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April 19, 2021 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

01:51:08

Christianity and the Modern World | Bishop Barron | EP 162

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	Hello.
	If you have found the ideas I discuss interesting and useful, perhaps you might consider purchasing my recently released book, Beyond Order, 12 More Rules for Life, available from Penguin Random House in print or audio format.
	You could use the links we provide below or buy through Amazon or at your local bookstore.
	This new book, Beyond Order, Provides what I hope is a productive and interesting walk through ideas that are both philosophically and sometimes spiritually meaningful, as well as being immediately implementable and practical.
	Beyond Order can be read and understood on its own, but also builds on the concepts that I developed in my previous books, Twelve Rules for Life, and before that, Maps of Meaning.
	Thanks for listening and enjoy the podcast.
	Hello everyone.
	I have the pleasure today of speaking with Bishop Robert Barron.
	We've spoken before on YouTube but felt that it was worthwhile doing so.
	Again, it's been a long time and many people have reached out to both of us continually asking us to converse and so we felt that that would be useful and Something, at least in principle, of public interest.
	Bishop Barron is the founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries and Auxiliary Bishop of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.
	He's a number one Amazon best-selling author and has published numerous books, essays, and articles on theology and the spiritual life.
	He has been invited to speak about religion at the headquarters of Facebook, Google, and Amazon.
	And is one of the most followed Catholics in the world on social media.
	Thanks for agreeing to talk with me again, and I'm looking forward to this conversation.
	Yeah, my pleasure, Jordan.
	Great to see you, too.
	So why do you think that people have written to you and to me suggesting that we converse?
	What's your take on this?
	It's surprising to me in some sense because it's not really my bailiwick, you know, although obviously I've been putting my nose in there anyways.
	I think for a number of reasons people see the work you do as at least opening a door to the religious dimension of life or a deeper dimension of life.
	I'll tell you a story.
	I got up in front of the bishops of the United States because I was chairman of our Committee on Evangelization.
	And I talked about why we're losing a lot of young people.
	I went through some of the statistics and then reasons why we're losing them.
	And then I gave various signs of hope.
	And one of the signs of hope I gave was, I called it the Jordan Peterson phenomenon.
	And what I meant was this.
	I told the bishops, here's this gentleman who gets up in a pretty non-histrionic way.
	And speaks for several hours in some cases about the Bible.
	And young people all over the English-speaking world are listening to them in theaters and by their millions on YouTube.
	And I said, I'm not here to endorse everything that Jordan Peterson is saying, but I think that in itself is a sign of hope.
	And so that became a source of some conversation among the bishops.
	But I do think it's a sign of hope.
	And I said to them, and it's really in some ways to our shame, that you are making the Bible more compelling and appealing in many ways than we were.
	That's our bailiwick.
	That's our profession is the Bible.
	But you were opening the Bible up in a way that young people especially were finding very compelling.
	And you were indeed, I think, thereby opening a door toward a richer and fuller understanding of the Scriptures.
	I think that's part of it.
	But I also think it's the opening to the realm of objective value.
	So I think as I read you and listen to you, you talk a lot about The objective realm of value, that's not simply a matter of my subjective whim, that I'll decide what to do, or I make up my values as I go along.
	But there's something about the tradition, something about what's been given to us, and objectivity to us.
	Moral value, aesthetic value, intellectual value.
	And see, to me, that's, I mean, it's a good way, a gateway drug to religion.
	Because God, I would say, is the ground and the source of objective value.
	And when you sort of hyper-subjectivize the whole operation, that becomes, you know, questionable.
	So I think your work there, too, has sort of primed the pump.
	For a deeper exploration of God as the source of these objective values.
	There's a couple of thoughts I have about it.
	It's almost as if we need a third category.
	Subjective, objective, and something else.
	That is an admixture of both.
	I mean, there's things...
	I come across information in the biological sciences, particularly, that...
	Speak deeply of an intrinsic morality.
	And you see this, you can look at the work of Frans Duval, for example, who's a Dutch primatologist, and he's been studying the social interactions of chimpanzees.
	And chimpanzees...
	Share a tremendous genetic overlap with human beings.
	And from an evolutionary perspective, we diverged from our common ancestor with chimpanzees something like 7 million years ago.
	Our cultures also share, or our biology also shares properties with that of bonobos, but I'm going to talk about the chimps for now.
	DeWall has been interested in what makes a chimp leader.
	So chimps organize their societies essentially in patriarchal fashion.
	The top chimp is male.
	That doesn't mean there aren't high-status females.
	There are, but the fundamental power structure appears, let's say, patriarchal.
	And in the popular eye, it's easy to assume that The top chimp is the most physically intimidating.
	But that's actually not the case.
	What de Waal has shown is that alpha chimps who maintain stable sovereignty, let's say, are more engaged in reciprocal interactions than all the other chimps in the troop.
	So they're very generous and reciprocal.
	They play fair.
	Now, you can get the odd situation where a chimp troop will be ruled by a tyrant, but the structure becomes unstable, and the tyrant chimp tends to be overthrown by coalitions of other male chimps torn to pieces.
	And so then if you think...
	Well, maybe there is a pattern that constitutes...
	This is the crucial issue as far as I'm concerned.
	Is there a pattern of behavior that typifies stable sovereignty?
	And I think that's, in some sense, the fundamental religious question.
	Is there a pattern of behavior that constitutes stable sovereignty?
	And if so, what does it consist of?
	Jak Panksepp has looked at rat behavior and...
	Rats, juvenile male rats, engage in rough and tumble play.
	And when you pair them together, if one rat is 10% bigger than the other, he can dominate the lesser rat.
	And so they do that, and they establish their relative dominance.
	And then if you repeatedly pair them together, which is a crucial issue, it has to be repeated pairings, the lesser rat has to invite the dominant rat to play.
	So that's his role, and the larger rat agrees and plays.
	But if the larger rat doesn't let the little rat win 30% of the time across repeated play bouts, the little rat will stop playing.
	And I read that.
	It just blew me away.
	It's so significant because it shows...
	Imagine that part of what morality is.
	Morality is precisely that pattern of behavior that serves to keep repeated interactions going.
	And those repeated interactions might be across days or weeks or months or years or decades or centuries or eons.
	A tremendously long time span.
	And so what you get is the emergence of a pattern of behavior that's stable for the individual and stable for society.
	And as that's instantiated more and more deeply, it becomes something we can observe and something that we adapt to and something that then becomes part of our central nature.
	And for me, that's the bridge between biology and religion right there.
	Because it looks like there's an evolved ethic that even goes beyond human beings.
	No, I wouldn't deny for a second there's a biological ground for a lot of this business.
	And I'm with Lonergan, the great Canadian philosopher, that the condition for the possibility of real objectivity is a properly constituted subjectivity.
	So I like your opening comment about something that bridges the two.
	We don't just live in the subjective and objective as though they're discreet.
	But it's a properly constituted subjectivity, which means one free of various prejudices, one free of various fears, one free of games of self-denial and all that, that can properly intuit the objective value.
	And objective value does indeed come up out of the physical to some degree.
	I mean, we're embodied creatures.
	So the biological plays a role in that for sure.
	But I think, too, it goes beyond it.
	I mean, it goes beyond simply a question of survival of the individual or even of the species, but certain values, you know, of the truth and beauty and the good that transcend that, although they're grounded in it, for sure.
	Well, this is one of the things I really wanted to ask you about, because I do think In evolutionary terms and across the timescale that evolutionary biologists and physicists have come to accept.
	And so that's a universe that's about 15 billion years old on a planet that's about 4.5 billion.
	And with life being three and a half and mammalian life, say, being 60 million years.
	That's my time span.
	The biblical time span is much truncated in relationship to that, and that sets up a certain tension between the biblical stories, certainly if they're read as Objective truth.
	But the Catholic Church, from my understanding, has, and this comes from the Pope himself, the Catholic Church has already accepted the basic tenets of evolution.
	But I don't know, yes, is that wrong?
	Sure, oh no, absolutely.
	Yes, okay, but that begs the question, because for me, and I'm sure this is part of the sticking point for young people, and maybe for people in Western culture in general, is that it's easy to say that that That evolutionary theory is being accepted, but that still begs the question.
	It's right, okay, so fine.
	You can look at the span of life over three and a half billion years before you get to human beings, but our religious stories talk of a reality that looks like it's about 15,000 years old, something like that.
	And so that...
	I'm not blaming the Church for that, obviously, and I think the stories in the Bible are far older than 5,000 to 10,000 years.
	I suspect they were part of an extraordinarily ancient oral tradition that stretches back tens of thousands of years, because that's the rule rather than the exception.
	And I don't know to what degree the Catholic thinkers within the Church are working constantly to attempt to reconcile these two viewpoints, apart from saying that they do accept them both.
	Yeah, but I don't think they're apples and oranges in a way.
	I don't worry too much about that issue.
	I'm not trying to read the Bible as a scientific text.
	It's not about the evolutionary process.
	It's a theological and spiritual text that's discerning truths that are, I think, available within our experience.
	But there are discrete moments there.
	I mean, the scientist who talks about evolution, fine, I've listened to him or her.
	The Bible's not concerned so much with that.
	But it's giving us a theological interpretation of history and indeed of the cosmos, but not in scientific terms.
	So it has implications for our understanding of the cosmos, for sure, and of nature, of human nature, but it's not done in a scientific manner.
	So it just predates, as you say, I mean, any of what we'd associate now with the scientific method.
	The last biblical text is around the year 100 AD, and so it long predates that preoccupation.
	So to me, it's kind of an apples and oranges issue.
	And I think a lot of that religion science stuff, in that sense, It's an early 20th century preoccupation that we should just get beyond.
	Right, but I think that may be the case, but I don't think people have gone beyond it.
	No, many have, yeah.
	I also think that, and this pertains to something we also talked about discussing, which was the continual drain from the Church, the Catholic Church, perhaps in particular, but perhaps not in the West, of young people.
	And I think part of that is their inability to make intellectual sense of everything that they're faced with, a religious tradition and a scientific tradition, especially on the biological front.
	But not only that, they don't know where to place these things in their view of the world.
	I think that's partly why my lectures, because you asked about that, had become popular, because I am trying to do that.
	No, I'll say this.
	You look at the surveys.
	There's a lot of surveys now that ask young people, Precisely that question, how come you left?
	And people speculate, oh, it must be because of the scandals or because they had a bad experience in church or something.
	Number one reason across many years in all the surveys is I don't believe the teachings.
	And then to specify that, religion and science seem to be at odds with each other.
	So for young people, the scientific way of knowing is the way of knowing.
	So it's sort of scientism, at least implicitly, holds sway in the minds of a lot of young people.
	So once you make that move, knowledge equals the scientific manner of knowing.
