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Nuance is a podcast of The Collaborative helping Christians to faithfully live out their faith in their work. We recognize most of life is not lived in black and white but rather lived in the gray, lived in the nuance.
You can find more, including complementary spiritual exercises, at www.collaborativeorlando.com/nuance.
It's been very, very important to me to listen to people from the other parts other parts of the world who love God as deeply and seriously as anybody that you and I would know, who look at America and say, are you sure you that you know what you're doing? Just when we look at you, we have concerns for you.
Speaker 2:Hopeful about our culture or maybe cynical, naive. Well, I'm back today with author and sage Steven Garber, and we'll cover it all. Welcome to Nuance. What does it look like to live faithfully when justice is never complete, when our best work is always unfinished, when the world in which we live and the one we hope for is just out of reach. Today, we're gonna press a bit more deeply into the proximate and how it applies in our vocation, in our public life.
Speaker 2:And how do we hold on to a hope that refuses both cynicism and naivete? Well, friends, welcome to Nuance where we seek to be faithful in the public square. So last week, I sat with Steven Garber and we explored the the heart of his new book, Hints of Hope, what it means to draw near to what is real, to know the world and to still love it. So we're gonna go ever more deeply today and do wanna thank you, Steven, for being with me again.
Speaker 1:It's a great gift to see you again, to hear you again, to talk with you again, Case. Thank you.
Speaker 2:Friends, please, like, share. It helps us to share this good word and this robust theology in life application with a wider audience. So I mentioned Steven's new book, Hints of Hope, Essays in Making Peace with Approximate. It is published by Paraclete Press. Through these eight lyrical essays, that's the the best adjective I could think of is Steven's writing is so lyrical.
Speaker 2:He explores what it means to be human, to wrestle with the contradictions of beauty and brokenness, wander in despair and still yet to choose to love. So last week, we we worked through this concept of proximate and how it's worked its way out in some very concrete real world situations. Well, I wanna keep going in that direction. And so, Steven, proximate justice is a phrase you mentioned last time that it sparked your imagination in this particular direction. So my goodness, our world today with Washington and and all its foibles, we see a lot of bad justice or injustice.
Speaker 2:What kind of lens do you think Christ followers should have when thinking about proximate justice in chaos right now?
Speaker 1:And we have four or five hours to talk about this case? That right? Well, I'm deeply Augustinian in ways that probably would have surprised my my mother who was a dear holy woman of God and I'm not sure she read much of Augustine. I have, and I've been deeply influenced by his thinking. It's hard for us looking back on fifteen hundred years to think, is that really true that he wrote his work, his best known work, while he watched Roman Rome implode?
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Mhmm. But he did. He had no categories like the decline of the Empire, that wasn't a book written, you know, in his his lifetime. They literally was writing the city of God while Rome, the eternal city, the eternal city was burning.
Speaker 1:It was falling apart. And he was I write he wrote a book for the ages, we call it The City of God Mhmm. Which is a book about the nature of love. And we think, well, how could that be? This is a more serious book, isn't it?
Speaker 1:How could it be about love? But Augustine argues that actually it's the ordering of our loves that is central to what it means to be a holy human being. It is central to flourish as a human being. In fact, to use the language of Jeremiah, it is essential to the flourishing of a city and a society. If we disorder our loves, we get our loves in the wrong order.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:We will fall on our faces eventually because it's still God's world. Mhmm. We can imagine we can do that because maybe for a period of time, we think it seems to work to do it that way, you know, to make things that are not so important be the most important, you know. To think that this matters more when it really it can't matter more because it really isn't true. It's not true.
Speaker 1:And what Augustine is saying is that it's only in the ordering of our loves that we actually can find our way both to individual flourishing and our cities and our societies can flourish. So in almost everything about what happens in the news of the day and the world, you know, beyond America too, I find myself thinking, I mean, it is instinctively for me in our case to think, I wonder what this means in terms of how what priorities have been chosen, what loves have been set before, what what's been made most important? And it almost always mean, obviously, it it always seems to me that in whatever particular we're having to discuss this day, so economic issue, some global, you know, trade issue, you know, some, you know, order dispute, that to me it's always a matter of how are we ordering our allowance? Are we getting the right things in the right way? Are we making things that never could be and never should be more important than they can be?
