Speaker 1: Josh Pauling, thank you for joining me on a commitment
Speaker 1: to reality.
Speaker 2: Hey, Dave, great to be with you. Thank you.
Speaker 1: I'd like to begin the podcast the same way that
Speaker 1: you began the book. You quote Wendell Berry, you say,
Speaker 1: it is easy for me to imagine that the next
Speaker 1: great division of the world will be between people who
Speaker 1: wish to live as creatures and people who wish to
Speaker 1: live as machines. I think about that a lot. I
Speaker 1: think that we are at an inflection point in human history.
Speaker 1: And one of the reasons I think about it a
Speaker 1: lot is I wonder am I being alarmist or am
Speaker 1: I living in reality? And that's one of the reasons
Speaker 1: that I became convinced that the need for a podcast
Speaker 1: like this where we consistently talk about making a commitment
Speaker 1: to reality is important. And as I was thinking about it,
Speaker 1: I started to think about the old joke about a
Speaker 1: man at a party and he's talking to a woman
Speaker 1: and he says, hey, would you sleep with me for
Speaker 1: a million dollars? And the woman says, you know, for
Speaker 1: a million dollars, I think I would, And he says, okay,
Speaker 1: what about fifty? It said fifty dollars? What kind of
Speaker 1: a woman, do you think I am? He says, well,
Speaker 1: we've already established that. Now we're just haggling over the price.
Speaker 1: And I think that's a joke, but it could also
Speaker 1: act as a parable, a parable for our principles. And
Speaker 1: when we cease being committed to something, it's almost as
Speaker 1: though we become commodified when it comes to the practices
Speaker 1: that we really commit ourselves to. And I wonder if
Speaker 1: for the sake of efficiency, for the sake of progress money,
Speaker 1: have we done that when it comes to reality and
Speaker 1: our humanity? I mean, your book is called are we
Speaker 1: all cyborgs now? Reclaiming our humanity from the machine? Have
Speaker 1: we done that to reality?
Speaker 2: That's a great, great opener. I really like that, and
Speaker 2: I think in some ways we have already made that bargain.
Speaker 2: And it's not a coincidence that many of the philosophers
Speaker 2: of technology have referred to technological trade offs as a
Speaker 2: Faustian bargain, as a deal where we sort of sell
Speaker 2: our soul to the devil in exchange for efficiency, productivity, measurability, quantification,
Speaker 2: things like that. Right, I think that's really the question
Speaker 2: we need to be asking. Have we already crossed that
Speaker 2: threshold into viewing ourselves as machines and treating others as
Speaker 2: machines or objects. As you said, we tend to commodify ourselves.
Speaker 2: So yeah, I really like that as a starting point
Speaker 2: to a launching off point, and that's really where we
Speaker 2: start the book. Like I said, have we already sort
Speaker 2: of crept into a cyborg existence? We call it the
Speaker 2: cyborg creep right, where it just sort of little by little,
Speaker 2: like you said, haggling over now right in the joke
Speaker 2: you gave, that creep has already sort of started, right,
Speaker 2: and it's underway, whether we have a chip in our brain, right,
Speaker 2: whether we've actually literally merged with technology or not. Living
Speaker 2: in the digital age, it's so easy just to creep
Speaker 2: into that cyborg mindset and to really live through our
Speaker 2: machines in a way that in prior eras wasn't possible.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's also a part where you talk about how
Speaker 1: AI sentience. You know, we're all so fascinated or concerned
Speaker 1: or intrigued, whatever word you want to use with Let's say,
Speaker 1: let's take chat, GBT and all of these large language models.
Speaker 1: Do they pass the Turing test? Like are they conscious?
Speaker 1: Do they have sentience, and I think that you made
Speaker 1: a really important distinction, that that's a distraction. The real
Speaker 1: question is that whether machines can think? But what about
Speaker 1: when humans start living like machines?
Speaker 2: Mm hmm. Yeah, And this is not a new question.
Speaker 2: This is one that we draw on a lot of
Speaker 2: philosophers of technology in the book. And one of the
Speaker 2: stories I love the best is from Joseph Weisenbaum in
Speaker 2: the sixties, the MIT professor who was on the front
Speaker 2: edge of computer science and artificial intelligence as that was
Speaker 2: really emerging as a movement in the fifties and sixties,
Speaker 2: and he created what many have called the first chatbot,
Speaker 2: a program called Eliza, which could simulate human conversation in
Speaker 2: sort of a psychiatrist type setting, and he had people
Speaker 2: testing it at MIT and including his secretary, and at
Speaker 2: one point a secretary asked him to leave the room
Speaker 2: so that she could continue her conversation with Eliza, and
Speaker 2: Weisenbaum really just became so distraught over what was happening
Speaker 2: with this very basic chatbot program. People were humanizing it, right,
Speaker 2: and so he really became a canary in the coal mine.
Speaker 2: Wrote a great book called a Computer Power and Human Reason,
Speaker 2: in which he lays out his argument that we need
Speaker 2: to stop using this machine template to think about ourselves
Speaker 2: because just as you said, we end up humanizing our
Speaker 2: machines and mechanizing our elves. Right, And so he really
Speaker 2: is one of the key figures we use in the book,
Speaker 2: and he has a lot to offer in his way
Speaker 2: of thinking about this from being on the front lines
Speaker 2: of this AI movement, if we could call it that,
Speaker 2: as it emerged to becoming one of the profits of
Speaker 2: warning about what would happen as we continually sort of
Speaker 2: think of ourselves through the machine template. And you got
Speaker 2: to remember he's doing this in the sixties, long before
Speaker 2: we all carried around a supercomputer in our pocket, right,
Speaker 2: long before these large language models had the capabilities they
Speaker 2: have today. But the same basic problems problem remains.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I mean even since you wrote this book,
Speaker 1: I mean when was it officially published August of twenty four,
Speaker 1: so it's old news by this point. I mean, just
Speaker 1: think about everything that you discussed in the book and
Speaker 1: how much the technological world has already changed in less
Speaker 1: than two years. And is this something that you're keeping
Speaker 1: up with or sure? Obviously for the book.
Speaker 2: Robin, my co author, Robin Phillips and I were very
Speaker 2: much keeping up with this day to day, all the
Speaker 2: new articles that are coming out. We've continued to stay
Speaker 2: up as much as we can, but it's also important
Speaker 2: to take a little break from that type of intense research.
Speaker 2: And really it's easy to get consumed by these topics
Speaker 2: and something that we want to try to avoid, especially
Speaker 2: with the themes we're writing about. So yeah, we've kept
Speaker 2: up with them closely, and it's been interesting to see
Speaker 2: what's happened since the book. For sure. When we wrote
Speaker 2: the book, the latest model was chat GPT four O
Speaker 2: that had just been released, and that O stands for omni,
Speaker 2: which I think is a pretty telling thing. Especially within
Speaker 2: the book, we refer to digital devices as omni tools,
Speaker 2: as things that can do way more than prior technologies
Speaker 2: and tools could which were tended to be single use tools, right,
Speaker 2: static things, whereas digital devices tend to be much more dynamic,
Speaker 2: which also has effects on how they impact us. So yeah,
Speaker 2: lots has changed since the book, But the way we
Speaker 2: frame the book is that, look, we want to provide
Speaker 2: a framework for thinking about these things that will stand
Speaker 2: the test of time, and I think the framework is
Speaker 2: holding up well, and a lot of the things that
Speaker 2: we were sort of warning about and wagering on are
Speaker 2: coming to the fore I think, and coming to fruition.
Speaker 2: Of course, we'll be wrong on some matters, but the
Speaker 2: overriding thing is the framework, Right, how do we think
Speaker 2: about these technological questions, because what's not going to change
Speaker 2: is our humanity, our understanding of what it means to
Speaker 2: be a human, our understanding of God and the world.
Speaker 2: And if we can ground the discussions there, then you
Speaker 2: know a book will be durable and be able to
Speaker 2: handle whatever comes in the tech future.
Speaker 1: The book is incredible. It's like a field guide to
Speaker 1: working through these issues because in a lot of ways
Speaker 1: you point to the past, right, and we'll get to
Speaker 1: that as we go forward. But you talk about this
Speaker 1: technology and how it's changing, and how it's an omni tool,
Speaker 1: how it's so much different than prior versions of technology
Speaker 1: that our world came into contact with. How is this
Speaker 1: digitization and on the tool? How is it different? How
Speaker 1: is it a reality mediating mechanism as you call it?
Speaker 2: Yeah, great question. People will say, well, we've had technological
Speaker 2: changes before, isn't this just you know, the same thing basically,
Speaker 2: And I understand the point, but I really think it's
Speaker 2: a fairly shallow perspective and one that we can push
Speaker 2: back on in several areas. For one, as I've already
Speaker 2: sort of hinted at, prior technologies tended to be static
Speaker 2: in their use and tended to be very mechanical and observable,
Speaker 2: intuitive right by nature. Think of technologies of the Industrial revolution.
Speaker 2: You have gears and pulleys and levers, and you can
Speaker 2: sort of see how those things work. Digital technologies are hidden,
Speaker 2: they're obscured, and zeros and ones. They're almost like magic.
Speaker 2: And many philosophers of technology have pointed this out that
Speaker 2: when technology gets sufficiently complex, it's really indistinguishable from magic.
Speaker 2: Very few of us know how our smokephone works. We
Speaker 2: can't really peel back the layers in a way that's
Speaker 2: easy to understand. Prior technologies you could do that in
Speaker 2: an easier way. Also, prior technologies tended to still involve
Speaker 2: the body in a more central way. I think of
Speaker 2: tools in a workshop, or even a car. You still
Speaker 2: traditionally have had to engage your body with the car,
Speaker 2: use your feet for the brakes, and use your hand
Speaker 2: with the steering wheel and so forth right. Digital technologies
Speaker 2: are disembodying by their very nature. They are by sort
Speaker 2: of default, separating you from your body or allowing your ideas,
Speaker 2: your voice, your image to transport itself beyond your bodily presence.
Speaker 2: So that's different. And then perhaps the biggest difference, they
Speaker 2: go with us everywhere. They're ubiquitous. When I'm done using
Speaker 2: a hammer in my workshop to make furniture, a saw
Speaker 2: or chisel or even a table saw, right, an electricified tool,
Speaker 2: it stays there and I put the tool down or
Speaker 2: I leave the tool. The digital goes with us and
Speaker 2: it talks back in a way that prior technologies don't.
Speaker 2: And those types of things have huge effects on our attention,
Speaker 2: our desires, and are really designed purposefully. Right. This is
Speaker 2: called persuasive design by Silicon Valley. I call it attention hacking.
