. Yeah.
23:08
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: It comes from being out in the world with others and
23:11
experiencing problems and figuring out how to solve
23:14
them and being with, with others and feeling supported and
23:17
connected to people. Because what's wisdom for if
23:20
it's just you having it? Right, right. It's really
23:23
to help the world and help others and to make the
23:26
world a better place. If you can be. As, as my.
23:29
One of my favorite ancient theologians
23:31
named Ambrose, who was the one that converted Augustine and
23:34
baptized him.
23:35
>> Loren: Mhm.
23:36
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: So he's pretty smart. Yeah, well,
23:38
yes, well, Augustine's maligned in ways
23:41
that I think are unfair, but anyway, his favorite name
23:44
for God was beauty. Anybody that cares
23:47
that much about beauty, I have sympathy for. But,
23:50
But Ambrose said people think
23:53
innocence is a way to protect yourself from bad stuff.
23:56
But innocence is just basically
23:58
stupidity that if you don't know what evil
24:01
is, you can't avoid it, you might do it yourself.
24:04
And to learn that means being related to
24:07
the world and paying attention and looking
24:10
into what evil is
24:12
to understand it. Because otherwise you're just gonna
24:15
be stupid about it.
24:17
>> Speaker E: Yeah.
24:18
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: And right now we need people who are wise about
24:21
these things. And, um, and as people are
24:24
more and more isolated, they're, they're, they're not
24:27
capable of you. You
24:30
cannot engage evil alone. Right, Right.
24:32
So. So that for me, that's why
24:35
having communities and friends and
24:38
connections that you can rely on
24:41
and be part of, um, is really, really
24:44
important. And I know when the pandemic started,
24:47
a lot of that stuff stopped for people because you were stuck in
24:49
your apartment or house by yourself or with your
24:52
dog or something. Right. You know I was with my cat.
24:55
>> Loren: Right.
24:55
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: I got a cat so I wouldn't be alone.
24:56
>> Loren: You and everybody else. Right?
24:58
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Yeah. Right. And now I have three. So. But
25:00
anyway, um, and so
25:03
when that, when that started to happen,
25:06
then I had friends. We all agreed that
25:09
we would meet on Zoom.
25:11
>> Loren: Mhm.
25:11
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Right. So I have two regular
25:14
weekly meetings on Zoom. And that
25:17
started during the pandemic. But it was so useful
25:19
and so satisfying that we just keep doing
25:22
it because we don't live in the same
25:25
place. And before we counted on going on vacations
25:28
together and seeing each other at events and stuff like that, and we couldn't
25:31
do that. But now I feel even closer
25:34
to them because I see I'm on there every week with
25:36
them. So there's ways to use the technology
25:40
that can be helpful, but mostly it's atomizing
25:42
people.
25:43
>> Speaker E: Yeah.
25:44
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Um, and I. But you have to be deliberate and
25:47
intentional about creating community
25:49
now because so many people are suspicious of
25:52
institutions and won't invest time and energy in them.
25:56
So we're also not only losing the
25:58
connections of just casual, just friendship,
26:01
but also where institutions, where people
26:04
used to collect and be together.
26:07
>> Loren: Why don't we stay on this term of the, the
26:10
decline of institutions? Certainly we're, we're here in an
26:13
institution talking about a broader institution that the
26:16
Christian Church Disciples of Christ there was
26:19
just released on social media this week data
26:22
about the decline of our denomination
26:25
and mainline process. And writ large
26:29
I'm thinking about,
26:32
maybe I'm making a connection that isn't there, but I'm thinking
26:34
about the disconnect
26:37
people have towards institutionalism. And a lot
26:40
of it is fair because of the
26:43
way, uh, this is where the connection between moral
26:46
injury comes because people have
26:49
protected the institution at.
26:50
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: The cost of individuals,
26:54
or they're just unjust institutions.
26:56
So the decline of the churches
26:59
started during Vietnam. And I
27:02
think there are a couple of
27:05
major factors involved in that.
27:10
One is, um, uh, it's not
27:13
the main one. So I'm going to talk about it in a minute. I think the
27:16
main problem was that
27:19
coming out of World War II, the
27:21
country was built
27:23
economically, ah, around a
27:26
focus on nuclear families with one
27:29
breadwinner. Um, and churches were also
27:32
set up that way. So the ways that
27:34
churches function was that you had a
27:37
family with one breadwinner and a bunch of volunteers that keep
27:40
the church going. Right. Who had time.
27:43
So now we have people
27:46
with two parent homes and nuclear
27:49
families with four jobs. They're both working two
27:52
jobs. It's the only Way to have a middle class life
27:54
because of the cost of health care and a whole bunch of
27:57
other housing and all of that. Um, and that
28:00
is an economic uh, issue that started
28:03
with Ronald Reagan.
28:04
>> Loren: Mhm.
28:05
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: I mean it was, it was, it was a serious
28:08
shift of trickle up economics. So we have
28:10
billionaires and poor people. Right, right. So.
28:13
And every administration since
28:16
Reagan has contributed to the problem.
28:19
Some of them have tried to stop it in some forms
28:22
but basically the momentum of that billionaire
28:24
juggernaut has driven a huge amount of what's
28:27
happened now where college is out of the
28:30
hands of the middle class and you need a middle class
28:33
to have a democracy. Um,
28:36
uh, and churches can't survive because the
28:39
only one who has time to do any work is one minister.
28:42
>> Speaker E: Yeah.
28:43
>> Loren: Um, it really makes sense when you think
28:46
about the. Where churches are today.
28:49
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Yeah.
28:49
>> Loren: There's either like a bunch of tiny churches that can
28:52
survive because they're so small or they're like these
28:55
corporate behemoth.
28:56
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Right.
28:57
>> Loren: Churches who can afford a multi staff to do everything.
