Latest / Thinking Christian: Bible, Theology, and Culture / Norman Wirzba on Land, Life, and Dominion | Faith & Politics #15

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Norman Wirzba on Land, Life, and Dominion | Faith & Politics #15 · Thinking Christian: Bible, Theology, and Culture

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  Speaker 1: The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that
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  Speaker 1: deny God. As such, we need Thinking Christian to become
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  Speaker 1: as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast.
• 0:11
  Speaker 2: I'm Dr.
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  Speaker 1: James Spencer. Through calm, thoughtful, theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights
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  Speaker 1: the ways God is working in the world and questions
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  Speaker 1: the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians
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  Speaker 1: from becoming more like Christ. Now, on to today's episode
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  Speaker 1: of Thinking Christian.
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  Speaker 3: Hey, everyone.
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  Speaker 2: Welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm Dr. James
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  Speaker 2: Spencer and my co-host, Dr. Sheet Barman, and I today
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  Speaker 2: are happy to be hosting Norman Worspa. He is the
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  Speaker 2: Gilbert T. Rowe Distinguished Professor of Theology at Duke University,
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  Speaker 2: and he's also a senior fellow at the Kenan Institute.
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  Speaker 2: He's the author of several books. The one that I
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  Speaker 2: know him from most is This Sacred Life. But his
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  Speaker 2: most recent book is actually called Love's Braided Dance, Hope
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  Speaker 2: in a Time of Crisis. And so we're going to
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  Speaker 2: be talking a little bit about as we continue our
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  Speaker 2: political series. We're going to be thinking more in terms
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  Speaker 2: of maybe politics and public life and particularly related to creation, land,
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  Speaker 2: some of those kind of themes. And so we're really
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  Speaker 2: excited to have you on today, Norman. Thanks so much
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  Speaker 2: for being here.
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  Speaker 3: Oh, it's great to be with you.
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  Speaker 4: Yeah, thanks for joining us. To me, I have to
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  Speaker 4: say it's a special thrill. I've assigned several of your
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  Speaker 4: books in class, and students always love them. You know,
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  Speaker 4: I've been allowed to do that. Others that I've done
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  Speaker 4: have been a little bit more controversial, but yours have passed.
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  Speaker 4: And they've all always enjoyed it. So I appreciate your work.
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  Speaker 4: You've opened my eyes to many things and new ways
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  Speaker 4: that And with perspectives that I hadn't seen before. I'm curious,
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  Speaker 4: what brought you to the particular study you do? You've
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  Speaker 4: done a lot with regard to land, environment, the intersection
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  Speaker 4: with theology. How does one arrive there?
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  Speaker 3: Well, I suppose there are several paths, but my own
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  Speaker 3: was that I grew up farming and wanted to be
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  Speaker 3: a farmer. And I just had that in my sort
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  Speaker 3: of imagination and heart from the very beginning. And I
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  Speaker 3: love farming. working with animals. I love working with plants.
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  Speaker 3: I love being outside. And the fact is, that's the
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  Speaker 3: way most people have lived throughout the history of humanity.
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  Speaker 3: And we're the really unusual ones now because we live
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  Speaker 3: mostly inside and don't take care of land, plants, or animals,
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  Speaker 3: hardly at all, maybe a pet and maybe a few
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  Speaker 3: potted plants in the house. But that sensibility that I had,
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  Speaker 3: and I look back on this now, and I think
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  Speaker 3: how odd it was that I didn't ever build upon
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  Speaker 3: that understanding, that sort of affection, we might even say,
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  Speaker 3: all through graduate school, because there were never farmers on
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  Speaker 3: a syllabus. And so land plants, animals just weren't discussed.
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  Speaker 3: They weren't even considered. And so what really changed all
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  Speaker 3: this for me was becoming friends with Wendell Berry, who
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  Speaker 3: helped me understand that agricultural traditions and practices are They're
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  Speaker 3: not just for farmers. They actually open up the major philosophical, economic, moral, political,
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  Speaker 3: spiritual questions in really profoundly fresh and I think fundamental
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  Speaker 3: ways that are often overlooked. And one of the clearest
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  Speaker 3: signs that these realities of land, plants, and animals are
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  Speaker 3: being overlooked is that we're building economies on the assumption
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  Speaker 3: that they can just keep going as they are without
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  Speaker 3: really understanding the tremendous amount of destruction these priorities or
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  Speaker 3: policies are creating. And I think what was such a
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  Speaker 3: great gift to me is that Wendell allowed me to
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  Speaker 3: expand the scope of consideration whenever you're trying to address
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  Speaker 3: any kind of major philosophical or political questions.
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  Speaker 4: Yeah, you mentioned that there were no farmers on your syllabus.
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  Speaker 4: I think we probably, all three of us share that experience.
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  Speaker 4: It doesn't seem like the obvious place to turn. I
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  Speaker 4: can say too that when I first learned the name
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  Speaker 4: Wendell Berry over a decade ago, for sure, I looked
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  Speaker 4: him up and my first thought was, oh, a farmer?
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah.
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  Speaker 4: And so I think we're conditioned to be trained in
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  Speaker 4: certain ways theologically that don't don't think to look to
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  Speaker 4: a farmer. And in, and in Barry's own case, he's
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  Speaker 4: quite critical of modern farming practices, even as he's richly
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  Speaker 4: engaged with the importance of what a farm could and
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  Speaker 4: should be. Could you talk a little bit about how,
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  Speaker 4: whatever it is you were doing before him really, so
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  Speaker 4: you grew up on a farm, but you didn't go
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  Speaker 4: straight to the path of Barry. What led you to
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  Speaker 4: thinking through Barry and really making a career about it?
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  Speaker 2: Right.
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  Speaker 4: I think. So many of your books touch on that.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah.
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  Speaker 3: So, you know, I went to, you know, university and
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  Speaker 3: thought I might be a school teacher. I was interested
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  Speaker 3: in the sciences, but then really fell in love with
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  Speaker 3: humanities because growing up, I didn't read books. I worked
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  Speaker 3: and I played sports. Those were the two things I did.
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  Speaker 3: And to discover the traditions of philosophy and literature and
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  Speaker 3: history and theology was just, just wonderful. Absolutely loved it. And,
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  Speaker 3: You know, I went to study theology at Yale and
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  Speaker 3: loved that time period. But while I was there, I
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  Speaker 3: discovered that a lot of the questions I was most
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  Speaker 3: interested in is what constitutes a religious sensibility in the
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  Speaker 3: modern world and why has a religious sensibility faced such
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  Speaker 3: a hard time, right? I mean, the growth of atheism,
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  Speaker 3: the secularization hypothesis, all these different things that were floating
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  Speaker 3: around when I was in graduate school in the 80s
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  Speaker 3: and 90s. They made it seem as if the whole
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  Speaker 3: category of faith was irrelevant because that was something from
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  Speaker 3: the past. And so I wanted to know what was
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  Speaker 3: going on in the ways modern people were thinking about
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  Speaker 3: basic and ultimate questions. And so I studied a lot
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  Speaker 3: of 19th century figures in particular, you know, idealism and
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  Speaker 3: then moved into phenomenology. And these became ways for me
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  Speaker 3: to look at, you know, the basic questions about life
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  Speaker 3: in some pretty interesting ways. And then I discovered that
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  Speaker 3: in the first job that I had, my chair, my
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  Speaker 3: new chair asked if I would teach an environmental ethics course.
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  Speaker 3: And I thought, oh, sure, I can do that. And
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  Speaker 3: of course, I had no understanding of what environmental ethics
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  Speaker 3: was because you don't tell your first chair of the
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  Speaker 3: department that you don't know something.
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  Speaker 2: So.
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  Speaker 4: Yeah, you say yes to everything at that point.
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  Speaker 3: That's right, yeah. So I worked really hard to try
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  Speaker 3: to understand what is going on in this field of
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  Speaker 3: environmental ethics and philosophy. And in the early 90s, it
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  Speaker 3: was pretty thin. It was mostly how do you make
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  Speaker 3: either John Stuart Mill or Immanuel Kant into an environmental philosopher?
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  Speaker 3: And it was not at all thrilling or exciting. And
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  Speaker 3: then I started to learn more about environmental history, especially
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  Speaker 3: in the North American context. And of course, all of
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  Speaker 3: that goes down to the 1960-64 Wilderness Act and these
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  Speaker 3: kinds of major pieces of legislation that were really quite important.
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  Speaker 3: But the focus in the American context in particular was
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  Speaker 3: on wilderness. And I thought that's kind of a strange
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  Speaker 3: way to frame whatever environmental ethic you're going to come
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  Speaker 3: up with, because wilderness is where people don't belong. They
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  Speaker 3: can go visit, but they should definitely not live there
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  Speaker 3: or make their livelihoods from there. And it was right
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  Speaker 3: about then that I had moved to Kentucky, and I
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  Speaker 3: asked a Kentucky native, I said, who's a Kentucky writer
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  Speaker 3: I should read, who you think I'd enjoy? And they said, well,
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  Speaker 3: have you heard of Wendell Berry? And I said, no.
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  Speaker 3: And they said, well, he writes novels, he does poetry,
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  Speaker 3: and he writes essays. And I started to read some
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  Speaker 3: of each of those different genres and absolutely loved it.
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  Speaker 3: And then I read his book, The Unsettling of America.
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  Speaker 3: And that one just floored me because it was describing
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  Speaker 3: what I saw up close and personal in the history
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  Speaker 3: of farming of my family, where I had a grandfather
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  Speaker 3: who was very much in the tradition of animal husbandry.
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  Speaker 3: But then the push from banks and from implement dealers
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  Speaker 3: was to do industrial agriculture. And I saw what that did,
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  Speaker 3: what it did to animals, what it did to fields,
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  Speaker 3: what it did to farmer indebtedness. I mean, it was
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  Speaker 3: It was a really stressful path. And I decided pretty
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  Speaker 3: quickly that that was not going to be a way
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  Speaker 3: to make a living when I saw this in person.