	But then the Bible is non-scientific, therefore it's, you know, old superstition, Bronze Age mythology, etc.
	And see, what you were doing, Jordan, I think...
	You were doing what a lot of the church fathers did with the scriptures because the church fathers are very interesting.
	People like Origen and Augustine and Chrysostom and those people.
	They knew fully well in the 3rd and 4th century that the Bible should not simply be read in a sort of You know, straightforwardly literalistic way.
	Augustine knew that very clearly.
	Origen knew that clearly.
	And they talked, therefore, about the different senses of Scripture.
	What you're doing, I think, in a lot of your lectures is what Origen would have called the moral sense of the Bible, the tropological, to give it its kind of technical term.
	The biblical texts are about the moral life.
	Now, we might say today, the psychological life or what makes you psychologically healthier or more productive.
	They would have said the moral sense.
	They knew all about that.
	And so the texts begin to open up in these marvelous ways.
	So, you know, Noah and the Ark, Jacob and wrestling with the angel and the ladder going up to heaven, etc., etc.
	If you start fussing about, you know, the literal...
	Truth of these stories.
	You're going to miss these really deep spiritual insights, which the church fathers knew very well.
	And I think you were in your own way tapping into that.
	And the fact that young people were responding to it, see, I think is very encouraging.
	That's why I told the bishops, it's a positive sign that you were getting the audiences you were getting around this.
	Well, the problem with the scientific viewpoint, technically speaking, is that it's amoral.
	Within its own confines, by definition, it strives not to address issues of value.
	Now, it can't help it because scientists have to investigate some things and not others, so value enters into it.
	But by its own nature, science can't answer and tries not to answer questions of value.
	Now, it gets more complicated when you look at...
	Work like the primatology I discussed earlier, the origin of morality in animals and game playing, say, among rats, that starts to move into the domain of morality to some degree.
	But the problem with science is that it doesn't...
	It strips out all subjective meaning.
	It's designed to do that.
	And that leaves everyone at a loss about what to do with the world of value.
	And I do believe that stories in particular...
	Address the world of value.
	That's their function.
	And the world of value is the world that we act in.
	They're guides to action.
	I come across it all the time in my work on the internet.
	So I have, you know, dialogues with people that interact with my videos.
	And they'll say things like, well, the sciences give us access to the truth, period.
	The scientific method, that's how we get to the truth.
	And I'll say, so Hamlet tells you nothing true.
	Plato tells you nothing true.
	T.S. Eliot's poetry tells you nothing true.
	I mean, who would believe that except the most ideologically scientific person?
	My fear is a lot of young people are in the grip of that.
	They're in the grip of a real ideological scientist.
	They don't know how to think their way out of it, and so they just abandon the attempt, but it leaves them nowhere.
	What you were doing, though, is you're showing a way out.
	And there is a way out.
	And it's by an introduction into the great masters of these texts to show you how they function.
	That's what a good preacher ought to be doing.
	So let me throw another objection, and this is another stumbling block, I think.
	And I think this emerges in postmodernism in particular.
	Because the postmodernists, there's reasons for their manner of thinking.
	So one reason is...
	Artificial intelligence researchers discovered in the early 1960s that perceiving the landscape was much more difficult than anybody had ever suspected.
	Originally, it was sort of felt that objects were just there in some simple way, and the complicated computational problem would be how to move among the obvious objects.
	But it turned out that It's really, really difficult to perceive the environment.
	There's an infinite or near infinite number of ways that you can perceive even a finite set of objects.
	And that means there's a multitude of potential interpretations for every set of events.
	And so that was a radical discovery in the computational world.
	But the same discovery basically occurred at the same time in the world of literary analysis.
	For the same reason, is that every text is susceptible to an inordinately large number of interpretations, and it's not easy to identify the canonical interpretation.
	And maybe the canonical interpretation isn't canonical, it just serves power, for example.
	And that would be, you know, religion as the opiate of the masses or religion as a political tool.
	And I think that takes things far too far.
	But there's a real problem here, is that if you divorce the narrative from the objective world, And say, well, the narrative is valuable because it gives us a guide to value.
	Then you have another problem is, which instantly, which is, okay, which narrative?
	And how do we make a hierarchy of value among narratives?
	We would say Hamlet is deeper than Harlequin Romance.
	But trying to specify why that is and what deep means is very, very difficult.
	And you might say, well, the Bible is the deepest of all narratives, but that still begs the question.
	Well, compared to Buddhist writings, say, compared to the Upanishads...
	Compared to any long-term complex mythology that's developed over thousands and thousands of years, what makes it canonical?
	Why is it preferable to Shakespeare, for example?
	Perhaps I could get you to address that, because that's a vicious problem.
	There's a lot there, and I'll start with your opening remark about postmodernism, because I quite agree with you.
	I'm not simply anti-postmodern.
	In fact, I wrote a book called Toward a Post-Liberal Catholicism, where I took in a lot of the insights of the postmodernists, one of which is, as you quite correctly say, a sort of legitimate perspectivalism, that we never get reality, you know, too cool.
	I just open my eyes, there's reality.
	Again, that's Lonergan.
	It's only a properly constituted subjectivity that It opens the door to the properly objected.
	But one of those ways of properly constituting your subjectivity is to put your subjectivity within a community of discourse.
	So it's never the case that I simply intuit the way things are and end of the argument.
	No, as Lonergan says, it's not the cogito.
	That was the trouble with the Enlightenment.
	It's the cogitamos.
	It's always we think.
	And that means I have my perspective.
	I bounce it off your perspective.
	You bounce off somebody else's.
	We have a disciplined and structured conversation.
	And in that process, all the different aspects of the real begin to emerge.
	Or like my intellectual hero, John Henry Newman.
	He said, the contents of a real idea is equivalent to the sum total of its possible aspects.
	That's about 1870, he says that.
	Which is really an extraordinary thing because he anticipates, in many ways, the phenomenologists.
	You know, when they talk about walking around an object and to intuit its essence thereby.
	And the walking around is not just I walk around, but you're walking around.
	And someone else is walking around.
	We're all...
	We're exchanging our points of view.
	And again, I'd bring this into line with Catholicism, which has always stressed the communitarian element that we know precisely in the community of the church.
	Now, linked to the Bible, The Bible's never like, just open it up.
	You're a single subjective viewer.
	Now you take in its meaning.
	We've always said the Bible is read within the church in this long interpretive tradition, where I'm bouncing it off of Augustine's perspective.
	We've got it from Origen, who now throws it to Thomas Aquinas, who now brings it to Newman, and then through preachers and teachers, through the saints.
	So you've got the technical intellectual interpretation of the Bible.
	Then you have the saints, who in many ways, they embody the Bible.
	So I'm going to read a lot of the biblical stories in light of Francis of Assisi, in light of Teresa of Calcutta, etc.
	So I like that side, if you want, of the postmodern, which is much more attuned to the communal way in which we come to know things.
	The big question you raised at the end, and we could spend some time with that, how do you make ultimate judgments and determinations like this one is right, you know?
	Well, you hinted at it a bit there by saying, well, look, many, many people have worked on this for a very, very long period of time, and in some sense, it's a living document.
	Because it does have to be...
	The Bible just doesn't exist as a book on a shelf.
	It's a pattern of meaning within a context, and the context has to be taken into account.
	So you say, well, there's a powerful context for its interpretation.
	It's also a fundamental text in that...
	The Bible is implicit in all sorts of other great texts, like Shakespeare, or anything that's a product of Judeo-Christian culture that's a deep product, is deeply affected by the Bible.
	So it's there implicitly, whether you like it or not.
	And so it has to be taken seriously, I would say, even if you don't believe it.
	But then to the degree that you believe the central axioms of Western culture, you have to wonder how much of What's biblical, you do end up believing because of its implicitness.
	Well, yeah, I mean, it's all through the Western culture, for sure.
	And the question of belief, you know, in some ways is the most fundamental question in all of theology.
	We call it fundamental theology.
	How do you articulate the meaning of belief?
	For the best people in our tradition, belief is always on the far side of reason, not the near side of reason.
	And that's a mistake that so many people make today, young people especially.
	Faith or belief, they mistake for credulity or superstition, something sub-rational.
	And our best people, of course, have always repudiated that.
	Authentic faith is on the far side of reason.
	So reason's done all the work it can and should do.
	But then there's this moment when the claim is made Deus dixit, right?
	That God has spoken.
	Now, do I believe that or not?
	I think it's precisely analogous to coming to know a person.
	I know something about you just from watching you over the years and I can Google you and I can read your books and I can come to some sort of objective knowledge of you.
	Now, in this virtual means, I've met you and so my mind is working trying to understand where you're coming from.
	But let's project into the future.
	If you and I met in person, you and I eventually became friends, And at some point, you spoke a truth about yourself that I could never have gotten on my own.
	I could never have gotten it from any objective source.
	You revealed something to me of your inner life.
	And at that point, I've got to make a decision.
	Well, do I believe that or not?
	I can't prove it.
	I can't...
	It's congruent with everything I've known, so that's one test I could give.
	If you told me something that's just wildly incongruous with everything else I know about you, I'd probably not believe that.
	But if you tell me something that's congruent with what I know, but goes beyond it, And I have to say at that point, okay, I have to believe that or not.
	I think faith is like that in a way.
	So the Bible, I can approach in all kinds of different ways.
	But the claim being made at the heart of the Bible, of biblical revelation, is Deus Dixit.
	God has spoken.
	God has said something in this text.
	Do I accept it?
	And that has to be a decision that's born of something beyond reason, not opposed to it, but beyond it.
	So that's, I think, where belief in the religious sense comes in.
	So I understand that argument, but I have trouble with it, I would say.
	So we could talk about faith a little bit.
	And this is groping around in the darkness.
	It seems to me that gratitude is a form of faith.
	It's like a decision in some sense.
	Because you could look at the world and you could say, well, there's plenty of reasons to be grateful and there's plenty of reasons not to be.
	And so the evidence doesn't necessarily support one interpretation or another.
	But...
	A decision about whether or not to be grateful is going to affect the way I interpret the world and also perhaps the way it reveals itself to me and the way I act in it and the consequences of my action.
	So I would say it seems to me to take faith to be grateful and that seems to be a worthwhile faith.
	It seems to me to take faith to operate always when we don't know what we're doing.
	And we usually don't know what we're doing.
	And so part of the reason that you have to have faith is because you're actually ignorant.
	And it fills in the gaps, right?
	Because otherwise you'd be stuck with a never-ending regress.
	You just ask why all the time, and then you could never act, because the why has to end somewhere.
	And I think virtually by definition it ends with an act of faith.
	That might be akin to your idea about faith being beyond reason.
	It's like, well...
	Look, if I ask you why you're having this conversation with me, you'll give me a reason.