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Mhmm. I've just finished a fascinating book called Augustine the African. Augustine and that's how we say it in the South. Augustine, not Augustine.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And You gotta say Augustine, don't you, Dan?
Speaker 2:Augustine. Right? I live down the street or the highway from Saint Augustine. Mhmm. And it's not a ethnocentric approach to Augustine to play on modern categories in contemporary schools of thought by saying Augustine the African.
Speaker 2:She does a wonderful attempt to draw out the Carthaginian perspective looking north over the Mediterranean towards Rome. I think that I have so long understood and learned about Augustine from a Roman perspective or from the Christian evolution in in theology. And she goes into a number of the political situations, the cultural situations going on in Carthage and across Northern Africa that then led him to write and respond and then work out his theology on these many things. And so it inspired me to think about how the American empire, if you will, the American dominance economically, culturally, militarily is is something to be that needs to be understood from a variety of points of view, not just from the inside. And as you think about justice being achieved or gotten close to either here at home or that which we advocate and fight for abroad, I'm reminded not to always rest on my laurels or assume my experience and perspective, but really hear and and look at it from from other angles.
Speaker 2:Very interesting work. We did a lot of work in Madagascar and they're at the bottom of the world looking up at all the world powers. And when I was physically there, I I understood their posture, their curiosity, their reactions, both positive and negative in ways that I just had never seen or known before. Your book reflects this.
Speaker 1:Well, does reflect that because I because you know me pretty well, okay, so you can see in the writing that I Not because I was trying to do something, I don't think that's ever what it was, I just I wanted to do something. I wanted the book to be to be read by people all over the world. Mhmm. Mhmm. And so I chose chapter by chapter to include images, references, stories from the whole world.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:I wanted there to be something of Africa, something of Europe, something of Latin America, something of Asia. And of course, I'm a North American, and so it's full of that as well. But I wanted people who I know who live in Singapore to think, I see myself here, don't I? I wanted somebody who lives in, you know, in Oslo to think, I see myself here, don't I? You know?
Speaker 1:Mhmm. I wanted a Japanese friend to think, I see myself here, don't I? Wanted a Latin American friend to say, well this is not just about Norte Americanos, this is I'm here too, aren't I? And it wasn't I don't don't There's anything in me that is, you know, I don't think, you know. I think it simply is I see the writing as a way to love my neighbor as I love myself.
Speaker 1:And I know that when I write, when I read, I'm always wondering will this be something for me? Or will it be something that's not quite thinking about who I am? I know, you know, some years ago I was speaking to a group of political business leaders in Kenya case and from all over the nation, and they were gathered together. The person who introduced me had been in Washington DC for many years working for the World Bank, a man from Nairobi. When he got up, he said he said to his whole group, I did a lot of things with Steven Garber through the Washington Institute when I was in The States.
Speaker 1:But one day he said to me something that just shocked me, he said, you do know, Cosmo, that Augustine was an African. I said back to Steven, no. You know, that wouldn't be the case. I mean, because I think the way the story's been told, Europe brought Christianity to Africa was He how he was bright and gifted, you know, globally, you know, able man working for the World Bank in Washington DC, so nothing, you know, less than that for my friend. He said, I never ever thought about that, you know.
Speaker 1:But he said, some years later, I've done my own reading and I was thinking, Steven, you were right about that. And he says, it's changed my sense of being part of the church. Because I realized that the church is more me than I thought it was.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, a friend who is a military chaplain and a pastor in our presbytery, the regional association of churches, whenever we have a new pastor transferring in and they're being examined on the floor of presbytery, my friend will and this is kind of his go to question and everybody knows, don't take it because it's Brian's. And he will stand up and say, can you please name three African theologians in the in in the church? Well, of course, our minds immediately go to contemporary individuals and and it also exposes the fact that we're way too male and pale and and we read everything from Netherlands and Scotland but neglect the other global voices. And then he throws them or I guess he relieves them of the tension by saying, oh, Augustine, Anthony.
