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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.
In the world we live in, now but not yet, this somehow where Christ has come to make everything be new, yet even the creation still groans, that we have to live with, we have to make peace with something that's true and beautiful and good, that's worthy of your life and mine, but it won't be everything.
Speaker 2:Today, we probe what it means to wrestle with the contradictions we all face in our marriages, in our workplaces, our friendships, and our jobs. What does it look like to come close to perfect, but as people of faith to be okay with being proximate? My guest is author and thinker, Sage Stephen Garber. Friends, welcome to Nuance. Well, today, I'm joined by someone who has shaped my own thinking about vocation and culture in in many ways, more than most, and that is Stephen Garber.
Speaker 2:He is author of a new book entitled Hints of Hope, Essays on Making Peace with the Proximate, published by Paraclete Press. Steven has been a teacher of many people in many places and his work has been a wellspring for those of us who care about having a faithful presence in the world. Steven, welcome back to Nuance.
Speaker 1:It's very good to see you again. Okay. Start. Thank you.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you. How how was Meg?
Speaker 1:She still loves me, so that's a great gift to me in my life.
Speaker 2:And y'all recently moved. I saw this on Facebook.
Speaker 1:After thirty five years in Washington DC, we moved to Charlottesville, Virginia last summer, so it's about two hours south of DC. We had three of our children go to the University of Virginia, so we knew the city very well over many, many years. Two of our our two oldest kids and their kids, now eight grandkids between them, live in Charlottesville, and we actually, given this long practice that Meg and I have had, to choose a neighbor before you choose a house, we bought a house across the street from our daughter. So she and her family live across the street from us and our our son and his family live about eight minutes away.
Speaker 2:Oh, wow. Wonderful. So lots more grandkids in your life.
Speaker 1:That's exactly right. Yeah. And it's an easier city easier city to live in than DC is, of course. So Oh, I bet. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, listeners and viewers, again, welcome to Nuance where we seek to be faithful in the public square. Let me remind you, as I always do, please like, share this episode, leave a comment. It helps us reach further with our work in remarkable ways. Also, I like to have Steven as a regular guest for us here on Nuance. His wisdom, his kindness, his his voice is is really needed in today's world.
Speaker 2:So he is a a writer, a teacher, and as I've mentioned, of the leaders in the Faith and Work movement. He was a founder of the Washington Institute for Faith, Vocation, and Culture, and now serves as senior fellow for Vocation and the Common Good for the Murdoch Charitable Trust. He's held appointments at Regent College as professor of marketplace theology and serves as senior fellow for the Institute for Marketplace Transformation and Access Ventures. His earlier books include The Fabric of Faithfulness and Visions of Vocation. Visions of Vocation is one of my top 10 books.
Speaker 2:I teach it every year in our Gotham Fellowship and in our Orlando Fellows. And the other day, Steven, you'll love this, I had our one of our youth directors in my office who is now working on his seminary degree at Reformed Theological Seminary. And he had been a Orlando fellow many many years ago. And he was looking around my office at my books and he saw the yellow binding of Visions for Vocation. And he pulled it out and he went, warm brown sugar.
Speaker 2:And I said, what? I said, do you remember that? He said, okay. I'll never forget it. And it's because when I teach it, I open every single class with rubbing it on my cheek and saying warm brown sugar.
Speaker 1:Oh my.
Speaker 2:Because it's a it's it's a feel good book and it's so deep and more than just feel good, but it's it's it feel it's it feels good to read it. Stephen's newest book, Hints of Hope, is a collection of eight lyrically written essays in memoir form, exploring what it means to draw near to the deepest realities of life and to still love. So, Steven, you have talked a great deal about this work, and I have so enjoyed reading it. For folks who are new to this conversation, what do you mean by proximate?