Speaker 2: My hammer isn't designed with persuasive design to sort of
Speaker 2: hack my attention. It's designed for a specific task and
Speaker 2: then I put it down and I'm done. Digital devices
Speaker 2: are not that way. So we need to really recognize
Speaker 2: that to start with that these things are different. Whether
Speaker 2: they're categorically different or not. We could have an argument
Speaker 2: about but certainly they're significantly different and have many more
Speaker 2: effects on our human capacities and abilities.
Speaker 1: So you just hinted at something, and I think, if
Speaker 1: it's not the first chapter in the book that you wrote,
Speaker 1: it's very near to it. And I have to be
Speaker 1: honest with you. When I got to it, I pick
Speaker 1: up this book. I was so excited when I got
Speaker 1: when Robin sent it over, I was like, Oh, I
Speaker 1: can't wait to dive into this. And I open the
Speaker 1: book and it starts with a chapter by you on woodworking,
Speaker 1: and I thought, I feel like I have to read
Speaker 1: it because it's the first chapter, but I don't want to.
Speaker 1: This doesn't sound interesting, this doesn't sound relevant. And yet,
Speaker 1: if you couldn't have set the stage for the issue
Speaker 1: in a better way, what has woodworking taught you about
Speaker 1: reality and the importance of being embodied?
Speaker 2: We use that chapter as a launching off point just
Speaker 2: to reconnect us to what it means to be embodied beings, right,
Speaker 2: and to bump up against the limits of reality through
Speaker 2: a trade. You know, for me it's woodworking, for other
Speaker 2: people it might be exercise. Right, There's all sorts of
Speaker 2: ways that we bump up against the limits of reality,
Speaker 2: and if we don't do that, we start to have
Speaker 2: a false idea of ourselves and our autonomy and our
Speaker 2: control and what I already said, sort of the disembodied
Speaker 2: way we think about ourselves in the digital world. So
Speaker 2: woodworking also bumps up against technological questions like I can
Speaker 2: choose to use hand tools or I can choose to
Speaker 2: use power tools. When I use hand tools, I'm oriented
Speaker 2: to the work differently than I am want to use
Speaker 2: power tools. If I'm using handplanes to flatten stock, then
Speaker 2: I need to pay attention to the grain. I need
Speaker 2: to almost get in a state of flow, as many
Speaker 2: people call it, when I'm planing the wood and sort
Speaker 2: of getting into a rhythm with my body and listening
Speaker 2: with my ears to the handplane and the noise it's
Speaker 2: making over the wood, and I'm feeling with my hands
Speaker 2: any rough spots sort of chatter it's called where the
Speaker 2: plane gets stuck. That creates a whole sense of engagement
Speaker 2: with my process, sort of a relationship to the wood
Speaker 2: that we might even say is intimate to a certain degree.
Speaker 2: When I use a power tool like a planer to
Speaker 2: surface wood, I plug it in, I hit the button,
Speaker 2: and I set the depth and I run it through
Speaker 2: and that's amazing. It's an amazing technology and I use it.
Speaker 2: But I'd be lying if I said it didn't orient
Speaker 2: me differently to the work. I don't have to pay
Speaker 2: attention to the grain. I just push it on through.
Speaker 2: And when I'm making big woodworking projects, I'm very glad
Speaker 2: I have the planer because it speeds up my ability
Speaker 2: to actually turn a profit. But that type of technological
Speaker 2: dilemma we have all over our lives. Right, Maybe another
Speaker 2: good way to think about it would be a guy
Speaker 2: who goes to the forest with an axe to cut
Speaker 2: down trees and clear the forest, versus a guy who
Speaker 2: goes with a bulldozer in a logging truck. Right, that
Speaker 2: different tool, that different technology that bringing with him is
Speaker 2: going to orient him to the forest differently. It's going
Speaker 2: to be much easier to clear cut the forest with
Speaker 2: a bulldozer and a logging truck. He might be a
Speaker 2: little more careful with the acts because it takes much
Speaker 2: more sweat and labor physical labor in the process of
Speaker 2: chopping down trees. So with that then in mind, then
Speaker 2: we can launch off into the digital world. Right, what
Speaker 2: are the trade offs? How are digital technologies orienting me
Speaker 2: to the world and even to my perception of myself. Right,
Speaker 2: the amount of power I have over nature and over
Speaker 2: reality things like that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, as as you say, I mean it leads us
Speaker 1: into a gnostic like disembodied state. And when we're constantly
Speaker 1: we just were stuck between our ears. Everything is James K.
Speaker 1: Smith says. I quote him all the time when it
Speaker 1: comes to this, We've we've become heads on sticks, and
Speaker 1: this is in every realm. I mean, unfortunately it creeps
Speaker 1: into theology.
Speaker 2: And worship practices. Yep, it's all related.
Speaker 1: Oh we're getting there later, trust me. But how did
Speaker 1: our body become the enemy of the story? I mean,
Speaker 1: it really feels like in our modern era we're trying
Speaker 1: to supersede our physical nature. I mean, how did our
Speaker 1: physical body become the antagonist of our tail?
Speaker 2: Oh that's a great question, and we could give a
Speaker 2: long answer for this, for sure, but I'll try to
Speaker 2: hit on some highlights. I think it's going to include
Speaker 2: the history of ideas and philosophy, right, sort of an
Speaker 2: intellectual history, but it's also going to be a history
Speaker 2: of our material environments, our inventions, our habits, our technologies,
Speaker 2: and those two things interplay and interrelate to create what
Speaker 2: Charles Taylor calls a social imaginary or Peter Berger calls
Speaker 2: plausibility structures. So our ideas and our material culture together
Speaker 2: make things seem right, make things seem possible, make things
Speaker 2: seem desirable. So if we just highlight a few things
Speaker 2: along the way in the realm of ideas, we do
Speaker 2: have some antipathy to the body in ancient philosophy, certain
Speaker 2: strains of Greek thoughts or gnosticism and things like that,
Speaker 2: where the body is seen as really the anim me,
Speaker 2: something to transcend and get out of, sort of the
Speaker 2: prison house of the soul. And of course that's not
Speaker 2: in all Greek philosophy. I don't want to simplify things there,
Speaker 2: but there are some strains where the body there's an
Speaker 2: antipathy to the body. So that would be one aspect.
Speaker 2: Then we could speed up to the enlightenment and see
Speaker 2: a thinker like Descartes. I think therefore I am where
Speaker 2: again sort of that brain on a stick mentality really
Speaker 2: creeps in. Further, those would again just be a few
Speaker 2: highlights along the way in the realm of ideas. Maybe
Speaker 2: let's take a minute and talk about the material side though,
Speaker 2: when it comes to material environments and inventions, If we
Speaker 2: think about the development of technologies over time, in many
Speaker 2: ways they have increased our power over nature and in
Speaker 2: some ways made physical strength less important to survival, and
Speaker 2: by doing that that changes the way you think about
Speaker 2: your relationship to the world. The classic examples to compare
Speaker 2: a medieval person to a modern person, the medieval person's
Speaker 2: experience of nature and bumping up against the limits of reality,
Speaker 2: and then comparing to a modern person. So medieval person's
Speaker 2: experience of the weather is going to be much more primal,
Speaker 2: if I could put it that way. You're going to
Speaker 2: experience the ups and downs of temperature in ways that
Speaker 2: we don't today. So we've insulated ourselves from that in
Speaker 2: homes and in cars and all sorts of things. And
Speaker 2: that weather is not only going to be physically felt,
Speaker 2: but it's going to have a huge impact on your livelihood.
Speaker 2: As a medieval person, if there's a famine, will then
Speaker 2: there go your crops. So you were much more dependent
Speaker 2: on natural rhythms and natural forces, and that oriented you
Speaker 2: to the world as a creature, as a creature of God.
Speaker 2: Now just fast forward to today, modern person, we insulate
Speaker 2: ourselves from the weather, as we already said, in highly
Speaker 2: insulated homes, and when we want to get warm or
Speaker 2: stay cool, we just push a button on the AC unit,
Speaker 2: or maybe on our phone. We just slide or tap
Speaker 2: and change the temperature in our home to stay warm.
Speaker 2: In medieval times, you had a lot more labor to do, right,
Speaker 2: You had to chop the wood, you had to light
Speaker 2: the fire and deal with the consequences of that in
Speaker 2: your home or your small shed, basically whatever you were
Speaker 2: living in. Now we could go on transportation. The medieval
Speaker 2: person was bound to his local community. We have cars
Speaker 2: and planes, right, things that allow us to transcend our
Speaker 2: location of ways that prior generations didn't. And again that
Speaker 2: changes the way we think about ourselves, the world, and
Speaker 2: even God. The medieval person it was easier for them
Speaker 2: to view themselves as a creature that was embedded in
Speaker 2: a community, that was bound to other people in ways
Speaker 2: that we don't. Right. We think of ourselves as autonomous
Speaker 2: in control and not as creatures, right, but as really
Speaker 2: self creators. So that would be a short answer to
Speaker 2: your question. I know we could go on and on there,
Speaker 2: but I don't know if you have any rabbit trails
Speaker 2: you want to run down there.
Speaker 1: Oh, there's so many. Preparing for this conversation was difficult
Speaker 1: because the book it's just so rich and so deep,
Speaker 1: and there's so many tributaries that you could go down.
Speaker 2: That's sort of the point of the book is to
Speaker 2: bring an interdisciplinary approach and to show how all these
Speaker 2: things are connected. That's where a lot of books on
Speaker 2: these topics sort of focus on one aspect. We wanted
Speaker 2: to show how this really relates to everything that.
Speaker 1: Really functions as a field guide to reality and how
Speaker 1: you can commit to it in a sense, not not
Speaker 1: to just go back to the theme of the podcast
Speaker 1: over and over. I mean, there's so much in here,
Speaker 1: and one of the things that really caught me was
Speaker 1: your personal practices and how they create freedom for you
Speaker 1: to live an embodied life. One you say, you don't
Speaker 1: have internet at home.
Speaker 2: So this has been really a long term commitment for
Speaker 2: me and my family. So right now I'm not at home.
Speaker 2: We're doing this from church where I work, and when
Speaker 2: I was a teacher for many years that was our
Speaker 2: practice as well to not have internet at home. So
Speaker 2: when we need to do things on the internet for
Speaker 2: many years while I still had my wife and I
Speaker 2: still had flip phones. Is we basically jot down a
Speaker 2: list of things that we want to do on the internet.
Speaker 2: We'd go to the library or I'd do it at
Speaker 2: school and then pronounce things to do at home or whatever.
Speaker 2: So that's been our approach for a long time. We
Speaker 2: do have smartphones now. I admit I've had a smartphone
Speaker 2: since COVID. I guess it was maybe a little bit
Speaker 2: before my wife and I did get smartphones at that point.