Speaker 2:And then the room kind of erupts in laughter because we're kinda used to it. But I think it's important for every Christian to hear voices from all over the world to intentionally get beyond our own little enclave.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Because you can't understand how you're proximate with the justice if you don't know what a full perspective of justice really is. And it's quite it's quite a hubris to think that we in our culture, in their time know it, know what it is.
Speaker 1:Again, I I wanna be cautious and careful in the best ways, you know, talking with you about all this stuff because even though you are given to the public square, you as well as anybody case knows how fraught that is with danger to talk about what that looks like in practical, you know, terms in the moment we're in right now. And I'm I'm aware of that, I think. But I would say that if what you just said, it's been very very important to me to listen to people from the other parts other parts of the world who love God as deeply and seriously as anybody you and I would know, who look at America and say, are you sure you that you know what you're doing? Because when we look at you, we have concerns for you. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. And I don't think that their concerns are even imagined by most of the church in America, because we don't have people we know like that who we're talking We live with our neighbors, or people who look just like us, talk just like us, and we couldn't even imagine that somebody, for example, who's been through, you know, decades and generations of totalitarianism would have anything to say to the Church in America in the year 02/2026. Mhmm. We just think, well, who are they? They're not us.
Speaker 1:I would say, well, you know, we actually are fools for not listening to people who know more about this than we do.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. One of my most humbling and I don't wanna say shameful. I experienced shame. I don't think the individual well, experiences was this.
Speaker 2:I we had had a we had a project in Madagascar where we were we were helping the major protestant denominations theology schools do some strategic planning and some renewal of their structures and thinking about how they go about what they do. And so I had meeting with the top theological leadership, many of whom were professors. And with me was our expert consultant in this project, a man named John Jusu, an accomplished African theologian who was Kenyan and he had flown in from Nairobi for this consultation. And we were in a small room, very tight with probably a dozen individuals. And as we talked through the different parts of the project and Janjisu was a wonderful translator, not in a language sense, but just to help describe for them what our hopes and aims were, which was to truly contextualize and give them the power.
Speaker 2:Well, one particular professor who I understood later was quite difficult in a in a number of fronts lit into me lit into me as an opportunity to sort of lash out at the choices of the American government and American military that he had been stewing on for for years. And he let me have it in terms of what we had done in The Middle East and what our military had done here and there and how we had compromised the ability to do missions that Americans show up and everybody wonders what sort of power struggle they're trying to do rather than to bring Christ. And that Malagazis were now being able to go into the Middle East and bear greater witness than we were. All to say, it was a very humbling, very humbling experience. And I wouldn't wish it again, but boy, I felt the pain and saw the perspective from a dear Christ centered brother.
Speaker 2:And I learned so much. We've gotta stay in touch with those voices. I wanna move to the voices of students in your life. You share so many great stories and insights on the very students that you've come across on Capitol Hill and who are having to interpret and understand that the messiness of Washington. How and and and this I think too is is benefited by your PhD studies in pedagogy, which the your first book.
Speaker 1:The Fabric of Faithfulness.
Speaker 2:Fabric of Faithfulness is it reflects upon. Have you seen students change over the course of your career? What how are the questions different or maybe the same?
Speaker 1:Mhmm. That's a very good question, Case. I think there's a yes and no in my mind to the question. On the one thing, things do change, don't they? Twenty twenty twenty six isn't the same as 1996 and isn't the same as '24 1776, and you know, 12/20 December.
Speaker 1:I mean, things do change in histories and centuries, and we need to pay attention to that. And, you know, it is interesting to me to talk about the generations of x y z and you know, whatever else is gonna come into the future. I I'm interested in those things. And yet, I would also say that we are perennial people too. Most profoundly, are perennial people.