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  Speaker 3: But what I didn't realize, and this is why Wendell
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  Speaker 3: was so important, is he helped me understand what was
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  Speaker 3: going on philosophically in this shift from traditions of husbandry
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  Speaker 3: all the way into this modern industrial way, what it
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  Speaker 3: was doing to the ways, not just the way we
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  Speaker 3: thought about ethics, but the way we thought about ontology,
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  Speaker 3: what things are, what kind of a world are we
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  Speaker 3: in Is it basically a dead world, just a whole
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  Speaker 3: bunch of commodities that we try to harvest as efficiently
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  Speaker 3: and profitably as possible? Or what does it mean when
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  Speaker 3: we think about soil as a living mystery that we
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  Speaker 3: have to now work with in ways that honor the
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  Speaker 3: complexity and diversity of its life? And so Wendell put
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  Speaker 3: me on this completely new trajectory that was actually a
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  Speaker 3: very old trajectory, which was... instead of paying attention to wilderness,
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  Speaker 3: which I'm not opposed to, okay, but instead let's look
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  Speaker 3: at agricultural traditions that have been practiced for thousands of
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  Speaker 3: years across the continents, and let's explore how these people
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  Speaker 3: thought about land, plants, and animals, and what a responsible
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  Speaker 3: human life in this sort of world, this agricultural world,
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  Speaker 3: what would that mean for the way we think about
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  Speaker 3: the big questions of our time? And it's been one
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  Speaker 3: of the most marvelous gifts to have been put on
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  Speaker 3: this agrarian path because it gives a perspective on major
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  Speaker 3: questions that people who've only ever lived in cities, who've
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  Speaker 3: only ever lived as shoppers, really have almost no understanding of.
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  Speaker 2: Would you say, oh, sorry, let me throw one in
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  Speaker 2: here real quick. You mentioned commodification, and I just think back,
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  Speaker 2: I'm an Old Testament guy, and so I think back
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  Speaker 2: to the Old Testament, and the people in the Old
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  Speaker 2: Testament are portrayed as living with the land, in a
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  Speaker 2: very different way, in an agrarian way, but in a
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  Speaker 2: very different agrarian way than we have today, there, there
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  Speaker 2: was a sacredness to the land, uh, that, that especially
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  Speaker 2: in Israel didn't necessarily, or wasn't supposed to lead to
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  Speaker 2: worship of the land.
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  Speaker 3: Right.
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  Speaker 2: But it was, it was intended to be a highly
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  Speaker 2: interdependent and relational system in which the people were caring
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  Speaker 2: for the land. I mean, this was, you know, um,
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  Speaker 2: God put Adam in the garden to till and to
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  Speaker 2: keep it, right? There's a service to the ground that
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  Speaker 2: Adam was supposed to perform. My impression is that many
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  Speaker 2: of the sort of cultures that maybe have been displaced,
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  Speaker 2: especially by the Western world, would have viewed the land
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  Speaker 2: in a similar fashion, you know, without the Yahwistic sort
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  Speaker 2: of tradition behind it. But do you see that as
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  Speaker 2: we've industrialized more and more and farming has become more
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  Speaker 2: about what is produced as opposed to what it's produced in,
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  Speaker 2: that you do see this mental shift that sort of
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  Speaker 2: your work is combating?
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. I think that's, I mean,
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  Speaker 3: the two things I would want to say, first of all, yes,
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  Speaker 3: there has been a focus all about production, maximizing production. And,
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  Speaker 3: you know, today's agricultural context is one where The margins
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  Speaker 3: of profitability are so small that you have to maximize
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  Speaker 3: yield at every way that you can. And that means
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  Speaker 3: lots of fertilizer, lots of herbicides, pesticides, lots of irrigation.
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  Speaker 3: And that has been uniformly harmful to soil. So, yes,
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  Speaker 3: the focus on productivity is huge. But the other one
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  Speaker 3: is the land itself, right? We no longer think about
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  Speaker 3: land as a living thing that has integrity of its own. Instead,
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  Speaker 3: land is viewed as a surface to mine or it's
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  Speaker 3: an investment opportunity. So right now, for instance, you know,
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  Speaker 3: when I was coming up and thinking about becoming a farmer,
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  Speaker 3: I realized that I couldn't do it just economically because
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  Speaker 3: the price per acre was so high that you could
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  Speaker 3: farm that land your whole life and never pay back
• 12:54
  Speaker 3: the loan.
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  Speaker 2: Right.
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  Speaker 3: Now that's in the 1980s when land where I was
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  Speaker 3: living was around $ 1, 500, maybe $ 2, 000 an acre. Land in
• 13:04
  Speaker 3: Iowa right now goes over $ 30, 000 an acre, depending on
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  Speaker 3: where you are. You can't possibly farm that and pay
• 13:13
  Speaker 3: back the loan. So who's buying the land? It's bankers,
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  Speaker 3: it's investors who are seeing that the land has more
• 13:19
  Speaker 3: value as investment opportunity for future development, or maybe the
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  Speaker 3: land is a tax write-off, or Whatever. And so what
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  Speaker 3: happens to land now is it becomes a financial asset
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  Speaker 3: rather than the source of life, which is the way
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  Speaker 3: indigenous and pre-modern traditional agricultural communities thought about land. It
• 13:39
  Speaker 3: was the very means by which human beings could work
• 13:44
  Speaker 3: out their living. The minute that ceases to be the case,
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  Speaker 3: you can start to say and believe, I can hurt
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  Speaker 3: the land without hurting myself. And that would have made
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  Speaker 3: no sense to indigenous peoples or traditional agricultural communities because
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  Speaker 3: the first rule of agriculture is you nurture the places
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  Speaker 3: that nurture you. You nurture the communities of life that
• 14:07
  Speaker 3: nurture you. We're not interested in thinking about nurturing the
• 14:12
  Speaker 3: land for the most part. I mean, there are people
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  Speaker 3: who obviously are, but the industrial process starts with the
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  Speaker 3: assumption that land is basically dead, which is an astounding
• 14:22
  Speaker 3: thing to say. And it's part of, sort of the
• 14:24
  Speaker 3: modern philosophical heritage. And there have been moments in the
• 14:28
  Speaker 3: history of modern thinking that have tried to go against that, right?
• 14:31
  Speaker 3: Romanticism in the 19th century, for sure. Darwin did a
• 14:34
  Speaker 3: lot to help us appreciate the vitality of soil and
• 14:39
  Speaker 3: the mystery of soil. But for the most part, if
• 14:41
  Speaker 3: you talk to the people who have been the major
• 14:43
  Speaker 3: players in what happens on the land, bankers, investors, and
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  Speaker 3: so forth, they treat land as a unit of production,
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  Speaker 3: not as a living being. And that shift is huge.
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  Speaker 3: And we're going to have to figure out how we're
• 14:59
  Speaker 3: going to help people understand that land is not simply
• 15:02
  Speaker 3: a unit of production and that people aren't simply a
• 15:04
  Speaker 3: unit of consumption.
• 15:06
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's been really interesting. I've done some work on
• 15:09
  Speaker 2: the data centers that are being put in for artificial intelligence.
• 15:13
  Speaker 2: And you look at the way they impact the local
• 15:15
  Speaker 2: communities where they're put, and usually the impact is not
• 15:19
  Speaker 2: overly beneficial if it's beneficial at all.
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  Speaker 3: Right.
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  Speaker 2: And I would say that as I was just prepping
• 15:25
  Speaker 2: for this episode, one of the things I realized I
• 15:28
  Speaker 2: hadn't really touched on was the destruction of that land
• 15:30
  Speaker 2: that these buildings are being put on. And so what
• 15:33
  Speaker 2: you see, what we tend to see is the effect
• 15:36
  Speaker 2: that it has on humans and But really, we miss
• 15:39
  Speaker 2: the fact that this is an extension of the way
• 15:42
  Speaker 2: the land is being treated that is now reverberating into
• 15:46
  Speaker 2: the way actual persons are going to feel it. So
• 15:49
  Speaker 2: I think we're getting to a point, at least in
• 15:51
  Speaker 2: certain spaces, where people are going to be primed to
• 15:55
  Speaker 2: recognize this connection in a different way than they have
• 15:57
  Speaker 2: in the past.
• 15:58
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I think so. I mean, I remember hearing an
• 16:01
  Speaker 3: interview with... I don't know if it was a mayor
• 16:05
  Speaker 3: or chair of some council or something in a county
• 16:08
  Speaker 3: in Georgia that was considering whether to build a data
• 16:11
  Speaker 3: center and or allow a data center to be built. And,
• 16:16
  Speaker 3: you know, the chair of the council said, look, we
• 16:19
  Speaker 3: have this much water. The data center will use most
• 16:23
  Speaker 3: of it. They don't give exact numbers off in the
• 16:26
  Speaker 3: companies that build these data centers. And it means that
• 16:29
  Speaker 3: now we have to decide whether or not people have
• 16:32
  Speaker 3: water or the data center has water because we can't
• 16:34
  Speaker 3: give water to both. That's right. And then the most
• 16:38
  Speaker 3: astounding thing is that the council voted for the data center, thinking, well,
• 16:44
  Speaker 3: we'll just find water somewhere. Well, this is a fantasy, right?
• 16:48
  Speaker 3: I mean, how do you just find water? I mean,
• 16:51
  Speaker 3: we're recognizing that in so many parts of the world,
• 16:55
  Speaker 3: fresh water is... is a huge concern. I mean, it's,
• 16:59
  Speaker 3: it's at the heart of a lot of geopolitical conflict, even, right?
• 17:03
  Speaker 3: You can't make sense of the Middle East without thinking
• 17:05
  Speaker 3: about water. You can't think about land management, land policy
• 17:09
  Speaker 3: without thinking about water, right? So much so that, you know,
• 17:12
  Speaker 3: to feed horses in these very arid desert climates, you
• 17:16
  Speaker 3: can't grow the hay because the hay uses too much water.
