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Krista Tippett is a Peabody award winning broadcaster and author. As the creator and the host of Speaking of Faith at American Public Media. She has innovated a new model of intelligent in-depth journalism about religion and spiritual ethics in every aspect of human endeavor. The program is heard on over 200 public radio stations across the United States and globally via podcast and Internet and of course on at least two of our PBS stations in the greater Boston area. Krista Tippett was a journalist and diplomat in divided Berlin in the 1980s. Before attending Yale Divinity School she is the author of a memoir and reflection on religion in the 21st century in 21st century life. Speaking of Faith why religion matters and how to talk about it and also the author of the recently published book Einstein's God conversations about science and the human spirit. And as a brief commercial both of those books will be available

today so you can look for them. We are so pleased to have Krista here today to help us think about the future of what I'm calling progressive churches. And without further ado let us give her a warm welcome. Thank you. Good morning and I'm also really and impressed and honored that you came out on a beautiful Saturday morning and I could not be happier to be here I I've known that I had to come to Harvard Divinity School one day. Really. And I want to thank Dean Graham and Lee Rose who extended that initial invitation and it feels like it's been a long time coming but here we are and I'm delighted to be here with members of the Harvard Divinity School community and also I know we have some friends of WGBH in here which is also fantastic and we are happy to be on both of your great public radio stations. So the topic today is large and I know we will

take it in many directions and I'm going to speak now for 45 minutes but after that I'm really interested as the day progresses and what's on your mind and engaging you there in terms of your questions and really where you would like to take this I'd like to kick start the day with some observations from the space I inhabit which is where religion Media and Public Life intersect. And I do want to say it's true I did go to your sister institution Yale Divinity School I was one of those people who was getting an MDA but not getting ordained which made me a second class citizen at Yale Divinity School I don't know how it works here. And some of my former divinity school colleagues have observed that my pulpit now is much larger than any of their stuff which there's a little bit of delight of that but but you know honestly sometimes I can't imagine actually that I could be using my theological education more and in

ways that I never could have imagined it was an incredible foundation. You know not just for thinking theologically in Christian terms and looking at Christian sacred text but it actually has enabled me also to move into an intelligent conversation with people from many traditions. So and you know sometimes I can't believe I'm getting away with it honestly on public radio and you know it has been a great adventure creating a public radio program about religion in these years in which religion moved from the sidelines to the forefront of American political life the new global affairs though in 1998 which is when I first proposed that public radio should have an intelligent in-depth program about religion. I encountered a nearly overwhelming skepticism. There was some doubt first of all that religion mattered enough in the grand scheme of things to merit an hour a week and Public Radio. Sure my

conversation partners in public radio said I could document that most Americans consistently report that they believe in God however they define God that they pray that they consider religion important that they have spiritual lives. But the skeptics asked could this be true of public radio listeners as well. And I'm not making this up they said. Art public radio listeners of above average sophistication highly educated and if they did have public religious lies I heard surely they wanted that kept as a private matter. And it is true that in the latter half of the 20th century though not before religion did become something in educated western society as the Boston sociologist Peter Berger muses. Religion became something that was done in private between consenting adults. But after the last few decades of U.S. electoral politics after September

11th 2001 at latest Western pundits and policymakers and journalists woke up to the fact that religion never went away for most people in most cultures in the world. Nor indeed did it go away in this one. Indeed it could still be a force that animated lives and nations and history for better or for worse. We began to grasp that religious identities and religiously fueled passions might determine this post-Cold War century as ideologies determined the last. Still in the mid 1990s I saw and I came out of divinity school in 1904. I saw a black hole where thoughtful religious voices might have been on public radio and every other form of media I had had an early career in journalism and diplomacy in divided Berlin and I had gone to seminary to test my discovery that faith could be reconciled with the