28:59
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Right. Because a bunch of people who are willing to give money
29:02
to them. Right. Um, instead of
29:05
uh, doing that money for
29:08
social services. Right. Feeding the poor,
29:11
building senior housing and other things. Right. So
29:14
there's. Yeah. These
29:17
are religious empires. Right, Right.
29:19
>> Loren: Yeah.
29:19
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Ah. Um, and
29:21
um, with all the
29:24
problems you have with all of that, um, including
29:27
sexual abuse by ministers and like Mars church
29:30
meltdown, all of that. So because they
29:33
are built on a Christianity that's highly
29:35
authoritarian so you don't
29:38
challenge the minister. Um, and
29:41
so uh, those are I would
29:43
say anti democratic structures a lot.
29:47
But they're also having issues
29:49
because um, they're losing a lot of their
29:52
youth to homophobia. Right.
29:55
So there's some of these big
29:57
behemoth churches and empires but
30:01
a lot of evangelical churches are not surviving. And
30:04
I think, I think somebody did a study at one point as
30:07
there was that big boom in evangelical churches.
30:10
They said well nobody's studying the clothes of all the rural
30:13
churches so they look like they're
30:16
new people coming in. But in fact uh,
30:19
there's a lot of drainage of happening at the rural
30:21
levels because there's no jobs left there.
30:24
Right, right. So. So there, I think there's fundamentally
30:27
a major economic issue in North America, in
30:30
the United States anyway, um, that is
30:33
exacerbated by a kind of
30:36
cruel kind of capitalism that we have. It's
30:39
particularly cruel that we don't have universal health
30:42
care because that's the biggest factor in
30:45
bankruptcies.
30:46
>> Speaker E: Yeah.
30:46
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: So that's a. Uh,
30:49
But Vietnam was The beginning of the death of
30:52
institutions, or not the death, but the
30:55
erosion of trust in institutions because of the
30:58
war. And in
31:00
fact, if Johnson hadn't
31:03
gotten caught and didn't have the courage to
31:06
end the war,
31:08
he had a great society plan to end
31:11
poverty. I mean, it was amazing what he wanted to do
31:14
as president. He couldn't pay for it because he had to pay for the war.
31:17
And the war meant he couldn't run for a second term.
31:20
To really implement the kind of society that
31:23
was sort of an echo of, uh,
31:25
fdr, that would take care of the middle
31:27
class. And it didn't happen because.
31:31
And there was that. And a
31:33
whole generation of us learned to distrust
31:36
the government because it lied and got a lot of
31:39
people killed.
31:40
>> Loren: Right.
31:41
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: And I remember the New York Times op
31:44
ed about the end of, uh, when McNamara wrote
31:47
his autobiography and said, yeah, it was a
31:50
big mistake. Sorry about that.
31:54
The New York Times editorial was just
31:56
excoriating about it. They want a Pulitzer for it because
31:59
it was, it was just, it was
32:02
that kind of searing critique with this deep sorrow
32:05
built into it about what was done to a whole
32:08
generation by that bad war.
32:11
>> Loren: And I feel like we have echoes of that in
32:14
Afghanistan and Iraq and Afghanistan.
32:16
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: So we have another institutional fit right.
32:18
>> Loren: In the church where it's this kind of defend the
32:21
institution at all costs. And the
32:24
cost tends to be the human beings and their
32:26
soul.
32:27
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: I've been in two churches where the minister did
32:30
sexual things.
32:32
>> Loren: Mhm.
32:32
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Um, and um, uh,
32:36
actually one of them involved a
32:39
dean from Phillips that was the minister of my church in
32:42
Houston. And
32:45
he. Well, this was a
32:48
very long time ago, so I don't think I'm slandering anybody now
32:50
that's alive. But he,
32:53
uh, senior minister, very
32:55
prestigious. The church was really
32:57
big. Um, there was a very
33:00
large, um, you know, young, uh,
33:03
adult, like up to 35 or 40 class.
33:06
There was like a huge class. We,
33:09
we did a lot of social activities. It was just
33:11
wonderful. And then it began to shrink
33:15
and new people that visited didn't come back.
33:18
Um, and then we had
33:21
sponsors in their 50s.
33:24
And the woman who was in the couple of that group,
33:26
the couple accused the minister of
33:29
trying to rape her in her home.
33:31
>> Speaker E: Oh man.
33:33
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: And she
33:36
fought him off.
33:37
>> Speaker E: Yeah.
33:37
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: But she, she didn't shut up about it.
33:40
>> Speaker E: Yeah.
33:41
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: We found out that he, as a
33:43
church investigated that he would pay these visits
33:46
to these new couples when the husband wasn't
33:49
home. Oh my gosh, it was really
33:52
bad. And
33:54
um,
33:56
so the personnel
33:59
committee spoke to Phillips
34:02
about was there a Problem at
34:04
Phillips. And he had been the dean
34:07
here, and
34:10
yes, there had. And
34:14
so they. The personnel committee in the church asked
34:17
why they weren't warned. M. And
34:20
the reply was, we didn't want to ruin a good
34:22
career.
34:26
So he ruined. I don't know if he ruined the.
34:29
>> Loren: Church, but he ruined some lives.
34:31
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: He ruined a lot of lives. And the,
34:33
uh. I don't know, it was part of the decline
34:36
of Protestantism. So the decline in that church is probably part of a
34:39
larger trend. But it didn't help that this
34:41
guy was forced to resign and then took a
34:44
renegade group and started a church across
34:47
town of the people who didn't believe the charges or anything.
34:50
So that was the first time I encountered it. And
34:53
I actually, um. My ex
34:56
husband and I made an appointment to see him
34:58
and said, you need therapy. This is really bad,
35:01
what you've been doing this. You need therapy. We just
35:04
decided that it was. That
35:07
we wanted to do everything we could do. And
35:10
we thought it was. It wasn't. It was an okay
35:13
thing to go in and tell him that we believe the charges and that
35:16
he needed help rather than just shine him
35:19
on. So. And he started. He actually literally started
35:22
to shake and said, I'm afraid I can't do that
35:25
because I would fall off my pedestal.