• 17:19
  Speaker 3: So what do you do? You buy farms in the
• 17:21
  Speaker 3: United States to grow the hay and then you ship
• 17:23
  Speaker 3: the hay to the Middle East, which, You're not just
• 17:26
  Speaker 3: shipping the hay, you're shipping the water because the water's
• 17:29
  Speaker 3: not there. So it's a question about how do you
• 17:32
  Speaker 3: understand the connections between various, what we might call consumer products,
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  Speaker 3: with their connection to the land and how getting those products,
• 17:42
  Speaker 3: manufacturing the products, what are they doing to the land
• 17:46
  Speaker 3: immediately but also long term?
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  Speaker 2: I'll say this and then I'll turn it back over
• 17:51
  Speaker 2: to Ashish, but as I looked into the issue of
• 17:55
  Speaker 2: the data centers, one thing that I was sort of
• 17:57
  Speaker 2: convinced of was we need to do a real deeper
• 18:01
  Speaker 2: audit of what we're using AI for. And there may be,
• 18:06
  Speaker 2: I'm not a completely anti-AI person or anti-technology person. I
• 18:10
  Speaker 2: don't take you to be either. But I think that
• 18:14
  Speaker 2: You know, when we're looking at artificial intelligence and we're
• 18:16
  Speaker 2: seeing videos of babies dancing for entertainment or, you know,
• 18:21
  Speaker 2: high video production, this is all using energy. And we
• 18:26
  Speaker 2: need to really ask ourselves whether those are necessities in
• 18:29
  Speaker 2: the same way that water, land, your creation is a necessity.
• 18:35
  Speaker 2: And if they're not, why are we we need to
• 18:38
  Speaker 2: then right size the amount of power we want to
• 18:41
  Speaker 2: allocate to artificial intelligence? Because if that could decrease by
• 18:46
  Speaker 2: even 50%, you know, because we're not using it for
• 18:49
  Speaker 2: frivolous activities all over the place, you know, maybe we
• 18:52
  Speaker 2: go back to Google as opposed to having AI answer
• 18:56
  Speaker 2: all our questions that seem to be working fine. Like
• 18:59
  Speaker 2: if we could just refine it down a little bit more,
• 19:01
  Speaker 2: there is a way I think to sort of pull
• 19:04
  Speaker 2: this back and have a moderate understanding of what we
• 19:07
  Speaker 2: could use artificial intelligence for. And I think we could
• 19:09
  Speaker 2: do that for all technologies, but we tend not to
• 19:12
  Speaker 2: look at those long-term consequences. And it may very well
• 19:14
  Speaker 2: be because we just are starting at the wrong place.
• 19:17
  Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, that's possible. I think you mentioned something
• 19:20
  Speaker 3: that I think is really, really important. What's the point?
• 19:22
  Speaker 3: Why are we doing this? Because we're, first of all,
• 19:25
  Speaker 3: not paying attention. to the vast infrastructure that is behind
• 19:30
  Speaker 3: the scene that's operating that makes it possible for us
• 19:33
  Speaker 3: to get on our laptops and type in an AI
• 19:36
  Speaker 3: search and get all this material. And we think, wow,
• 19:39
  Speaker 3: this is so quick. And it is. But the question is,
• 19:43
  Speaker 3: what's behind it? We're not talking about cobalt or lithium mining.
• 19:46
  Speaker 3: We're not talking about water. We're not talking about the...
• 19:50
  Speaker 3: hundreds of thousands of people who are working at starvation
• 19:53
  Speaker 3: wages to do the screening of what goes on the
• 19:56
  Speaker 3: web and all these sorts of things. But then we're
• 20:00
  Speaker 3: also not asking very basic questions. And that is, there
• 20:03
  Speaker 3: seems to be this assumption that more data and more
• 20:06
  Speaker 3: computation power will solve our problems. I don't believe that
• 20:10
  Speaker 3: for a second because I know we have more data
• 20:13
  Speaker 3: now and we have more computation power than we've ever
• 20:16
  Speaker 3: had before, more than we could have imagined. And it's
• 20:19
  Speaker 3: not solving our problems. And it certainly is not making
• 20:23
  Speaker 3: people happy. And so unless we can figure out what
• 20:27
  Speaker 3: is the point here, other than the fact that we
• 20:30
  Speaker 3: know it's going to make some people obscenely rich. Yes.
• 20:34
  Speaker 3: I mean, obscenely rich. Yeah. And if we're not prepared
• 20:39
  Speaker 3: to say, okay, this is not good, I think we're
• 20:43
  Speaker 3: in real trouble. We've lost something really important about how
• 20:47
  Speaker 3: we think about the sort of the value structures by
• 20:50
  Speaker 3: which we organize our life together. Because if we're going
• 20:53
  Speaker 3: to do so much to disrupt personal and common good,
• 20:56
  Speaker 3: public good, so that some people can make a lot
• 20:59
  Speaker 3: of money, I think we've lost our way.
• 21:05
  Speaker 4: If you don't mind, I'd like to connect a few
• 21:07
  Speaker 4: of these strands.
• 21:08
  Speaker 3: Sure.
• 21:11
  Speaker 4: So you had mentioned before we started that you fell
• 21:16
  Speaker 4: in love with, you were introduced to and fell in
• 21:17
  Speaker 4: love with humanities when you were in college. I had
• 21:21
  Speaker 4: a very similar story. I started out in the sciences
• 21:24
  Speaker 4: and was taking these general education courses. And I thought, wow,
• 21:28
  Speaker 4: this is fun. I like this. This is what I
• 21:30
  Speaker 4: want to do. And one of those first classes was
• 21:32
  Speaker 4: the seminar on the ancient city of Rome. And this
• 21:34
  Speaker 4: was around the time gladiator to come out. So that
• 21:38
  Speaker 4: was kind of the, the impulse to, Ooh, I want to,
• 21:40
  Speaker 4: I want to learn more about this.
• 21:42
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 21:45
  Speaker 4: There was a temple as we learned. So our, our
• 21:47
  Speaker 4: emphasis in the class or a good chunk of the
• 21:49
  Speaker 4: class was the ways in which the first emperor Octavius
• 21:55
  Speaker 4: built that city in a way in which it was
• 21:57
  Speaker 4: to point to him and how he would use symbols
• 22:00
  Speaker 4: all around the city so that people would be reminded.
• 22:02
  Speaker 4: It was very much a propaganda project.
• 22:04
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 22:05
  Speaker 4: And the one that was most interesting to me was
• 22:08
  Speaker 4: the Arapakas temple, the temple of peace. And the thing
• 22:12
  Speaker 4: is covered with imagery of vines and bugs. And all
• 22:18
  Speaker 4: of this was meant to be like, it's a pretty
• 22:21
  Speaker 4: big chunk of marble slab. And that's, that's what the
• 22:23
  Speaker 4: entire design is. And then a few people on it
• 22:26
  Speaker 4: and the entire imagery is meant to say peace. And
• 22:31
  Speaker 4: in our current context, that seems odd because, to be honest,
• 22:34
  Speaker 4: to think about vines and bugs. But as my professor
• 22:38
  Speaker 4: at the time was explaining, and as I've learned more,
• 22:40
  Speaker 4: I've realized the mindset at play here, something about life
• 22:45
  Speaker 4: and the entanglement of life, the intertwined nature of life
• 22:49
  Speaker 4: was meant to also then point to the way in
• 22:50
  Speaker 4: which there can be peace in life together. And Augustus
• 22:54
  Speaker 4: was going to bring this to us. Now, I want
• 22:55
  Speaker 4: to fast forward from there to this past winter, I
• 22:59
  Speaker 4: was starting a sweet pepper plant in my house. to
• 23:02
  Speaker 4: move to the garden once the season, once the outdoors
• 23:05
  Speaker 4: could sustain it. And my daughter, it was near the table.
• 23:09
  Speaker 4: My daughter was getting irritated because there was these tiny
• 23:12
  Speaker 4: little flies buzzing around it. And I understood it, right?
• 23:15
  Speaker 4: You don't, when you're eating, you're not terribly thrilled by
• 23:17
  Speaker 4: that reality. But then one day I wanted her to
• 23:20
  Speaker 4: notice that I apparently started it a little too early.
• 23:22
  Speaker 4: It started to flower in the house. And I thought, well,
• 23:24
  Speaker 4: those would be wasted flowers. And then all of a
• 23:26
  Speaker 4: sudden a sweet pepper started to grow from it. And
• 23:30
  Speaker 4: so I turned to her. Her name is Sophia. I said, Sophia,
• 23:32
  Speaker 4: why do you think that the sweet pepper is growing now?
• 23:35
  Speaker 4: I don't know, because that's what plants do. I said,
• 23:39
  Speaker 4: but you know how it works outside, right? How do
• 23:42
  Speaker 4: the flowers turn into the peppers? Well, you know, it's
• 23:44
  Speaker 4: the bees and the butterflies. We don't have those in here.
• 23:46
  Speaker 4: What's going on? I guess it's the flies. I said, yeah,
• 23:50
  Speaker 4: it's absolutely the flies. And that led into a conversation
• 23:56
  Speaker 4: about the soil and life and This sort of default
• 24:00
  Speaker 4: image that we have today. And what I want to
• 24:02
  Speaker 4: do is draw this contrast that this idea of plant
• 24:06
  Speaker 4: imagery with the bugs was seen as not just life-giving
• 24:10
  Speaker 4: but peaceful. And we live in a place where you described,
• 24:13
  Speaker 4: I think rightly, the default in which we see the
• 24:16
  Speaker 4: soil is dead.
• 24:17
  Speaker 3: Mm-hmm.
• 24:21
  Speaker 4: You talked about, and here's the other strand I want
• 24:23
  Speaker 4: to connect to. You said there's a lot of philosophical
• 24:24
  Speaker 4: work that's gone in the background to get us there.