life of the mind and with the complexity of the world I had experienced and I found a vivid landscape of others who shared this discovery. But I could not find this reflected anywhere in our public life. Instead in those years two men Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell largely dominated the media imagination of what it meant to be Christian what religious people religious people writ large sound like and advocate. Robertson and Falwell preached pronounced and condemned in language that captured headlines and made for great soundbites. And I bring this up though it really is old news because I think our culture is still reeling from that experience years after either of these men exerted the dominance in Christian and in the Christian culture that they were granted in secular media. And so this was the backdrop for

people hearing my idea of a public radio program about religion. They had these voices ringing in their ears. They simply could not imagine intelligent religious discussion. They couldn't imagine that we could invite people to speak from their deepest places without proselytizing or excluding or making lots of people angry. I still remember the first time. Long long ago in a very small recording studio that I recorded I'm Krista Tippett and this is Speaking of Faith and this reporter from The Newsroom who'd been assigned to be my producer rolled her eyes and said I can hear the radio dials clicking often now. OK and I got that and I get it even more now. This is in part the fault of these strident religious voices. It is in part the result of a media culture that encourages adversarial point counterpoint exchanges. These leave little room

for the spiritual and intellectual content of faith. They make the humble people sound trivial and they deliver inordinate play to strident voices who are willing to squeeze themselves into political modes of debate in order to be heard. It is hard for people of faith to express their ideas in an adversarial forum without betraying the very spirit of what motivates them. Now none of our ideas political or economic or religious is a noble old biased soundbite point counterpoint media culture but the content and effect of religious faith I believe is especially distorted and sometimes rendered dangerous when it is reduced to soundbites. Now nearly a decade after I began to ponder this journalism about religion is diversifying. Once upon a time my producer Kate Moss is here today and she planted

this image in my mind years ago and it's become one of my favorite that once upon a time there were women's pages in newspapers do we remember that and then everyone woke up to the fact that women were out there everywhere doing everything. And I think the same is happening with religion now. It's no longer the exclusive beat of the faith and values reporter or the reporter covering hot button political issues on any given week. You may find stories with some kind of religious or spiritual angle. Let's say in every section of the Sunday Mirror Times front page we can review arts and leisure travel book review and even style. And throughout the last presidential election all of the candidates talked about their faith not just the Republicans. Time magazine coined a good phrase to describe this that I really like they said this is the leveling of the praying field. And now of course just in recent months Arianna Huffington has launched Huff Po

religion with her Rauschenbusch as its editor. So this is all a sign of our times. We are moving into a period in which the spiritual and religious aspect of life assumes a more robust and diverse place in the mix of our public life a robustness and diversity that mirror the way this part of life actually works. There will continue to be straightforward religion news in which vocal positions and extremists who make dramatic headlines will continue to get inordinate ink pixels and air time. But we will also have a variety of forms to tell the whole story the whole story of religion in our time. Just as we have a variety of forms on public radio and everywhere else for talking about politics we're talking about money we're talking about the arts. But citizens in every field citizens who are people of faith themselves certainly must play a critical role

alongside journalists in further diffusing some of the minefields that have too often sidelined all but the most divisive voices among us. This is necessary if Christianity and other traditions are to bring the fullness of their resources of idea and practice to the to the great challenges of our time. So in that spirit for the next few minutes I'd like to name and respond to three guiding assumptions that still lurk often unselfconsciously behind journalism about religion and in places in our culture. Naming these I think is a critical step in disarming them moving beyond them creating new space and a new imagination about religious self-definition public expression and even internal vitality in religious traditions. And this task may be more complicated for progressive people and

churches than that sounds on the surface may be a little bit provocative here. For what what Peter Berger and others analyzed in the 1960s was not the demise of religion that's what they thought they were saying initially. It turned out instead to be a kind of civic indeed self-consciously civilized retreat of educated elites that have the effect of quieting religion in our spheres of speech and action in the world. And I don't think I'm saying anything too speculative to say that there is crossover between educated elites and progressive religious traditions. So as I name these biases between for the next few minutes that I encounter in the sphere of journalism I'm also naming internalized instincts that may have contributed to a kind of schizophrenia in progressive engagement with culture and religion writ large. And as I respond to these biases I think I'm also proposing some reasoning and