Speaker 2: But I will say, man, you can see its effects
Speaker 2: even when you know what it does. It's just so
Speaker 2: hard at tension spans and things. It just becomes the
Speaker 2: default thing to do. We're actually thinking about purchasing one
Speaker 2: of these newer options that have emerged where trying to
Speaker 2: sort of return to sort of a dumb phone. There's
Speaker 2: a lot of good options out there for folks in
Speaker 2: this realm. The light phone, the yse phone, punked. There's
Speaker 2: a whole bunch of companies that are trying to provide
Speaker 2: a product that allows you to return the phone to
Speaker 2: the tool lane right rather than the omni toool lane.
Speaker 2: But that could be a hold on the rabbit trail there.
Speaker 2: So now when we need the Internet, we can hotspot
Speaker 2: our phones, but even that is a barrier to entry,
Speaker 2: a small barrier. The computer's default setting is that it's
Speaker 2: off in our home and it's not connected to the internet.
Speaker 2: So if we need to do something with the computer,
Speaker 2: but then we open the computer and turn it on.
Speaker 2: If we need to use the Internet, then we would
Speaker 2: hotspot our phone and connect our laptop to the phone.
Speaker 2: So I do have access to the Internet at home
Speaker 2: now when I need it, But again I think it's
Speaker 2: important to have some barriers to entry for people. This
Speaker 2: is just a classic strategy of habits and habit formation.
Speaker 2: James Clear talks about this and atomic habits. The things
Speaker 2: you want to create for good habits, you want to
Speaker 2: lower the barrier of entry towards and things that you
Speaker 2: want to avoid or eliminate. You raise the barrier to
Speaker 2: entry to So that's the way we do that with
Speaker 2: the relation to the Internet. We just raise the barrier
Speaker 2: a little bit. We make it harder to enter that realm,
Speaker 2: and we make things that we want to do, write
Speaker 2: better things easier to enter. And that principle just translates
Speaker 2: all over the place. In the home where do you
Speaker 2: keep your devices? Are there parts of your home that
Speaker 2: you don't allow them to go? What default activities do
Speaker 2: you want you and your children to do? What should
Speaker 2: it be easier to turn on right? Should it be
Speaker 2: easier to turn on the TV or a device? Or
Speaker 2: should be easier to play board games right? Or read
Speaker 2: books or play the piano, those types of things.
Speaker 1: The word that keeps coming through my mind as you're
Speaker 1: talking is just intentionality. That's really like being intentional with
Speaker 1: your lives. Because with the phone, I mean, how many
Speaker 1: times have you heard somebody say, oh, I picked up
Speaker 1: my phone and an hour later I was still just
Speaker 1: sitting there scrolling through.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's we just get steamrolled. It's not a
Speaker 2: matter of willpower. Right. These things are designed purposely to
Speaker 2: hacker attention. Right, they're dopamine dispensers and all of that.
Speaker 2: Then it's a poll. Peter Limberger talks about it as
Speaker 2: a gravitational poll. To fight that. The first thing is
Speaker 2: again to be intentional, to realize that it's a battle,
Speaker 2: and then to structure your life in such a way
Speaker 2: that you can nudge yourself to better things right and
Speaker 2: resist the nudges of the device. Yeah, intentionality is so
Speaker 2: key here, and the way we mostly orient to technology
Speaker 2: is we just go along with it. That's sort of
Speaker 2: our default set. The progress. You know, Newest is the greatest,
Speaker 2: Latest is greatest. If this, if we can do something technologically,
Speaker 2: we should, It's called the technological imperative. We totally need
Speaker 2: to push back on that and really develop a personal
Speaker 2: philosophy of technology. Newcour talks about this in digital minimalism.
Speaker 2: That's the first step to realize the problem and develop
Speaker 2: a personal philosophy of technology and intentional relationship to your
Speaker 2: devices that then allows you to have freedom.
Speaker 1: Well, it's so interesting because when I, I mean, you
Speaker 1: talked about how your students when you used to teach
Speaker 1: would find out that you didn't have Internet and they think, oh,
Speaker 1: you're like prehistoric. But even as I read it, I
Speaker 1: had that reaction like, oh, man, that would be so difficult.
Speaker 1: And before I got married, I was a vagabond. I
Speaker 1: mean people use that to I was a real I
Speaker 1: mean I had lived all over the world. I would
Speaker 1: just find work, and up until I got married, I
Speaker 1: never had a TV in the home. I was like you,
Speaker 1: I was a very late adopter to the smartphone world.
Speaker 1: At one point I didn't even have a phone. I
Speaker 1: don't even I think about it. I constantly think about this,
Speaker 1: even just getting from point A to point a B.
Speaker 1: How did we do that before we had GPS? I mean,
Speaker 1: we clearly did, but I don't remember. And it's it's
Speaker 1: I'm thinking about my own life. And historically I was
Speaker 1: able to do this because I was very intentional about
Speaker 1: what I wanted out of life. I didn't want to
Speaker 1: sit at home and watch TV. If I was at home,
Speaker 1: I would read. But a lot of the time I
Speaker 1: was just traveling and I was out there experiencing the world.
Speaker 1: And so if I have a hard time grasping you know,
Speaker 1: the idea of being intentional, because we think, man, that's
Speaker 1: going to be really hard. Just think about how inconvenient
Speaker 1: that's going to be. Just think about the lack of
Speaker 1: efficiency that we're going to have in our household if
Speaker 1: we don't have these things. And I told you the
Speaker 1: woodworking chapter had happened again. You just had this penchant
Speaker 1: for writing these chapters that I got there and I thought,
Speaker 1: all right, this is a book on technology. Why do
Speaker 1: I want to learn about the Amish or the lad Heights?
Speaker 1: I mean, lut Heights. They're the fools, right, And yet
Speaker 1: I was captivating. I mean I told my wife, I
Speaker 1: was like, I kind of just want to talk to
Speaker 1: him about the Amish because we as technology keeps coming out,
Speaker 1: like you think, you call it the time technological imperative,
Speaker 1: Like if we just have to go along with progress.
Speaker 1: I mean, we're in this rapidly flowing river and we
Speaker 1: don't know what to do, and we feel like if
Speaker 1: we don't go along. Now there's the macro. If we
Speaker 1: don't go along, I mean, everybody's scared of AI and
Speaker 1: feels like we should put limits on this. But if
Speaker 1: we don't, they will. That's the macro if you're talking
Speaker 1: about countries. But then there's even just the issue of businesses.
Speaker 1: If we don't adapt, we're going to get left behind.
Speaker 1: And then it goes down to families, communities, individuals. If
Speaker 1: I don't, I'm going to get left behind. And I
Speaker 1: always over over the past several years, we're going to
Speaker 1: become Amish if we don't do this. And I said
Speaker 1: that as a negative, But I mean, is there a
Speaker 1: sense that the Amish have this right?
Speaker 2: That's a great question. Yes, and no, I think there
Speaker 2: are aspects of the Amish that are very admirable and
Speaker 2: that we should learn from, for sure. And that's the
Speaker 2: point of the chapter when it comes to the Amish
Speaker 2: in the Latites, and just sort of as a side note,
Speaker 2: Amish communities are actually growing and exploding at rates that
Speaker 2: our pretty at dounding. They're spreading into New States and
Speaker 2: all sorts of things. Twenty first century might be the
Speaker 2: revenge of the Amish. Who knows you heard it here first?
Speaker 2: Now the things that I love about the Amish. I
Speaker 2: went to a college in a portion of Pennsylvania that
Speaker 2: had some sort of Amish roots and Mennonite Brethren roots,
Speaker 2: and some of the professors really did a ton of
Speaker 2: research in this area and published books, and that was
Speaker 2: sort of my first exposure as a sort of a
Speaker 2: teen to this world and their way of thinking. And
Speaker 2: then when I went to grad school, I had another
Speaker 2: professor who would go and visit Amish communities and do
Speaker 2: a lot of research that way. So that was sort
Speaker 2: of my gateway into thinking about this, and I've continued
Speaker 2: to be fascinated by these communities and especially their approach
Speaker 2: to technology. Now it's easy to think that, oh, they're
Speaker 2: anti tech, right, but it's a much more nuanced position. Really.
Speaker 2: They embrace certain technologies, and they're even willing to use
Speaker 2: certain mechanized things just that aren't necessarily connect to electrical grid. Right.
Speaker 2: A lot of times they'll, for example, the woodworking world
Speaker 2: that I live in, they'll use mechanized woodworking tools, they
Speaker 2: just won't use them in their electric form, right, They'll
Speaker 2: run them on compressed air or something like that. There's
Speaker 2: actually folks that convert woodworking equipment to be Amish friendly,
Speaker 2: from running on electric motors to running on compressed air
Speaker 2: and things like that. So they use technologies, but the
Speaker 2: questions they ask about technologies are ones we should ask,
Speaker 2: what is this going to do to the community, what
Speaker 2: is this going to do to the sacred precincts of
Speaker 2: the home, and what is this going to do to me?
Speaker 2: And those types of basic questions are just common sense
Speaker 2: questions for a great sort of diagnostic set of questions
Speaker 2: to ask. In one of the books I read for
Speaker 2: that chapter and preparing, there was a bunch of people
Speaker 2: that were visiting, like I can't remember if it was
Speaker 2: an Amish like furniture factory or something, but some type
Speaker 2: of tour setting and the guide said, how many of
Speaker 2: you watch too much TV? And how many of you
Speaker 2: use your phone too much? And everybody's hand went up, right,
Speaker 2: how many of you would like to do something about that,
Speaker 2: right and change your relationship to all these devices? Everybody's hands,
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, that's a great idea. And then the guy said,
Speaker 2: we actually do something about it. I think that's just
Speaker 2: a great way to think about it. They don't just
Speaker 2: complain or bemoan the situation. They've made decisions, very intentional
Speaker 2: decisions to craft a different relationship to technology for the
Speaker 2: sake of their community, for their family, and the passing
Speaker 2: down of a tradition right that they value. And in
Speaker 2: large part it works. Their retention rates are much higher
Speaker 2: than other Christian denominations. Of course, we always hear stories
Speaker 2: of people that leave aumage communities, right, but that the
Speaker 2: norm is that they say. What's interesting though, some of
Speaker 2: the books that have been written more recently in this
Speaker 2: field are talking about the impact of the smartphone on
Speaker 2: amash communities because it's much harder to police because it
Speaker 2: goes with you in your pocket in a way that
Speaker 2: these prior technologies that they had questions about did not.
Speaker 2: So that's that's going to be interesting to see how
Speaker 2: even the smartphone might affect Amish communities and is affecting
Speaker 2: Amish communities. There's a place in Amish communities for communal discernment, right,
Speaker 2: and that's really important.