• 24:26
  Speaker 4: I think about one of your former colleagues, Willie Jennings,
• 24:29
  Speaker 4: who makes the case that it's not just philosophical, it's theological,
• 24:32
  Speaker 4: and that there's a theological abstraction from the land. I
• 24:36
  Speaker 4: like to think in my mind of you two sitting
• 24:38
  Speaker 4: around a table hashing these things out, rightly or wrongly.
• 24:42
  Speaker 4: You can leave me in my imagination. But I'm just
• 24:46
  Speaker 4: curious in your work, As we think about what Jennings
• 24:50
  Speaker 4: has done about describing some of that middle part, what
• 24:52
  Speaker 4: you have done, which to me seems like you've both
• 24:56
  Speaker 4: drawn from each other. And I think about that contrast. A,
• 25:01
  Speaker 4: how do we get here? B, how do we begin
• 25:06
  Speaker 4: to redefine that default? And C, maybe this takes us
• 25:10
  Speaker 4: into the work that you did to try to get
• 25:14
  Speaker 4: us to think, especially as Christians, more about creation and
• 25:17
  Speaker 4: less about nature.
• 25:17
  Speaker 3: Right. Yeah.
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 25:21
  Speaker 3: I mean, Willie and I are good friends, so we
• 25:23
  Speaker 3: love talking with each other about these things. And I
• 25:26
  Speaker 3: think one of the things that we're trying to hit
• 25:28
  Speaker 3: home again and again and again is the good of
• 25:32
  Speaker 3: human need. And the reason it's important to stress that,
• 25:37
  Speaker 3: start with that, is we live in a neoliberal culture
• 25:40
  Speaker 3: and time and not just philosophical position, but a neoliberal infrastructure, right,
• 25:47
  Speaker 3: which is built upon automobiles, now laptops, now private search
• 25:54
  Speaker 3: engines and all the rest where you can have the
• 25:57
  Speaker 3: world on your own terms. I mean, it is astounding
• 26:01
  Speaker 3: how you can take care of yourself by yourself now.
• 26:04
  Speaker 3: And you can look at a lot of modern institutions
• 26:06
  Speaker 3: like insurance companies and banks as ways of making it
• 26:09
  Speaker 3: so that you could handle your life without having to
• 26:12
  Speaker 3: ever ask a friend for help. You just go to
• 26:16
  Speaker 3: impersonal bureaucratic places and they'll take care of you. and
• 26:20
  Speaker 3: if you pay your money. Now, this idea that human
• 26:24
  Speaker 3: beings do not need is an utter fantasy. It's so
• 26:30
  Speaker 3: untrue to us as we think of ourselves physiologically, but
• 26:35
  Speaker 3: also as we think of ourselves philosophically and theologically. Because
• 26:40
  Speaker 3: the fact of the matter is, so not long after
• 26:43
  Speaker 3: we finish this interview, we're going to eat. And if
• 26:46
  Speaker 3: we don't, we're in trouble. We're going to drink. If
• 26:49
  Speaker 3: we don't drink, we're in trouble. If we don't breathe, man,
• 26:51
  Speaker 3: are we in trouble, right? And all of these very
• 26:54
  Speaker 3: basic physiological activities that we do all the time confirm
• 27:02
  Speaker 3: in the most visceral and often enjoyable way how much
• 27:06
  Speaker 3: our lives depend upon the lives of other creatures. And
• 27:08
  Speaker 3: what we got to then do is figure out, well,
• 27:10
  Speaker 3: what say you're living in on uh you're gonna have
• 27:14
  Speaker 3: bruschetta for dinner so you're gonna have bread you're gonna
• 27:17
  Speaker 3: have pesto you're gonna have tomato you're gonna have cheese
• 27:19
  Speaker 3: maybe what does it take to have all those things
• 27:24
  Speaker 3: you don't just have cheese because you want cheese no
• 27:27
  Speaker 3: you have cheese because probably there was a cow or
• 27:29
  Speaker 3: a goat that had milk and that cow has a
• 27:32
  Speaker 3: long history of development and a lot of dependencies upon
• 27:36
  Speaker 3: pasture upon then the soil that makes that pasture a
• 27:41
  Speaker 3: fertile place that has lots of growth of grass. And
• 27:45
  Speaker 3: then you want to have diversity of grasses, right? You
• 27:47
  Speaker 3: want some legumes. You want some, just some tall grasses.
• 27:50
  Speaker 3: You want all kinds of mixes there. You need sunshine.
• 27:53
  Speaker 3: You need water. I mean, suddenly you discover for you
• 27:56
  Speaker 3: to have something as basic as bruschetta, which otherwise would
• 27:58
  Speaker 3: have just been a thoughtless action on your part. You
• 28:02
  Speaker 3: have just stitched yourself into the world. I mean, stitched
• 28:05
  Speaker 3: yourself in the most complicated, intimate way possible because eating
• 28:10
  Speaker 3: is more intimate than sex. That's an astounding thing that
• 28:14
  Speaker 3: we can take not just the life of another creature,
• 28:17
  Speaker 3: but the lives of all that creature depended upon into
• 28:21
  Speaker 3: us every time we drink, breathe, and eat. So that's
• 28:27
  Speaker 3: the basic fact about us. So we now have to
• 28:29
  Speaker 3: figure out what does it mean now for us to
• 28:31
  Speaker 3: live in a neoliberal world and with a neoliberal imagination,
• 28:36
  Speaker 3: which assumes we're all individuals, we're all self-legislating, self-standing individuals.
• 28:42
  Speaker 3: all of which is a lie, what does it take
• 28:45
  Speaker 3: for us to make the shift where we recognize that
• 28:47
  Speaker 3: we are in fact creatures living with fellow creatures, all
• 28:50
  Speaker 3: of which are dependent upon their life for a source
• 28:55
  Speaker 3: that is beyond themselves, right? One of my former teachers said,
• 29:01
  Speaker 3: one of the most important things to say about creatures
• 29:03
  Speaker 3: is that they live on borrowed breath. And, you know,
• 29:06
  Speaker 3: to bring it back to the Yavis that we mentioned,
• 29:08
  Speaker 3: you mentioned earlier, uh, was the idea that you have
• 29:12
  Speaker 3: God in a garden lifting up soil and breathing into
• 29:15
  Speaker 3: it the life that makes the first human being, but
• 29:17
  Speaker 3: also the plants and the animals, right? This idea that
• 29:20
  Speaker 3: we could never have animated ourselves into being, right? Our
• 29:27
  Speaker 3: animation depends upon a source of life, which we refer
• 29:30
  Speaker 3: to as creator. And, you know, it's not just Christians
• 29:32
  Speaker 3: who talk this way. Jews, Muslims, jane all kinds of
• 29:35
  Speaker 3: religious traditions indigenous traditions presume something like a creator because
• 29:41
  Speaker 3: the idea is that we did not make ourselves we
• 29:45
  Speaker 3: depend upon a power which is beyond us which is
• 29:48
  Speaker 3: the power of life which is a miracle you know
• 29:52
  Speaker 3: and christians re-describe that power of life as the power
• 29:55
  Speaker 3: of love So what you have to do then, I think,
• 29:58
  Speaker 3: is you've got to figure out how you help people
• 30:00
  Speaker 3: connect dots that they have now thought they could just
• 30:03
  Speaker 3: push to the side and not pay any attention to.
• 30:06
  Speaker 3: And this doesn't just affect us personally, I would argue.
• 30:09
  Speaker 3: It has to also affect us as we think about communities,
• 30:13
  Speaker 3: whether that's an ecclesial community or a political community at
• 30:16
  Speaker 3: the same time. Because now we have to think about
• 30:19
  Speaker 3: an economy that is no longer unmoored from ecosystems that
• 30:24
  Speaker 3: make their functioning even possible. And so much of what
• 30:29
  Speaker 3: we have in our economies today is operation on the
• 30:32
  Speaker 3: principle of banditry. An economy that just takes from the
• 30:37
  Speaker 3: world and doesn't practice what Albert Howard called the law
• 30:41
  Speaker 3: of return, which is to nurture the life that nurtures you.
• 30:46
  Speaker 3: And that's sort of the big, big, huge hole in
• 30:50
  Speaker 3: our thinking and in our imagination right now. the fact
• 30:54
  Speaker 3: that we could imagine ourselves to be the kind of
• 30:56
  Speaker 3: creatures that just live on their own from themselves, it's
• 31:02
  Speaker 3: such an obvious lie, but we live by it as
• 31:06
  Speaker 3: if it were true.
• 31:06
  Speaker 2: I don't know if you've ever read much Albert Borgman.
• 31:14
  Speaker 3: Well, yeah.
• 31:16
  Speaker 2: I really love the way he puts it, and he's
• 31:18
  Speaker 2: talking specifically about technology, but I think you could apply
• 31:21
  Speaker 2: it to technology maybe more broadly. But he talks about
• 31:25
  Speaker 2: technology ruling us through the inconspicuous patterns that it develops
• 31:29
  Speaker 2: in our day-to-day life. And it just strikes me as
• 31:32
  Speaker 2: you're talking to the bruschetta, it's so inconspicuous. You're just
• 31:36
  Speaker 2: sitting down for dinner. It's just sort of the normal
• 31:38
  Speaker 2: thing you do. And it masks the ease with which
• 31:42
  Speaker 2: we eat it, the ease with which it comes on
• 31:44
  Speaker 2: our plates, masks then everything else behind it. It makes
• 31:48
  Speaker 2: that functionally anonymous if we don't really think back through it. Yeah,
• 31:53
  Speaker 2: really fabulous point.
• 31:55
  Speaker 3: Well, and one of his big points was to say
• 31:57
  Speaker 3: that technology is never simply a tool, right? We keep
• 31:59
  Speaker 3: thinking it's just a tool, but it's actually transforming the
• 32:03
  Speaker 3: way we think about what life is, what a person is,
• 32:07
  Speaker 3: what personal responsibility is. I mean, I think, I don't
• 32:11
  Speaker 3: know if you've had a chance to read Pope Leo's
• 32:13
  Speaker 3: latest encyclical, Magnificent Humanity, and there's so much good in it.