vocabulary for new forms of robust self-definition and public expression that I believe our aid not only makes possible but really demands. So the first assumption is that religion is a crutch. I notice that often still when my fellow journalists analyze a new religious commitments and spiritual curiosity let's say in this country among undergraduates or among new business classes in China or Muslim women they often betray between the minds and educated assumption that religion represents a kind of retreat. Certainly that passionate religion represents a kind of retreat toward supernatural comfort and away from reason in the face of life's complexity. In recent years I have interviewed people across a spectrum of calling theologians and scientists poets and activists parents and police officers. We have traced a powerful

creative and humbling line between theology and human experience big religious ideas and real life. And I do not experience the spiritual energy of our culture now to be a rejection of the rational disciplines by which we've ordered our common life for many decades. Law politics economics science. It is rather a realisation that these disciplines have a limited scope. I think that the very complexity of our age is driving people back to the enduring repositories of ethical and spiritual thinking that our great traditions have carried forward in time wondrous advances in science present us with choices that human beings have never had to make. Information Technologies equip us with mountains and mountains of facts. These things instill in us a parallel longing for resources to help us sort

and make sense and find meaning amidst the messy animating realities of life and death. Good and Evil we can construct factual account sense systems from DNA gross national product legal code but they don't begin to tell us how to order our astonishment. What matters in a life what matters in a death how to love how we can be of service. These are the kinds of questions religion arose to address and our great religious and spiritual traditions are keepers of conversation across generation about them. This is what many many people in our culture and others young and old are rediscovering in the 21st century. And this is true for many if not most of those who will call themselves an affiliated on last week's Pew poll or nest next week's Pew poll.

It's very fascinating to me that spiritual energy and curiosity of our age is very different from the spiritual energy say of the 1980s. It carries a hunger and I say this here at the to a people who are part of one of our great theological institutions it carries a hunger for real theology. It contains a longing to merge spiritual ethics and lived values and it carries a passion for service that sets substantively apart from the self centered spirituality of recent generations. I remember a conversation I had last year not on the air but off the air with Darren Sonnie who is the first he's that the dean of religious life it USC and he's the first Hindu to be in that position he's not a Hindu chaplain to be the dean of religious life in a major American liberal arts institution. And he started his sentence that I thought I'd heard many times before which is not a sentence that especially interests me he started talking to me about what

what all the religions have in common. I'm actually much more interested in pulling out the differences because I think that's also what we have. Those are the gifts we have to give each other our differences. So I was I was tuning out what even I do as a professional listener. But what he did is he said you know he's I don't know he's in his late 20s or early 30s he said you know what all these when you get down to it all the traditions have in common and I expected him to say something like I sensed in something larger than ourselves or purse spiritual fulfillment he said it's his service. Right. That's a new way to end that sentence that the cup and coming generation is ending that sentence in that way and that that is a new age. A second problematic assumption is that religion is subjective. This is one of these assumptions that we many of us who are educated hold without realizing it makes it hard for us to talk about religion or

religious ideas and convictions have long been suspect or at the very least treated journalistically as soft because it is agreed they are entirely subjective. Yet we routinely weigh other kinds of subjective opinion seriously. Does political analysis reflect objective reasoning. Is it economic forecasting an empirical feat. I have been posing that question for a few years and I wish it had not proven as pertinent as it has. Our culture including our journalists long ago decided that certain kinds of subjective opinion merit a respectful hearing. Though we know they may be contradicted or proven wrong almost immediately and to the extent that journalism about religion is improving it is honoring and pulling in close to