Speaker 1:Well, that's the billion dollar question, isn't it, case? Fifteen years ago, I was I lived in Washington DC for many many many years and I taught politics a long time in DC, even on Capitol Hill. And people who knew knew me in my work had watched that I suppose, but one was a new friend in Toronto, Canada. He was South African and had been part of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa after apartheid and and moved first to Vancouver to study at Regent College and then moved to Toronto. He was editing a journal or a magazine called Comment and said to me one one year, you've been watching Washington DC a long time, Steve.
Speaker 1:Is there a vocation in the political world? And I thought about it quite a while actually, and I offered an essay back to him called Making Peace with Proximate Justice. And what I was arguing was that if you're gonna stay in a messy messy city like Washington for more than a few months and decide to try to actually work at things and matter over the long haul, you'd have to be willing to make peace with doing something that's more true and right and real and honest and good, but you never get everything. And you could pick your question of whether it's immigration reform or tax reform or US Israel relations. You could pick the problem that, you know, has to be addressed.
Speaker 1:But if you imagine that because you're so smart, and you're so well resourced, and you know everybody, you know, that you'll get it done because you always get things done against just who you are. Well, probably after six months or a couple of years at most, you go back to Des Moines thinking, I tried that, you can't do it there. If you're gonna stay there with a sense of vocation, a deepened sense of a calling to serve God in the wider world, You have to be willing to make peace with doing something in the now but not yet of this life.
Speaker 2:I think you get to the answer of my next question, but you frame it as making peace with the proximate. There's an assumption of conflict. Yeah. Why those words? Why making peace?
Speaker 1:No. That's a good very good question, Case. Well, you're married and I'm married too. So if we take it out of the public square for a moment and come back more intimately and personally to your life and my life. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:I'm just guessing that, you know, that once was a time, you know, one evening probably where you said the most deeply meaningful words you had ever ever said to anybody else in the face of the earth. And he promises your whole soul to this woman who is now your wife. I'm also guessing that even having done that, you know, it might have taken five days or a couple of weeks or you know, two months or something, but you begin to realize, hey, it's harder to live this out. Yeah. And so even though I promised everything to her, you know, I had no idea how hard it would be to actually be an honest and good husband.
Speaker 1:And so all I'm saying, Casey, is that in the in the world we live in, this now but not yet, this somehow where Christ has come to make everything be new, even the creation still groans. Mhmm. That we have to live with, we have to make peace with something that's true and beautiful and good. That's worthy of your life and mine, but it won't be everything.
Speaker 2:The now and not yet concept in the Bible and in theology is one that lights me up. For somebody that may not have heard that phrase before, what do you mean by that?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Uh-huh. Well, we could met look at many many places of course, but think with me about Romans six seven and eight as, you know, some of the best windows into the reality of this. Here is the apostle Paul who's as serious about God as anyone in history, and written about it, as well as anybody in history has ever written about who God is and who we are and what the work of Christ means. Book of Romans, of course, is, you know, is there no better book?
Speaker 1:I'm sure that sets forth, it looks like this, you know. It looks like this. This is who God is. This is the nature of salvation. This is who we are.
Speaker 1:Then of course, it moves from chapter one, two to three to four, five to six to seven and eight, and especially six, seven, and eight are wrestling with our wrestling. You have the apostle Paul saying, well, you know, I know and yet, I want, and yet. I'm aware of. I wish I I hope I would, but and yet. So I think what the theologians are getting at when they describe this as an already, but not yet type of history, is we are saying, well, we do confess to believe with the apostles and the church of centuries that Christ has come.
Speaker 1:He's made his salvation relevant and meaningful and has offered it by the graces of amazing grace. It is true. And yet, we all live day by day of thinking, but why did I do that today then? Why did I think that way? Why did I make a choice like that today then?
Speaker 1:If that I have been made new, Christ may be made new, aren't I completely new then?
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:So the now but the not yet gets at that. And I think, you know, again, that language which I've already referred to in Romans eight, that even the creation groans. Even the creation groans, because it too, it senses that in fact, well, someday someday someday it'll all be new. It'll be a new heaven and a new earth. We live for that in our deepest being.