• 32:17
  Speaker 3: But I worry that there was a bit too much
• 32:19
  Speaker 3: emphasis on the idea that AI is a tool. AI
• 32:23
  Speaker 3: isn't simply a tool. It can be used as a
• 32:26
  Speaker 3: tool for sure. And I have plenty of colleagues at
• 32:29
  Speaker 3: Duke who are doing really good things in healthcare or
• 32:33
  Speaker 3: in the policy space with AI. And that's great. But
• 32:39
  Speaker 3: we shouldn't fool ourselves when we think that it's not
• 32:41
  Speaker 3: just transforming what we think life is or what we
• 32:46
  Speaker 3: think the expectations for life are. I mean, I have
• 32:49
  Speaker 3: colleagues at Duke who will come right out and say
• 32:54
  Speaker 3: the human being is a machine and the brain is
• 32:56
  Speaker 3: just a computer. And I want to say, you've got
• 32:58
  Speaker 3: to be kidding me. But that's the temptation because, you know,
• 33:04
  Speaker 3: AI is really good at computation. And because it's so
• 33:08
  Speaker 3: good at computation and because it can do computation much
• 33:11
  Speaker 3: faster than we can, we now think it's better than humans. Well,
• 33:15
  Speaker 3: that's just ridiculous. Because the things that make human beings
• 33:19
  Speaker 3: human are much, much more than computation, right? It's this
• 33:24
  Speaker 3: whole capacity for self-reflection, self-questioning, the capacity for affection for others,
• 33:33
  Speaker 3: the possibility for remorse, the possibility for just dreaming. I mean, comedy.
• 33:40
  Speaker 3: I mean, there's so many different dimensions to what makes
• 33:43
  Speaker 3: a human being human being and as long as we
• 33:45
  Speaker 3: think that these technological platforms that are being you know
• 33:48
  Speaker 3: sold to us that they're just tools and we're going
• 33:51
  Speaker 3: to easily control them and life will go on as
• 33:53
  Speaker 3: it always has my that's a dangerous delusion because you
• 33:57
  Speaker 3: know just thinking you know right now a lot of
• 34:01
  Speaker 3: the people who are encountering something like a robot that
• 34:05
  Speaker 3: they're using as a companion they may have had at
• 34:08
  Speaker 3: some point in their lives the experience of what a
• 34:10
  Speaker 3: real human relationship is right a real relationship that's difficult
• 34:15
  Speaker 3: That will tell you, you are a problem to me.
• 34:18
  Speaker 3: And you still have to figure out how you're going
• 34:19
  Speaker 3: to be in a relationship. Well, we have a whole
• 34:21
  Speaker 3: generation of young people now who are growing up who
• 34:23
  Speaker 3: really don't have that anchor. And they're growing up with robots.
• 34:27
  Speaker 3: And they're going to think that's normal. And that's really troubling. Yeah.
• 34:36
  Speaker 2: I find it. I went back to a lull a
• 34:40
  Speaker 2: little bit. So Borgman, I really enjoy, but when I
• 34:42
  Speaker 2: see AI treated simply as tool, I always think back
• 34:46
  Speaker 2: to a lull, Jocko lull, because he doesn't, he does
• 34:49
  Speaker 2: the more techniques or techniques. Right. And so to me,
• 34:54
  Speaker 2: that lends itself more to no technology is actually more
• 34:57
  Speaker 2: of a structure or a field in the PR board.
• 35:00
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 35:01
  Speaker 2: Sort of sense where it's structuring the way that we
• 35:04
  Speaker 2: are competing now for resource that we're, relating to one another.
• 35:09
  Speaker 2: The habitus we're creating within this new field is actually
• 35:12
  Speaker 2: shaping us into something a little different. And I think
• 35:17
  Speaker 2: you're right. I think AI can be a tool on occasion,
• 35:22
  Speaker 2: but I think even some of the early philosophical maybe
• 35:26
  Speaker 2: claims that were made about AI, that this thing is
• 35:28
  Speaker 2: going to be omniscient. You have this sort of super
• 35:31
  Speaker 2: intelligent sort of utopian world that's put out there, it
• 35:35
  Speaker 2: has this sort of religious fervor behind it that really
• 35:39
  Speaker 2: does create something more than just a tool. I mean,
• 35:42
  Speaker 2: we don't say this about hammers, right? We only say
• 35:48
  Speaker 2: this about AI and we force it almost to become
• 35:53
  Speaker 2: something more than a tool. We force it to become
• 35:56
  Speaker 2: an ideology that we live within or a structure that
• 35:59
  Speaker 2: we're living within.
• 36:00
  Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's so hugely important. I think,
• 36:04
  Speaker 3: you know, when I teach students, the question of AI
• 36:06
  Speaker 3: has to come up. Are you going to use chat
• 36:08
  Speaker 3: GPT for your work, right? And the question I put
• 36:10
  Speaker 3: to them is, well, do you want to disappear? Yeah.
• 36:13
  Speaker 3: I say, what do you mean, do I want to disappear? Well,
• 36:15
  Speaker 3: you know, I hear all the students around me talking
• 36:17
  Speaker 3: about identity. What is your identity? How is my identity shaped?
• 36:22
  Speaker 3: How has my identity been attacked or deformed or maligned
• 36:26
  Speaker 3: or whatever? And so you're all interested in preserving, protecting,
• 36:32
  Speaker 3: figuring out your identity, and now you're going to give
• 36:34
  Speaker 3: it all away to ChatGPT? Why would you do that?
• 36:38
  Speaker 3: Why do we want to further impersonalize our work, our engagement?
• 36:45
  Speaker 3: Why do we want to hand it over to Sam Altman?
• 36:49
  Speaker 3: I mean, seriously, why would we want to do such
• 36:51
  Speaker 3: a thing if not because maybe we're just lazy? And
• 36:56
  Speaker 3: if that's the case, then we have to ask the question,
• 36:58
  Speaker 3: what is it about us that makes us so lazy
• 37:02
  Speaker 3: that we no longer want to work? And I know
• 37:04
  Speaker 3: that some of these big tech companies, that's the dream, right?
• 37:08
  Speaker 3: You don't have to work anymore. You can just do
• 37:10
  Speaker 3: creative work, which of course is just idiotic because a
• 37:14
  Speaker 3: billionaire maybe he can say, I'm just going to do art.
• 37:18
  Speaker 3: But say that to a person who works at the
• 37:21
  Speaker 3: Food Lion or is working as an agricultural laborer. Take
• 37:24
  Speaker 3: their job away and say, oh, go do art. And
• 37:27
  Speaker 3: they're going to say, really? How am I going to
• 37:28
  Speaker 3: feed myself or my family when I don't have a job?
• 37:32
  Speaker 3: Or how would we think about work that rather than
• 37:35
  Speaker 3: being degrading actually helps us become better human beings, fuller
• 37:40
  Speaker 3: human beings, because the work is a place where we
• 37:44
  Speaker 3: get to, you know, develop our creative capacities, develop skill
• 37:48
  Speaker 3: sets that contribute to making the world work better or
• 37:52
  Speaker 3: make the world more beautiful. People need work as a
• 37:56
  Speaker 3: way of figuring out themselves. And so to say that
• 37:59
  Speaker 3: what we're promising with this technology is the elimination of work,
• 38:04
  Speaker 3: that to me is a nightmare because what it does,
• 38:06
  Speaker 3: instead of creating whole persons, what it does is it
• 38:09
  Speaker 3: creates a whole class of stupefied, what, slaves? right, who
• 38:15
  Speaker 3: will be basically there to purchase when you tell them
• 38:20
  Speaker 3: it's time for them to buy.
• 38:21
  Speaker 2: Well, I will say, I think, and again, I'll say
• 38:25
  Speaker 2: this and then pass it over to Ashish, but I
• 38:26
  Speaker 2: think I grew up in a farming community as well.
• 38:29
  Speaker 2: I didn't grow up on a farm. I was a
• 38:31
  Speaker 2: quote unquote city kid. You know, the city was just 5,500, right?
• 38:34
  Speaker 2: So a rural community. But I can remember going out
• 38:38
  Speaker 2: and working on farms. And there was something about the
• 38:43
  Speaker 2: embodied movement that you get when you were doing that.
• 38:46
  Speaker 2: I can remember being really disappointed when we no longer
• 38:51
  Speaker 2: got to walk alongside the wagon and throw the bales
• 38:53
  Speaker 2: of hay up on the wagon because the farmer had
• 38:56
  Speaker 2: gotten that fancy machine that'll just spit the hay up
• 39:01
  Speaker 2: on top, right?
• 39:02
  Speaker 3: That's right.
• 39:03
  Speaker 2: And I remember thinking, I'm like, I'm out of a
• 39:06
  Speaker 2: job because of this stupid thing. And I just don't
• 39:08
  Speaker 2: get to do it anymore. Like, I actually enjoy it.
• 39:11
  Speaker 2: fucking fails it was so much fun and uh and
• 39:14
  Speaker 2: i think that we often when we think about oh
• 39:17
  Speaker 2: it'll we will no longer have to work anymore i
• 39:19
  Speaker 2: think we miss the fact again that like the production
• 39:23
  Speaker 2: that comes from work isn't the only point it's actually
• 39:27
  Speaker 2: the process of working that is really impactful and helpful
• 39:31
  Speaker 2: to us and to the formation of our character and
• 39:34
  Speaker 2: who we are. And so I think the whole thing
• 39:37
  Speaker 2: is sort of rooted in a misunderstanding of what embodied
• 39:41
  Speaker 2: knowing really involves and how that process helps shape and
• 39:45
  Speaker 2: form us.
• 39:46
  Speaker 3: Oh, yeah, I'm totally tracking with you on that for sure.
• 39:49
  Speaker 3: Embodied knowledge is so, so important. You know, I talk
• 39:52
  Speaker 3: about it in terms of sensuous intelligence. But let's just
• 39:55
  Speaker 3: go back for a second, you know, since we've mentioned
• 39:58
  Speaker 3: the Yahwist a couple of times now. Think about that
• 40:00
  Speaker 3: Garden of Eden story. Human beings are made when God
• 40:04
  Speaker 3: breathes into soil the life that makes you a human being.