Faith's subjective insights. Only by doing that can we get at the power of this part of us to shape lives and communities and its capacity to nurture our common life. I'll give you a few examples of what I'm describing of how we have come at this. So after the economic turmoil began. Whenever this was in the last year or two I was deeply aware that there were huge gaps in what we as reflected in the media were discussing. So coverage of the economic crisis was interesting Lee framed morally but in a very black and white way. Right there were victims and predators. There was greed and gullibility. Or we were focusing understandably but kind of obsessively on what my colleagues at Marketplace market place call the numbers. So missing from all of this was real reflection and what had happened and why. And human and cultural terms and

real wisdom on how to live forward differently. So at Speaking of Faith we created a project we called Repossessing Virtue this is one of these moments where we were it was so thrilling that the world has changed because we were able to do this immediately online and then later bring it to the air. And it so we sent out this question first to people who had been on the show previously people who we think of as wise voices and then ultimately to all of our listeners. And the core question was is this economic crisis also a moral and spiritual crisis. Now so much richness came out of this but for right now I'm just going to focus on one recurring thread that we heard that surprised me. It was a very clear reflection on the meaning of human community and the fact that the loss of that in recent generations had something to do with what had gone wrong and that recovering that had to be part of our way of living

forward. It crystallized in a question you know who will we be for each other in and through and beyond these changed economic circumstances and it was articulated in this amazing range of voices from Shane Claiborne who some of you may know as a new monastic figure to a young recently laid off stockbroker in Manhattan to this delightful young filmmaker in Los Angeles all asking versions of this question and it came through Also in the voice of the great history Christian historian and public theologian Martin Marty. So he reminded us of the phrase in the letter to be a fusions. We are members one of another. And this is what he said. This is written to people who have a religious commitment that makes them members one of another. But I think you can without limiting its appeal to agnostics and Jews and Muslims and Buddhists and anyone else in America. You can carry it over and say in the political order. We are also members one of

another and we pretended that we weren't and that's where I think the great immorality lay. Marty says that we were on our own all political groups all economic groups were acting that way. I once heard somebody say he's a self-made man and he worships his creator. And Marty says and that's the highest form of idolatry and that's immoral. Now is this kind of reasoning subjective. Sure. But it is also powerful and practically helpful reflection on great and enduring aspects of our personal and economic lives that economics cannot touch. I think also of a conversation I had with Major John Morris who's a chaplain in the U.S. Army and he told me about his experience in Iraq of standing before a bridge across the Euphrates where the bodies the charred

bodies of four American contractors had been hung on display. He told me how fury consumed him along with a certainty that the people who did this did not deserve to live. They were animals. He would be an agent of God. The wrath of God and as that conviction seized him he understood that he was at an abyss that would render him just like capable of the very actions he hated. He prayed God help me and have mercy on me save me from becoming a debased immoral human being and save my soldiers as well. Is this prayer subjective. Yes but prayers like this theology like this belong in our common life. One of the phrases that recurs most often in my interviews from Jewish and

non-Jewish voices is the moral longing and commandment to Kona Lama repair the world. In the beginning Hasidic legend goes something happened to shatter the light of the world into countless pieces. They lodged a sparks inside every aspect of the creation and the highest human calling is to look for this original light from where we said point to it gather it up. And in so doing to repair the world. Now this can sound like an idealistic and fanciful tale but Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen who told it to me as her grandfather told it to her calls it an important and empowering story for our time. It insists that each one of us flawed and inadequate as we may feel has exactly what's needed to repair the part of the world that we can see and touch. Religious traditions offer up stories like this as practical tools to a

world longing to address images of suffering that can otherwise overwhelm us. Yes this kind of moral vocabulary is entirely subjective but our public life needs moral vocabulary like this just as it needs sophisticated vocabulary for political economic and military analysis. The third assumption that's out there. Religion is about what people believe. Equating religion with belief I think is one of the most narrowing instincts in American culture. Maybe one day I'll have a have the time to trace where this came from I suspect our Puritan ancestors but I'm not sure. Somewhere along the way Americans came to imagine that you can gather a quick idea of what a religious person is about if you can get a list of what they believe. I still remember when we did it earlier early on we did our first show with a Buddhist voice and

my executive editor said Well right at the top of the show we need a list of what they believe in it doesn't work like that. Well some kinds of Protestants including the Protestants who raised me Southern Baptists they are trained in this kind of confessional speaking. It doesn't in fact take you that far beyond the surface of who they are. Most importantly most religious faith doesn't revolve around belief at all it's not just Buddhists Jews and Muslims are not trained to talk about what they believe because of religion for them is first and foremost about how you pray when you pray what you do how you live. Believe has almost nothing to do with Hindu is a more Buddhism religion is about making sense of life and the world it is about ritual and sacrament service and community. It is very often this is one of my big themes in the world. It is