35:29
That was. That was my first
35:32
experience with that. And then there was another instance where
35:35
the minister was charged, um,
35:38
with, um, you
35:40
know, inappropriate behavior in a counseling
35:43
situation. And it, uh. We had
35:46
a. He was very popular, very charismatic.
35:49
Um, and, um, the congregation had to take a
35:52
vote. And, uh, it was close, but
35:55
he was removed.
35:57
>> Loren: Wow.
35:57
>> Speaker E: Ah.
35:57
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Um. But it split the church. That church never really
36:00
quite recovered. It kept going for a few more. You
36:03
know, it kept going, but it, um. Some of the
36:06
key. Most enthusiastic members left with him.
36:09
>> Loren: I feel like this all ties into this idea
36:12
of the challenge of seeking wisdom. Um, when we think
36:15
about not only do we
36:17
have so many disparate voices, but
36:20
these institutions,
36:23
these sources of wisdom that historically have been
36:26
trustworthy places are seen
36:29
as less and less trustworthy,
36:32
many times deservedly so.
36:34
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Well, this is. You know, ministers
36:37
are human beings and they're just as flawed as any other human
36:40
being. But the sort of aura that attends to
36:42
their authority, to speak the word and all that
36:45
is. It's
36:48
actually, um, probably not an ancient
36:51
church practice. There's
36:54
a pilgrim diary from a woman named
36:56
Egeria. They think she was from
36:59
Tarragon, Spain, and she spent a year. She probably was
37:02
a woman of means because she had a little entourage and she Spent a year on
37:05
a pilgrimage doing all the Christian sites in the Mediterranean
37:08
world. And she spent all of Lent and Easter
37:11
at Jerusalem, which was. She was thrilled
37:13
to do. But she, but she started in Spain, went all the way around North
37:17
Africa, across Europe. It's an amazing
37:19
pilgrim diary. But she was writing to her
37:22
women's community in Spain, so she's
37:25
talking to the ladies. And
37:28
in Jerusalem, during Lent, the
37:30
practice in the ancient church was Lent was when the
37:33
catechumens had to go through spiritual
37:36
exercises like fasting and education
37:39
in a preparation in six weeks to be baptized. Because they
37:42
baptize everybody one day of the year, which
37:44
was Saturday night before Easter Sunday. So they. So
37:47
she's there for this and she's thrilled. She's like, uh, she's
37:50
reporting on all these things that are happening. And the last week of
37:53
Lent is the most intense because the bishop gives the
37:56
creed and every day he gives a new line of the Creed. And
37:59
they have to learn the theology, uh, in. They don't just
38:02
recite the Creed, they understand the Creed. So, so the
38:05
bishop is doing this instruction in the Creed and she's there to
38:08
observe and
38:10
she writes this line and the
38:13
bishop gives the Creed. And
38:16
ladies, you would not
38:19
believe the arguing with the
38:21
bishop even more than when
38:24
he preaches in church.
38:29
So if you read between the lines in that
38:32
statement, the
38:35
bishop, uh, had people arguing back with
38:37
him to him in the sermon.
38:40
>> Loren: Wow.
38:42
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: They didn't just believe what they were told.
38:45
And, and they were. And that model in Lent was they had
38:48
to own it.
38:49
>> Loren: Mhm.
38:50
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: So the arguing was they had to own.
38:53
Wasn't just told to them. And they said, yes, sir. That was like,
38:56
well, what do you mean by that? Or what? You know, so the arguing
38:59
back. When we, my friend and I wrote this book, Saving
39:02
paradise, we found that, that diary. We were like, oh
39:05
my God, this is such a different model when we
39:08
hear the word Bishop. Yeah, right.
39:10
>> Speaker E: Yeah.
39:11
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Um, and so, but we have this idea
39:14
that when the minister says it, it's the word, it's preaching
39:17
of the. And the Protestants are worse at this than Catholics.
39:20
Right. We're so biblically trapped,
39:23
as it were, this in the, in our heads, around
39:25
Scripture instead of really in our hearts.
39:28
Um, and so in any case, the
39:31
whole idea that the minister is some
39:34
hallowed presence that shouldn't be
39:36
challenged is, um, really
39:38
dysfunctional. I think in an environment,
39:41
um,
39:44
I'm sure there was authority. The bishop had a lot of authority
39:46
and power, but it wasn't to tell people
39:49
what they had to believe.
39:52
Um, and of course, in the ancient church, the arguing about
39:55
theology was something they didn't like in coffee shops.
39:58
I mean, whatever we would think of.
40:01
Yeah, yeah. I mean, they lynched. They, they were
40:04
serious. They lynched bishops that they didn't agree with.
40:07
I mean, people got killed over these theological arguments.
40:09
So it was very intense.
40:12
Um, but people actually had an opinion.
40:16
Um, and it. So I don't know, I'm getting, you know, I
40:19
wouldn't recommend violence. Yeah, no, no, not that
40:22
part. But the, the. But the idea this is, I
40:25
think the problem, ah, with a
40:28
lot of the ways that the church works is
40:31
we believe that it's belief that unites us.
40:34
>> Loren: Right.
40:34
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: And I do not believe that belief. I mean, my
40:37
opinions change all the time.
40:39
>> Loren: Let's stay on this because the other half of this,
40:42
again the conference is seeking wisdom and
40:44
understanding.
40:45
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Yes.
40:46
>> Loren: So like you said, I think especially
40:49
Protestantism, especially has
40:52
been around. I mean, not our denomination, shout
40:55
out to the Christian church, saints of Christ.
40:57
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Well, we're like, you believe whatever you want to believe,
41:00
but you read the Bible with some discernment. Right.