Speaker 1:And yet right now, you know, we look around us, whether you can look at it in the city of Orlando or the state of Florida or America or the world at large, you think, that can't be quite right. Know, or even you think sometimes the earth itself almost seems to vomit back at us and thinking, you you can't do this to me. And so we're aware if we think about it more carefully that in fact even the world around us isn't the way it's supposed to be.
Speaker 2:So true. I I find in in the pastoral sense, particularly new believers get so excited and and understandably and appropriately for their salvation. And then the brokenness of life still is there.
Speaker 1:It still is there.
Speaker 2:And they know the answer in Christ. They know the future reality to come but we have to still endure and live in this world.
Speaker 1:And that's the point of the book. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Mhmm. You chose the the memoir format and I've shared this with you before, but for listeners and viewers to know, I have finished a manuscript and I have a writing coach, not a ghost writer but a coach who encourages me and helps me edit and and think through my logic which I need help with. And this individual, he kept pushing me. What's your voice case?
Speaker 2:What's your voice? You gotta find your voice. And because I so appreciate your writing, I finally articulated, I want to write how Steven Garber writes. Now, certainly not at your talent level or or wisdom, but to me, the way in which you use the memoir vehicle, I guess, to take the reader from your own personal experiences and insights, then you dip into deep theology. And then you come up through scripture.
Speaker 2:And then we're back into how you've applied this or seen it at work in the many rich conversations and people you've met over the years. I feel like that's such an effective effective mechanism. So why did you choose this means? Why couldn't another format have worked?
Speaker 1:I'm sure another format could have worked, but not for me probably. So I had along one of my longest friends in the world write me an hour ago. She lives in Charleston, South Carolina. And she has been reading John Stott and his books Commentary and Romans.
Speaker 2:And
Speaker 1:she has just been so deeply nourished by uncle John's gifted exegetical pastoral ways of looking at the bible and saying this and this and that and that, and make sure you understand this about this and Well, again, he was a great great teacher to me. That's I'm unabashed in my honoring of him. But that's not me, and I'm not him, and I think you have to, in some ways, come back to the make peace imagery a bit. Make peace along the way with, well, who are you then? And what what is your gift?
Speaker 1:And it can't be that, it won't be that. I think there's also something for me, a case, I I did my PhD in the philosophy of pedagogy, the philosophy of learning. And so I spent a long time reading and thinking and writing and reading and thinking some more about what how we learn and what learning actually looks like, how it happens in the world. After I'd finished all of the the university required of me to to do that, I spent another I met several years beyond the degree, but I was still in a very significant serious learning mode trying to understand how did Jesus, rabbi of the rabbis teach.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:You know, I know a lot of things we could say about that. There isn't just one sermon to say, well, this is how it is all the time for everyone. But it was impressive to me that in the teaching of Jesus that we call the parables, he's asked a question by an expert in the law in Luke chapter 10. In the twenty first century language, we would say, the expert in the law wanted to deconstruct the idea of neighbor, didn't he? You know, let's take it out here and abstract it and put it out here at a place to talk about it abstractly.
Speaker 1:Jesus says, well, I won't do that with you, but I will tell you a story. And we know the story, of course, is the good Samaritan. So I know that in my thinking through of what Jesus did, how he taught, again, would say that in John chapter one, the heart of Christian theology is the incarnation, that God became flesh. But I would also say that it's a genius pedagogy. That we have to actually see that words can become flesh to believe them to be true.
Speaker 1:We don't believe words that don't become flesh to be true. You think about your life True. Case. So I would just say there's something about who God is and who we are, what he knows to be true about us, that we have to see in fact that this could be played out in life. It actually can look like the life we live for us to understand what's being said and to be persuaded by what's being said.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The power of storing. When I teach the scriptures, especially to our Orlando fellows, I point out, you know, God could have used Plato's essays and God could have written a systematic theology. But what do we receive? We receive letters that are rooted in relationship.