Speaker 1:We are, in the best language of George McDonald and C S Lewis, we are sons of Adam and daughters of Eve. And if we forget that one, we miss something awfully important about who we are. So on the one hand, yes, my grandfather, you know, couldn't have imagined, you know, and I have a iPhone, what are even talking about? Was college educated, he read two papers every day, you know, as bright and good as you can imagine, you know. But you know, he would have no idea, not only that it exists, but that it can exist long enough that people who are serious analysts of our time and history are at at are writing books of serious critique about what does an iPhone mean for the way we even see the world, not just that we use it to call somebody, but the way that our I mean, the better analysts, as you know, are arguing seriously that our brains are being rewired
Speaker 2:right Yes, they are.
Speaker 1:Well, something's happening that didn't happen fifty years ago, so we need to pay attention to that and not be naive about that. Parents who are, pastors and churches, staffs who are not paying attention are missing things that are really important to us. So that does change. You and I have talked before in other podcast conversations about sexuality, know. And I would say, you know, again, is there a figure to the wind that I pay attention to in the year 2026, twenty first century, well, it isn't the same as it once was, you know.
Speaker 1:And all these questions of what does it mean to be sexual, what does it mean to be male, female, you know. We talked quite a bit about gender and identity the last time we we talked. And and so yes, we need to pay attention to that and realize that for the 15, 16, 17, 18 year old coming of age right now, that they will be, I would say, the world, the flesh, and the devil will bear down upon them heavily on these questions of the nature of technology and the nature of sexuality. We need to pay attention to that. But I would also say, intention, we must not forget that we're perennial people and that things don't change either.
Speaker 1:Things don't change either. You know, if you've You are bright and you've traveled, you've You know, you read and you understand that, know, shock of all shocks when the people of Israel finally made their way through the long long kogan reach from Egypt into the promised land. The promised land it was from God himself. They crossed the Jordan River. What'd they find?
Speaker 1:They found hillsides covered with what? Giant phalanx symbols.
Speaker 2:Oh, well, John. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, we think, well, it's oppressive to us to have be confronted with pornography anywhere we look, all different kinds, soft and hard, you know. But we realize that, you know, Joshua and his fellow, know, his fellows were conferred with their own, you know, engorged sexuality, distorted sexuality their faces, you know, a long long long time ago. You know, and why of all the commandments of God, you know, of the 10 that were given to us, why is the only one that's repeated have to do with marital fidelity? Because that's been a perennial problem for human beings. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We stumble over that generation after generation after generation. If we imagine that something, you know, unique to our moment in history, well, the Internet is the Internet, and you can do all these things anonymously, and la la la la la la Well, yes, yes, yes, but it's also true that the only commandment that's underscored of the 10 has to do with be faithful to your husband, be faithful to your wife. Yeah. So on the other hand, I mean, I would just say, yes, things change, but we're perennial people too.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I think the was it did you say this in your book? Or maybe you said this in your conversation the other night with Borger that only the true is worth reading or or saying or you know something's good because it's it's the truth.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, I I've it's it's one of your best southern writers, K. Thorpe. Walker Perce. Perce.
Speaker 1:Okay. Grew up in born in Alabama, grew up in Mississippi, lived his life in Louisiana. But you know, he put it this way, an essay that's really captured my heart for years now. Bad books lie, they lie most of all about the human condition.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:And I would say that's true of books, it's true of films, it's true of political, you know, ideas, true economic ideas, you know, that the question's always going to be, what does it teach us about what it means to be human? That's always the question.
Speaker 2:And I think back to related back to what we said about various cultures, you're you're writing for that individual in Norway and elsewhere, you're at the higher level of the big human questions. And those human questions are the same over generations. They're the same over centuries and over cultures. And that's an important place to be too many might think, oh, you know, I I that's too heady or too up there for me. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But deep down, you're asking the same thing and we do in a variety of ways. So Hints of Hope, that title. Why couldn't it be named Hints of Optimism? What's the difference in in optimism and hope?