41:03
>> Loren: But there has been that, like this idea that what unites
41:06
us is, at least broadly speaking in
41:08
Protestantism, is like adherence to a certain set of beliefs,
41:11
especially most, ah, recently, you know, in the last
41:14
century in American Christianity.
41:17
How do we change that to a
41:20
more allowance for
41:23
understanding?
41:25
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: I think where this is in
41:28
retrospect, I think where Protestantism,
41:31
um, failed to understand human behavior
41:35
was the debates were around the
41:37
Eucharist. The Eucharist was the flashpoint for the
41:40
Protestant Reformation because of the transubstantiation.
41:43
And what was the meaning of the body on the table? That was
41:46
true in ancient Christianity or in medieval
41:49
Christianity as well. Um,
41:52
um. And it focused on what you believe
41:55
was happening in the Eucharist. I
41:58
think the reason it was a flashpoint is it's ritual that
42:01
matters so much.
42:04
Um, and the Protestants, rather
42:07
than figure out how to do
42:10
ritual that worked, they gave
42:13
it up. I heard it over and
42:16
over in the lecture this afternoon about, uh, the,
42:19
uh, biblical texts from the prophets where they say, I hate your
42:22
rituals and I, blah, blah, blah,
42:24
as a very Protestant bias to select those
42:27
texts. Right. And I
42:30
think it's meant that we,
42:33
um, are very thin and weak on ritual.
42:36
It's um.
42:39
Even the ritual becomes an expression of a particular
42:42
person's belief system rather than being
42:46
a kind of, um,
42:49
what we know. For example, in any other form
42:52
of collective work, you have to
42:54
train people so that stuff is automatic in their
42:57
body.
42:58
>> Loren: Yes, yes.
42:59
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: And uh, if they don't get it automatic in their
43:02
bodies, you can't tell an athlete,
43:05
you know how to do something and then they do it.
43:08
Yeah.
43:08
>> Loren: You don't want them thinking during a game. You want them acting, acting.
43:11
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Right. So you drill, drill, drill, drill. But behind
43:14
that is a commitment to the sport, A, uh, commitment
43:17
to doing well. And ritual is like
43:19
that. It's not meant to be. Every week you
43:22
change the words of something so people will think about it again in a
43:25
new way. You just do the same thing over and over
43:28
again and you recite the same.
43:31
Everybody's got to memorize. You don't have to read and you don't be looking
43:34
down. You're each other. Right. And
43:36
connecting. And so
43:39
it's actually the automatic
43:41
behavior of the recitation that delivers the meaning,
43:44
not thinking about the meaning.
43:46
>> Loren: Right.
43:47
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: It's an embodied practice and Protestants are really
43:50
lousy at that. Yeah, I,
43:53
you know, it's like changing the language.
43:56
You can't do anything by memorization, so
43:59
it's not trained into you. You have to redo it every week to think
44:02
about. And that's a very weak way to create a community.
44:05
>> Loren: I love this point because I'm thinking of an interview I
44:08
did. It'll be coming out before yours with David
44:10
Taylor. I don't know if you're familiar with him.
44:13
Can't remember. I think he's out of Fuller. But he has a
44:16
book on the body and worship and talks
44:19
about the importance of physicality
44:22
in worship and how the physicality. Of
44:25
course, I'm thinking shout out to our denomination
44:28
the weekly practice of communion
44:31
and how, if I'm understanding you
44:33
correct. Right. It's not the words we're saying that is really
44:36
making the impact, it's the action that is,
44:39
uh, teaching lessons to us.
44:41
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Yeah. And it's sort of random because
44:44
it's so non formalized. Right, right.
44:47
So you never know when you show up in a
44:50
disciple church what you're going to be served and how you're going to get
44:53
it. Um, because we don't have
44:56
standard ways, we, we really do things.
44:59
And um, and I actually am
45:02
much more interested in,
45:05
in things like the Common Book of Prayer. And of course
45:08
you have problems inclusifying and adding trans and all
45:10
those. But so there's, there's those kind of language
45:13
adjustments. But really,
45:16
um, you know, I've been in several Protestant
45:19
churches for the prayer time. And then let
45:22
us pray as Jesus taught us to pray. And then you can't recite
45:25
the Lord's Prayer. From memory. Because they've got a whole
45:27
paragraph that's an interpr of it that you have
45:30
to read out loud together.
45:32
>> Loren: Again, your point is. The point is
45:34
not the words, so to speak. It's the action of saying
45:37
it together. Hearing it. Hearing it.
45:40
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Yeah. It's like the way I've been
45:42
profoundly moved. Occasionally I was at
45:45
a memorial service, and now I can't even remember who it was
45:48
for. But it was interfaith. It wasn't one
45:51
tradition. And I remember a
45:54
rabbi getting up and saying,
45:57
will you say the words with me?
46:00
Uh, and he just started
46:03
this 23rd Psalm, and everybody
46:06
knew how to say it, and it was like,
46:09
so powerful. The Lord is my
46:12
shepherd. I shall not want he make it. And
46:14
that's like. If there's two things that
46:17
everybody in Christianity has memorized. Is the
46:20
Lord's prayer in the 23rd Psalm?
46:21
>> Speaker E: Yeah.
46:22
>> Loren: And probably maybe Amazing Grace, too.
46:24
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Maybe.
46:24
>> Loren: Yeah.
46:25
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Yeah. Especially Protestants, right? Yeah, yeah.
46:28
Methodists and Protestants. But. But that. Ah, but. But
46:31
really, uh, there's almost nothing else.
46:32
And for sure the Lord's Prayer. For sure.
46:35
The Lord's Prayer. So now they're all. I've been in these
46:38
Protestant services where you have to read the Lord's Prayer because
46:41
it's not the one, you know. Right, right. And it.
46:44
And so it's still just words. Right.