• 40:08
  Speaker 3: And the first thing that this God, who is a gardener,
• 40:11
  Speaker 3: does is say, take care of the garden. You can
• 40:14
  Speaker 3: look at that and say it's a punishment because if
• 40:16
  Speaker 3: you've ever done gardening or farming work, you know it's hard.
• 40:19
  Speaker 3: It's frustrating. You're constantly dealing with the fact that plants
• 40:23
  Speaker 3: and animals have their own schedules. They get sick. They die. And, oh,
• 40:26
  Speaker 3: it can be miserable. Tell me about working in a
• 40:30
  Speaker 3: garden when it's 95 degrees or 20 below or whatever.
• 40:33
  Speaker 3: It's not fun. But that's the point.
• 40:36
  Speaker 4: Or fighting with that chipmunk and squirrel and rabbit.
• 40:39
  Speaker 3: Exactly. But that's the point because God says– Take care
• 40:42
  Speaker 3: of the garden because then you're going to learn about
• 40:44
  Speaker 3: what it is for me to take care of you, right?
• 40:46
  Speaker 3: That's one thing. You're going to learn something about the
• 40:48
  Speaker 3: kind of world you're in, that it's fragile, it's vulnerable,
• 40:52
  Speaker 3: it's beautiful, it's fertile. It's a whole mix of things.
• 40:56
  Speaker 3: And you have to learn to bring your expectations to
• 40:58
  Speaker 3: meet the expectations of the creatures that you depend upon.
• 41:02
  Speaker 3: Because if you don't meet their expectations, you're going to die, right?
• 41:06
  Speaker 3: If you think that you can just disabuse or abuse plants,
• 41:11
  Speaker 3: that you can just do with plants whatever you want
• 41:13
  Speaker 3: or do with animals whatever you want and have them
• 41:16
  Speaker 3: live on your terms, you're just delusional. So God inviting
• 41:23
  Speaker 3: us to take care of the garden is a way
• 41:24
  Speaker 3: of giving us our fundamental vocation, which is nurture the places,
• 41:28
  Speaker 3: the communities of life that nurture you. And when you
• 41:30
  Speaker 3: do that, A, you discover how hard it is. You
• 41:33
  Speaker 3: discover how impatient you are. You discover that you have
• 41:35
  Speaker 3: skills that you could bring to this that would make
• 41:38
  Speaker 3: all of us flourish better because we've got creative capacities, right?
• 41:41
  Speaker 3: There's so much learning about the world and learning of
• 41:45
  Speaker 3: self and learning of God. That is a package deal. Yeah.
• 41:50
  Speaker 3: When you do that kind of labor of nurturing the
• 41:53
  Speaker 3: life that nurtures you. And the fact that we want
• 41:57
  Speaker 3: to promise people a friction free world where you don't
• 42:00
  Speaker 3: have to do any nurture of any kind is in
• 42:05
  Speaker 3: my view, just, almost dereliction of our humanity. I don't
• 42:11
  Speaker 3: know what the best word is, but it's a crucial
• 42:15
  Speaker 3: misjudgment about why we're alive in the first place. Yeah.
• 42:20
  Speaker 2: It's definitely, I think, a dehumanizing moment. And I would
• 42:23
  Speaker 2: just say that mutuality and those early chapters of Genesis,
• 42:29
  Speaker 2: what I usually think of is it removes any opportunity
• 42:35
  Speaker 2: for dominations from the dominion human is supposed to exercise.
• 42:41
  Speaker 2: The dominion we exercise is supposed to be within that
• 42:44
  Speaker 2: wheel of mutuality where we can't force these other things
• 42:49
  Speaker 2: just to go along with us without implications for ourselves.
• 42:54
  Speaker 2: And so that movement toward domination becomes far less interesting,
• 43:01
  Speaker 2: far less feasible.
• 43:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 43:03
  Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, I've got a take on that dominion stuff,
• 43:05
  Speaker 3: which I've come to, you know, in the last several years,
• 43:08
  Speaker 3: which I think has been a game changer for me anyway.
• 43:11
  Speaker 3: And that is, you know, we love that verse, subdue
• 43:13
  Speaker 3: and have dominion, because it suggests that we can control
• 43:16
  Speaker 3: the world, which is, again, ridiculous if you're an agricultural person, because,
• 43:20
  Speaker 3: you know, you can't dominate in the way of control.
• 43:23
  Speaker 3: You can't control plants. You can't control animals, except for
• 43:27
  Speaker 3: very limited ways. So what if we were thinking about
• 43:30
  Speaker 3: mastery in a completely different way? And I often start
• 43:34
  Speaker 3: with music. If you want to master a guitar or
• 43:38
  Speaker 3: a piano or something like that, it doesn't mean you
• 43:41
  Speaker 3: can do with the guitar or the piano, whatever you want.
• 43:44
  Speaker 3: You become a student of the guitar. You become a
• 43:46
  Speaker 3: student of, you know, and you practice like crazy and
• 43:50
  Speaker 3: you realize how impatient you are, or you realize that
• 43:54
  Speaker 3: you haven't got the skills yet. And so you have
• 43:55
  Speaker 3: to learn the skills. But when you master either of
• 43:59
  Speaker 3: those instruments, the guitar or the piano is magnificent. So
• 44:05
  Speaker 3: what your mastery has the effect of doing is making
• 44:09
  Speaker 3: what you master better than it could have been in
• 44:12
  Speaker 3: your imagination. Now imagine if we thought about mastery in
• 44:16
  Speaker 3: that way, in that early passage in Genesis 1, so
• 44:20
  Speaker 3: that all of the things, all the places, all the
• 44:23
  Speaker 3: creatures that we are supposed to master We're better because
• 44:27
  Speaker 3: of our engagement with them. It's the exact opposite of
• 44:30
  Speaker 3: what we often mean by subdue and have dominion, which
• 44:33
  Speaker 3: is we get to do with them whatever we want. No,
• 44:35
  Speaker 3: you don't. You have to become a student of another
• 44:38
  Speaker 3: person so that you can learn how to live best
• 44:41
  Speaker 3: with them so that their lives are made better because
• 44:45
  Speaker 3: you're engaging with them. That is a fundamentally different way.
• 44:51
  Speaker 3: I mean, you could do it with sports too. I mean,
• 44:53
  Speaker 3: to master a sport, You can't just do whatever you want.
• 44:58
  Speaker 3: You have to learn how to play basketball. And that
• 45:01
  Speaker 3: means spending a lot of time in the gym, having
• 45:05
  Speaker 3: a lot of pain because you screw up or you
• 45:08
  Speaker 3: fall or you hurt yourself or you hurt somebody else
• 45:10
  Speaker 3: or whatever, right? I mean, it's a vastly different way
• 45:14
  Speaker 3: of thinking about the human place in the world that
• 45:17
  Speaker 3: acknowledges our need of others and how being in need
• 45:22
  Speaker 3: of others is just potentially beautiful.
• 45:27
  Speaker 4: My mind immediately went to basketball when you were saying that,
• 45:30
  Speaker 4: in terms of mastery. Because you're a.
• 45:33
  Speaker 3: Duke basketball fan, right?
• 45:35
  Speaker 4: I'm a big basketball fan.
• 45:36
  Speaker 3: Duke basketball fan, right? Oh, Duke.
• 45:39
  Speaker 4: You know, I was the Michael Jordan guy in the day.
• 45:42
  Speaker 4: So honestly, I had a bit of an allergic reaction
• 45:45
  Speaker 4: to Duke because of that.
• 45:47
  Speaker 3: You're a Duke hater, aren't you?
• 45:48
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 45:50
  Speaker 4: In my age, I no longer have a hater, but
• 45:52
  Speaker 4: I definitely was.
• 45:53
  Speaker 3: I don't mind. I can talk to people who are
• 45:56
  Speaker 3: doing this.
• 45:57
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 45:57
  Speaker 4: You know, I mean, coach K, how can you go
• 45:59
  Speaker 4: against coach K? I know he's not there anymore, but
• 46:03
  Speaker 4: to me, that epitomizes the sort of thing you're talking
• 46:07
  Speaker 4: about from a coaching angle and the kinds of players
• 46:09
  Speaker 4: you produced. But to me, Michael's where I started with
• 46:12
  Speaker 4: Michael Jordan. And I think now to that same degree
• 46:16
  Speaker 4: from the now, the now defending champion Knicks, uh, Jalen Brunson,
• 46:21
  Speaker 4: it's that footwork. Everyone marvels at, how can this little
• 46:26
  Speaker 4: guy do all this?
• 46:27
  Speaker 3: It's that footwork.
• 46:28
  Speaker 4: And that footwork is a mastery. He's able to make
• 46:32
  Speaker 4: precise moves. He's able to get defenders to overcommit. And
• 46:37
  Speaker 4: then he gets himself to his own places. But that
• 46:40
  Speaker 4: kind of mastery is an artwork, right? It's less a science,
• 46:45
  Speaker 4: which is what we generally tend to tie to the
• 46:48
  Speaker 4: idea of dominion and control. And it's the artwork of
• 46:51
  Speaker 4: someone who knows the craft so well that in Brunson's case,
• 46:57
  Speaker 4: he can do whatever he wants with the ball. And
• 47:00
  Speaker 4: I think about that with gardening. You're absolutely right. It's
• 47:02
  Speaker 4: one of my favorite things to do is to garden,
• 47:04
  Speaker 4: but it is maddening at times. You think, why won't
• 47:07
  Speaker 4: that seed sprout? And in the process, you gain... acquaintance
• 47:16
  Speaker 4: with the land with the soil itself you stick your
• 47:18
  Speaker 4: hands in it you realize what kinds of things you
• 47:20
  Speaker 4: need to do to it to cultivate it but you
• 47:22
  Speaker 4: still don't control it right right but when we talk
• 47:25
  Speaker 4: about technology um i think this this is a this
• 47:29
  Speaker 4: is a helpful segue because we you both are right
• 47:33
  Speaker 4: that we tend to think of technology merely as a
• 47:36
  Speaker 4: tool but we don't ask often enough why was this
• 47:39
  Speaker 4: tool developed there's always a purpose for why this tool
• 47:44
  Speaker 4: and not some other hypothetical tool that could have been invented.