Speaker 2:We receive parables that are simple in the sense that they are very concrete and relatable, but yet profound in the depth of insight that they provide. And there we learn the story of Jesus and so there's such power in telling stories. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:I think so too.
Speaker 2:Speaking of stories, I wanna hear I want everybody to hear about your experience with the thirtieth anniversary of the the Velvet Revolution. I don't know if you saw in the I think it was the Wall Street Journal this week, an interview with Lek Walesa of Poland with the Solidarity Movement. And he laments the fact that he's the last one left in terms of the major leaders in Europe and abroad that brought down communism. And Vaclav Havel's role, you you write a great deal about in the Central European context. Tell us about that story.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 1:Why would I be even be interested in this story? In some ways, I have this deep thesis that runs through my my life case that most of life is pretty autobiographical. And that's true for all of us, for blessing and for curse, that most of life is pretty autobiographical. So why am I interested in the story of Europe and I grew up in California, born in Colorado, a long ways from Czechoslovakia. Of course, in a thousand ways it is a long ways, but I grew up in a family where my father fought in World War II.
Speaker 1:Now I'm one of four sons. I don't know why really, but I'm the one of the four sons that really took up the life and the war years of my father's you know, growing up, and began to be very interested in that. I think in my twenties when I began to articulate the idea of a worldview and just think that worldviews had meaning and had consequence, I began to see the World War II and especially nature of Nazism, as a very powerful incarnation of world views gone bad. Destructive and terrible and horrible. It wasn't just in this historical moment, but it was a set of IKEAs about the way the world should be, and it would be, and always will be.
Speaker 1:Death went terribly, terribly bad, and it was destructive from the beginning all the way to the end. Yeah. So when I began to see Nazism and the war years as a rest in overworld views, and those were years in my twenties and thirties when that language was pretty important to me. You know, my wife and I had this little joke between us when the years of having little kids in the house, and before we had streaming possibilities with, you know, all over the universe, and you had to go to the local video store to get a movie to watch after the kids were in bed. And after that happens, sometimes on a Saturday night, and we think, well, could we?
Speaker 1:Can we? Shall we? And I'd go off and she said, well, just make sure Steve Don't read back another Nazi film with German subtitles. And, you know, because I had done that a lot and a lot and even more more than that. And I've seen most of the good films made about that era, and I've read a lot about that era.
Speaker 1:Right. So I think, you know, communism eventually fell, which was not Nazi as if it was in the next totalitarian, you know, great horror for Central Europe. I got drawn into coming to speak one summer in Bratislava, Slovakia, which of course was the other side of Czechoslovakia. When the nations separated, They became their own people again. I spent two or three weeks with a group of former Soviet Union 20 men and women who had never been that far into the West.
Speaker 1:This was Wow. Bodhislava is right on the Danube. They never ever ever seen the Danube. Never looked into the West across the river. Wow.
Speaker 1:It was just sort of like astounding for them. Mhmm. But I was just to speak to them about, you know, what's going on in the world, what has happened in the world, and what what does a vocation then mean for a 20 person who'd been in the university, who's looking into the rest of life. And I did that, you know, and then I got invited back again and again, and I began to read more, and I began to understand more, and I became very, very taken by the political philosopher who'd been the playwright, poet, Atlav Havel, and read everything he wrote actually, And finally found my way spending time in Prague, and walking through the streets of Prague, and sitting in the cafes cafes that Pavel sat in, and looking up the balconies where he gave his important speeches. And in fact, this is a little bit self referenced.
Speaker 1:I'm sorry to be that. But I went to while, I was speaking there for a weekend in Czechoslovakia, and a man walked up to me afterwards, and he said, at the end of the weekend, he said, you know, you're an American, but he said, I think I know more about being Czechoslovakian now than I did before you got here. Well, it's not because, of course, I am an expert at any of those things, but I had taken very seriously the people and the place that I was in. And the revolution, of course, it's a reference to there weren't tanks, and there weren't machine It was really more ideas that brought about the fall of communism. And so you've asked, you know, my involvement.