46:47
Um, but. But. And there's something about the. The way
46:50
the ritual itself, the. The memorized
46:53
words, the gestures, load all the meaning in.
46:56
You need.
46:56
>> Loren: Yes.
46:57
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: So there's a. There's a wonderful book by Tanya Lorman
47:00
called How God Becomes Real.
47:02
>> Loren: Okay.
47:02
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: She's a. She's not a real particular. She grew up
47:05
UU Unitarian Universalist. So she's. I
47:08
don't think she's particularly religious herself. Now, I've met her and talked
47:11
to her. It. And she wrote. And she is
47:14
a participant anthropologist. So when she studies
47:17
a religious group, she goes to the services and does the
47:20
work. And for her doctoral thesis, she
47:23
decided not to do the colonial
47:25
anthropologist thing and pick an exotic group somewhere
47:28
in a third world country and study them. She went to London
47:31
and studied Druids.
47:33
So she was there for a couple of months going to
47:36
druid ceremonies and being with Druids.
47:39
And she said she woke up one morning. I think
47:42
this is when she woke up. She looked out her bedroom
47:45
window, you know, just sort of when you wake up. And she
47:48
looked and she saw a group of Druids.
47:52
And she sort of blinked and looked again,
47:55
and then they were gone. And she
47:58
said. So she had been in these services for long enough
48:01
that she was seeing things that she
48:04
wouldn't have ever had before and
48:07
that she observes that it's
48:10
the repetition of the ritual
48:13
that makes that kind of putting in your body
48:16
system possible.
48:17
>> Loren: See, this is my, uh,
48:19
soapbox that I think the best way to get
48:22
kids to hold onto their faith in adulthood is simply
48:25
bringing them to church regularly.
48:26
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, I remember as a kid
48:29
I didn't understand the sermons really. But I love
48:32
singing the hymns. So I would sit down and
48:35
I would put a marker in every page where the
48:38
next hymn was so that I could open up right away and sing.
48:41
And as an adult, I still do that. I still mark the
48:44
hymn. The hymnal for the next song. So. Because I
48:47
can open it right away and I don't like to look for it while the
48:49
music's playing. Um, but that.
48:52
But we. We relic. The
48:55
reason I think also that people don't come back
48:57
to church as adults is that it's not in their body
49:00
system, so they don't miss it.
49:03
>> Speaker E: Yeah.
49:04
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Right. But if you grow up as a child and you have to make
49:07
the service child friendly. Right. But if you grow up
49:09
as child in the service and not like
49:12
in a play area separate from the service, where you don't have to
49:15
listen to it, but where you're sitting in a pew.
49:17
>> Speaker E: Yeah.
49:18
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: That it really gets in your body system in a very different
49:21
way.
49:21
>> Speaker E: Yeah.
49:22
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Than. And you sort of miss it.
49:27
Why?
49:27
>> Loren: Uh, it's interesting because, like, whenever I'm stressed out
49:29
driving, I'll turn on just piano
49:32
hymns.
49:33
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Yeah.
49:34
>> Loren: Because that's. For me, I heard them so much. Just kind of just
49:36
brings me down.
49:37
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Yeah. And I love singing. You know,
49:40
just singing in my car. I sing hymns because it feels
49:43
really good to sing. And they don't usually play them on the
49:45
radio. So. But yeah.
49:48
Um, and there's
49:51
another really important work that
49:53
really influenced me in this shift I've really
49:56
made in the last 10 years around moral injury, because I think
49:59
ritual is part of the recovery process. Is a book called
50:02
Ritual and its Consequences. And it's
50:05
written by a team of five authors in one
50:08
voice. Um, and there's like
50:11
a Chinese historian of China and,
50:14
um, an anthropologist. And I mean, it's
50:17
a whole group of different kinds of scholars in different
50:19
disciplines that are. That.
50:22
That make a case that,
50:24
um, that ritual, uh,
50:27
is how meaning is delivered. Believe
50:30
it and. And that we
50:32
have an Enlightenment, Protestant
50:35
rationalist bias that
50:38
thinks it's like ideas that
50:40
matter and they're looking at
50:43
Confucian, um, traditions and other traditions that are highly
50:46
ritualized in terms of how they talk about
50:49
ritual. And I think we've inherited
50:51
the Protestant enlightenment anti ritual
50:54
bias that's also deeply anti
50:56
Catholic.
50:57
>> Loren: Mhm.
50:58
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: And I think it's cost us a lot. Like our churches are
51:01
failing and cost us some
51:04
understanding. That too. That too.
51:07
But I think that that's part of the decline of
51:09
Protestantism is there's not enough there to hold people.
51:12
>> Speaker E: Yeah.
51:13
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: And part of that is the anti institutional world
51:16
that we're living in based on failures of a
51:19
lot of institutions. It's not just the wars and
51:22
the government and
51:24
um, but it's also,
51:27
uh, religious institutions where they've had sexual
51:30
abuse scandals. It's like the
51:33
churches don't know how to pull people back together when those things
51:36
blow up. Right, Right. And
51:38
um, yeah.
51:40
>> Loren: It's like we need. It's like.
51:41
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Because there's not much else to hold.
51:42
>> Loren: Yeah. It's like we need a ritual to say, like I just, I can't
51:45
remember the, where it came from, but I just got shipped a
51:48
book, the COVID talking uh, about lament. And some
51:51
people are trying to re. Explore the traditional
51:54
lament in Christianity. But like, exactly like that. Like
51:57
we need a tradition, we need a ritual when. Well, one of them
52:00
blow up to bring people together.
52:02
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: One of the most successful
52:04
movements in the modern world has been
52:07
Alcoholics Anonymous. Right, Right. It was
52:10
the Oxford movement that created. It
52:13
used the ancient Christian penance
52:15
system, which is the highly
52:18
ritualized process, highly
52:20
formulated. When you walk in, there's a formula for how
52:23
you say so you can go to
52:26
an AA meeting anywhere in the world.