• 47:47
  Speaker 4: It's always to do something. Now, what is it we're
• 47:50
  Speaker 4: trying to do? And that doing is more often than not,
• 47:53
  Speaker 4: and it's in sepant form, to control. Now, it doesn't
• 47:58
  Speaker 4: mean we can't re-narrate. We see that in the Christian
• 48:01
  Speaker 4: scriptures and the Hebrew scriptures all the time, where the
• 48:06
  Speaker 4: phrase I like to use with my students is, God
• 48:08
  Speaker 4: sort of says, I can work with that. So that
• 48:11
  Speaker 4: you start with a garden and you end with a garden,
• 48:13
  Speaker 4: but the the garden and the city sort of intertwined
• 48:18
  Speaker 4: in a way that at the beginning, the city sits
• 48:20
  Speaker 4: in distinction from what God's doing with the garden. God
• 48:23
  Speaker 4: can work with that. And so we have to have
• 48:26
  Speaker 4: that same mentality of how can I work on that?
• 48:29
  Speaker 4: But it's gotta be, we've got to understand what's at play.
• 48:33
  Speaker 4: So for me, that transition now is to something that
• 48:36
  Speaker 4: you write about quite a bit. I actually just talked
• 48:39
  Speaker 4: about it in class this morning and students are students'
• 48:43
  Speaker 4: reaction is always, I don't know what in the world
• 48:45
  Speaker 4: that means. That's a big word. But I have them,
• 48:48
  Speaker 4: the word is the Anthropocene. I have my students watch
• 48:51
  Speaker 4: this documentary where, I forget who makes it, but Alicia
• 48:55
  Speaker 4: Vikander does the voiceover for it. Very little talking, primarily
• 49:00
  Speaker 4: just showing. I don't know if you've seen this.
• 49:02
  Speaker 3: I don't think I have.
• 49:04
  Speaker 4: Pretty incredible. And the theme of it really is control.
• 49:10
  Speaker 4: But it begins with these environmentalists in Kenya. And it
• 49:19
  Speaker 4: ends with the same environmentalist.
• 49:21
  Speaker 3: In Kenya.
• 49:21
  Speaker 4: What you realize is going on.
• 49:23
  Speaker 3: They're burning all the tusks. Is that the one?
• 49:24
  Speaker 4: That's the one.
• 49:25
  Speaker 3: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I have seen that one. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
• 49:29
  Speaker 4: And it's so anti-functional what they're doing right there. But
• 49:33
  Speaker 4: the symbol of them is so powerful.
• 49:35
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 49:37
  Speaker 4: For those listening who've probably not listened to that or
• 49:40
  Speaker 4: watched that documentary, the documentary is less the point, but
• 49:43
  Speaker 4: the Anthropocene. What is this Anthropocene? And I find with
• 49:48
  Speaker 4: my students, once they know, they realize, oh, we do
• 49:50
  Speaker 4: have to care. But in your own words, what would
• 49:53
  Speaker 4: you say it is and why should we care?
• 49:54
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, the Anthropocene is a very contested term, right?
• 49:59
  Speaker 3: So we should be clear about that. And when I
• 50:02
  Speaker 3: use that term, I'm meaning it to designate this fundamental
• 50:06
  Speaker 3: shift in the way that we think about world and
• 50:08
  Speaker 3: humanity's place within it. So for instance, in the Holocene period,
• 50:12
  Speaker 3: which is the roughly 10,000 year period in which modern,
• 50:16
  Speaker 3: not modern, just any civilization emerges, right? And a lot
• 50:21
  Speaker 3: of that has to do with agriculture. So think about
• 50:23
  Speaker 3: ancient Babylon, all Sumeria, all the way through, you know,
• 50:26
  Speaker 3: to Roman Empire, to American Empire, for that matter, British
• 50:32
  Speaker 3: Imperial Empire, right? These are all ways in which civilizations
• 50:36
  Speaker 3: have been able to capitalize on the regularity of nature,
• 50:39
  Speaker 3: the predictability of nature, right? That if you grew something,
• 50:44
  Speaker 3: you could count on the weather to support your growing
• 50:47
  Speaker 3: of it. And human beings were, you know, living within
• 50:52
  Speaker 3: natural systems and figuring out how to use those systems
• 50:55
  Speaker 3: to their own benefit. The Anthropocene represents this fundamental shift
• 51:00
  Speaker 3: because now we don't think about human beings as simply
• 51:03
  Speaker 3: living within natural systems. We think of ourselves as dictating
• 51:08
  Speaker 3: natural systems. And we've done that in lots of ways
• 51:11
  Speaker 3: through economic and technological development primarily. But the way that
• 51:17
  Speaker 3: a lot of people who talk in this area of
• 51:20
  Speaker 3: study They look at the Industrial Revolution as maybe the
• 51:24
  Speaker 3: beginning of the Anthropocene because that's when human beings started
• 51:27
  Speaker 3: burning a lot of coal, fossil fuels to run the
• 51:30
  Speaker 3: industrial processes that gave us beautiful cotton and steel and
• 51:34
  Speaker 3: railroads and all the rest. And this sort of new
• 51:38
  Speaker 3: energy system pumps all the CO2 into the atmosphere along
• 51:42
  Speaker 3: with methane and other kinds of things that are heat-trapping
• 51:46
  Speaker 3: gases that have now fundamentally altered weather systems. So that
• 51:51
  Speaker 3: the possibility that any weather system we have now is
• 51:55
  Speaker 3: a natural weather system, no, we shouldn't think that way anymore.
• 52:00
  Speaker 3: Because that is how powerful our ability has become to
• 52:04
  Speaker 3: alter the atmosphere. But not just the atmosphere. We're talking
• 52:08
  Speaker 3: about cellular life at the same time because we're now
• 52:11
  Speaker 3: genetically modifying life forms. We're thinking about cyborg development. There's
• 52:17
  Speaker 3: so many ways now where you start from cellular all
• 52:19
  Speaker 3: the way to atmospheric and everything in between. It bears
• 52:23
  Speaker 3: the imprint of human desire, human technology, whatever. And so
• 52:28
  Speaker 3: now the whole concept of nature has become irrelevant. We
• 52:32
  Speaker 3: don't know what's natural. Is any disease that we have
• 52:36
  Speaker 3: a natural disease any longer when we recognize that over
• 52:39
  Speaker 3: the last hundred or so years, we have dumped literally
• 52:43
  Speaker 3: billions of gallons of poison on our land and water?
• 52:47
  Speaker 3: What should we say about that? Do we know? I mean,
• 52:49
  Speaker 3: we don't know. And it's hard, obviously, if you're a
• 52:52
  Speaker 3: doctor or epidemiologist to figure out, well, where's the causation
• 52:56
  Speaker 3: between this chemical and this disease? It's impossible because you're
• 53:01
  Speaker 3: dealing with complex environments where you've literally got thousands of
• 53:06
  Speaker 3: chemical additives to our systems that didn't exist 100 years ago.
• 53:13
  Speaker 3: So this is what the Anthropocene presents. We have taken
• 53:16
  Speaker 3: literally the idea that human beings can do with the
• 53:18
  Speaker 3: world whatever they want. And the effect of all of
• 53:21
  Speaker 3: this is that it's creating a very unpredictable world. It's
• 53:27
  Speaker 3: creating unpredictable effects, right? So we're wondering, all this spraying
• 53:32
  Speaker 3: of glyphosate on our wheat, what is that doing to
• 53:36
  Speaker 3: carcinogen rates in human bodies? We're worried about what the
• 53:41
  Speaker 3: effects of all of these human interventions, what are the
• 53:44
  Speaker 3: effects on our bodies, on our natural systems or created systems,
• 53:49
  Speaker 3: whatever you want to call them. And we don't have
• 53:51
  Speaker 3: clear answers to that. And we don't know because ecosystems
• 53:55
  Speaker 3: are so complex. Weather systems are so complex. We don't
• 54:00
  Speaker 3: know how one intervention is going to have the desired effect.
• 54:05
  Speaker 3: So for instance, now many parts of the world are
• 54:08
  Speaker 3: becoming so hot that it's impossible to do labor in
• 54:12
  Speaker 3: them during the day. So go to places in India
• 54:15
  Speaker 3: where temperatures hit up to 50 degrees Celsius. A human
• 54:19
  Speaker 3: body cannot live in that. So you think, okay, well,
• 54:23
  Speaker 3: we'll just start early in the day and start again
• 54:26
  Speaker 3: late at night, and maybe that will help us.
• 54:29
  Speaker 4: Yeah, they stop in the middle of the day.
• 54:30
  Speaker 3: That's my family. Let's try to send up sort of
• 54:34
  Speaker 3: a cloud that we'll put up there, kind of, I
• 54:38
  Speaker 3: don't know what the chemical is that they use now,
• 54:41
  Speaker 3: as a kind of shield to block some of the
• 54:43
  Speaker 3: sun's radiation coming to earth. But you talk to meteorologists
• 54:47
  Speaker 3: and they say, are you crazy? We have no idea
• 54:50
  Speaker 3: what the effect would be if we create such a
• 54:53
  Speaker 3: cloud or a screen up in the atmosphere over India,
• 54:56
  Speaker 3: which they will move because weather patterns, right? There are
• 55:01
  Speaker 3: all kinds of streams in our atmosphere that go in
• 55:03
  Speaker 3: all sorts of directions. What if we bring the cloud
• 55:06
  Speaker 3: in the wrong place or, We maybe block some of
• 55:09
  Speaker 3: the sun's radiation here that then sets off a huge
• 55:13
  Speaker 3: tsunami somewhere else. So the complexity of this earth that
• 55:19
  Speaker 3: we have claimed to master is now really going to
• 55:23
  Speaker 3: hurt us. But the question that the Anthropocene poses, you
• 55:28
  Speaker 3: can't go back. How do you go back? So now
• 55:33
  Speaker 3: we're effectively going to be something like managers of the
• 55:37
  Speaker 3: earth systems because we have taken so much control of
• 55:41
  Speaker 3: the earth and its processes. And we don't know what
• 55:45
  Speaker 3: we're doing. It's like, we've put a kid in a
• 55:47
  Speaker 3: speeding car and you want to say, step on the brake,
• 55:50
  Speaker 3: but there is no break. So now what do you do?