very often more about questions than it is about answers. Religion allows many of us to live more peaceably with ambiguity and new wants. It is there for us when everything doesn't add up. In the midst of life's passions and suffering and frailty. Now the language of belief has led us to place voices of faith in the marketplace of certainty and fact and argument. This gets all of us into trouble. We see dramatically how in civic and global life religious passions flattened out into positions and arguments become blunt instruments with the same power religion has to inflame hearts to infuse life and death with meaning. More fundamentally a focus on believe severely limits our capacity to comprehend the nature

of this part of life. It is easy to compare. A religious belief flatly to a scientific belief and declare it intellectually inferior or on a media platform to pit a preacher's convictions against the pundits arguments and find the one more logical and the other fanciful or inflammatory. Now convictions are one expression of religious faith. I'm not saying they're not. But in many important ways religious truth finds its shape and voice in the same place in us that art comes from the great sacred texts employ multiple forms of language to convey truth poetry narrative metaphor didactic wisdom saying Faith's territory is the drama of human life where art is more precise than science where ideas are lived and breathed

and think with me of the difference between hearing a serious interview with a musician or a poet and hearing a serious interview with a political thinker. We don't put poets on the defensive off the bat ask them to justify their very existence or the fact that they sit in a room by themselves all day making things up. We don't ask them to prove the factual validity and empirical truth of their work. We marvel at the work itself and its effect of others at the mystery of its creation at the way it conveys truth differently than fact or logic. We probe behind that under the stand the spirit that gave rise to it and that it brings into the world. I remember hearing one of the bast veteran NPR News hosts he really is a good interview Sir John Polkinghorne after he won the Templeton Prize on religion and spirituality. Some of you may know Polkinghorne he's a Cambridge quantum

physicist who later in life also became a Cambridge Filosa. He's at the forefront of this fascinating global dialogue between religion and science that you never hear about. Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens got all the press and when Polkinghorne won the Templeton Prize he had just written a book pondering eschatology the end times in light of quantum physics and chaos theory. So here we have this world class intellectual and a world class journalist begins his five minute interview with this man five minutes by asking how does one bring a scientific sensibility to something about which none of us has the faintest clue. Now again the reality is we invite people to speak authoritatively on things about which none of us has the faintest clue. All the time. Two words.

Had fun. We do and must engage different kinds of knowledge varied ways of knowing different ways of getting at the larger truth of what it means to be human. John Polkinghorne is smart on this. He says we need both science and religion to interpret and understand the rich varied and surprising way the world actually is. As a quantum physicist he sees a universe that is subtle and subtle. A mix of determinism and of freedom. And this informs his imagination about the nature of God. What happens when he prays. What happens when we die. And I love this analogy he offered when we spoke for my radio program he said. Science treats the world as an object something you could put to the test pull apart and find out what it's made of. And of course that's a very

interesting thing to do and you learn some important things that way. But we know that there are whole realms of human experience where first of all testing has to give way to trusting and also where we have to treat things in their homeless in their totality. I mean he says a beautiful painting a chemist could take that beautiful painting could analyze every scrap of paint on the canvas tell you what its chemical composition was would incidentally destroy the painting by doing that but would have missed the point of the painting because that's something you can only encounter in its totality. So he says we need conflict we need complementary ways of looking at the world. The truth is you can inhibit. And now I speak as a journalist you can inhibit a religious voice you can rigid of the tenor of a religious voice more easily than you can do with other kinds of opinions. This part of life is as intimate as anything else