	And if I ask you why that reason is valid, you'll give me another reason.
	And if I do that five or six times, you're going to run out of reasons.
	But you're still having the conversation.
	So that means you have faith that the conversation can go somewhere good.
	And that's not actually a delusion.
	Right.
	No, no, no.
	Actually, you're moving toward God, and I think that's a classic route in our tradition, and just the way you were doing it.
	Why are we having this conversation?
	I can give these particular reasons, but then ask the why again, ask it a third, a fourth, a fifth time.
	Finally, I'm going to get to something like, well, because I want to be happy.
	What ultimately motivates the will is some desire for happiness.
	Well, no, what's happiness?
	Well, keep pressing that question.
	It can't be something simply in this world.
	We all know that doesn't make us happy in the way that we're seeking.
	It's something like the sumum bonum, right?
	Something like the ultimate good.
	I want to be happy in the fullest possible sense all the time.
	Which is why, you know, Teilhard de Chardin said this, that I wouldn't get out of bed in the morning unless I believe in God.
	And that's what he meant, was if you do that kind of horizon analysis of every act of the will, even the simplest, like getting out of bed, you finally come to the sumum bonum.
	Okay, so let me walk through that.
	Okay, let me walk through that, because I think that's a useful thing to think about.
	Technically, I've thought about identity in this regard, because identity is a nested structure.
	It's also a lens through which we view the world.
	And so, if I'm sitting at my typewriter typing, you might ask me what I'm doing.
	And the answer is, well, I'm moving my fingers up and down.
	But then that's true.
	And the next answer is, well, I'm producing words on a page, but I'm also producing phrases, and I'm producing sentences, and I'm producing paragraphs, and then chapters, and then a book.
	And then you might say, well, Are you writing a book or are you being a professor?
	And I'd say, no, well, I'm being a professor, pushing my fingers up and down on this keypad.
	And then you might say, well, what's professor nested in?
	And the answer to that would be something like, well, good citizen.
	And that's nested in good man.
	And then that's nested in, well, then that's right where you start to encounter what I think are something like religious presuppositions.
	It's like, well, what exactly do you mean by good man?
	And I think psychologically, I think, well, that means to act out the mythological hero.
	And that's exactly the point where that identity touches on something that's, I think, indistinguishable from religion at that end.
	Now, I'm not sure what that means about God per se.
	I would say this, that God, in our great tradition, could be defined as the good in its unconditioned form.
	So all the things you've been raising here, so the why, why, why, I'm answering with some kind of good, with a conditioned good.
	The very fact that I can put it in a wider context means it's conditioned.
	It's good, I'm seeking it, but it's not the ultimate thing I'm seeking.
	So unless we have an infinite regress, which I think is repugnant to reason.
	And immobilizing.
	You know, there are people who have neurological conditions that put them into an infinite regress, and they cannot act.
	Right.
	So if that's repugnant both, let's say, epistemically and psychologically, we have to come to something that's properly called the unconditioned good, good in its absolute form, that which is desirable simply for its own sake.
	So Aquinas will say God is called good because God is the supremely desirable.
	What do we desire?
	Thomas says some form of actuality or being.
	That's why we call God the fully real, that which is most actual, octus purus, right?
	But I like the analysis that comes not so much cosmologically but psychologically from what motivates me.
	And finally, unless my life just sort of founders into irrationality, I am motivated.
	Ultimately, by God.
	Right.
	Well, I think so.
	Because, you know, I would also say, well, let's reject that argument and say, well, you're not nested in good man, good citizen, hero, and then beyond that, you know, cosmic hero.
	And I think, psychologically speaking, the figure of Christ is, if nothing else, a cosmic hero.
	And I'm not saying it's nothing else, but it's at least that.
	Well, what would the alternative be?
	Well, you wouldn't be doing what was good.
	Well, then what's on the outskirts of your value structure is something that's adversarial, something that's the opposite of good.
	And maybe you're likely, in fact, your psyche is not pure and you vary depending on your faith, I suppose.
	But...
	But there's no escaping being nested in some sort of transcendent structure like that.
	And then I think of it this way.
	So you have this outermost reach of your identity structure, which is something like whatever the idea of good man is grounded in.
	And I do think it's grounded in this hero narrative.
	But then I look at the hero narrative and I think, well, that's a biologically, that's an emergent narrative.
	It has evolutionary roots.
	It's something like Man has discovered that his goal is to move into the unknown, to confront what's predatory and dangerous, and to garner something of great value in return and to share it with the community.
	It's an ancient, ancient story.
	It echoes through the Old Testament continually.
	It's even there It's even there.
	It lurks underneath the accounts of God's creation itself.
	And that means that that outermost rim of identity Is something that has an evolutionary origin?
	And then you think, well, that means that it has to be connected.
	It's connected with reality in some fundamental sense.
	Does that demonstrate the existence of God?
	Well, that's a different question.
	But you can push, you can make a logical case for the necessity of that hypothesis of goodness to that point, as far as I can tell.
	Well, stay first with your example of someone, let's say, who's really wicked.
	And there are wicked people.
	We can analyze that psychologically.
	Two of them are sitting right here.
	Well, yeah, because it goes right through the human heart, as Solzhenitsyn said.
	But Thomas Aquinas says a wicked person, even the most wicked person, is seeking at least the apparent good.
	So something that appears good to that person.
	Now, they could be totally mixed up about it.
	It's not, in fact, good for them, but at least it appears good to them.
	So even the most wicked person, Thomas says, is inchoately seeking God, because it's always some good.
	And now he's got the wrong sense of it.
	But he's still being drawn and motivated by this first cause of the will, even the most wicked person.
	See, but I think that's a sign of hope.
	That means grace is always possible.
	Now read whether it's Dostoevsky or Flannery O'Connor and people that talk about the most wicked types, but they're sometimes the place where grace breaks through, you know, because they are seeking God in their perverse way.
	So, in a way, he's got us coming or going.
	You know, I mean, whether we're Mother Teresa or we're a wicked Dostoevsky character, we're all seeking God in some way.
	And I agree with you, too, about the Bible.
	The Bible...
	Well, see, I'm not that optimistic because I think that...
	I don't think that all evil actions are misguided.
	I think that because...
	And I think that's best illustrated in the story of Cain and Abel.
	And I took the story of Cain extremely seriously.
	I think it has unbelievable explanatory power.
	It's quite staggering, the power of that story, the explanatory power, especially for how short it is.
	You know, Cain is resentful.
	He has his reasons.
	His sacrifices were repudiated by God for reasons that aren't made clear in the text, which is a great ambiguity, because often our sacrifices are repudiated.
	And Cain is bitter and no wonder.
	And he has Abel around to rub his nose in it as well.
	But Cain's reaction is, I'm going to destroy what God values most.
	Now, you might say, well, Cain is conflicted and ambivalent about that, and I believe that.
	But I don't think he was seeking the good when he struck down.
	He was shaking his fist at God.
	Indeed, he was, objectively.
	But he was seeking at least the apparent good for him.
	In his twisted mind, he thought that was the good.
	I don't believe it.
	I don't believe it.
	I think you can get to a point where you're so resentful.
	I really believe this, that you're so resentful that you will do harm to yourself as well as everyone else.
	But a suicide is seeking at least the apparent good.
	A suicidal person thinks my non-existence is a good thing.
	So they are seeking the good, but in a twisted, misguided way.
	And to me, it's got metaphysical roots, because I would hold to the classical view that evil is a privati oboni, right?
	It's a privation of the good.
	So good is always more fundamental than evil.
	It has to be.
	They're not co-equal principles fighting away.
	So I'd repudiate any sort of Gnostic or Manichaean I believe that too.
	I thought about that a lot.
	Jung is being accused of manichaeanism, for example, because he took evil so seriously.
	Who has?
	Sorry, I couldn't hear you.
	Carl Jung was accused of manichaeanism.
	But he took evil extraordinarily seriously, which is something that's definitely worth doing.
	So you look at examples like the Columbine killers.
	Well, you know, the suicide could have come before the murders.
	But it didn't.
	And so, I don't...
	I even see maybe in those situations the desire for non-existence, not so much as a seeking of the good, but a desire to punish God for the inadequacy of his creation.
	Yeah, it could be.
	But at least in their mind, that's a good thing.
	So that's the Cain connection, the resentment against God and getting back at God.
	Sure, I see it in the pastoral life all the time.
	It's a justified thing.
	For them it is.
	They think God deserves it, because look at what's happened.
	But God has us coming or going, because that is in fact a quest for God.
	Even the most resistant sinner is in fact...
	I've always liked both Origen and C.S. Lewis say this, that it's the love of God that lights up the fires of hell.
	If someone's in hell, it's the resistance to God's love that's lighting up the fires, that's causing the friction.
	And so God has you coming or going.
	I mean, is God present in hell?
	Sure, because whatever is has to be grounded in God.
	And God's even present in the fires of hell because it's the resistance against God that's causing them, you know?
	So I think it's a metaphysical statement and a psychological statement.
	About the primacy of the good.
	But it's a source of hope.
	And a lot of my pastoral work, you know, and you as a psychologist too, when you go into people's pain in a very deep way, and priests go all the time to these limit situations where people have lost loved ones, they're facing their own death, they're facing tremendous failure.
	That's where priests go.
	Because that's often where grace is going to break through.
	Well, I've encountered situations as a clinician Yeah.
	I always think of, you know, Hegel said, to know a limit as a limit is to be beyond the limit.
	And I think that's true here.
	So whether it's the physical sciences or psychology, our reason comes to a certain limit.
	But then it recognizes the limit as a limit.
	And that's to be already beyond it in a way.
	And they often talk about religious questions as limit questions or it's a limit situation.
	When I begin to ask the meta question beyond questions, or I come to a meta experience beyond any ordinary experience.
	And that's why, again, priests tend to show up at those limit cases.
	That's when we're looking into this abyss.
	And it is, from our standpoint, rather abyssal.
	I mean, what is it that stands beyond what I can know and control?
	And there's this, I mean, do a Kierkegaardian, there's a kind of leap that that abyss is something loving.
	What stands beyond what I can control is a force of love that's actually summoning me.
	Go back to what I said about Deus Dixit, God speaking through the scriptures.
	I think that's what it means.
	The voice from the cloud is a symbol of it.
	When someone hears the voice of God, it's coming from the abyss.
	It always is.
	Job, the voice comes out of the whirlwind.
	So your eyes are closed and you can't see anything, but from the whirlwind comes the voice.
	And again, that speech is so important because, Job, where were you when I did all these?
	I mean, what do you know about what's going on?
	You know nothing about what's going on.
	But from the abyss beyond reason comes the voice.
	And the Bible witnesses to that stuff all the time.
	And boy, it happens in people's experience.