Speaker 1: There's an interesting distinction, but as with everything, sometimes the
Speaker 1: smallest distinction makes the biggest difference. The Amish have access
Speaker 1: without ownership, so they use cars, but they don't own cars.
Speaker 1: They'll use phones, let's say, in their business, but they
Speaker 1: won't bring them into their home. And that discernment, that
Speaker 1: distinguishing factor. How important is that? And what can we
Speaker 1: learn and almost bring in if we're trying to become
Speaker 1: somewhat Amish in our own world in terms of trying
Speaker 1: to embrace the embodiment of our day to day life,
Speaker 1: how can we do that by practicing that discernment Because
Speaker 1: on some level, it's almost what you're doing when you
Speaker 1: choose to have internet in your home via the hotspot. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you have the access, but it's not all encompassing ownership.
Speaker 1: It's not all the time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right. I think it shows there's a place
Speaker 2: for nuanced thinking here. It's not like an all or
Speaker 2: nothing deal in the Amish model that and we can too.
Speaker 2: I can choose to have access to certain technologies, maybe
Speaker 2: at work or at the library, and maybe not in
Speaker 2: my home. Those types of things are good creative solutions
Speaker 2: that allow us to benefit from the goods of these
Speaker 2: technologies and also minimize their detrimental effects on me as
Speaker 2: an individual, or for me and my family, or on
Speaker 2: the communal level. I think that's a really good way
Speaker 2: to think about this. None of us are saying that
Speaker 2: there's no goods that come from these potential technologies. It's
Speaker 2: just that we need to recognize the potential detriments and
Speaker 2: situate them in our lives in ways that allow us
Speaker 2: hopefully to benefit from the goods and not to be
Speaker 2: impacted negatively by their detriments.
Speaker 1: I have to admit I only ever use the word
Speaker 1: Luddite as a slur, and that's the only context that
Speaker 1: I understood it from. That's somebody who's kind of like
Speaker 1: dull or anti technology or whatever, doesn't want to get
Speaker 1: with the program when it comes to progress. And it
Speaker 1: wasn't until I read your book that I realized that
Speaker 1: Luod Heights were actual people in a place in time
Speaker 1: who were the lud Heightes and what can we learn
Speaker 1: from them?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so this was a group in England in the
Speaker 2: Industrial Revolution that were very familiar with technologies. They were
Speaker 2: using machines and factories. But as certain new industrial technologies emerged,
Speaker 2: they became concerned about what it was doing to their labor,
Speaker 2: to their agency right, to their ability to have control
Speaker 2: in a certain sense over the product they were making,
Speaker 2: over their livelihood, and what that was going to do
Speaker 2: then and impact on their community and on their family.
Speaker 2: And so what they ended up doing is really resisting
Speaker 2: the latest technology that was emerging in the factories at
Speaker 2: the time, and they did become known for smashing some machines,
Speaker 2: and that's the origin of sort of the Luodite straw
Speaker 2: man is, oh, these are just people the smash machines
Speaker 2: and hate technology. But they actually knew how to use
Speaker 2: many of the machines in the factories. They were very
Speaker 2: technologically adept. But they also realized where these new technologies
Speaker 2: were going and what it was going to do to
Speaker 2: the economy, to the nature of labor, was going to
Speaker 2: essentially reduce them to cogs in a machine in the factory,
Speaker 2: and they were concerned about that that then they would
Speaker 2: become replaceable, that this would have an impact on their
Speaker 2: income and on their families, and those things drove them
Speaker 2: to raise serious questions about technological developments. So it wasn't
Speaker 2: again just like the Amish, it's it's not an anti
Speaker 2: tech approach. It's asking questions, what is this going to
Speaker 2: do to the meaning of my labor, the meaning of
Speaker 2: my life, the way I provide for my family, and
Speaker 2: things like that.
Speaker 1: You didn't say this in the book, but as I
Speaker 1: was thinking about the line of Okay, you've got the Amish,
Speaker 1: you've got the Bloodites, what about monastics because practice a
Speaker 1: lot of the same principles they you know, they kind
Speaker 1: of assess and they bring some or they don't depending
Speaker 1: on the circumstance, and even probably more so than the Amish,
Speaker 1: because it's not as they have some sort of ban
Speaker 1: on the electrical grid. But do you see a connection
Speaker 1: with the monastics and is there something as Christians that
Speaker 1: we could really take and absorb from the monastic influence
Speaker 1: of that has kind of been dormant for a lot
Speaker 1: of Western Christianity.
Speaker 2: Great connection, Absolutely, there's a lot of connections we can
Speaker 2: make to monasticism here in monastic wisdom. Yeah, right, on
Speaker 2: the money very good. There are a few points in
Speaker 2: the book where we refer to it as technological asceticism,
Speaker 2: that the decisions we make are a form of asceticism.
Speaker 2: We're denying ourselves certain things intentionally. Paul King's Norses North
Speaker 2: has talked about this in the terms of being a
Speaker 2: technological ascetic. So, yes, we want to draw on that tradition.
Speaker 2: We can reclaim the wisdom of the fathers here, the
Speaker 2: Desert Fire monastic fathers. There's so much here, and we
Speaker 2: do have some quotes sort of sprinkled throughout the book
Speaker 2: from some of these folks, especially when they're talking about
Speaker 2: Acedia and sloth right and some of the seven Deadly sins,
Speaker 2: subduing the passions. We need to train ourselves to do so,
Speaker 2: and the wisdom of the monastics here is something we
Speaker 2: can definitely tap and should continue to tap in this age.
Speaker 2: You know, the West, as you said, has especially you know,
Speaker 2: since the prosent Reformation, there's been sort of a looking
Speaker 2: down upon monasticism, and maybe there were some extremes that
Speaker 2: needed to be addressed. We could have a discussion about that, perhaps,
Speaker 2: but there's wisdom there in the intentional living and in
Speaker 2: the seriousness with which the disciplines are approached and the
Speaker 2: importance of reordering our desires right, retraining our desires towards higher,
Speaker 2: higher ends and permanent things. And that's the type of
Speaker 2: wisdom we need today. And I think the monastic language
Speaker 2: also is helpful when we think about the relationship to
Speaker 2: digital devices that we have. Ian Harbor of Mere Orthodoxy
Speaker 2: wrote a recent article about this. Recently, he said we
Speaker 2: should have a monk's and a missionaries approach to the
Speaker 2: digital age, and I love the way he fleshed us out.
Speaker 2: And what he said is that most people should be
Speaker 2: monks when it comes to the digital age. In other words,
Speaker 2: we should be very intentional about our relationship to the Internet,
Speaker 2: especially social media, and most of us probably don't need
Speaker 2: to spend a lot of time there, maybe none when
Speaker 2: it comes to social media. But then he also said
Speaker 2: there's going to be a missionaries approach too. There are
Speaker 2: going to be people that devote time and effort to
Speaker 2: having an intentional relationship to social media, YouTube things like that,
Speaker 2: and producing good content and trying to bend this towards
Speaker 2: better ends. I think that monks and missionaries framework isn't
Speaker 2: a bad one to think about, right, that we need
Speaker 2: to have almost a monastic approach to these things, just
Speaker 2: because they're so alluring and so tempting and designed to
Speaker 2: be such. But then there's also a place in which
Speaker 2: we need to be putting good con tent into this
Speaker 2: space to bring people out of that space, to show
Speaker 2: them that there's a better world, a deeper world, another
Speaker 2: world in which they can they can sort of learn
Speaker 2: to grow into. And for many you know that we're
Speaker 2: seeing this unfold and sort of the internet pipeline into Christianity.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of folks that discover, let's say, at
Speaker 2: Jordan Peterson or some somebody in the manosphere, right, and
Speaker 2: then they start learning a little bit more about Christianity,
Speaker 2: and then all of a sudden they show up at
Speaker 2: a church. We just had a guy this Sunday show up, right,
Speaker 2: a young man who had been online, right, who had
Speaker 2: been doing going down that pathway, that pipeline, and then
Speaker 2: all of a sudden he's here. So that there is
Speaker 2: a place for sort of missional, a missional approach to
Speaker 2: these things as well.
Speaker 1: I don't know if it's relevant, but you know, this
Speaker 1: is the point of a conversation when you talk about missionary.
Speaker 1: I think about when I was younger and I would
Speaker 1: bring somebody home and I'd talked to my dad afterwards,
Speaker 1: and he'd be like, how's her? Is she a Christians?
Speaker 1: Her faith? So, oh, she's not, but she's interested. And
Speaker 1: it's the term missionary dating. I'm gonna win her over,
Speaker 1: not her worldview, winning mine over. And my dad and
Speaker 1: his paternal wisdom would always say that rarely works out
Speaker 1: in the direction that you're intending. It actually almost always
Speaker 1: brings the other person down. And I think that's relevant
Speaker 1: when discussing how intentional and careful we have to be,
Speaker 1: because I sit there and I think I'll have to admit,
Speaker 1: even with this podcast, I thought, do we need more noise?
Speaker 1: Isn't the answer to remove ourselves? But at the same time,
Speaker 1: I see people coming in the front door of our
Speaker 1: church every Sunday, and I know that the vast majority
Speaker 1: of them are finding the church online, right, and so
Speaker 1: it's kind of walking that narrow path and being extremely
Speaker 1: careful and discerning, and it's just prayerful the whole time.
Speaker 1: I mean, maybe you're a monk animissionary. At the same time,
Speaker 1: that's possible because man, the mediums are so insidious. I mean,
Speaker 1: the way that they can grab you. Even as I'm
Speaker 1: working on this podcast, I'm finding myself on social media
Speaker 1: more and on the internet more.
Speaker 2: Sure.
Speaker 1: I've told my wife I love the conversations. I think
Speaker 1: they're rich and I think they will help people. But man,
Speaker 1: do I hate the aspect that encompasses social media and
Speaker 1: you get stuck in it, even just deploying the things,
Speaker 1: sending them out into the universe.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you'll have to develop intentional practices and boundaries
Speaker 2: right to make sure that you don't get swallowed up
Speaker 2: by the machine here either. It's so easy, right to
Speaker 2: sort of get sucked up into that influencer mentality or
Speaker 2: performative mentality, right, because as we know, the medium is
Speaker 2: the message. It nudges us, it forms us, and shapes
Speaker 2: us in a certain direction. So, yeah, there's a fine
Speaker 2: line here that individuals need to navigate. Also, churches need
Speaker 2: to navigate. And I think you know the way our
Speaker 2: churches has dealt with this is the internet can be
Speaker 2: a place sort of like the vestibule to the church,
Speaker 2: perhaps the narthex to the church. We want to have
Speaker 2: a footprint online, we want to have good material online,
Speaker 2: but We certainly don't want to give the impression that
Speaker 2: one can worship online, that one can have that sense
Speaker 2: of what happens on Sunday morning and in the embodied
Speaker 2: community of the church. You can't replicate that online, and
Speaker 2: we shouldn't give the impression that we can. Right. So,
Speaker 2: for example, I know this is a bit of a rabbitrail,
Speaker 2: but we don't live stream our worship services. We record
Speaker 2: the sermon, the service of the word, portion of the service,
Speaker 2: but we do not record the Eucharist. We don't want
Speaker 2: to give the impression that one could attempt even to
Speaker 2: commune from home. We want them to come to partake
Speaker 2: of these things with us and become part of our community.