Speaker 1:Well, two things I would say back to you, Casey, it's you know, you ask good questions, of course. I did teach politics for a long time in Washington DC, and we had eager beaver, bright, you know, longing for the future of their lives, the future of the world, 21 year olds coming to be our students. But I began over time to think they needed to hear me say before the semesters were all over, to lecture on the difference between hope and optimism. And what I argued for I had to read an essay by the Duke theologian Stanley Harrowas, and he was examining that that contrast between hope and optimism. And what he argued, and I began to flesh that out in my own way, was that optimism is a lie about the world.
Speaker 1:It's a lie about who we are, what the world is really like, and inevitably, inevitably, it will cycle down into pessimism and cynicism because it believed a lie to begin with. We aren't like that. We are too much glorious ruins all bound up together. We're not all glory, and life isn't all glory. It isn't all happy, happy, happy.
Speaker 1:It is all good, good, good. There's a tension, glorious ruins, together we are. I think, you know, the phrase hints of hope actually does come from Walker Percy, the gifted southern novelist and essayist. And when he was finally discovered by the New York literary critics and given the National Book Award for fiction for his novel, The Moviegoer, they of course wanted to talk to this person, and you know, were assuming, having read his novel, that he was now gonna be seen as the American Camus, Albert Camus, the French existentialist philosopher novelist. You know, we had somebody serious like that in America, who looked bleakness right in the eye, amazing stories about bleakness.
Speaker 1:And Walker Percy said back to them, well, yes, but you don't get me either. You must understand who I am. I do, I am honest about how bleak it is much of the time. But he said, there's always a hint of hope in my writing.
Speaker 2:A hint of hope.
Speaker 1:And I loved that image years ago, and I kept held onto it and wrote about it in the book, and finally, we were giving the title to the book, we decided to use that imagery of Walker Perceus. He wasn't saying that hope isn't is not not there, but he was just saying, okay, let's be careful how we use it, because if we Yeah. Promise if we promise too much, well, that'll change, you know. That'll be different. She'll change she'll be different, know.
Speaker 1:You get all the ducks in order, well, everything will work out, won't it?
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 1:Well, you know, I mean, you might think that when you're 13, you don't know any better. But of course, when you get to be 23 and you thought it gets harder or you get to be 63, you realize there's a lot of sorrow than this life actually. You've got to realize that you know, in my reading of The Lord of the Rings forty years after I first read The Lord of the Rings, I didn't hear Gandalf say to Frodo, you know mister Frodo, not all the wounds in his life are gonna be healed. Mhmm. I read the book the first time.
Speaker 1:Just missed that completely. But then you begin to realize, well, how are you going to live with the wounds that we we do bear into the world? Can you do that? Can you still do that and be a person of honest joy? That's the count the challenge we have.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. But if we imagine somehow that's not that broken world, we we lie to ourselves, we lie to the world around us.
Speaker 2:You so beautifully asked the question and it's not rhetorical. The answer is yes, we can endure those wounds because of Jesus, because of the gospel. The way in which that relationship but also Christ gives us the tools to understand this broken world, it's not gonna ever be perfect. But then how to have hope and to bring love and to see the kingdom of God break out in a beautiful way.
Speaker 1:Because you read so widely, Case, I'm sure you have read some of N. T. Wright or Tom Wright's work Mhmm. Years ago, and becoming right into Lent beginning tomorrow. But he read a book of Lenten essays and meditations years ago, and there was a paragraph that jumped off the page right into my face, you know, when I first read the book, and he says something pretty close to this, that the vocation of Jesus was to take into his own heart both the most remarkable joy and the most remarkable sorrow.
Speaker 1:And as we take up the imitation of Christ in our own vocations, our own lives, we too will find that same remarkable joy and remarkable sorrow, and we are called to weave them into the pattern of our days.
Speaker 2:Beautiful.
Speaker 1:It is beautiful, and it's true. And I know when I read that case, thought, well, I'm not a I'm not a Buddhist. I'm not going to be a Buddhist in this life, because there is real joy and there's real sorrow. They're not the same thing. And so you have to somehow make have a way to make account of to understand what what they are and how they're different, and to realize that in this now but not yet world, we are called to take up both, like Jesus himself, and into our own lives, and somehow lived for tomorrow as can.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. In closing, and I don't wanna close. This is too good. But we live in the now, not not yet.