52:28
>> Speaker E: Yeah.
52:29
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: And it's the same.
52:30
>> Speaker E: Yeah.
52:32
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: So it's highly successful.
52:34
>> Speaker E: Yeah.
52:34
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Right. It may not keep people from
52:37
drinking, but they drink. But they come back to it. Right. Because they miss
52:40
it.
52:41
>> Speaker E: Yeah.
52:42
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: And they make sure you have a person who uh, a, uh,
52:45
sponsor. Right. They have a whole system, uh,
52:48
for supporting people going through
52:50
this intense penance process that
52:53
the higher powers really got. I mean, you know,
52:56
they've fixed it so you can attend and not have
52:59
to be a Christian looking for penance. But
53:02
they were studying. And in the ancient church, penance was
53:05
not punishment, it was rehabilitation.
53:08
That was the whole point of it. So you were
53:11
asked to do a particular discipline, um,
53:14
of praying and fasting. You had to
53:17
come to church in um,
53:20
plain clothes, like sackcloth to show
53:22
and you. But you didn't come alone. You were in the order of
53:25
penitence. So there were big enough churches,
53:28
so there were Always multiple people going through
53:31
penance. And you came to
53:34
church and you were required to be there, really that
53:37
they expected you to come, and then they, you
53:40
would go through the service of the Word. But then
53:43
when it came to the Eucharist, that was reserved
53:45
for baptized Christians
53:48
and, and so the catechumens
53:51
and the penitents, because when
53:54
you were a penitent, it was like you reverted to a pre
53:56
baptized state and so you couldn't stay.
53:59
And. But then when you were recommunic, that's what
54:02
excommunication meant. They didn't throw you out of the church,
54:05
they threw you out of the Eucharist.
54:07
>> Loren: Interesting.
54:07
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: And we think it was like banishment, but no, it wasn't. It
54:10
was rehabilitation. You couldn't be in the Eucharist if your soul
54:13
wasn't okay. And if you were doing something
54:16
serious enough to require a term of penance, then you
54:19
needed to be rehabilitated so
54:22
you could be back. They didn't want to lose you, but they also didn't
54:25
want you there messing everything up.
54:28
Like you arriving as it were, drunk.
54:31
Right, right. No, that would not be acceptable. So they,
54:34
it was a very different sensibility about who could come to the
54:37
Eucharist and why they couldn't be there. You,
54:40
catechumens, they hadn't been baptized, penitents
54:42
reverted back anyway. It was. But it was highly ritualized
54:45
processing and it was a formal process. And
54:48
the other thing was that if you were marked as, uh, in
54:51
the order of the penitents, it was a responsibility. But
54:54
everybody else in the church to support you to get better.
54:56
>> Speaker E: Yeah.
54:57
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: It wasn't about punishing you or shaming you,
55:00
although there might have been some of the shame. And you have to
55:03
confess what you did to the whole community.
55:05
Right. But then they would support you in getting better. That was
55:08
the whole point of it.
55:10
>> Loren: How beautiful. Because I just think like when we think about our
55:13
society and we think about again, our
55:16
topic here of seeking wisdom and understanding in troubling
55:18
times. Like
55:22
my mind just bounces back and forth between
55:25
so many issues that these rituals, these
55:27
Christian traditions
55:29
inherently could solve.
55:32
Because we think about, uh, like I'm thinking
55:35
like cancel culture comes to mind, which
55:38
is based on someone's wrongdoing. But then it, you
55:41
know, there needs to be some ritual to hold them accountable, but
55:44
then to offer them acceptance back into the
55:47
community with them making penance.
55:50
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: And there was a, um, this is, you
55:53
know, I'm generalizing each, every region.
55:56
And they were connected churches, but there
55:59
were variations. But, um, I
56:01
think it was pretty understood that you could go through
56:04
a serious process of penance
56:07
once and if you did it again, then you couldn't
56:10
come back because you weren't fixable.
56:12
>> Speaker E: Yeah.
56:13
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: So there was, there was a penalty, but then
56:16
you just couldn't come to church. You just weren't part of the community anymore. And
56:19
for a lot of people it was like, especially people who
56:22
were poor, they got fed there.
56:24
>> Loren: Right.
56:25
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Because they, once you joined and you were at the Eucharist
56:28
table, they had a commitment that everybody would be taken care of in
56:31
their community. And John Chrysostom talks about how his
56:34
church in Antioch fed. I mean, this is
56:37
round numbers, but 3,000 widows, orphans and
56:40
sailors and poor people every day from their
56:42
Eucharist.
56:43
>> Speaker E: Yeah.
56:45
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: 3,000 people. What? Even if that's a broad
56:48
number, 500 would be impressive. It's
56:51
impressive.
56:52
>> Loren: 300 is incredible.
56:53
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: I know. And they just brought the food with. The Eucharist
56:56
wasn't a symbolic meal, it was actually a
56:58
meal.
56:59
>> Speaker E: Yeah.
56:59
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: For some people it was the only meal of their day. Um,
57:02
so they made sure it was. And the list of foods is
57:05
fun to look at. Um, there's
57:08
that second century list of acceptable
57:11
foods. And no meat,
57:14
no red meat because it was associated with blood
57:17
sacrifice. Um,
57:20
nothing that grew on the ground and touched the
57:23
ground because fertilizer is kind of dangerous.
57:26
And no vegetables to say have to be
57:29
cooked. So foods that didn't need to be cooked. And
57:32
so any fruit that like, of the vine, like
57:35
a grape, a peach, an apple that hung.
57:38
Most fruits were okay. Um,
57:41
and um, olives, cheese,
57:44
milk, all of those were okay things
57:46
that could be consumed right there. Uh, and of course
57:49
bread. So it's really interesting. Uh,
57:52
just a list of what, what's, what's, what was okay to
57:55
bring.