Speaker 2: And with each video we post, we also have like
Speaker 2: a one minute explanation of that ahead of time. Hey,
Speaker 2: I hope this is a good thing for you to receive,
Speaker 2: but remember this isn't the real deal. This is not
Speaker 2: the embodied community where you're really hearing the living word
Speaker 2: of Jesus and receiving his living body that needs to
Speaker 2: take place in community in the flesh.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, I mean church is the embodied alternative.
Speaker 2: That's right.
Speaker 1: There's so many circumstances where we can sit here and
Speaker 1: lament the darkness that that's approaching as opposed to building
Speaker 1: a lighthouse. And Yeah, on a podcast that we did
Speaker 1: years ago, I remember somebody we kind of teed it
Speaker 1: up for this, Hey, aren't things terrible? And the guests
Speaker 1: basically said, yes, things are terrible, but we're made for
Speaker 1: this moment. I mean, there's no better opportunity for us
Speaker 1: as Christians as the world goes in this direction. We
Speaker 1: have to be ready to receive people who are going
Speaker 1: to be hurt by those the ramifications of that. And
Speaker 1: in just the same way, the church is the embodied
Speaker 1: all alternative to a digitized world, and we have to
Speaker 1: be intentional about how we approach that. As you said,
Speaker 1: I mean, you felt like you were going to ruffle
Speaker 1: feathers when you said, we don't do church online here,
Speaker 1: and there are some circumstances where somebody might be unable
Speaker 1: to come, but those are rare, right, And you can't mean,
Speaker 1: you can't allow that option to become the main thing
Speaker 1: because the church is embodied. And I wondered, I wanted
Speaker 1: to ask you, how do you think treating church's education
Speaker 1: has left us vulnerable to this ideology?
Speaker 2: Yeah, that whole brain's on a stick thing. Right. It
Speaker 2: comes back to that, if church is just about putting
Speaker 2: information in your head, essentially a data download, well you
Speaker 2: can you can sort of do that online and probably
Speaker 2: with better preachers and educators on YouTube. But if Christianity
Speaker 2: is about much more than information, right, But if it's
Speaker 2: about the formation of a person and a living encounter
Speaker 2: with Risen Christ in word and sacrament, well you cannot
Speaker 2: replicate that online, right, So I think, yeah, part of
Speaker 2: the problem is we've really had such a shallow view
Speaker 2: of what Christian worship is and also what Christianity is,
Speaker 2: and it really goes two directions. The one direction is
Speaker 2: brain on a stick, right, that Christianity is just sort
Speaker 2: of an intellectual exercise, and this sermon is basically a lecture,
Speaker 2: and that's what you get at church. You get new
Speaker 2: information that then you like deploy in your life to
Speaker 2: be more productive and more efficient. That's one trajectory that's wrong, right,
Speaker 2: or not complete, I should say. Then there's also a
Speaker 2: trajectory where you're like a heart on a stick, right,
Speaker 2: You're just a bundle of emotions, and what Christianity is
Speaker 2: is like an emotional high. It's experiential worship. You have
Speaker 2: these certain feelings about God, and that's incomplete too, right,
Speaker 2: So what we need is the full thing. We need
Speaker 2: the embodied worship, which, yes, there's information involved, but it's
Speaker 2: much more than information. It's formation. And there are emotions involved,
Speaker 2: but there's more than emotions. It's emotions based on truth
Speaker 2: and goodness and beauty, and that you know, I would
Speaker 2: argue this would be a different argument, but that that
Speaker 2: historically the church has done in its worship service, which
Speaker 2: has historically been a pretty liturgical affair with embodied practices, kneeling, bowing,
Speaker 2: crossing yourself, right, you're using your body and worship, eating right,
Speaker 2: the Lord's Supper, talking about an embodied thing, hearing with
Speaker 2: your ears, right, all of your senses are enveloped in
Speaker 2: in the divine service in the Sunday worship service.
Speaker 1: And.
Speaker 2: Talk about a multimedia experience from God. You don't need
Speaker 2: PowerPoint projectors, you don't need screens. He's already designed this
Speaker 2: thing to hit your senses with all the things that
Speaker 2: occur in a historic Christian worship worship service.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I mean you talk about the dangers of
Speaker 1: missionary dating, Well, that's really what the secret sensitive movement
Speaker 1: is and you're you're trying to adapt the practices of
Speaker 1: the world to make your church service feel more in
Speaker 1: to really reach people where they're at. And as I said,
Speaker 1: with missionary dating, the missionary is usually the one.
Speaker 2: That falls right.
Speaker 1: They lose what made them then. And I remember I
Speaker 1: went to a church here in Charlotte and you'd walk
Speaker 1: in and there's just a really hip art gallery and
Speaker 1: it's very well intentioned. I want to be careful when
Speaker 1: I'm saying this. I'm not saying this as to denigrate
Speaker 1: them or anything, because everybody, I mean they're well intentioned,
Speaker 1: of course, and clearly doing good work. In the example
Speaker 1: that I'm giving, where you walk in this art gallery
Speaker 1: and it's just these beautiful pictures of work that they're
Speaker 1: doing in the mission field, and then tugs on your
Speaker 1: heart strings and you donate there, and then you pour
Speaker 1: your coffee and you go in and you sit and
Speaker 1: it feels like you're in a hip coffee shop. Then
Speaker 1: you got a couple of songs, and I remember one
Speaker 1: of them was a pop song that they were baptizing
Speaker 1: for use in worship. I mean it's it was relevant.
Speaker 1: I mean thematically, you could see, okay, that fits, But
Speaker 1: it was also hey, you like this song, We're gonna
Speaker 1: play this here. And then the pastor came out with
Speaker 1: the wire mic and I remember sitting there thinking, this
Speaker 1: is just a Ted talk. That's right, I mean, this
Speaker 1: is And I eventually left church and then started to
Speaker 1: go more and more sacramental liturgical in my leanings. And
Speaker 1: that's when I started to see the purpose in church
Speaker 1: a little bit more, because otherwise, like you said, I
Speaker 1: can get a better Ted talk online. If all this
Speaker 1: is about hacking my personhood and becoming efficient and better,
Speaker 1: you know, I can do that somewhere else. I don't
Speaker 1: need to go to the church for that. They're going
Speaker 1: to do a worse job than the world at being
Speaker 1: the world.
Speaker 2: It's like a party without the beer. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: And this again relates to I think some of the
Speaker 2: insights of the philosophers of technology that for a long
Speaker 2: time have been saying the medium is the message influences content.
Speaker 2: As Christians, we usually think of content. It's either got
Speaker 2: to be good content or bad content. We don't think
Speaker 2: about how the form influences what's being communicated and actually
Speaker 2: might be more influential in what we take away from things,
Speaker 2: and that relates to worship. Form communicates something right. Everything
Speaker 2: we do in worship communicates a theological truth or a
Speaker 2: theological falsehood, and we want to make sure that the
Speaker 2: medium and the message line up right, the form and
Speaker 2: the content align and are saying the same thing about
Speaker 2: who we are, about who God is, and how God
Speaker 2: comes to man.
Speaker 1: Respectfully. Do you think a memorial view of the sacraments
Speaker 1: has unintentionally made light of our embodiment.
Speaker 2: I do think that a lot of Evangelicalism and Protestantism
Speaker 2: at large ends up in a pretty gnostic place, a
Speaker 2: pretty disembodied place. I grew up Baptist and then became Reformed,
Speaker 2: and now I'm in a more sacramental and liturgical tradition,
Speaker 2: and so I have much respect for those different traditions
Speaker 2: and think that we can learn a lot from each other.
Speaker 2: But I do think there's a tendency in sort of
Speaker 2: low church traditions to end up denigrating the body. And
Speaker 2: there's been a lot of research on this. Philip Lee
Speaker 2: has a great book called Against the Protestant Gnostics from
Speaker 2: like the nineties. I think Michael Horton wrote one called
Speaker 2: in the Face of God talking about the gnostic tendencies
Speaker 2: within evangelicalism. So I do think there's something there. I
Speaker 2: don't want to overplay that hand and you know, be uncharitable,
Speaker 2: but I do think that we should be willing to
Speaker 2: consider how those a memorialist view of the sacrament or
Speaker 2: some of the other teachings of evangelicalism can can nudge
Speaker 2: us towards disembodiment and really a false view of the body. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And I kept thinking about how you know, we're made
Speaker 1: for to be deified, deification union with God. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: when we make ourselves nothing more than data processors, we
Speaker 1: become datified and that's end goal. Can you name that shift?
Speaker 1: I mean the importance of that where we become just
Speaker 1: pure exchange of information as opposed to union with God.
Speaker 1: Because it's something that I talk about a lot with
Speaker 1: friends where I talk about my own church life. Orthodoxy
Speaker 1: smallow only exists for orthopraxy. It's only to guide right worship.
Speaker 1: It's not an end to itself. And I think that
Speaker 1: we've lost our humanity for the sake of greater data processing,
Speaker 1: because that's what we've become. It's all just how much
Speaker 1: information can I accumulate, and you compared it almost to
Speaker 1: like microplastics or pfas, and how we aren't made to
Speaker 1: process this amount of information and we're all experiencing almost
Speaker 1: like toxic shock.
Speaker 2: The speed at which we can access information. The amount
Speaker 2: of information we're accessing is just inhuman in its scale,
Speaker 2: and we don't know what to do with it all.
Speaker 2: And the comparison was then made to the way that
Speaker 2: plastics are sort of in the environment everywhere, right and
Speaker 2: are part of our bodies now in ways that probably
Speaker 2: will end up being pretty toxic to us. That's sort
Speaker 2: of our information environment that we live in. It sort
Speaker 2: of permeates everything, and then that impacts how we think
Speaker 2: about everything. We want to quantify everything, even ourselves. Everything
Speaker 2: is measurable, and think about the technologies that allowed us.
Speaker 2: We have apple watches that can keep our heart rate
Speaker 2: and steps and all of those things. There's actually a
Speaker 2: movement called the quantified self movement, which desires to quantify
Speaker 2: every aspect of human life right to basically become more
Speaker 2: productive and efficient. And there may be some place for
Speaker 2: thinking about quantifying some aspects or measuring some aspects of
Speaker 2: our humanity, but when that becomes the default setting. We
Speaker 2: really are short circuiting what it means to be human
Speaker 2: to use an electrical analogy. And if we think about
Speaker 2: the way that God comes to man, it's very inefficient.