	I mean, you and I both know that.
	When you come up against limits, what comes out of the abyss is a very interesting thing.
	Well, one of the ways that's interesting to think about this, I think, is that, well, let's assume that at the outermost limits of your identity, you don't make the assumption that you're involved in an enterprise that's good, nested inside a being that's good.
	Let's say you take the opposite approach to that.
	What happens to your behavior?
	And what I believe I've observed, and I tried to document this particularly in my book, Maps of Meaning, is that You start acting in ways that make everything worse very rapidly.
	I had a debate a while back with an antinatalist, David Benatar, and he believes that existence is so rife with suffering, conscious existence is so rife with suffering, that it would be better if it just didn't exist at all.
	Dostoevsky's Ivan makes that case in The Brothers Karamazov brilliantly.
	He tortures his brother Eliosha, who's the novitiate.
	And it's a very interesting book because Eliosha is nowhere near the rhetorician that Ivan is, but he is the most admirable character in the book because of the totality of his personality, not because of the brilliance of his rational mind.
	It's an amazing book in that regard.
	The problem I had with Benatar's hypothesis wasn't its axiom, because I think you can make a strong case that there's so much suffering in the world that the question of its validity is a valid question.
	The problem for me there is that if you do that and you start to act that out, Things appear to take a vicious turn very rapidly.
	You start working against everything that's alive and striving.
	Yes.
	No, quite right.
	Gosh, there's a lot there.
	I was thinking of, as you were talking, Dante's image of Satan at the pit of hell.
	Not in a fiery place, but an icy place.
	Much, much better symbol of stuck.
	Surrounded by the betrayers.
	Yeah.
	Chewing on the three great traitors.
	But his great wings, he's meant to fly.
	He's meant to fly up into the presence of God.
	But all they do is he's beating his wings.
	And that's our earlier point about he's seeking God.
	I mean, Satan is seeking God.
	You have to.
	That's the way the will functions.
	But all he's managing to do is make the world around him colder.
	So as he's beating his wings, he's creating the meteorology of hell.
	So that's what happens when someone gets really stuck.
	They are, in fact, seeking God.
	And he cries from all six eyes.
	He's got six eyes and he's weeping.
	And he's drooling from the people he's chewing, and he's stuck, and he's making the world colder.
	It's a beautiful picture of what happens.
	It's really useful, too, for listeners to realize.
	If you look at, this is my opinion, and you can take it for what it's worth, The images of Satan in Paradise Lost and in Dante's Inferno are unbelievably instructive.
	If you start to understand that what these thinkers were trying to do was to produce an imaginative representation of evil, and evil as an embodied and transcendent being.
	And the psychological rationale for that, I believe, and it has something to do with our ability to communicate, which you referred to earlier, is that The evil we do is informed by the entire human race's conception of what constitutes evil.
	And stretching back from the beginning of the time when we began to communicate.
	So, for example, you see this quite clearly.
	I read the Columbine killer's notes in quite a bit of detail, and it's saturated with satanic thought.
	And the reason for that is that that sort of thought is part of the culture because we've come to represent these transcendent figures of evil in poetry and in movies.
	And it happens all the time in movies with characters, say, like Hannibal Lecter and in horror movies.
	And the Milton's Satan, who's often viewed, at least by some, as a revolutionary hero, seems to me to be something like the rational mind hero.
	It's what happens to the rational mind when it places its presuppositions in the place of God.
	Because Satan seems to presume that he can replace the transcendent by his own presuppositions.
	And I think my reading of that is that's actually what happened on Earth not long after Milton wrote when these totalitarian states emerged.
	It's something Solzhenitsyn commented on where the presuppositions, the utopian presuppositions of man rationally thought out.
	We're seen as sufficient to represent everything, the totality, to eliminate the need for something transcendent.
	And the consequence of that was that they produced something that looked an awful lot like hell.
	And Dante did that more psychologically.
	And so Milton, being the great poetic genius that he was, had a poetic sense that that was what was coming down the pipelines.
	I wonder if you read your countryman, Charles Taylor, much the Canadian philosopher, because Catholic too.
	Taylor said that we in the West, let's say Western Europe, America, Canada, Australia, we might be the first civilization ever, ever, to think you can find real happiness apart from a transcendent reference point.
	And everyone in human history has felt something like The alluring darkness beyond what I can control and know is necessary.
	A relationship to that realm is necessary for happiness.
	We're the first culture ever that said, no, I don't care.
	I'm indifferent to it.
	But that does produce versions of hell, for sure, because something will take the place of the transcendent point of reference.
	Well, it seems useful even from the perspective of humility.
	I mean, I don't know if this is a reasonable thing to say, but a tyrant who believes in God is likely preferable to one who doesn't, because at least in principle, the tyrant is held accountable by something that isn't him.
	He's under God.
	That's right.
	And he would get caught, at least in principle, again, in the operation of his own conscience.
	I love the fact in the scriptures, they're very unique this way.
	They do not apatheicize their leaders.
	And it's very different from so many other ancient cultures where the kings become like gods.
	And there's the Bible.
	I mean, the Bible is bluntly honest about its leaders and its kings.
	Even the greatest, even David, murderer, adulterer, Solomon, Saul, the whole realm of them.
	That's a brilliant insight of the Bible, that all these people are under God, and they're under judgment.
	And that's a liberating idea.
	And when we lose that, the leaders do become apotheicized.
	Well, you saw that in Rome constantly, in ancient Rome.
	That literally happened.
	And there's always a proclivity for that to happen.
	That's the imperial presidency, you know.
	Right.
	It's very important.
	I always tell when I'm preaching on this subject to Christians, the fact that Jesus is called the Son of God was so important because it was dethroning the Roman claim that the emperor was the weos tutu, so one of the titles after Julius Caesar.
	He's divinized.
	Then his son, Augustus, becomes the son of the God.
	So when the first evangelists were saying, I've got good news about Jesus, the son of God, they were saying, right, it's not Caesar.
	He is not the son of God.
	This one whom Caesar killed, by the way, he's the son of God.
	The Bible's always making that move of knocking our own pretensions off their pedestals.
	I think that's an amazing observation, actually.
	And it is one of the things that is extraordinarily striking about the Old Testament, is that it's so sophisticated psychologically, because what's happening there is that the idea of absolute sovereignty is disconnected from the person bearing the sovereignty.
	And so at the very least, again speaking psychologically, what you have is...
	The representation of God as that which is sovereign.
	And now each individual can be a representative of that and can have that operate within them, but they aren't that.
	And that, well, as I said, at the least, that's a brilliant psychological innovation.
	And the fact that the biblical characters are so, they're realistic to the point of Dostoevskian painfulness.
	You know, Abraham doesn't leave home until he's, what, 80?
	75 or something.
	He's a late starter, right?
	Yeah.
	catastrophe after another for the first while.
	It's like, you know, you have some contempt for him, let's say, because he's hanging around his father's tent.
	And then he does finally pay attention to the call of adventure, to God's voice.
	And he goes out and encounters tyranny and starvation and corruption.
	And he makes all sorts of mistakes.
	And it's easy to be contemptuous, I think, of the biblical characters because of that.
	But it actually speaks to their intense psychological realism.
	And it's so useful for people to see that, because Abraham, for example, is blessed by God, despite the fact, despite his evident character flaws, and that's the case for the patriarchs in general.
	So it is remarkable.
	Right.
	A descendant of yours I'll put in the throne that will last forever to David, who was a deeply flawed character.
	What I find cool is that even before you get to the human characters, go to the very beginning of the Bible, and you have a dethroning of the cosmic pretenders to the Absolute.
	So in the creation account, you know, sun, moon, stars, planet, animals, the Earth itself, All the things mentioned were worshipped in different contexts.
	So the author is saying, no, no, no, no.
	They're not divine.
	They're creatures.
	But then he turns it around beautifully.
	But they have a purpose, which is to give praise to God.
	So they're not God.
	They should be dethroned from that.
	But now they're given the privilege of praising God with their manner of being, led by the conscious people.
	Creature, human beings, who, and Catholics know this, whoever comes at the end of a liturgical procession is the one that leads the prayer.
	So Genesis, the opening verses, sound like a liturgical procession.
	You know, the first this, then that, evening came, morning followed, then the fourth day.
	It's like a steady procession of liturgical actors.
	The last figure, the human being, is the one now that will lead the chorus of praise.
	To my mind, it's the master theme of the whole Bible, if you want.
	We're rightly constituted when we give praise to God and can lead all of our creaturely brothers and sisters in the right praise of God.
	Sin is bad praise.
	Without fail in the Bible, they went after false gods.
	They went after the gods of those people.
	They abandoned the teaching of the Lord.
	Bad praise leads to the disintegration of the self.
	So that's now in the psychological order.
	That's really...
	Well, praise is what you praise is what you pursue.
	And so if you're pursuing the wrong thing, then you're going to fall apart.
	Right.
	One of the great biblical ideas, I think, is you become what you praise.
	So what gets your worth-ship, that's the origin of our word there.
	What's the highest worth for you?
	You become that.
	So you become what you worship.
	We're meant to become children of God.
	But what happens, we end up worshiping something, so every one of us worships something, and we become conformed to that.
	And then, if it's not God, we disintegrate, and then, like Satan, we start beating our wings and making the world around us worse, so that the world around us disintegrates.
	That's the Bible.
	The Bible tells that story over and over and over again.
	Which is why, from a Catholic perspective, a Christian perspective, that Jesus on the cross Is offering the Father right praise on our behalf?
	And see, now you're getting to the Mass, which is very powerful.
	The Mass is the great act of praise, where we join ourselves to the sacrifice of the Son, we say.
	We conform ourselves to Christ.
	I have to ask you about that, because it's just burning a hole in me.
	Well, I'm in chronic pain, a lot of it.
	And it's constant.
	I don't know what to do with it, generally speaking.
	I know things that make it worse.
	You said something.
	A lot of ideas were flashing through my mind, and I want to hit at it because it's a crucial concern.
	You said something so surprising that Christ on the cross was offering up the proper praise to God.
	I'm not going to just let you say that without noticing it, because that's a hell of a thing to say.
	So I'm going to put together some things that you touched on, and then we can address this.
	So you said in the Bible, one of the things that's remarkable about it is the conception of the divine.
	So the conception of what is of highest worth is stripped from some of its obvious objects of projection.
	The sun, the moon, the cosmos, the stars.
	But then also...
	Earthly leaders of other cultures, idols, and also earthly leaders of your own culture.
	It says, no, whatever the ultimate divine is, it's not to be found in its fullest expression in any of those examples.
	It's something else.
	Okay, so then the question is, well, what is that else?
	Well, the Christian answer is, well, whatever it is, in its human form, let's say, it's something human.
	It's something that humans can aspire to.