we try to talk about and that is a simple explanation for why we make a mess of it so much of the time. It's a part of life that like Mystery ultimately defies words. I've been very informed by an observation that the Quaker educator Parker Palmer has made that our culture is highly skilled at bringing the intellect to the public table. We know how to wield ideas and opinions with abandon and in recent years we've also become very adept at bringing emotions into the public sphere. But he says we are quite primitive when it comes to inviting the soul to speak for inviting the insights of the soul to the table. Parker likens the soul to a wild animal which if cross-examined will retreat back into the depths of our psyche. Now I am told by listeners of speaking of faith that they have heard people on religious people on my program speak with a depth and

integrity and intelligence that they don't hear on media much. And if that's true it is in part because I took Parker's advice that the soul needs quiet inviting and trustworthy spaces to speak its truth. Now such spaces are admittedly hard to create in this culture and in a media environment. And I want us to acknowledge that it's hard to find or create these spaces in our charged environments. In every sphere in a liberal arts institution in a seminary in a religious community the language of belief that has put the language the belief that has put religion in the marketplace of certainty and fact and argument on the Sunday morning talk shows extends into the way we resolve or fail to resolve some of the huge painful human and theological

questions even as we wrestle through those questions within our own traditions. It's natural to resort to our well honed civic instinct to deal with our counterparts even in our religious communities in terms of their opposing belief their adherence to the other opinion. Ha ha. It's it's we treat them as we do in our civic lives as those people who won the last vote are those people who lost the last vote. Not my neighbor who I am bound to find a way to love. Whatever that can look like in this moment. So for the record I am no longer really very interested in what religious people believe. I am interested in how they think. I'm interested in how the totality of their experience and knowledge forms their

theology their sense of the sacred and how their theology and sense of the sacred inform their experience and knowledge. I'm interested in how that changes across time. This is something we never talk about when we talk about religious beliefs. How it changes across time and is capable of changing across time because if we are breathing all of our answers to those great abiding questions behind the religious enterprise do evolve with age and experience. I'm interested in the questions people have. We don't spend nearly enough time in this culture dwelling on our questions together. If our traditions are keepers of these great questions of human life and conversations about them then I think that this virtue of dwelling with questions could be a great contribution of religious thinkers to our public life and it would be a great and edifying contrast to the model our media

culture has too often encouraged of setting up religious people to proclaim beliefs and positions and there for answers for themselves and for all the rest of us too. So I want to end by addressing a question which is always on my mind of the programs we do and that's the so what question what does this conversation what do my observations have to do with the vast and varied lives of those who are listening. What tools do they offer up for practical application. Once the conversation ends. Now it's easy as I did at the beginning of this talk to lay some blame for religions recently fraught role in public life on the likes of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and the media that amplified their voices. But in a free society as the great Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel reminded us while some are guilty all are responsible. And there's

much to be hopeful about. Once the whole story of religion in the world begins to come into relief. It's certainly too soon to declare the culture wars over but they they are changing. They are cooling to some extent. A surge of public stridency in the name of religion culminated a couple of years ago and I feel that this is gone very quickly culminated in a backlash that portrayed all reet religion as the enemy of reason. But there is now a whole new genre of books and figures to temper and counter those and who are tempering and countering the stereotypes of religion that arose in the last few years. The science religion clash is also not the whole story of course and it never was. And my interviews with scientists whether they are personally or religious are not. Shows me that science is throwing up beautiful and thrilling learnings that are ripe for theological modeling. It is even taking

concepts like empathy altruism forgiveness care for the other it's taking these religious virtues out of the realm of idealism and giving us more sophisticated views of some of religion's own highest virtues. It's showing us in new ways why they work when they work and why they matter. I think of a conversation I had with a clinical psychologist named Michael McCullough and he's his research is demonstrating how human brains are hardwired for both revenge and forgiveness. And he is learning in the laboratory how we can nurture social conditions that will strengthen the forgiveness instinct and make it more likely in all kinds of human interaction both at the level of neighborhood problems and global crises. So I am absolutely fascinated by this kind of interplay 21st century interplay between scientific and religious questions. Religious