Speaker 1:In the fall of two thousand nineteen, I was asked to make again. They said, would you come return this time and speak about the challenge of vocation for the common good thirty years later? So that was 2000 or 1989 to 2019. So I did, and and it was really that case that I would say doing that that made me think, I think maybe if I can, if I can, I should try to find a way write a book about the proximate? Because I could see that the question that was theirs to wrestle with thirty years later was the question of the proximate.
Speaker 1:As the wisest man in Barislava put it to me, Milan Chichel, PhD in physics and gifted to Sirius and done good work with the whole of his life, he said to me, Steven, don't you think would be the case? He said, on Friday afternoon in 1989, when communism fell, the communists ran the trains. Of course, they did. But on Monday morning, they did too. And he was saying that thirty years later, not everything has changed, Steven.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And so he says, need help thinking through how do we then live lives in this time in history where we had such hopes for more, which had not happened thirty years later. But what what do we do now?
Speaker 2:In your answer?
Speaker 1:I wrote a book for them. I was back there this fall actually again, and I've been back twice since that time, in the last few years. But in the book, I've written about them. Actually, the very first chapter is a chapter with three windows into the proximate. One's a story of my father, one is the story of my friends in Czechoslovakia, and then the third is a story of my reflection on reading the Lord of the Rings again.
Speaker 1:So it's a sort of a comparing of reading the stories when I was in my early twenties, reading them in my sixties, and thinking, how did I read them differently, and what did I see differently reading them years later? So on all three stories, all three windows, they are a look into the nature of the proximate.
Speaker 2:For those who've lived through the trauma of dictatorships and devastating war and decades of communism, how might their understanding of the proximate differ than ours as Americans?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Or is it a
Speaker 2:common human response and longing?
Speaker 1:No. That's a very good question, Case. And I wish we had more time just to walk and walk together. Maybe we should take a walk home in the Danube together. We could see what else it looks like looks like, you know, in the flesh.
Speaker 1:But Well, I would say that in America, we have I would say this is a gift to us mainly, but it's also made us fat you know, and slovenly and lazy about what ideas mean. And we don't, in some ways, take them as seriously as other people in the rest of the world do. They have lived with ideas gone very very bad. Mhmm. People who I
Speaker 2:Not at all proximate, but perpendicular.
Speaker 1:Well, very perpendicular. I mean, part of what I wrote about in that first chapter was, you know, you could not talk to a person of a certain age in that part of the world without them having a story of great sorrow to to tell you, if they're willing to tell you. Not everybody has the willingness to do that. But if you take to know somebody well enough, they too have a story you think, oh, Jesus. This is a terrible thing you have to hear with my heart.
Speaker 1:You know, because you know the the sorrow and the grief and the the weight that they bear because, you know, as I'll just give you an example. My father was taken away when I was 14, you know. I didn't see him for two years, He never ever talked about what happened to him between he's two years away, but I knew it was terrible. And it affected our family life for the best of his life. That story is repeated again and again and again and again and again.
Speaker 1:And Americans, as Americans, don't have that story to tell typically, and we haven't had that to live with. We sort of bandy about, know, well, you know, what is this, what is that, and what's this political party mean, and you know, what do they promise, and you know. And I would say that people in the rest of the world often are not as intellectually or politically lazy as Americans are. We think that, you know, it'll all work out okay, won't it? This is America after all.
Speaker 2:It's all we've ever known.
Speaker 1:And the rest of world does not see it that way, Casey.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Mhmm. And I can imagine for your Eastern European friends, their desire certainly evolved over those thirty years from '89 to 2019 and continues. The the great hope at the beginning of we can get this right. We can correct all these wrongs and then finding out, okay, you can only get so far.