	It's both of those.
	And it's made manifest in the figure of Christ.
	Something specifically human.
	But then you have this terrible paradox with Christ, which is partly the paradox that you just laid out, which is a very difficult thing to get a grip on.
	So what is it exactly?
	Why is what Christ is doing proper sacrifice?
	What is it?
	His willingness to bear the pain?
	What is it?
	That's close to it.
	So we say the Word became flesh.
	So the Word who is always in the presence of the Father.
	So the Word doesn't worship the Father because the Word is God.
	So we shouldn't talk about worship within the Trinity itself.
	But now the Word becomes flesh because the Father, God, so loved the world, He sent His only Son, that all who believe in Him might have eternal life in His name.
	He sends the Son into flesh, but into flesh that's been so compromised by sin, so not into a pristine creation.
	That's an interesting question theologically.
	Would He have sent the Son if creation had not fallen?
	That's an interesting question.
	Right, the valuable fall that laid the groundwork for...
	Yes, it's a remarkable idea.
	It is indeed, but like Don Scotus argued, you know, the Franciscan medieval theologian, that God would have sent his son even if we hadn't sent.
	But that's another question.
	Okay, so let's take that apart for just a sec so that people are clear about it.
	So the theory here is that...
	There is something wrong with the structure of creation.
	That's its steepness in sin.
	And everyone has to ask if they believe that.
	And it seems to me that people do.
	There's a sense that things aren't how they should be.
	That we're not how we could be.
	That something has gone astray and is continuing to go astray.
	Which is a mystery in and of itself if it's a God-created world.
	It's like, well, why is that precisely?
	Well, the quick answer is corrupted freedom, you know, or a misguided freedom, you might say.
	But the word comes into flesh, into fallen flesh.
	And the cross is what?
	The cross is cruelty and hatred and violence and institutional injustice and stupidity.
	And if you read the passion narratives, it's a beautiful sort of poetic presentation of all that's wrong with us that comes out to meet him.
	And bearing all of that, he continues in his relationship of obedience and unity with the Father.
	So, bearing the sins of the world, bearing all the dysfunction and twisted quality of the world, he brings us back online.
	So, in the attitude of the Word made flesh on the cross, we see a sinful, corrupt That's the sacrifice of the cross that's pleasing to the Father.
	So we should never play the game of, well, the Father is a dysfunctional, alcoholic Father that is now demanding this blood sacrifice.
	It's rather the Father is pleased by the Son's entry into our fallen situation.
	And his bearing of all that dysfunction, even as he brings us back online to the Father.
	Okay, so why does...
	Okay, so let's say Christ maintains his...
	I know this isn't exactly the right way of thinking about it, but it'll work for rhetorical purposes, I think.
	So Christ is tortured.
	By betrayal, physically, and spiritually as well.
	Because the best way to torment someone is to punish them despite their innocence, right?
	Yeah, right.
	Right, right.
	Or maybe worse than that, to punish them because of their virtues.
	That's even better.
	And so that's intrinsic in the story as well.
	Christ bears up under that.
	It doesn't repudiate God.
	It doesn't repudiate his own essence.
	It's something like that.
	But then, is the example of that, is the example of bearing up under that exceptional duress and maintaining a moral stance, is that the example that redeems the world?
	Is it that if you do that in your own life, the world is de facto redeemed?
	It is that, but more, because if it's just that, then a Pelagian system would be true, that we just need a good, you know, moral exemplar.
	It's something more metaphysical.
	Well, a bit more than just merely good.
	I mean, it's superhuman, what's being asked for.
	No, true, but it's something more metaphysical about it.
	It's a reworking of the way things are.
	If Jesus takes upon himself all the dysfunction of the world and swallows it up in the ever-greater divine mercy, So it's Christ bearing all of our dysfunction, but transfiguring it in His great act of forgiveness and obedience to the Father.
	I think all of that coming together simultaneously is the sacrifice that's pleasing to the Father.
	In some ways, the word from the cross, Father forgive them, they know not what they do, is the most important.
	Or play with this too, Jordan, that after the resurrection, So Jesus comes back precisely to those who had denied him and betrayed him and run from him in his moment of greatest need.
	And in almost any telling of a similar story, if that had all happened, and then the person who had died is back from the dead, and he appears to those who had abandoned him, you'd expect him to, you know, wreak havoc on them, right?
	So Jesus shows his wounds, to be sure, because the wounds of Jesus are a sign of the world's dysfunction.
	If I'm ever tempted, you know, when we were younger, the book, I'm Okay, You're Okay, came out, right?
	So we're always tempted to say, well, you know, basically we're okay.
	You just need a little fixing up around the edges.
	Whenever we're tempted to say that, it's the wounds of Jesus that say otherwise.
	That's why I was insisting earlier that I don't, you know, that it isn't merely misguided good that turns people towards the darkness.
	It's voluntary desire to produce the darkness as well.
	Anyways, I do take that very seriously.
	And it's an interesting idea is that the ideal is wounded in proportion to the degree that everything has deteriorated away from the ideal.
	And that's almost by definition true, right?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, no, that's true.
	But it's just the very act of the will itself is structured in such a way it has to be seeking some kind of at least apparent good.
	But that's our earlier issue.
	So the wounds show the dysfunction of the world, which the Son of God took upon himself.
	But then, the word of Shalom, which is in all the resurrection accounts, that Jesus says, peace.
	So when Paul, for example, says...
	I'm certain that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities, nor height nor depth, nor any other creature could ever separate us from the love of God.
	How does he know that?
	Because we killed God.
	And he returned with a word of forgiveness.
	So that means it's like the divine goodness and forgiveness can trump any evil, even the evil of killing God.
	So we killed him, but yet he returned in forgiving love.
	I think that's the moment when Christianity is born.
	In the dual sense of, yes, we kill them.
	Look at the wounds.
	But he says shalom to us nevertheless.
	So that I can't run away from him.
	I can try.
	You know, that's what all of us sinners do.
	I can try.
	But ultimately, the divine love is such that it's greater.
	That's why Paul can all say, where sin abounds, grace abounds the more.
	That's Christianity.
	So the greatest sin, we kill the Son of God.
	There's no greater sin than that.
	Where sin abounds, grace abounds the more.
	And see, all of that was made possible in a way by the great sacrifice of the cross, which is why it's a saving act.
	Well, I'm striving to understand.
	Okay, so I want to ask you a bunch of questions about that.
	So we talked a little bit before about the church bleeding its people.
	They're leaving.
	The young people are leaving.
	And my sense of that is it's because the church does not demand enough of young people.
	Yeah, I think that's right.
	It doesn't demand enough.
	And by not demanding enough, it doesn't indicate its faith in their possibility.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	So, now, in Orthodox Christianity, as I understand it, there seems to me to be more emphasis on the idea that it's each human's obligation to become like Christ.
	That's the goal.
	Well, by definition, we could say, and we could speak psychologically about this as well, That means to become the ideal.
	The ideal that's beyond rationality.
	That's what you're aiming at.
	That's what's hypothetically within your grasp.
	And it seems to me as well that that's what the mass symbolizes.
	And I'd be happy to have any objections to this, I would be happy to hear.
	The incorporation of the host is the embodiment.
	It's the incarnation of Christ within.
	That's what it's acting out.
	That's the idea.
	In some sense, it's the consumption of the saving element, but the saving element is actually a mode of being.
	And this isn't hit home.
	It's like, look what the church demands everything of you.
	Absolutely everything.
	And the reason that people are leaving is because, That adventure isn't being put before them.
	It's like, look, you can have your cars and your money and all of that, but that's nothing compared to the adventure that you could be going on.
	Yes, I wish you'd preach to our people because I think you're absolutely right about that.
	The language we'd use is be a saint.
	That's the ordinary goal of every baptized person is to be a saint.
	A saint means someone who's holy or utterly conformed to Christ.
	Now, press that.
	To be conformed to Christ means you're willing to go into the dysfunction of the world, to bear its pain, and to bear to it the ever greater divine mercy and love.
	Now fill in the blank, Francis of Assisi.
	Mother Teresa may be in our time.
	Like when we were younger, if someone said, well, who's a living saint?
	We all would have said Mother Teresa.
	But what did she do?
	She went into the worst slum in the world.
	I've been there.
	And she bore the suffering of the world, literally picking up the dying and bearing their disease and bearing their psychological suffering.
	And she took on herself the wounds of Jesus.
	But then think of the smile of Mother Teresa.
	She brought to that place the ever greater, more super abundant mercy of Christ.
	That's being a saint.
	And you're dead right.
	I think we're not sufficiently calling our people to that kind of heroism.
	Mom, look, I can tell you one thing I've experienced.
	This is really something to see.
	I spoke in about 150 cities sequentially, with a day or two in between, to large audiences, 3,000 to 10,000 all the time, something like that.
	And I always paid attention to the audience, singly, because I was always talking to one person at a time, but also en masse, you know, to see, to hear.
	Because if the words are landing in the right place and hypothetically emanating from the proper source, then there's silence.
	And sometimes that silence can be dramatic, and that's why people say, well, you could have heard a pin drop.
	It's no one's moving because their attention is 100% gripped by whatever just happened.
	And one thing that reliably elicited that was the proposition that the meaning that sustains you and protects you from corruption during suffering is to be found in responsibility.
	And I thought part of the reason that that produced silence was because no one says that now.
	They say happiness, or they say rights, or they say privileges, or they say reward, or something like that.
	They don't say, pick up the heaviest load you can carry, or care for that matter, and stumble forward.
	And I've seen people cut those ideas and put them on t-shirts and play with them.
	It's not that the church is asking too little of its people.
	No, it is asking too little of them.
	I quite agree.
	It's precisely, and so there's no heroism in it.
	There's no call.
	Well, because finally, I call it the culture of self-invention is a very boring culture.
	Stanley Hauerwas is a Methodist theologian who said he defined liberalism or the modern attitude as, I have no story except the story I invent for myself.
	And that's finally a very boring place to live, it seems to me.
	In fact, you're part of this incredibly rich and complex narrative, which I would refer to as God's creation and God's providential movement.
	But I go back to Luke's Gospel, you know, when Jesus says to them, duk and altum is the Latin, go out into the depths.
	You people have been horsing around in the shallows way too long.
	That's where the fish are, by the way.
	But also, it's where adventure is.
	It's where the glory of life is.
	Get out into the depth.
	And we have, I think, allowed our people to be kind of horsing around by the seashore all the time.
	It's also where what protects you from hell is.
	Because you need to be engaged in something that's deeply meaningful enough to justify the suffering.
	And so, you know, part of what happens in the story of Christ is the only thing deep enough to justify that level of suffering is absolute immersion in a cosmic drama.
	And then you ask yourself, well, are we each immersed in a cosmic drama?