inquiries so answers not question not answers but inquiry. And as science takes a notion like forgiveness or compassion out of the realm of idealism it is also illuminating the true substance and promise of the ground. Religion claims in society and it is throwing a whole new light I think on the place for informed intelligent religious perspectives in society. It just is interesting Lee I find that this mutually illuminating exchange between science and religion flows in both directions. Back during the presidential election I spoke with Bishop bash time Mackenzie of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and she reflected with me on how science and technology especially information technologies are not just changing the world they are changing human relationship as we speak in ways that we have not yet begun to fathom. And she is emboldened in her calling in her

ministry as she also sees that churches and religious communities are some of the last places in Western society where we focus together on human relationship at a communal and existential level. I'm very aware and appreciative of the fact that religious communities are some of the last places in this culture where we have intergenerational relationship. Finally the questions people of faith know how to ask to ponder across time and generations are precisely the questions so many people in our culture are asking themselves right now in the supermarket because of economic conditions. What do I really need. What sustains me. Who do I trust. What matters in life. Our culture denies suffering and frailty with a million

devices. Our great religious traditions more realistically stare these things in the face and invite us to make sense right there. The longer I do this work of mine the more I cherish the fact that this part of life that we call religious and spiritual is a repository of deep wisdom not just about God or about ultimate truth but about this extremely complicated nature of human character. Human Action human being. Now I know that clear eyed realism is not religion's most famous attribute in our age but it is there in the theology in the DNA of theology I love. Consider the succinct opening line of Reinhold Niebuhr twentieth century classic The Nature and Destiny of Man. Man is his own most vexing problem. I because we're a public radio show

we do have to get a T-shirt one day and I want our teacher to say I am my own most vexing problem. You cannot lead an examined life without noticing that all of our grandest objectives political economic and scientific are inevitably complicated by the inner drama of the human condition. I hear man is his own most vexing problem as a diagnosis of the observation Einstein made as he watched chemists and physicists become the purveyors of weapon of weapons of mass destruction in the early twentieth century mid 20th century he said science in this generation is like a razor blade in the hands of a three year old. Man is his own most vexing problem is what major thinkers now are acknowledging as they analyze the forces that shape economic decision making and that we must factor into our hardest economic projections and regulation.

I like to think that in the 21st century we might see a renewal a renewal and a transformation of what we used to call public theology. Now Reinhold Niebuhr of course was the quintessential public theology of public theologians and we've got we've got to get past that as soon as you start quoting him someone will last or at least in the. Circles in which I run at times they will say well who is the new uber of our day. And that's that's the that's not the right question. Because we start imagining a white Protestant Christian man who would look just right on the cover of TIME magazine the way TIME magazine used to look but me ever belonged to an American culture where a person like him could have a privileged voice that is unimaginable now. Public theology in our time must look a lot more like the student body of Harvard Divinity School. Right. It must be dispersed plural multifaceted multiple The articulated thing the neighbor of our day may look like Bishop bash time Makenzie may look like

the young Muslim interfaith activist Patel may even look like the theoretical physicist Jan 11 who I interviewed last year who was not a religious person but who is a physicist is investigating the finitude of the universe and how we can know what is real and true. Or And all at the same time I think the neighbors of our day are to be found less in the spotlight more at work locally regionally maybe even the definition of what is local and regional is changing that member of your congregation or your faculty or your family who will never make headlines but who is changing the world that he or she can see and touch. And a paradox of our time is the way in which globalization actually magnifies the potential ripple effects of what is local and distinctive. You know

Much is said of the dangers and the potential trauma of globalization. But this I think is a great and empowering gift. Public the ology means in my vision. Modeling the virtues that accompany the work of theology. It means connecting up grand religious ideas with messy human reality. It means articulating religious and spiritual points of view to challenge and deepen thinking on every side of every important debate. As a life giving antidote to the distortions and excesses I described as I began to speak I long for a new generation of public theologians at every level of American life and to this group I would say I think this could be a mantle uniquely suited to progressive Christians a way to reframe the challenge and meaning of religious identity public expression and even institutional vitality. So I see this

day we have together as a kind of exercise in imagining that. And I very much look forward to wherever our discussion now will lead. Thank you.