Speaker 2: God took on human flesh in one place at one time,
Speaker 2: in Jesus Christ, and to spread his message, she had
Speaker 2: to walk around and talk to people. He you know,
Speaker 2: used spit and mud and touch and words and all
Speaker 2: of those things to heal. He couldn't simulcast his sermons, right,
Speaker 2: He couldn't livestream the resurrection, He couldn't use any of
Speaker 2: the modern communication technologies we have. And that wasn't an
Speaker 2: accident that God came at that moment. The scriptures talk
Speaker 2: about this as the Chiros moment, the moment, the perfect
Speaker 2: moment for him to come was a time before he
Speaker 2: could be videotaped, a time before he could post on YouTube.
Speaker 2: I mean, you could just go on and on with
Speaker 2: the things that we would think would be efficient or
Speaker 2: effective in getting the message out. And instead it's this embodied, slow,
Speaker 2: incarnational way of spreading his man message, and that is intentional.
Speaker 2: That's the pattern in the paradigm. The incarnation is the
Speaker 2: pattern in paradigm for for everything, And as you said,
Speaker 2: that that is our ultimate destiny. God became man so
Speaker 2: that man may become God in properly understood and that
Speaker 2: that is where we're headed. We're not headed to some
Speaker 2: you know, mechanized reality or some reality separate from our bodies,
Speaker 2: or some you know data world that that somebody like
Speaker 2: you've all Noah Harari wants or something like that. We
Speaker 2: are destined for an embodied existence in union with God
Speaker 2: and one another, in a new heavens and new Earth. Yeah,
Speaker 2: very embodied, real destiny.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but there's no butt. I don't want I don't
Speaker 1: want to put a butt on that. As I said earlier,
Speaker 1: I'm constantly trying to understand what reality is right now
Speaker 1: because we are experiencing, I think, an extreme state of disorientation.
Speaker 1: And I wonder am I being alarmist or am I
Speaker 1: being a realist? Right? When you think about technologies like neuralink,
Speaker 1: and yeah, there can be really good implementation of that
Speaker 1: technology where you get somebody who's locked in and all
Speaker 1: of a sudden they're engaging the world. Right, that's the
Speaker 1: best case scenario. But there's a lot of slippery slopes there,
Speaker 1: and I just can't help but I mean this is
Speaker 1: where you think about the Amish and you say, hey,
Speaker 1: if you don't do this, we're going to become Amish
Speaker 1: intentionally or otherwise. And yet it just can't help but
Speaker 1: to ponder constantly, in this moment that we're living through,
Speaker 1: where do we draw the line? Right? I mean, you
Speaker 1: talk about are we all cyborgs now? And as we
Speaker 1: all exist with this smartphone in our hand, and it's
Speaker 1: the first thing we grab and we wake up, and
Speaker 1: the first thing or the last thing we look at
Speaker 1: before we go to bed, I mean, what's the difference
Speaker 1: between that and it being implanted? And yet there is
Speaker 1: a very real thing. And I know maybe I'm just
Speaker 1: I don't think that I'm living in this science fiction
Speaker 1: world where I think that's going to be a real thing.
Speaker 1: And I think that's why you started the book the
Speaker 1: way that you did with the Wendell Berry quote. It's
Speaker 1: a decision that we're going to have to make. Do
Speaker 1: you see that? Do you feel that as strongly as
Speaker 1: I do?
Speaker 2: Oh? For sure? Yeah. And I will just say with
Speaker 2: the decisions you said, well, we pick up the smartphone
Speaker 2: first at the beginning of the day, and last thing
Speaker 2: we put we don't have to do that. We can
Speaker 2: make decisions not to do that, and I think we
Speaker 2: need to. You know, lots of books have proposed like
Speaker 2: practical steps each day. Justin Whitmill Early has a great
Speaker 2: book called The Common Rule, and one of his rules
Speaker 2: is scripture before phone each day, recripture before screen, prayer
Speaker 2: before phone. We shouldn't pick it up first each day,
Speaker 2: and we shouldn't have it in a room at night.
Speaker 2: So we can make decisions to resist these things. So
Speaker 2: we could talk about some rs here. One We need
Speaker 2: to recognize, we need to recognize what the problems are
Speaker 2: and develop a intentional philosophy of technology. Then we can resist.
Speaker 2: We can intentionally make decisions that are hard. We can
Speaker 2: be weird and known it, and Christians always have, and
Speaker 2: there's something attractive about being weird. Actually, my high school
Speaker 2: students loved it that I was weird. It actually gave
Speaker 2: me a sense of like credibility with them that I
Speaker 2: wasn't trying to be cool because I'm not cool. So
Speaker 2: just own it, right, own the weirdness. There's a sense
Speaker 2: in which that actually becomes attractive and almost anticipates the
Speaker 2: pendulum swing in some ways. That's happening on these technological questions.
Speaker 2: I collected phones long before in my classroom, long before
Speaker 2: the anxious generation was suggesting this. Right, and now it's
Speaker 2: like in twenty states. But by being weird, I was
Speaker 2: already sort of thinking about some of these things. So, yeah,
Speaker 2: be weird to own it. We need to resist. Then
Speaker 2: we also need to replace and reclaim and recover what's good,
Speaker 2: true and beautiful. So there's a no aspect of this. Yes,
Speaker 2: we do need to say no to some things, but
Speaker 2: even more important, it's because there's better things we can
Speaker 2: say yes to. Yes, And that's you know, like you
Speaker 2: were saying, the Christian response to this moment, We're just
Speaker 2: made for this moment in so many ways. Right, It's
Speaker 2: not about saying no, it's about we have a better yes.
Speaker 2: And by saying no to certain things, you give room
Speaker 2: for that.
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 2: You can reclaim those practices in your home of time together,
Speaker 2: of true leisure, of reading and playing games and music together.
Speaker 2: As communities, you can host dances and picnics and hikes.
Speaker 2: As churches, you can embrace the tables of the Lord.
Speaker 2: First off, the eucharistic table, and from that table, then
Speaker 2: community and fellowship flows over into the parish table, and
Speaker 2: then from the parish table it flows over into our
Speaker 2: familial tables in our homes. There's just so much Christianity
Speaker 2: has to offer this moment, and that's the vision that
Speaker 2: we need to cast. Not that we're negative nancies, but
Speaker 2: we have something better. I think that's really where we
Speaker 2: need to end up on these things.
Speaker 1: Yeah, next to your better, yes, that you talk about,
Speaker 1: I wrote the word hope, and I mean, there are
Speaker 1: moments when you really think about the extension of how
Speaker 1: everything could go technologically over the next couple of years,
Speaker 1: you can start to feel hopeless and yet your better
Speaker 1: And that's something that I really appreciate that you guys
Speaker 1: laid out in the book is the Better Yes. I
Speaker 1: really want to drill down on this hopelessness for a second,
Speaker 1: because these are real decisions that I think we're going
Speaker 1: to have to make. And it's kind of like the
Speaker 1: proverbial lobster in a pop We're all so inundated with
Speaker 1: this technology and it's such a large part of our
Speaker 1: lives and our work lives, and it's coming into our churches.
Speaker 1: How do we do this? I mean, for example, if
Speaker 1: they start wiring models into human beings into our actual bodies.
Speaker 1: So like the neuralink type of thing. I mean this
Speaker 1: is there's almost going to be the temptation to become
Speaker 1: two different species in a sense. And how do we
Speaker 1: resist that? Where do we draw the line? Because I
Speaker 1: gave the example of neuralink. If somebody's locked in, that's
Speaker 1: a very attractive technology. If you can create an artificial organ.
Speaker 1: All right, my son needed an artificial organ. I'm getting
Speaker 1: it right, I mean, I love my son, I want
Speaker 1: but where do we draw the line? How many organs?
Speaker 1: Assuming that it's possible, I'm sure. Do you get where
Speaker 1: I'm going with this?
Speaker 2: Of course? Yeah. The realm of bioethics in relation to
Speaker 2: technological questions is very challenging. And this is where I
Speaker 2: think we need to really combine the insights of our theologians,
Speaker 2: our ethicists, our technologists, engineers, and so forth. Is we
Speaker 2: need all hands on deck on these questions. But just
Speaker 2: a couple guiding principles, if I may. One, We need
Speaker 2: to start from a clear understanding of Christian anthropology. What
Speaker 2: is a human being? An embodied soul? The unity of
Speaker 2: body and soul is a human person and that grounding
Speaker 2: needs to be right there in the forefront when we're
Speaker 2: thinking about all these questions. Second off, you know, we
Speaker 2: want to think about technologies in relation to restoration of
Speaker 2: human capacities, right. So there's definitely restorative uses of technology,
Speaker 2: knowlogy and medicine that I think we can embrace as Christians. Right,
Speaker 2: because of the Fall, things are broken, right, and medicine
Speaker 2: plays a role in restoring some of those things that
Speaker 2: are broken because of the Fall, because of disease and
Speaker 2: sickness forth. But when we start to cross over into enhancement, right,
Speaker 2: that's I think where we need to be very careful.
Speaker 2: We will have to draw some hard lines, right, just
Speaker 2: like we do on abortion and other matters, right, which
Speaker 2: are related to technological questions.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: This is another thing people don't think about medicine is technology.
Speaker 2: The same types of thinking that we have about smartphones,
Speaker 2: we should be having about medical procedures. And that's going
Speaker 2: to get more complex to navigate, and that's going to
Speaker 2: require communal discernment. That's going to require pastoral care. And
Speaker 2: would I would not on a podcast talking to strangers
Speaker 2: try to offer you know, specific advice because that's there's
Speaker 2: going to be so much individuality on these types of things.
Speaker 2: But yeah, those would be guiding principles what is a
Speaker 2: human being? And then thinking about this in relation to
Speaker 2: restorative technologies that can probably have a place, but not
Speaker 2: in the realm of enhancement or body modification or things
Speaker 2: like that which which we're already seeing in realms that
Speaker 2: Christians say no to, right like transgenderism is body modification.
Speaker 2: It's a technological attempt to change the body to align
Speaker 2: to who I think I am inside, to talk about narcissism,
Speaker 2: and we say no to that, We say no to transhumanism,
Speaker 2: we say no to attempts to sort of transcend our
Speaker 2: bodies digitally or technologically. And in a certain sense, you
Speaker 2: could even say that transgenderism is a subset of transhumanism.
Speaker 2: So we already in certain areas, are willing to place
Speaker 2: some boundaries around things will continue. We will need to
Speaker 2: continue to do that as these medical dilemmas intensify.
Speaker 1: Do you see where I'm going with this?