57:55
>> Speaker E: Yeah.
57:56
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Um, because what are you gonna do
57:59
with a, you know, a raw onion. Yeah, yeah,
58:02
yeah. And mushrooms are very bad because they grow, you know, in nasty
58:05
places. So. Yeah. And you, and you could
58:08
get a two toad stool. Right. So. So they, they had
58:11
rules about it. But the, uh, um. But there were,
58:14
you know, and, and people stood. There were no chairs.
58:17
Mm.
58:17
>> Loren: Mhm.
58:18
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: And. And the services were two to three hours
58:21
sometimes.
58:21
>> Speaker E: Yeah.
58:22
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: But there's processional people were moving and there was a lot of
58:25
movement and chanting and stuff.
58:28
>> Speaker E: Yeah.
58:28
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: If you go to an Eastern Orthodox church, that's the
58:31
closest kind of service to an ancient church practice that
58:34
you'll find.
58:35
>> Speaker E: Yeah.
58:36
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Because they didn't go the way the Western
58:38
church did with crucifixion and
58:41
Crusades and awful things like that.
58:43
>> Loren: Mhm.
58:44
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Um, the ancient church didn't believe that Jesus died for our
58:47
sins. That whole ideology that God needs
58:50
violence to save us was not an ancient church
58:53
theology. They really thought he had
58:56
come in human form to teach us how to live, not how to
58:59
die. So the first book in the
59:02
Atonement by Anselm is why God became human was
59:05
to die. Never mentions the resurrection or
59:07
anything else much except that
59:10
to die.
59:11
>> Speaker E: Yeah.
59:13
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Um, we didn't figure this out in Saving
59:16
Paradise. There was another scholar who looked at that
59:18
in relation lot of other things and realize that
59:22
the idea, uh, that Jesus died for your sins is war
59:24
propaganda for the Crusades.
59:26
>> Loren: Interesting.
59:28
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Well, it emerges by right in
59:30
tandem with the Crusades.
59:32
>> Loren: That's wild to think about. Well, we got to save that for another
59:35
time.
59:35
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Okay.
59:35
>> Loren: How much M. I don't know.
59:36
We're at, we're at 4:15 our time.
59:39
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Oh, all right.
59:40
>> Loren: So do you need to leave?
59:41
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Um, yeah, I probably ought to get my, my,
59:44
my partner in crime here.
59:46
>> Loren: Uh, we're kind of just ad. Living this, so.
59:48
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: No, no, this is.
59:49
>> Loren: Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate the
59:52
conversation.
59:52
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Yeah. I think the
59:55
turn that Western Christianity made
59:58
that has been the most difficult
1:00:01
and destructive of human,
1:00:04
uh, wisdom and um,
1:00:06
flourishing is the
1:00:09
theological turn to believing
1:00:12
that uh, we are,
1:00:14
um, broken and cannot be saved
1:00:17
by m and require,
1:00:20
um, the punishment to be visited upon
1:00:23
Jesus of how depraved we are and
1:00:26
that whatever he did to save us is
1:00:29
going to happen after we're dead.
1:00:32
Right, right.
1:00:33
>> Loren: So the Christianity, salvation in this life.
1:00:36
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Well, there is, but it's. You wait for it.
1:00:38
>> Loren: Right.
1:00:39
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Yeah. Right. The church is a holding tank, as it were.
1:00:41
>> Loren: Right, right.
1:00:42
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: And um, and that is not an ancient church
1:00:44
theology. Ancient church believed that the church's
1:00:47
destiny was to be the paradise in this world. And
1:00:50
so that was what it meant to have human life flourish
1:00:53
here. And so if you died, you just went to a new neighborhood
1:00:56
of paradise, but you already had at baptism
1:00:59
everything you ever needed for salvation. It was
1:01:02
there so that you could love
1:01:05
the world.
1:01:06
>> Speaker E: Yeah.
1:01:06
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Not say, this world is not my home. I'm just
1:01:09
passing through. Famous hymn.
1:01:11
>> Loren: Speaking of a good hymn.
1:01:12
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Yeah, right. No. And of course, climate change,
1:01:15
it's like you have this conservative,
1:01:18
God's just going to destroy it all anyway, so don't worry
1:01:21
about it. It's all part of the end times.
1:01:24
So we're going to get a whole new heaven and earth.
1:01:26
So it's very anti
1:01:30
flesh, anti world, anti creation.
1:01:33
Actually. Right. Um, and
1:01:36
um, I think that has allowed
1:01:38
us to think we can just exploit things and use them
1:01:41
and be indiscriminate about how we treat
1:01:44
everything. And so now we're
1:01:47
seeing in California the consequence
1:01:49
of um,
1:01:53
an otherworldly religion.
1:01:56
Um, Peter Brown, who was a very famous early
1:01:59
church historian at Princeton, he's sort of the.
1:02:02
I don't know if he's still alive now, but he's done
1:02:04
amazing work on antiquity and Christianity.
1:02:07
His sort of magnum opus, it's one of these end of
1:02:10
career books famous scholar can do is
1:02:13
a thousand year history of rise of Western
1:02:15
Christendom. And his
1:02:18
flat out thesis in that book is Early
1:02:21
Christianity was a life
1:02:23
affirming this worldly
1:02:26
optimistic religion.
1:02:28
>> Speaker E: Yeah.
1:02:29
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: And that's why it succeeded.
1:02:31
>> Speaker E: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:02:32
>> Loren: Offering people a better vision and a.
1:02:35
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Community that delivered it. It isn't even just a vision or
1:02:38
a hope. It's a community that was responsible for delivering
1:02:41
a decent life for people. And
1:02:44
um, the only difference between this world and the
1:02:47
world of the dead is the death has
1:02:50
a veil between the living and the dead. And
1:02:53
Satan can't get through that veil. So
1:02:56
in the living world, creating paradise in the
1:02:59
church requires being wise about evil
1:03:01
and dealing with all the forces of death and destruction
1:03:04
as well as normal natural death and stuff.