• 55:56
  Speaker 4: Right?
• 55:56
  Speaker 3: You got to keep going fast. Do you build a
• 55:59
  Speaker 3: new road for this kid so that they won't likely crash?
• 56:03
  Speaker 3: Do you give them better steering mechanisms? But you're not
• 56:06
  Speaker 3: going to slow the car down because the brake is gone.
• 56:10
  Speaker 3: And the kid might be saying, this is fun. Let's
• 56:13
  Speaker 3: go even faster. That's Elon Musk.
• 56:22
  Speaker 2: Ashish, I know you wanted to ask a question about,
• 56:24
  Speaker 2: you know, sort of leaving this off and maybe this
• 56:28
  Speaker 2: will be the last question we can get to because
• 56:30
  Speaker 2: we're almost out of time, but the question related to
• 56:33
  Speaker 2: life and, um, and moving that into politics and maybe
• 56:37
  Speaker 2: connecting some, um, threads between, uh, some of our political
• 56:41
  Speaker 2: views and the sort of intertwined nature that we've been
• 56:46
  Speaker 2: exploring this episode. So why don't you go ahead and
• 56:48
  Speaker 2: we'll end with this one. And, um, but I think
• 56:50
  Speaker 2: it's an important point.
• 56:51
  Speaker 3: I don't want to lose it. Okay. You want me
• 56:55
  Speaker 3: just to go or you want to stay?
• 56:57
  Speaker 4: Oh, do you want me to, to flesh out?
• 57:00
  Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead.
• 57:02
  Speaker 4: For sure. So it's no secret to anyone that many Christians,
• 57:09
  Speaker 4: especially in the U.S., even in certain regions of Canada,
• 57:13
  Speaker 4: in what they call the Bible Belt in the West,
• 57:18
  Speaker 4: are fairly one-dimensional in their engagement with the political realm.
• 57:24
  Speaker 4: And yet we're all political citizens in the broadest sense.
• 57:28
  Speaker 4: We live intertangled lives. Our decisions impact each other. We
• 57:32
  Speaker 4: see this in the form of industrial and economic and
• 57:36
  Speaker 4: environmental effects that you're talking about. And yet only one
• 57:43
  Speaker 4: issue seems to really raise the blood pressure. And even then,
• 57:48
  Speaker 4: one might argue, not even in the most informed way,
• 57:52
  Speaker 4: to put it in the best possible way. And yet
• 57:57
  Speaker 4: here we are, we've spent almost an hour talking about
• 58:00
  Speaker 4: the deep, interpenetrating issues involved as people who take nature
• 58:07
  Speaker 4: not just to be nature but god's creation creation not
• 58:09
  Speaker 4: just to be something outside of us but around us
• 58:12
  Speaker 4: and within us that we are a part of and
• 58:17
  Speaker 4: yet we don't seem to have the appetite to let
• 58:21
  Speaker 4: that be informative in our politics right we care about
• 58:24
  Speaker 4: life in one sense but not in this way that
• 58:27
  Speaker 4: affects everybody such that We even have a president in
• 58:31
  Speaker 4: office in his second term now where both of his
• 58:34
  Speaker 4: terms began with him separating from environmental efforts that previous
• 58:42
  Speaker 4: administrations had, I think rightfully, whether perfectly or not is
• 58:46
  Speaker 4: another story, but rightfully had entered us into. What would
• 58:50
  Speaker 4: you say, what do you say to Christians in this environment?
• 58:56
  Speaker 4: What would you want to say to our audience?
• 58:59
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 59:00
  Speaker 4: How do you navigate?
• 59:01
  Speaker 3: Well, I would want to have a lot of time
• 59:03
  Speaker 3: to unpack things because there's obviously a lot of complex
• 59:06
  Speaker 3: issues on the table here. And I think one of
• 59:08
  Speaker 3: the things that I would do right off... off is say,
• 59:10
  Speaker 3: let's be clear about what we mean when we're talking
• 59:13
  Speaker 3: about questions of abortion. Are we pro-baby or are we pro-life?
• 59:20
  Speaker 3: And it seems to me that a lot of people
• 59:22
  Speaker 3: who are pro-baby are not pro-life. because of the thing
• 59:27
  Speaker 3: that we were talking about earlier, which is to assume
• 59:29
  Speaker 3: that a person is a discrete single thing that lives
• 59:32
  Speaker 3: by itself. And it doesn't, right? A baby, to be
• 59:37
  Speaker 3: a healthy human being, needs clean water, clean air, nutritious food.
• 59:43
  Speaker 3: If you need those things, you need good water management,
• 59:47
  Speaker 3: you need soil fertility, you need animal and plant health,
• 59:51
  Speaker 3: you need vibrant agricultural communities, you need to make sure
• 59:54
  Speaker 3: that kids when they get older are getting nutrition, right?
• 59:58
  Speaker 3: And so there is this awful contradiction between saying we
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 3: want to make sure that babies are protected. At the
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 3: same time, we put in place legislation that takes away
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 3: lunch programs because we don't think it's important that we
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 3: feed the kids that are now alive or that we
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 3: don't come alongside the mothers or the families that are
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 3: trying to raise these kids under incredibly difficult economic So
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 3: what we've done is we've taken that neoliberal imagination and
• 1:00:28
  Speaker 3: just even further, right, made it narrow so that the
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 3: only thing that matters is the baby's birth. And that
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 3: to me is a real tragedy. And I think it's
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 3: also a profoundly, and this is where things get a
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 3: little more interesting, anti-Christian way of thinking. Because what is
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 3: very clear when you look at scripture is that God's
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 3: deal with what we call God's salvation story, has never
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 3: been restricted to just people, let alone individuals. Right? Read
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 3: the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, God's covenant, it's with people, land, animals, plants,
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 3: the whole creation. So much so that if the land
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 3: is suffering, right, it's a signal that your relationship with
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 3: God is broken. And in the same thing in the
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 3: New Testaments, Which, you know, a lot of Christians, they
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 3: get surprised because they think that, you know, the New
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 3: Testament doesn't do all that Old Testament creation stuff. That
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 3: is simply false, right? Look at the very first hymn
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 3: that Christians wrote to make sense of who they believe
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 3: Jesus was and why Jesus mattered for them and for
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 3: the world around them. It's in Colossians 1, 15 to 20,
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 3: where they say Christ is the icon of the invisible God.
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 3: And through Jesus, all things are created. For Christ, all
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 3: things are created. and in Christ all things hold together,
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 3: and that God, through Christ's cross, was reconciling to himself
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 3: all things in heaven and on earth. The vision that
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 3: the early Christians started with had nothing to do with
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 3: the salvation of your individual soul. It had to do
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 3: with the redemption and the reconciliation of the whole of
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 3: creaturely life. And we could get into this in a
• 1:02:17
  Speaker 3: lot more detail if people were interested, but that's the
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 3: Christian story. N.T. Wright, I think, has done a real
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 3: service by hitting this point again and again where he
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 3: says the story is not creation, fall, redemption, heaven, and
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 3: meaning by heaven something like your souls escape from earth
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 3: to go somewhere else. No, the biblical story is creation, fall, redemption,
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 3: new creation. And that new creation is about the redemption
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 3: of this created world because heaven has never been closed
• 1:02:49
  Speaker 3: to creaturely life. Heaven is only closed to the sinful
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 3: ways that people have for destroying, degrading, abandoning life. And
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 3: that's the crucial thing. It's a whole package deal. If
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 3: it's not the whole creation that gets saved, none of
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 3: it gets saved. And it's a Christian fantasy to think
• 1:03:09
  Speaker 3: that God would hate the world that God has only
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 3: loved because the only thing that God cares about is
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 3: my individual puny soul. And that's a huge, I think, distortion.
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 3: of what the scripture story is about. That's great. Yeah.
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 2: I think of Romans 8, when you go through that,
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 2: you know, the earth is groaning for what? For the
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 2: glorification of the sons of God, I think is what
• 1:03:37
  Speaker 2: the phrasing there. And the idea is that as human,
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 2: as they wait on humans to get their act together,
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 2: you know, the creation is groaning.
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 3: Because we're subjecting creation to futility.
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 2: Right that's right that's right i mean it's all about
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 2: in some ways it's not like all about us in
• 1:03:55
  Speaker 2: a bad way but it is really all about us
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 2: like we we're the ones who have done this and
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 2: so now all of creation is waiting for god to
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 2: glorify us so that it can move into its glorification
• 1:04:09
  Speaker 2: as well it'll carry forward with us um And so
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 2: a really beautiful way to put that. Norm, I really
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 2: appreciate you being on the show today.
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it's great to talk with you both.
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah, we're out of time, but just really fascinating stuff.
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 2: I've always enjoyed your work. Like I said, he's kind
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 2: of a fan. He uses your stuff in class and
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 2: that kind of thing. And we just really are excited
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 2: to have you come on the show. So thank you
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 2: very much.
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 3: All right. Thank you so much.
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 2: Hey, everybody. Thanks for sticking with us. We'll catch you
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 2: on the next episode of Thinking Christian.
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 3: Take care.
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 1: Just want to take a second to thank the team
• 1:04:43
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• 1:04:45
  Speaker 1: Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio.com, you'll find
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 1: dozens of other faith-centered podcasts in their network. They've got
• 1:04:52
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