Speaker 2: Though?
Speaker 1: That, especially in connection to the Amish, and that's the
Speaker 1: reason that I led the whole conversation with that joke
Speaker 1: or parable, depending on how you want to view it,
Speaker 1: because there are going to potentially be real stakes. There
Speaker 1: is going to be a situation where, I mean, we
Speaker 1: look at the Amish and they live such different lives
Speaker 1: than we do, where we may, hey, if we're going
Speaker 1: to truly make a commitment to the reality as we
Speaker 1: understand it, to an embodied reality, that we're going to
Speaker 1: be cost if you're left behind. But there will be cost,
Speaker 1: there will be sacrifices. I mean, do you do am
Speaker 1: I being alarmist or do you see that on the forefront?
Speaker 2: I think it's possible. I do. I don't want to
Speaker 2: get apocalyptic or too pessimistic. I try to be a
Speaker 2: tech realist, not a tech optimist or a tech pessimist.
Speaker 2: But I do think that we need to be talking
Speaker 2: honestly with people about the hard choices that we need
Speaker 2: to be making for the good of ourselves and the
Speaker 2: good of our children and the good of our communities.
Speaker 2: What that exactly looks like, I'm not going to attempt
Speaker 2: to predict, because things change so quickly. I mean, even
Speaker 2: in the realm of LMS, there's been a huge cooling
Speaker 2: on that the last few months. Investment is starting to
Speaker 2: dry up. Some people are carling in a bubble. GBT
Speaker 2: was five was a huge disappointment as far as capabilities.
Speaker 2: You know, we can't predict exactly what the future is
Speaker 2: going to look like, but yes, difficult decisions need to
Speaker 2: be made now and we'll continue to need to be made.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you talk about for your children, and I think
Speaker 1: that so many people view the doing what's right for
Speaker 1: your children as an economic investment to set them up
Speaker 1: for economic success. And I do think that we are
Speaker 1: going to have to make a real intentional distinction between
Speaker 1: the success of their soul and and how that might
Speaker 1: look different if there is you know, and my let's
Speaker 1: call it apocalyptic worldview, and it's not a worldview, it's
Speaker 1: more just a pondering. I think, could things go this direction?
Speaker 1: And if they do, what do we do? And as
Speaker 1: we talked about before, I mean, what do we do?
Speaker 1: Every time I go into church and I and I
Speaker 1: touch the physical walls. I kind of joke, but I
Speaker 1: mean it. This is like when we played tag as
Speaker 1: kids and you had a home base. And whenever I
Speaker 1: enter into the church and touch those walls, the physical
Speaker 1: walls of the temple, say you can't hurt me here.
Speaker 1: This is home base. And I think, to answer my
Speaker 1: own question, in a sense, I mean, that's what we
Speaker 1: need to do, is that we need to retreat not
Speaker 1: from the world but into the temple, into the home base,
Speaker 1: and just really commit ourselves to that reality of the incarnation.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, that's right, and then that empowers us and
Speaker 2: enables us and sustains us to face whatever comes. So, yeah,
Speaker 2: there's going to need to be more intentional communal decisions.
Speaker 2: There's going to need to be coming together of churches
Speaker 2: and families to support each other on these things. It's
Speaker 2: really a collective action problem in some ways, because if
Speaker 2: just one person makes a change on these things, it's
Speaker 2: it's very hard to see the benefits. But if a
Speaker 2: group of people come together, say in a church or
Speaker 2: a community or a school, and agree to make certain
Speaker 2: decisions about technologies, then you start to really see the benefits.
Speaker 2: It's sort of like a synergy that occurs between the people.
Speaker 2: So yeah, I'm right there with you that the place
Speaker 2: to really resist this is in the church, and then
Speaker 2: that flows out into the home and then into sort
Speaker 2: of small little platoons as Edwin Burgh called them. This
Speaker 2: is what the church knows how to do and has
Speaker 2: been doing for a long time. And I think in
Speaker 2: some ways. Honestly, that type of intentional raising of children
Speaker 2: or raising of the next generation in the human things
Speaker 2: and in the permanent things actually ends up being best
Speaker 2: preparation for service to the world as well. It actually
Speaker 2: might have some economic benefits in the long run. I know,
Speaker 2: we don't make decisions based on pragmatic calculations or utilitarianism,
Speaker 2: but ironically, it turns out that what's going to be
Speaker 2: most relevant in the workplace is people that actually know
Speaker 2: how to think and know how to write and communicate
Speaker 2: without outsourcing everything to AI. So I think in the
Speaker 2: long run we're actually going to be doing everybody a
Speaker 2: service by resisting the sort of infiltration of the machine
Speaker 2: into everything.
Speaker 1: Well, let's hope and you talk about like the straight
Speaker 1: stick versus the crooked stick, and the straight stick actually
Speaker 1: helps you see where the imperfections lie. It's the same
Speaker 1: thing that I think has been happening with a lot
Speaker 1: of traditional churches, let's say call them high churches. Sacramento
Speaker 1: liturgical churches are experiencing an influx, and I think a
Speaker 1: lot of that stems from when anything goes in the world,
Speaker 1: the last true rebellion, as they call it, is to
Speaker 1: limit yourself and to actually embrace some sort of asceticism
Speaker 1: to really free yourself from the passions. And I think
Speaker 1: I think it took the world going to an extreme
Speaker 1: for people to come back to the church to see
Speaker 1: that as the more attractive thing. And so you are
Speaker 1: providing hope in that sense, and that we just have
Speaker 1: to keep doing what we do. And like I said,
Speaker 1: we're made for the moment. The church is the best
Speaker 1: alternative here. We just have to be ready when they come.
Speaker 1: You provide a lot of invitations to hope when you
Speaker 1: say you have the better Yes. One of them is
Speaker 1: the joy of thingness? What is the joy of thingness?
Speaker 2: Yeah? This is the fact that there's something really cool
Speaker 2: about physical things, and we're we're made to enjoy those
Speaker 2: physical things, whether it's natural things or whether it's even
Speaker 2: man made things, things that we do as sort of subcreators,
Speaker 2: as Tolkien called us. We are creators by nature. We're
Speaker 2: in the image of the divine creator. So to be
Speaker 2: able to enjoy a guitar and the thingness of a
Speaker 2: guitar it's wooden body and its metal strings and the frets,
Speaker 2: and how all those things work together with you and
Speaker 2: your body to create music. That's the joy of thingness.
Speaker 2: Using a hand plane is the joy of thingness. Going
Speaker 2: out in nature and tuning yourself to the environment and
Speaker 2: watching birds is the joy of thingness. Taking in the sunshine.
Speaker 2: I mean, we could just go on and on. Anything
Speaker 2: that involves our bodily senses in real time and real
Speaker 2: space are ways that we can sort of reconnect to
Speaker 2: that joy of what it means to be human and
Speaker 2: the joy of enjoying objects and jests that are made
Speaker 2: by God and subcreated by us. You said to hear
Speaker 2: the birds, And this morning I went for a run.
Speaker 2: And usually when I go for a run, I changed
Speaker 2: one thing. So before you want to talk about like
Speaker 2: quantification and the problem that.
Speaker 1: It pertains to. I used to not run. If I
Speaker 1: couldn't find a like my headphones and everything all of
Speaker 1: the kutuma, I wouldn't go for a run. Or I
Speaker 1: remember one time I couldn't get my Strava or Nike
Speaker 1: Run Club or whatever app to work, and I didn't
Speaker 1: go for the run because in my mind, if I
Speaker 1: can't quantify it, it's not worth doing. If I can't
Speaker 1: track it, it's not worth doing. And I would get
Speaker 1: done with running. I'm a big runner, and oh man,
Speaker 1: I thought I did a way better run than that.
Speaker 1: It's the same thing with the sleep trackers. I thought,
Speaker 1: I slept all this as I didn't, and how much
Speaker 1: of a creep that can become. But even this morning,
Speaker 1: because I wanted to prepare for our conversation, I said,
Speaker 1: I'm going to run without headphones. Love it. And a
Speaker 1: midway through the run, I could hear all of the
Speaker 1: birds and I was so much more in tune with
Speaker 1: the physical environment around me, and I almost got emotional.
Speaker 1: I thought, am I missing this? This feels new? This
Speaker 1: probably isn't new. I'm just numb to it, or I'm
Speaker 1: not hearing it because I'm hearing some people like us talk.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right. Yeah, we need to retrain ourselves to
Speaker 2: become attuned to the natural world, and it's a training
Speaker 2: you need to practice that develop the practice of it
Speaker 2: we all do.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's great. I love that story. No, it was beautiful,
Speaker 1: So thank you. You talk about true leisure. How can
Speaker 1: true leisure save us? I mean, it sounds like you
Speaker 1: just want people to be lazy.
Speaker 2: Here, we'd have to do a little Lastodian into the
Speaker 2: history of the word leisure and This comes from skul
Speaker 2: A and Greek and Latin, which is where we get
Speaker 2: the word school, which is sort of funny. When people
Speaker 2: think of school, they don't think of leisure. They think
Speaker 2: of like work and quantification, grades, measurement, all that. But
Speaker 2: historically leisure was much more about what you did with
Speaker 2: your time to develop as a person, to meditate and
Speaker 2: ponder and reflect on what was true, good and beautiful,
Speaker 2: and a free person had leisure time. The person who
Speaker 2: was liberated free could do such things with their leisure.
Speaker 2: Today we think of leisure as like entertainment, right, watching TV, Internet,
Speaker 2: amusement parks, things like that, leisure time activities. But that's
Speaker 2: such a shallow view of leisure. So yeah, the recovery
Speaker 2: of true leisure, the developments of human capacities, and the
Speaker 2: sort of enjoyment of reality as it is not for
Speaker 2: the sake of quantification or pragmatism or something like that.
Speaker 2: That actually is vital to recovering and reclaiming our culture.
Speaker 2: And as as Joseph Peeper says in Leisure the basis
Speaker 2: of culture, leisure actually is what made our culture what
Speaker 2: it is because we took seriously the permanent things and
Speaker 2: the importance of developing those human capacities that aren't utilitarian,
Speaker 2: that aren't economic.
Speaker 1: Hey, you talk about I think about this all the time,
Speaker 1: you know, entertaining ourselves to death, that we're almost because
Speaker 1: we have such consistent access to these distractions. I really
Speaker 1: do feel like we are one of the first few
Speaker 1: generations that it's not like just outright imperative that you
Speaker 1: ponder existential questions, Right, is there a God? Why am
Speaker 1: I here? I mean I think that there are actually
Speaker 1: people that have never thought those questions, They've never attuned
Speaker 1: themselves to thinking like that. And yeah, and it's it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because our devices can constantly distract us. Right, we
Speaker 2: never have to hear the skeletons in our closet or
Speaker 2: the voices inside our head because we can always be
Speaker 2: hearing other voices and have other music on and just
Speaker 2: constantly distract ourselves in all the while never confront those,
Speaker 2: as you said, existential existential questions that we need to. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I remember Clear's Day. It was probably six years old,
Speaker 1: sitting in the back of my parents' minivan, staring out
Speaker 1: the window and really just thinking, what is this? How
Speaker 1: am I here? What does all this mean? And I
Speaker 1: worry that there's a large portion of the population that
Speaker 1: hasn't pondered the questions that were just you had to before.