1:03:07
But then when you died you could,
1:03:10
you could go and rest, um, because
1:03:13
Satan couldn't follow you there. And then if you were
1:03:16
arrested, you could come back and visit the living
1:03:18
and offer comfort and help. So they
1:03:21
believe that the dead of the church arrived at every
1:03:24
Eucharist first, or origin says that the dead
1:03:27
arrived first and the, and the. In the Eucharist table
1:03:30
was hosted by the risen Christ. Every Eucharist, every
1:03:33
feast, Jesus was there to host the table because he came
1:03:36
back because they all the dead could come back to the living.
1:03:38
Right. So our um,
1:03:41
metaphor, my friend Rebecca and I in Saving
1:03:44
paradise, our metaphor for this is that you work your whole
1:03:47
life in New York. You have a good life, but you know, there's bad
1:03:50
weather and traffic and crappy things and crime. You have
1:03:53
to deal with it. But basically you have a decent life
1:03:55
and you raise your kids and you die. Uh, or not die. But
1:03:58
then you retire and you go to a gated community in Florida. That's what it
1:04:01
meant to die. You got to go to a gated community where
1:04:04
it's really nice and you have to deal with all that stuff and you could
1:04:07
relax and enjoy it and you could
1:04:09
visit your grandkids and your kids in New York. If you wanted to.
1:04:12
Yeah, it was, it's, it was more, that was more of what
1:04:15
they thought about human life than um, than
1:04:18
death being a deadline. And you, once you cross it,
1:04:21
you were up or down and you couldn't come back and
1:04:24
people couldn't visit you either. I mean it's like there was,
1:04:27
um. And what's so silly about that idea
1:04:29
is everywhere in the world people have
1:04:32
visitations from the dead.
1:04:33
>> Loren: Right?
1:04:34
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: It's a common human experience to
1:04:37
see the dead. I had a visit for my mother.
1:04:40
I mean I am a science. I mean, you know, it's like not.
1:04:43
I'm a modern person. I was just shocked when it happened. I had no
1:04:45
idea what was happening, but I knew what happened when it was over.
1:04:49
Um, and when I tell my story about that,
1:04:52
people come up to me afterwards. You know, that
1:04:55
happened to me. Who? And then they'll tell me their story.
1:04:58
Uh, so it's just a common occurrence. The only
1:05:01
person in the ancient world that argued with that position that the
1:05:04
dead could visit the living was Augustine.
1:05:07
And he argued with it because his mother had never visited
1:05:09
him.
1:05:10
>> Loren: Interesting. That's one.
1:05:13
Interesting.
1:05:14
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: We could end with that. It's just very funny.
1:05:17
That's a, um, funny one. The credit I
1:05:20
give Augustine though, as a theologian is he
1:05:22
trusted his own experience to tell him things.
1:05:28
Um, you know, his confessions, tells. I mean he
1:05:30
really grounds a lot of his theological
1:05:33
stuff in his own experience. And that's a feminist principle.
1:05:36
Trust your experience.
1:05:37
>> Loren: Interesting.
1:05:38
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Yeah.
1:05:39
>> Loren: Well, share how you're working now for the Volunteers of
1:05:41
America. Share if folks want to connect with
1:05:44
you, your book titles, anything like that.
1:05:47
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Oh, okay. So my, my email is R Brock
1:05:50
Simple R B R O C K at V as
1:05:53
in Victor V O a dot org.
1:05:56
Um, and that's my email. It's the fastest
1:05:58
way to get to me. Um, and
1:06:01
M, my magnum opus is Saving
1:06:04
Paradise. M, um.
1:06:07
And I've made it a principle since I finished my doctoral
1:06:10
thesis and published my doctoral thesis as a single authored
1:06:13
book. I co author
1:06:16
with friends because I think the project is
1:06:19
better and it's a lot more fun to write with a friend than it is to do
1:06:21
it yourself alone.
1:06:24
So all of my books after my dissertation
1:06:27
were co authored and Saving
1:06:30
paradise is not the last.
1:06:32
The soul repair book on moral injury is a different
1:06:35
co authored work. But the work I
1:06:38
most love in terms of the theological
1:06:41
perspective is Saving Paradise.
1:06:44
Um, uh, and it's this.
1:06:47
What does it mean that
1:06:50
we can say the church is planted as a paradise
1:06:52
in this world
1:06:55
and where that idea got trashed in
1:06:58
Western Christianity with the
1:07:00
Crusades and the, uh, wars,
1:07:03
um, and then the colonization of the rest of the
1:07:06
world. All of that is related to the loss,
1:07:09
I think, of that. It isn't that there wasn't.
1:07:12
I mean, I think it's
1:07:15
a, um, an amazing
1:07:18
thing that in a world where the Roman
1:07:21
Empire oppressed people and
1:07:24
salted the fields of their opponents when they
1:07:26
defeated them, and the life
1:07:29
expectancy was under 40 years old and half
1:07:32
of all infants died, and malaria
1:07:35
and cholera, I mean, these normal diseases were
1:07:38
just deadly. Um, and
1:07:41
like 10% of the people live beyond 50
1:07:44
in a world like that. They could say the
1:07:46
church is planted as a paradise in this world.
1:07:51
I, um, think we could say that too.
1:07:53
>> Speaker E: Yeah.
1:07:54
>> Loren: Well, I really appreciate your time and your
1:07:56
conversation. Always leave folks with a word of
1:07:59
peace. So may God's peace be with you.
1:08:01
>> Rita Nakashima Brock: Thank you. And also with you.
1:08:07
>> Loren Richmond: Thanks for joining us on the Future Christian Podcast.
1:08:10
The Future Christian Podcast is produced by Resonate
1:08:13
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1:08:16
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