	And it's not so easy to say no to that.
	It's a life or death situation, and everything's in it.
	I would say the instinct of a Christian is to go where the suffering is.
	So I spent a lot of my life forming priests, working in seminary.
	Eventually, I was the rector of the seminary.
	So my job was to help these young guys discern the priesthood.
	And I would say that's the test.
	I mean, do you have an instinct to go where the pain is, to go where the suffering is?
	If you want to live a comfortable life, then don't become a priest.
	You might be a bad priest if you embrace...
	A comfortable life.
	But it's the Mother Teresa model.
	It's the Duke and Altum.
	Go out into the depths.
	And the depths mean the depth of human suffering.
	So then what's wrong with what you guys are doing?
	Why isn't it working?
	What's the problem?
	It's true that we're not doing enough of that.
	And I do think we've succumbed a bit to the modern thing, which is a preoccupation with rights and freedom and my individuality and so on.
	Well, you see this with church activism so much now.
	So, like, the church seems to be replacing itself in some sense with social activism.
	It's like we've got enough social activists.
	Yes.
	Well, but see, I'd say this.
	Pope Benedict XVI, who's a great intellectual hero of mine, said the church always does three essential things.
	The church worships God, it evangelizes, and it cares for the poor.
	Poor broadly construed, as I say, anyone who's suffering, right?
	But that first move, as we said earlier, is indispensable.
	The church worships God.
	It teaches the world right praise, because without right praise, the whole thing falls apart.
	Secondly, it evangelizes.
	What's that?
	Well, that's a cool thing, too, because euangelion in Greek, good news.
	They were playing with that because the Romans would have used that in the eastern part of the empire to announce an imperial victory.
	They would send an evangelist ahead with the good news.
	Evangelion, hey, Caesar won a victory.
	So these very edgy first Christians who had zero social status, no power, no military behind them, said, oh, no, no, I got the true Evangelion.
	It's about Jesus, risen from the dead, who was put to death by Caesar, but whom God raised.
	So that's the proclamation of the good news that now we have hope.
	Now the sacrifice has been made and God's love is greater than anything that's in the world.
	Okay, now I got those two things in place.
	Now serve the poor.
	Now go where the pain is.
	Go where the suffering is.
	But if you divorce them from each other, and that has happened.
	So who cares about worship, and that's fussing around with altars and sacristies, and who cares about evangelization?
	Let's just get down and serve the poor.
	Then it does devolve simply into social work, right?
	But if the three are together, worship God, evangelize the dying and rising of Jesus, and serve the poor, now the church is cooking, you know?
	Alright, so let's look at the second one of those.
	It seems to me, I can understand this, not that whether I can understand it or not is a hallmark of its validity, but I have to try to understand what I can understand.
	I can understand the idea that bearing forward in a moral direction, acting as if being is intrinsically good, and that humanity as part of that is also intrinsically good, Bearing all that up as a set of propositions, even in the most extreme cases of suffering, I can see that as a valid moral good.
	That's Christ's refusal to be, what would you say, corrupted by the injustice and terror of his fate.
	And so that might be something like, you don't have the right to become a tyrant no matter how badly you were tyrannized, let's say.
	And I think that's an unshakable moral proposition.
	But then there's the resurrection element of it, because I could say, well, the first thing I would say is, well, I kind of understand that psychologically.
	Parts of us die, and And they have to die because they're in error.
	They have to be cast off.
	And we're reborn constantly as a consequence of our movement, our ascent forward.
	There's no movement forward without some death of the past.
	And so I can see the resurrection idea as a metaphor for the part of us that continues onward despite our failures and constantly reconstitutes our spirit.
	It's not something trivial.
	But then there's the insistence in the church of the bodily resurrection, which is, well, let's call that a stumbling block to modern belief.
	No doubt about that.
	That's something more than mere metaphor.
	And so you might ask, well, why is it insisted upon?
	Why isn't the proposition that you have a transcendent moral obligation to bear, to operate for the good of all things, regardless of your suffering— A hard line, no justification with the defeat of death necessitated.
	I'm not trying to make a fundamental critique of the idea of the resurrection, because I know there are things that I don't know.
	I know that for sure.
	And God only knows how the world is fundamentally structured.
	But...
	But it seems, and this is a Nietzschean criticism in some sense too, and a Freudian criticism, that seems in some real sense too good to be true.
	Yeah.
	And so what do you make of the resurrection?
	How do you conceptualize it, even as it's related in the Gospels?
	Yeah, good.
	You're raising a lot of interesting things.
	First of all, everything you said about it, in terms of psychological archetypes and metaphors, good.
	Fine, I think those are legitimate.
	I think those are our correct perceptions of things.
	And it has indeed functioned that way in a lot of the literature of the world, resurrection-type stories.
	But I think what's really interesting about the New Testament, as Lewis said, you know, C.S. Lewis, when someone said, well, the New Testament is just another iteration of the ancient myth, and he said, anyone that says that has not read many myths, because there's something so distinctive about the New Testament.
	And I would say, Jordan, first this.
	I think from the first page of Matthew through Revelation, what you get throughout is what I call this grab-you-by-the-shoulders quality.
	They knew about literature that is conveying deep psychological and philosophical truth.
	Paul certainly knew that literature very well.
	It doesn't sound like that, though.
	It has overtones with it.
	It bears some of that.
	It has family resemblances with it.
	But what you find on every page is this euangelion, this good news.
	So everything you said is true.
	I think it is true.
	But it's not exactly news.
	It's part of the philosophy of Perennis.
	It's been around for a long time and a lot of the great thinkers of the world.
	And again, I agree with it.
	I like the philosophy of Perennis.
	But the New Testament is people...
	Who grabbed everyone they met by the shoulders to say, something happened.
	Something's happened here that we were not expecting, that was not part of our thought system.
	And it's so shaken us up that we feel obligated to go careering around the world, and indeed to our deaths, announcing it and defending it.
	And what it was, was the fact, here in the 10th chapter of Acts of the Apostles, This sort of almost tossed off line.
	We who ate and drank with him after his resurrection from the dead.
	I don't think people trading in mythic talk use that kind of language.
	Mythic language, and again, I say it with high praise.
	I love the myths.
	But, you know, once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, and then a mythic story unfolds.
	But read the Acts of the Apostles.
	Did you hear about what happened?
	First, it was up in Galilee, and then in Judea.
	You know those people, remember John the Baptist?
	And then there's Jesus, and then in Jerusalem, and then we who ate and drank with him after his resurrection from the dead.
	And then look at Paul.
	Paul who saw him on the road to Damascus.
	Now the Pauline letters.
	Man, they do not read like myths.
	They just don't.
	And I love the myths.
	I love the philosophy of Prentice, but it doesn't read like that.
	It reads like someone who has been so bowled over by something, and he wants you to know about it, and it's changed everything.
	And I think what it was, was what we said earlier.
	It's, okay, now we know.
	God's mercy and love is greater than anything we can possibly do.
	Why?
	Because we killed God.
	And that's why Paul will say, I'm going to hold up one thing to you, Christ and him crucified.
	And crucified, I mean, it was the most horrific thing they could imagine in the ancient world.
	It was deeply embarrassing even to talk about a crucifixion.
	Paul says, no, no, let me put it right in your face.
	See, the author of life came and we killed him.
	But I got the good news, euangelion, is God's mercy and love is greater because he brought this Jesus back from the dead.
	Well, you do have the following argument, which is that it isn't clear which is harder to believe, whether that happened or whether people made it up.
	Because if they made it up, that was really something.
	And that does strike me quite frequently reading the New Testament.
	There are lines in there that hit so hard you think, hmm, it isn't obvious to me how someone could have just thought that up.
	And there is that.
	Well, Carl Jung, who I greatly admire, he believed, I think, in the same way that C.S. Lewis did, and he doesn't talk about this that much, but that there is this archetypal mythological pattern of the dying and resurrecting hero that has this psychological reality which is extraordinarily deep.
	But that archetype was realized once in history, and that's fully realized.
	So it came from the mythic realm, let's say, the realm of eternal truth, the realm of pattern, instinctive pattern for that matter, and was fully realized at one point in history.
	And you might think, well, if it's going to be fully realized, it has to start somewhere.
	You know, it can't start everywhere at the same time.
	Right.
	Right.
	What does an archetype look like when it takes flesh?
	Might be a way to get at that.
	Well, and the thing is, we do see this, and it does grip us, because movies, like, we see representations of this all the time.
	In my new book, I talk a fair bit about Harry Potter.
	And Harry Potter is definitely an archetype taking flesh.
	Well, clearly he's in battle with Satan himself, obviously.
	And she has an unbelievably profound mythological imagination.
	And the thing that's so fascinating about all of that is that because her mythological imagination is spot on, She captivated the entire globe and produced this immense storehouse of wealth and dominated the entertainment landscape for a decade.
	People don't take that seriously, but it's a great mystery to watch that.
	Absolutely, they should.
	Anything that grips people's attention like that is obviously worth paying attention to.
	Yeah.
	Lewis called them good dreams, right?
	So all the sort of archetypal anticipations of the gospel, the good dreams of the race.
	Or use the Jungian.
	I love Jung, too.
	But what happens if that archetype of the person perfectly pleasing to God, Kant's language, what would happen if that archetype became flesh?
	And indeed, that's how they put it.
	The word became flesh and dwelt among us.
	I think that's also the question we should each be asking ourselves.
	In our own lives.
	Yeah, quite right.
	It's like, well, who could we be?
	And you say, well, you don't have to ask yourself that question.
	It's like, well, good luck with your conscience then.
	You should be another Christ.
	That's the objection to the self-created person.
	It's like the idea that you can create your own values is, well, good luck.
	Right.
	Good luck with that project.
	Yeah, good luck.
	Right.
	It's not going to work.
	You know, Newman referred to the conscience, I always love this, as the aboriginal vicar of Christ in the soul.
	So he took the language descriptive of the Pope, you know, the vicar of Christ, but he said the aboriginal vicar of Christ is the conscience.
	John Henry Newman.
	Okay, because I was thinking of Eric Neumann.
	No, John Henry Newman.
	It's a beautiful way of describing it, because we'd say the Christ dwelling within you is the voice of the conscience that's calling you to sanctity, ultimately, to heroic self-sacrifice, to being who Christ is.
	It is what people worship, because here's a way of thinking about it technically.
	Well, look, when I have a conversation with you, There's something I want from you.
	I want everything you can give me.
	I want you to be as there as you can possibly be.
	That's what I'm demanding all the time.
	If my attention...
	Assuming a properly constituted subjectivity.
	If my attention wanders, that means you're not delivering.
	And so if you're wandering around and everyone's attention is wandering away from you, you're not delivering.