Speaker 1: There are two words that I really, really really loved
Speaker 1: in your book, and I don't know that they would
Speaker 1: have stuck out to everybody, but it's that that thing
Speaker 1: where two people find something in common and oh wow,
Speaker 1: you talk about no agenda togetherness, no agenda, And those
Speaker 1: are two words that have been so near and dear
Speaker 1: to me for the past couple of years. As I've
Speaker 1: gotten more involved in my church community. They're constantly trying
Speaker 1: to put a label on everything. This is a bunch
Speaker 1: of men. Get this is men's group, you know, we
Speaker 1: we need These are a bunch of old people. They're
Speaker 1: the old they the young at Heart group and all
Speaker 1: of these different groups. And I keep thinking to myself, now,
Speaker 1: you know what we need. We need no agenda togetherness,
Speaker 1: just to be together without Well, what's the end goal?
Speaker 1: What are we going to get out of this? What's
Speaker 1: what's there to just? I mean, is that something that
Speaker 1: you think about? Clearly it was in your book of course.
Speaker 2: Yeah. This again gets back to that efficiency and productivity
Speaker 2: mindset that we've We've just so absorbed. Right, we want
Speaker 2: to be able to turn everything into a quantifiable, measurable thing.
Speaker 2: We want to put it in these nice little categories
Speaker 2: that fit with metrics and things like that. But if
Speaker 2: we're not comfortable with just being, then the new Kingdom
Speaker 2: might be boring to us, right, I mean there's going
Speaker 2: to obviously there's going to be things to do, but
Speaker 2: it's not going to be like things to do for
Speaker 2: the sake of productivity or efficiency or quantification. It's going
Speaker 2: to be things to do that are of permanent value
Speaker 2: and whatnot. So, yeah, that's a great, a great thing
Speaker 2: to think about. Right, How are we in our lives
Speaker 2: finding ways to practice togetherness that doesn't have an agenda.
Speaker 2: It isn't about what we're going to get out of
Speaker 2: this little time here or in some productivity sense, but
Speaker 2: more for the cultivation of who we are and cultivation
Speaker 2: of relationships with each other, which is something that transcends
Speaker 2: quantification and many times is very inefficient. Think about walking
Speaker 2: with somebody through depression or being at the bedside as
Speaker 2: somebody's near death. Those are very inefficient things. Those take
Speaker 2: time and hand to hand human care. But that's love.
Speaker 2: That's who we are. Relational beings designed for love and
Speaker 2: communion with one another and with God.
Speaker 1: Unhurried was another word that really stuck with me as
Speaker 1: I was pondering those words in your book, No Agenda,
Speaker 1: unhurried togetherness, just getting lost in conversation. I mean, I
Speaker 1: think that's when you really experience Chiro's time. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And our society's driven by Chronos time, right, the
Speaker 2: clock rains. Chronos is a jealous god and he wasn't
Speaker 2: the Greek pantheon, by the way too, And so yeah,
Speaker 2: the ways we can recapture moments of Chiros are so
Speaker 2: vital today to sort of step out of that Chronos
Speaker 2: clock time and into these eternal moments. The church is
Speaker 2: a great place for that to occur, where we literally
Speaker 2: experience a Chiros moment as Christ comes to us in
Speaker 2: his word and in his gifts in our homes. Great
Speaker 2: times for Chiro moments where we don't have to be
Speaker 2: driven by the clock. And ideally there can be times
Speaker 2: we're not driven by the clock at work and at
Speaker 2: school too, where we're not driven by shifts or bells,
Speaker 2: but by the actual engagement that we're having with other
Speaker 2: people and the things that we're doing and.
Speaker 1: They say that beauty can save the world. I hate
Speaker 1: to make a false distinction here, because there's beauty and hospitality,
Speaker 1: but I really started to think, I mean, you talk
Speaker 1: about bringing people into your homes and how hospitality can
Speaker 1: save the world. Do you believe that?
Speaker 2: I do. I think that really is present in the
Speaker 2: scriptures and in the way that God saves the world.
Speaker 2: He welcomes us to his table. Jesus was all about hospitality,
Speaker 2: eating with sinners, tax collectors, and prostitutes, bringing people around
Speaker 2: the table. And that paradigm obviously has all sorts of
Speaker 2: connections to the table of the Lord and the parish table,
Speaker 2: and our tables and our homes, and it's very powerful.
Speaker 2: It's countercultural to welcome people into your homes and into
Speaker 2: that act of eating. Last weekend, I was at a
Speaker 2: conference in New Jersey speaking on education and technology, and
Speaker 2: in the airport when I was waiting for my flight
Speaker 2: to get home to Charlotte, a guy sat across from me,
Speaker 2: and he had a pizza. And you know what happens
Speaker 2: at the airports nowadays, everybody's just like this, right, nobody
Speaker 2: is interacting with each other. But he saw what I
Speaker 2: was reading, and he said Hey, brother, let's share some pizza.
Speaker 2: And so we sat This was just this was just
Speaker 2: such an amazing moment to me. We sat there for
Speaker 2: a half hour waiting for our flight, sharing a pizza together, right,
Speaker 2: and talking about wonderful things. We had a wonderful conversation
Speaker 2: and just made a human connection because he was willing
Speaker 2: to say, Hey, do you want to have some of
Speaker 2: my pizza? You know, there's something about eating together that
Speaker 2: can do that. Right. It opens up avenues of conversation
Speaker 2: that don't happen otherwise. There was a Cairo's moment for
Speaker 2: right right in the middle of a mechanized, quantified metric
Speaker 2: driven place like an airport, right where everything runs by Kronos.
Speaker 2: Thanks thanks to that guy for for embracing Cairos and
Speaker 2: sharing his pizza.
Speaker 1: With me and humanity, right, I mean totally, you're a
Speaker 1: person right in front of him, and we've lost the
Speaker 1: ability to I mean, you're a weirdo if you do that.
Speaker 1: And yes, thank god he asked you, because there's so
Speaker 1: many people who be like, what is this creep trying
Speaker 1: to do? There's there's got to be a and you know.
Speaker 2: Because I hadn't, I had skipped dinner that night to
Speaker 2: get to the airport, and I was hungry, and so
Speaker 2: it actually met a need too. It was just such
Speaker 2: a wonderful confluence of things. And again he was open
Speaker 2: to that. Right, he was looking around and it saw
Speaker 2: that I was there and looked at what I was
Speaker 2: reading and was like, hey, we could we could have
Speaker 2: a conversation and need some pizza, And it was those
Speaker 2: are the types of things that that give you hope.
Speaker 1: I really, I mean, my wife and I wanted we
Speaker 1: worked really hard to try and find a home that's
Speaker 1: close to our church, that's close to the community that
Speaker 1: we're trying to develop and be really becoming rooted to,
Speaker 1: because we wanted to say, hey, come over our house
Speaker 1: before we live forty minutes away. Yeah, that's an investment
Speaker 1: for people. Now we're ten minutes away. Come And it's
Speaker 1: really that hospitality driven not for ourselves, but for the
Speaker 1: sake of our community. I mean, we really do believe
Speaker 1: that that's such an important thing to break bread together
Speaker 1: and just right, yeah, well.
Speaker 2: And around the table to connect back to the beauty state.
Speaker 2: We'll save the world quote, I mean, you can engage
Speaker 2: in beautiful things. A meal can be a beautiful thing
Speaker 2: when it's well prepared around your table. You can have
Speaker 2: beautiful artwork, you can have beautiful discussions. You could listen
Speaker 2: to beautiful music or make beautiful music together in your home.
Speaker 2: So it's not disconnected. Hospitality and beauty aren't disconnected, that's
Speaker 2: for sure, Josh.
Speaker 1: What happens to a culture they can't name what it sees?
Speaker 2: You just get blindsided by whatever's coming because you're not
Speaker 2: thinking intentionally about it. And I think we're seeing that today.
Speaker 2: People just don't have the categories and the frameworks to
Speaker 2: think about what they're getting steamrolled by. And if you
Speaker 2: can't name something, then you're certainly not going to be
Speaker 2: able to resist it.
Speaker 1: Where are we most eager to look away from reality?
Speaker 2: Probably when it would force us to change something about ourselves,
Speaker 2: that it would cause us to confront our weaknesses and failures.
Speaker 2: I think those are probably the the areas that we
Speaker 2: are blind to.
Speaker 1: And in a world that feels increasingly unreal, what feels
Speaker 1: most real to you?
Speaker 2: What feels most real to me? As I'll give a
Speaker 2: couple things, maybe in different categories, like as a pastor,
Speaker 2: as a parent, and as a husband. Maybe as a pastor,
Speaker 2: what feels most real to me is when I have
Speaker 2: the honor and privilege of distributing the sacrament to people
Speaker 2: and literally in my hands in the chalice. I'm able
Speaker 2: to distribute the blood of Christ intimately to that person
Speaker 2: and have in a way share that experience with them,
Speaker 2: person by person by person. That is most real to me.
Speaker 2: That's the deepest reality of the universe right there, the living,
Speaker 2: resurrected body of Christ. As a parent and as a husband,
Speaker 2: what makes me feel most real is embracing my children
Speaker 2: and my wife.
Speaker 1: Hey man, I'm with you on all front. Sign it's reality, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, it all comes back to the incarnate Christ.
Speaker 1: I mean it's if that story is true. It's everything.
Speaker 1: It's right and clearly you and I believe that. One
Speaker 1: more thing. When you heard commitment to reality, what does
Speaker 1: that mean to you?
Speaker 2: I love it. I think it's a great title. I
Speaker 2: think it's exactly what we need, and to me, it
Speaker 2: means commitment to being embodied beings uh the unity of
Speaker 2: body and soul together and that we're going to have
Speaker 2: practices and habits that help us live this out in
Speaker 2: our lives and in community with each other.
Speaker 1: Josh Pauling we both live in Charlotte.
Speaker 2: Yeah, sombodied meal together, Let's do it.
Speaker 1: I want to end by thanking you for joining me
Speaker 1: on a commitment to reality and putting a public proclamation
Speaker 1: out there that we've got to do this in person.
Speaker 2: Let's just break bread, all right, man.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Josh. I appreciate it.