Speaker 2:What gives what gives you hope?
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Wow. Coming in from this morning, you know, we've had not unlike you there in Orlando, I'm sure, but we had a Virginia for about two weeks, six inches of frozen snow. And initially for the first week or so, you couldn't even walk outside. It was so slippery, it was not snow.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It was frozen snow. Six inches solid of frozen snow. Well, three weeks later, I was noticing just coming in this morning, little green shoots popping up out of the ground. You're probably, you know, three or four weeks ahead of us in Orlando, but these are these are daffodils popping up.
Speaker 1:And in the life that I've lived, you know, I have loved and loved and loved again flowers and flowers and more flowers. Mhmm. So for me, watching daffodils pop up out of the ground gives me hope. We bought a house across the street from our daughter and her family. And most nights, not every night, but most nights, my 10 year old grandson will come over about eight 08:00 and we'll read a chapter of a book together.
Speaker 1:And you know, not all little boys are like this, but he happens to be he always snuggles up next to me and wants to be as close as he possibly can, you know, and we read a chapter together, and I are you ready to be done tonight? And he says, I need to get to bed, and you know, but sometimes we can't stop here, you know, we read a second chapter, you know. But I would say that gives me hope. His little brother who's just five, you know, when he sees me, more often than not, he looks up to me with his eyes as bright as bright eyes can be and a smile on his face, and and I am It makes me have the deepest smile of my life to see a little person like that, you know, know that I love him or I love her. That gives me hope.
Speaker 1:I would say that the work I get to do I mentioned, you know, one project as well on rethinking the business of business, but I could talk about other things as well that I get involved week after week. I choose to be part of projects, which in my mind are projects born of honest hope. Mhmm. The things are not we're not we're not just stuck. We're not just having to, you know, curse the darkness.
Speaker 1:We could actually say to each other and the world around us, this is worth my life, it's worth working on. Because in fact, it is it's true, and it's real, and it's right, and it's worth giving myself to actually just try to see this accomplished in the energy, the time that I have. So I'm maybe at Oxford next month doing a remarkably good thing, a wonderful thing to be able to do, but it's called the Peregrine Fellows. And it's people from you know, around the world coming for for a week, it's people who are you know, I don't know how old you are exactly the case, but people more probably in their forties, I'm guessing, who have They don't need a degree that is this what this is. It is like Mhmm.
Speaker 1:I studied at Oxford University, you know, is that what this is about? You know, people who actually are already serious about the world, and lived in the world for a while as serious people, but they want to go deeper. Yeah. They want a deeper understanding of God and themselves and the work of the world, and so they're willing to spend a week, know, in a busy busy life, to say, I'll step away from my life in Orlando, I'll step away from my life in Miami, my life in, you know, Seattle, I'll step away from here and here and here and here, and I will I'll take up a week. Why?
Speaker 1:Because you see, all this stuff matters to me. It matters to me to be as faithful and thoughtful as I can about my own work in the world, and I'm willing to give myself to something like this. So being drawn into projects like that gives me hope.
Speaker 2:What a great note to to end upon projects of honest hope. That's what I hope we are doing here at the collaborative and you give us inspiration. Steven, thank you.
Speaker 1:Great gift to be with you again, Case. Thank you.
Speaker 2:Friends, let me encourage you. Go and get hints of hope from Paraclete Press. You can find it on Amazon or wherever books are sold. You can learn more about his work at washingtoninstitute.org. You will find that link and others in our show notes.
Speaker 2:Well, friends, that's all for today. Thank you for letting us join you on your commute or maybe as you work out. If something stirred your thinking, share this episode with a friend at work. Hop over to our website, wecolabor.com, and we'll send you a copy of Zeitgeist, our latest journal on faith, work, and culture. You'll also find us across the various social media platforms.
Speaker 2:Many thanks to the Magruder Foundation for making today's episode possible. I'm Case Thorpe, and God's blessings on you.