	And conscience, because we're so social, we're social creatures to the final degree, conscience tells you when you deviate from the ideal.
	And that ideal is what people worship.
	By attending to that manifestation of the ideal in you, they worship it.
	And so that's there.
	It's there in the demands that we can't help but make of each other and of ourselves.
	There's no escape from that.
	And so I do think it's a perfectly good question.
	What would happen?
	And this is the right question for your life.
	What would happen if you took that seriously?
	And so, again, what I see is that it doesn't seem to me to be If the church can no longer attract young people, it has to be that they're not taking that with sufficient seriousness.
	Yeah, I think there's a lot to that.
	I don't want to externalize the blame.
	It's like, I know the church is a human organization and all of that, but it's still evidence that When I was coming of age, so back in, let's say, the 1970s, the presumption of the church was, we should make this thing as easy as possible, because if we make it hard, these people are going to run away.
	So we don't want to make it intellectually easy.
	So I got a very dumbed-down Catholicism.
	It was through the grace of God that I discovered later in life the very rich Catholic intellectual tradition.
	When I was going through school, including through high school, You know, banners and balloons and collages and it was very superficial.
	We got the clearer impression when I was a kid that English and science and math and all that were serious subjects.
	Religion was like gym or it was like, you know, I don't know what else, like art class or something.
	It was considered not that serious.
	So we dumbed it down intellectually, and we lessened the moral demand, for sure, because we didn't want, I think, people to run away.
	And then, you know, I'll say it bluntly, rather pathetically, we tried to be as relevant as possible.
	That was the term from our time.
	Right, and that's like the uncool guy at the party, man.
	Right.
	You know, if you have to strive to be relevant, you're not on the cutting edge, that's for sure.
	Right, and so...
	There's a study I read some years ago that I thought was very plausible.
	The conclusion was what young people find compelling in a mentor figure are the two things.
	One is that the person knows a lot about the subject that he or she is sharing.
	And secondly, they're really committed to it.
	And when the kids sense those two things, there's a lot to know here, and this guy or this woman, they really believe it.
	They find that compelling.
	You don't need, you know, the games of relevance.
	You don't need to dumb it down.
	In fact, smarten it up and make it as intellectually challenging and morally challenging as possible.
	We dropped a lot of practices that were much more common years ago, you know, to kind of draw young people into the challenge of it.
	So that is a problem, absolutely.
	Well, you know, one of the things that I've been so delighted by is my observation that there's a tremendous hunger for serious conversation.
	Yeah.
	Public hunger for it.
	And when I have engaged in my lectures, I'm always extending myself to my limits of thought.
	Like, that's what the lecture is.
	It's an attempt to go past what I think.
	And there's absolutely no doubt that That everyone in the audience is on board with that.
	I mean, it was the case when I debated Sam Harris, for example, that discussion, which was as technically complex as Sam and I could make it.
	And that might not be as philosophically complex as the absolute ideal, but it wasn't dumbed down by any stretch of the imagination.
	And there's no reason that that If you spoon-feed that material, it catches no one.
	And I can tell you this, those new atheists, so Sam and Hitchens and Dawkins, those guys, they were good evangelizers.
	I mean, for their position, I deal with young people all the time.
	Yeah, and they didn't dumb it down either.
	They didn't dumb it down.
	They had the two things I talked about.
	They were intelligent, and they were passionately committed to it.
	But every day on the internet, when I go into these comm boxes, I hear the phraseologies from Hitchens and Dawkins and Sam Harris.
	A lot of young people read them.
	They didn't hug them into atheism.
	They argued them into atheism.
	So I've been telling our people, we've got to stop trying to hug people back into the faith.
	We have to argue them back into the faith.
	We have to make it compelling and morally challenging.
	I've been walking with this friend of mine.
	I'm talking with him.
	And, you know, he said something quite interesting.
	He was raised in a communist country and was an atheist after that.
	He said his family observed Christmas and he criticized them for that because it was logically incoherent.
	And then he realized that All that would happen if they abandoned Christmas was that they wouldn't have Christmas anymore.
	It wasn't like he had something to replace it with.
	Right.
	And so it's magical.
	You might even call it naive if you're of the sort of mind that would call that naive.
	But do you want to have it or not?
	And if the answer is, well, I'll replace it with another weekend, then that's really not helpful.
	And the problem with the atheists is that they don't have...
	The best they can offer is something like a materialistic utopia, and I've got nothing against that.
	I've been talking to people like Bjorn Lomberg, who lay out this vision of an increasingly wealthy world, where absolute poverty is a thing of the past, and where people can take the levels of health that are more or less taken for granted in the West, for granted everywhere in the world, through a process of incremental economic improvement.
	You know, more power to that, I think.
	But I also know that that isn't a sufficient story.
	There's a kind of despair that goes along with material security because the adventure is drained out of it.
	And Dostoevsky touches on this, and this is where I really learned this when I first encountered this idea.
	You know, Dostoevsky in Notes from Underground says, look, this is something you have to understand.
	If you gave people everything they need so that they had nothing to do but eat cakes and busy themselves with the continuation of the species, if they were so happy that nothing but bubbles of bliss would appear on the surface of the water that they were in, They would smash it all to pieces just so that something adventurous and unique could happen.
	And so there has to be a call to a higher order of spiritual being, let's say, or psychological being that accompanies that materialism, or we won't even accept it.
	It'll kill us.
	No, absolutely.
	It'll smother us.
	It's got to be the call to sanctity.
	And the call to sanctity is a call to love.
	And Dostoevsky, you know, love is harsh and dreadful.
	It's not a cute little emotion, or it's not a...
	It's not a sentiment.
	Real love is harsh and dreadful because it means going into the place where people are suffering and becoming another Christ and bearing the burdens of the world.
	That's serious business.
	Love is something awful about it.
	But there's also something awful about the judgment.
	Because if you love someone, you also hold them to a standard.
	Yeah.
	You will their good.
	Right.
	And that means holding to a standard.
	Russia triggered this in my mind.
	I'm reading these wonderful books by this priest, Walter Chizek.
	I don't know if you know that name.
	He died in 1984, but for 23 years he was a prisoner in the Soviet system.
	So he was arrested in 1939, right when the war got going with the Germans.
	To make a long story short, he was in Lubyanka prison for five years in Moscow, basically in solitary confinement.
	Then he was sent for 15 years or so to Siberia to the worst work camps.
	And he describes it in this book called, With God and Russia, in this kind of bold, just straightforward way.
	But all through it, he says, okay, I went into Russia to be a missionary, to announce the gospel.
	It's not the way I expected it to be.
	I didn't expect to be in a prison camp.
	But okay, this is what God has willed, obviously.
	At least his permissive will is that I be here.
	So I'll do what I can.
	So for 23 years, this man set up when he was in solitary.
	A Jesuit program of prayer, and he would go through his day.
	He had the prayers of the Mass memorized.
	Then when he gets to the camps, they would smuggle in little bits of bread and wine, so he would say Mass on a little table clandestinely, you know, and he would minister in his own quiet way to the people around him.
	I'm telling that story because in the most horrific circumstances, in a way he never saw coming, he said, okay, but I'll try to be a saint here.
	I'll try to be Christ.
	Bear the sufferings of those around me and bring the grace of God.
	He was finally sprung in 1963.
	JFK was involved in getting him out with a prisoner exchange.
	As he left Russia, the plane's taking off, and he did the sign of the cross over the country, blessed the country.
	And it's an incredibly moving story because it's not at all flashy.
	It's told in a really almost bland manner.
	But it's someone who decided, no, I'm going to go in the depths.
	I'm going to deal with what I've been given.
	And it's horrific.
	I'm in a Soviet-Siberian concentration camp doing hard labor.
	But I'll be Christ for the people here.
	That's it.
	I mean, that's the adventure.
	There's the hero's journey that he went on.
	So let's get back to the resurrection idea there, because again, see that story to some degree Doesn't require the resurrection to underscore his heroism.
	In fact, to say, in some sense, to say, well, that was motivated by faith in the resurrection, in some sense undermines the heroism of the action.
	And again, I'm saying I'm not trying to casually dispense with the idea of the resurrection, not least because of its undoubted metaphorical structure.
	But...
	There is this crazy emphasis, this crazy idea that somehow bearing up under all that burden reformatted the entire structure of being.
	And that's associated with, I believe, and I'm no theologian, I believe that's associated with the idea of the harrowing of hell.
	Well, yeah, there's something.
	But what I do as a first step, though, that's the church.
	Christ's resurrection is the seed from which the church grows, and the church is the means by which God wants to reconfigure the world.
	That's right.
	We're not there just to kind of whisper our convictions among ourselves.
	Our whole purpose is to go now and recreate the world.
	That's the church's purpose.
	It reminds me, I read history, and history is so interesting that it's unbearable, right?
	If you read history, it's unbearably interesting.
	And yet, if you go sit in a history class taught by the typical history teacher, it's so dull that you can hardly keep your eyes open.
	You need to memorize what happened in 1612, and that's not the point.
	The point is the unbelievably magnificent drama.
	And so then again, If that story that the church is telling is not being taken up, it's not being sold, there's something about it that's not being sold properly.
	I'm not saying I have the answer to that.
	No, that's true.
	But, like, I saw this kid once when I was in Montreal, and he was about 17 years old, and he was a big guy, big, like, six-foot-five guy, and, you know, like a physical specimen.
	And he was standing on the corner of a...
	Like a shopping area, and he had two pink shopping bags in his hands, and he looked kind of bereft.
	And I thought, you know, if you came up to him and said, I've got some heroism in battle for you around the corner, he'd drop those, and you said it right, he'd drop those damn pink shopping bags in a second and be off for the adventure of his life.
	Yeah.
	And you'd...
	What is it?
	Is it a lack of faith, a fundamental faith, that is sapping the lifeblood out of that story?
	Because you're saying, well, here, I'm calling you to an adventure that's as great as any adventure you could possibly conceive.
	By definition, this is the ultimate adventure that you're being called to.
	Yeah, but the hobbit hole is so attractive.
	I mean, Bilbo would rather stay in his hobbit hole.
	I mean, it's comfortable, and I got my doilies, and it's nice.
	It's comfortable here.
	Gandalf has to summon him to adventure.
	It's a burden.
	It's a task, you know.
	And so the church has got to play that role of Gandalf to get into these hobbit holes and get people motivated to get them out.
	You know what it was with Walter Chizik?
	I'll tell you exactly.
	He's a Jesuit novice in Pennsylvania, 1930-something.
	And Pope Pius XI at the time from Rome says, Russia's just gone communist.
	The church is being persecuted.
	I need, and he said it this way, I need heroes to go into Russia and you Jesuits, you're kind of my shock troops.
	I'm going to summon you into Russia.
	And young Walter Chizik, 18 or 19, says, he just knew that's where I'm going.
	And he went up to the speaker and said, I'm in.
	Okay.
	They sent him to Rome to study Russian language and Russian liturgy, and they sent him into Russia.
	So, I mean, he was summoned.
	He was summoned to adventure, and he took it on.
	You're in?
	Why?
	Like, what happened in your life to pull you in this direction, and how has it worked for you?
	You know what was it, Jordan?
	For me, I was a Catholic kid, you know, going to Mass on Sunday, but not all that interested in religion.
	And I was interested in baseball when I was like 13, 14.
	But I'm in high school, freshman high school class.
	And it was a Catholic high school, so it's a religion class.
	And one of the teachers laid out for us one of Thomas Aquinas' famous arguments for God's existence.
	And I did not disbelieve in God, and I believed in God.
	But I never in my life thought that you could think about God in a serious way.
	And it opened up something.
	It set my mind on fire.
	I started going to libraries, back in those days we went to libraries, and I was taking these books about Thomas Aquinas off the shelf.
	I had no idea what I was reading, but I still, to this day, think of those like magical days, that I had discovered something that just turned my mind on, you know?
	So that was the opening of the door.
	Then the other book I read at that time that was so influential was Thomas Merton.
	Do you know Merton?
	He's a Trappist monk.
	He'd been a man of the world all the way and then had this huge conversion experience and becomes the most radical kind of monk you can become.
	And those two Thomases, Aquinas and Merton, had a big impact on me when I was a Because there's something romantic about it.
	You know, Mertens was the story of someone kind of falling in love with God totally.
	That's what got me in the door.
	And then I followed a lot of the intellectual path.
	I was always kind of a thinker type.
	And that got me into the priesthood.
	And then, you know, off I go.
	But at every stage, it was something like a summoning to mission is language we would use.
	Summoning to a mission, an ever greater kind of mission.
	That kept me going.
	I always found it, I don't know, the most compelling option on the table.
	It always struck me that way.
	As you look at the options of life, like, well, serving God?
	Yeah, duh.
	Wouldn't that be the most exciting?
	Well, yes, that's the thing.
	Well, that's it.
	Apart from the terror that that might reasonably evoke, it is the best, by definition, and again, you could just speak psychologically here, by definition, that's the best game you can play.
	That's how it struck me when I was a kid, yeah.
	Well, it's almost a tautology, you know.
	Right.
	It struck me that way.
	And I understand everyone's different.
	Everyone's path is different.
	But that's how it struck me, how grace, I would say, you know, entered my life.
	And I truly, I've been a priest now for 30, what, five years?
	Bishop now for five years.
	I've never been...
	I've never been unhappy as a priest.
	I mean, I've suffered, certainly, and have gone through difficult times.
	I've never been unhappy, though, as a priest.
	I've never been tempted to leave.
	Never felt like, oh, God, why did I do that?
	I've never felt that.
	And this social media enterprise of yours, you know, when I introduced you, I noted that you're perhaps the most well-known Catholic speaker in social media circles.
	I think that's a reasonable presupposition.
	Do you have competitors, so to speak?
	Oh, yeah.
	There are some people.
	I was one of the pioneers in a way, because I know when YouTube first got started, it was 2006.
	By early 2007, I did a review of Scorsese's movie, The Departed.
	Because my instinct was, let's talk about the culture.
	Let's talk about things going on that have a religious overtone.
	So I started early 2007, right when YouTube got off the ground.
	And then everything else, Facebook and Instagram came along.
	And then others sort of saw what I was doing and got into the game too.
	But I guess I was one of the first ones to do it.
	Not that I know that world that well.
	I got all these young people that helped me navigate that world.
	But I've been providing a lot of the content.
	And so what's that been like and how is that received by your peers or your superiors for that matter?
	I would say, well, to answer the second part first, I think, well, I think they saw, oh yeah, this is good.
	I'm glad he's doing it.
	I'm glad someone is taking the initiative.
	And they began asking me early on, like, hey, tell us more about this and how are you doing it and what are the pitfalls and how's it working?
	So I think my superiors have always been, you know, Very open to it, interested in it.
	When I've spoken to the...
	Now that I'm a bishop, I'll speak at the bishop's conference meetings about it.
	And there's always tremendous interest.
	Now, these are all older men for the most part.
	They don't know, you know, Facebook from, you know, French fries.
	But they get it.
	They get the importance of it and why it's worth doing.
	And the success of it, in a way, has been a source of surprise and delight to me.
	When I started...
	YouTube videos.
	I mean, we thought if we got 300 views, we're doing great.
	I was thrilled when my first one got to 300 views.
	And then it just grew.
	It just grew from there.
	And I think it was a willingness to talk about the culture.
	And then engage people.
	So I can't do it as much now, but in the early days, I would get in the comm boxes and I would really enter into these debates.
	And, you know, as you know, 97% of people that come on comm boxes are mad at you for some reason or they, you know, don't like what you're saying.
	So, okay, I was able then to at least have an argument.
	I could get into the, you know, lists with them.
	Well, I'll tell you, it's interesting you say that because I've certainly met my fair share of opposition.
	In the media domain, let's say, especially with the legacy media.
	But I'm stunned by the positivity of the comments.
	It's absolutely overwhelming.
	I can't really make heads or tails of it, that it's so consistent and it's been very sustaining to me.
	I guess the reason I think that's the case is because I think I'm encouraging people, you know, who haven't had any encouragement or enough, and that's lots of people, maybe everyone, because, I mean, how much people should be encouraged to the ultimate degree, right?
	They should say, well, you want to reveal the divine within in your own particular way.
	You could do that.
	You know, I'm curious about, you did the Reddit AMA, didn't you, a couple times?
	Yeah.
	Well, I did that.
	I've done it twice now.
	And I think one year, I was like, you were first and I was third.
	And not because they knew me.
	I'm sure they didn't.
	But I just got on and said, I'm a Catholic bishop who loves to dialogue with non-believers and atheists or something.
	Right, so you were also inviting some pushback there as well.
	Yeah, but I loved it.
	We got an enormous response.
	Now, a fair amount of obscenity and just people that hate religion.
	See, part of it might be religion, and I'm so institutionally identified with religion, so all that.
	But I love both times I did that.
	The questions that emerged and the themes that emerged...
	We're very illuminating to me, you know?
	So, no, I've loved that world, too, of entering into it.
	And it's, you know, it certainly gets attention.
	People watch these videos.
	And then I've done a lot of, you know, writing and so on, longer form things.
	I've done documentary films as well.
	So what kind of crowd are you getting now with your YouTube channel and your podcast?
	What's your audience numbers?
	Yeah, we have like 77 million or something.
	Yeah.
	You know, total views.
	Oh yeah.
	On your channel?
	Yeah.
	Wow, that's a lot.
	Are people cutting up your videos and posting them in pieces as well?
	Yeah, sometimes.
	Sometimes.
	I'm trying to think of an average.
	It depends on the type of video we're doing.
	But yeah, we're getting good numbers, solid numbers.
	Not in your ballpark, but yeah.
	Well, 77 million total views, that's far beyond respectable.
	Think about comparing that to something like a published book.
	I mean, YouTube has a reach that's absolutely...
	Right.
	And I appreciate that very much, you know, that all these different forms...
	And then that's just YouTube, you know, many of all the other forms of social media.
	So, you know, I'm...
	Look, as an evangelist, as someone trying to speak for the church, I'm delighted by that.
	And, you know, we just did it.
	We just...
	As you did.
	I mean, I think the first video of yours I saw...
	You were in like a poorly lit room sitting in this chair talking about Nietzsche or something.
	And I thought, wow, this guy, someone said, oh, he's getting these enormous numbers.
	And I thought, wow.
	But it speaks to the fact that- It wasn't the production quality that was doing it.
	Yeah, no, it wasn't.
	It was the content and the willingness to talk about important ideas and to do it in a way that respects the audience.
	I think all that is worthwhile, you know?
	Well, look, that was really good.
	We got nice and deep into it.
	Yeah.
	I appreciate that very much.
	Loved it.
	I wish it could have gone on longer.
	I had more questions, but I think I've exhausted my capacity for concentration.
	We went for a couple hours, huh?
	Yes.
	Well, it's a good natural end, I would say, as well.
	Yeah.
	No, I loved it, Jordan.
	Thank you.
	I appreciate your taking the time, you know.
	Anything else that you want to say or that we didn't cover?
	Just, you know, tell – your wife's name is Tammy, right?
	Yes.
	Tell her, you know, we did – just came out with it.
	It's on YouTube.
	A series of reflections I did on the rosary.
	And I know with her interest in the rosary that she'd just go on YouTube and check it out.
	She might find that interesting.
	Yeah, it's too bad we didn't have a chance to talk about that.
	Yeah, but just tell her that because I love the rosary too.
	It's a great prayer and it works at so many different levels.
	You can look at it psychologically and even physically, you know, what that does to you.
	So have her look at those maybe and, you know, give her my best.
	And I remember we were in Rome and Right after you and I spoke the first time, our team was in Rome doing some filming.
	And I think we, I forget who we sent it to, someone in your office, but we did a little video.
	And I knew that your wife was very sick at the time.
	I didn't know that you were on the verge of your issues, you know.
	But I just said, we said Mass in my room there in Rome, which is in the hotel room, and said it for your wife.
	So we sent that to you.
	So let her know that we have been for a long time praying for the two of you.
	Well, that's much appreciated, and certainly all the care that people have shown, including the care that you've shown, has been extraordinarily helpful.
	And she's listening to you on a regular basis.
	I appreciate that.
	And she's certainly found the practice of the rosary.
	Tammy's quite a physical person, and so it's practice for her rather than an intellectual endeavor.
	Not that she's incapable of intellectual endeavor, but she's an adept practitioner.
	So she does yoga for years.
	In your hand matters, you know.
	It's a very physical thing.
	Yes, well, it helped her maintain peace while she was facing death, essentially, continually.
	And so...
	That's the ritual element, which we never talked about at all, partly, I suppose, because we tend towards the abstract and the intellectual, but the ritual shouldn't be dismissed.
	No, I'm a Catholic.
	Heck, ritual is our whole thing, you know.
	Yeah, well, there's peace in ritual, right?
	That's the thing.
	You know what to expect.
	It's a place of safety.
	And in a world that changes constantly, ritual is the only thing that provides order.
	And so we may need that now more than ever because things are changing so unbelievably fast.
	Which is also partly why the church should be careful about being too relevant.
	Yep, I agree.
	I agree, yeah.
	All right.
	Well, thank you very much.
	No, I enjoyed it immensely.
	God bless you.
	Me too.
	Thank you.
	I need all the blessing from God I can get.
	I can tell you that.
	I'll keep praying for you.

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