Speaker 2:You can only get so close. And how do you keep hope alive in the midst of that rather than giving up on the enterprise? Or even the way in which societies and cultures and people take steps back.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Yeah. That's worthy. Those are worth words worthy of being written down again and again and said out loud again and again, Case. Of course, it's not only the thirty years of the last last generation, but this is the two generations before that for these people who did live through Nazism, did live through communism, and so these are not, these are memories that are still alive for them.
Speaker 1:And again, that generation, those generations are coming up getting older and older, and so is their children and grandchildren now. But I would say, know, and part of what keeps drawing me back to them is that even in the face of such intense, weighty, burdensome policies brought about by totalitarian governments, which did not ever finally and fully leave these places. I mean, I I see these people as wonderfully, remarkably courageous and visionary people who've tried and tried and tried to I'll use way to image here, but it's a good one. They have worked for years and years now to try to to work to bring about a healthy social ecology in their cities. See, Bratislava, for example, which on the one hand looks like a fairy tale kind of a city.
Speaker 1:It's right on the Danube, but there's a castle on top of a hill, and the streets leading up to it are all cobblestone streets, the buildings below are all pastel colored buildings. You think, oh, that's so pretty really. But then if you look back behind you, you can see across the Danube, and you can think for miles and miles are communist infrastructures left behind when the communism fell that were intentionally built to be ugly. Was ugly, architecturally embodied. And and they left all that, of course.
Speaker 1:And so that's where the city of Bratislava is also. But what I've seen cases, these people, you know, in every area that matters very much to us at all. The church, the arts, education, business, you know. I mean, they have worked very hard to create windows or signposts of something different than what was for the city as a city to enjoy, to be part of. One of my dearest friends in my life now is Josef Luptock, and he's a remarkably gifted cellist, very globally renowned cellist.
Speaker 1:But for thirty years, he for twenty five years now, he has curated a fest an arts festival, a music festival for the whole of Slovakia. And it was brought into being, but he said he said to me, Steven, I just found myself thinking after generations of of political, social, economic ugliness, cultural ugliness enforced upon us, I thought my people need to know that beauty still exists in the world. Mhmm. So for twenty, twenty five years now, he is brought into being at the annual festival called Konvergensee, k o n, looks like convergence, Konvergensee. And it's for the whole of Slovakia.
Speaker 1:I mean, it could be for the, you know, a little group of churches in Bratislava, but it actually this is for everybody. The whole of Slovakia is divided into this. And convergent say, well, he doesn't always say this out loud, because the artwork is very, very graphically sophisticated, and they know, their advertising is very engaging and draws a whole country into it. But convergence, say, for him is to say, could we, in and through the work we do, offer a window into the way heaven and earth touch each other and bring it about a more beautiful moment for us to enjoy. Right.
Speaker 1:The convergence of Now, he doesn't say, get up with his cello, to say, well, it's heaven and earth tonight, my dear Sri Lankan people. But clearly, if you have eyes to see, ears to hear, you think, where does where does this beauty come from, Joseph? But I would say that's just an example of wonderfully good work. And I've written about these people twice pretty substantively in this new book.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Dictators have often hated Christians because they have a global connection to one another, that national boundaries and countries are are secondary to our bond with one another in Christ. But also, wouldn't you agree for the fact that we carry out this hope that your oppressive rule and ridiculousness isn't forever and cannot fully control us. And that that spark, that hint as you say in the title is quite threatening to oppress I
Speaker 1:think that is and I think it is. And even yesterday was the terrible anniversary of Alexei Navalny's murder by Putin and his government. Yes. And you know, was reading this morning one of his statements when he was in his last days of his life in the jail or the prison of Putin, looking up from his cot, looking up at his ceiling. Case, this was just confessional and open hearted, and acknowledgement that God is God, and that I live in God's world, and that what I do, I do for the sake of God, as you could find by anybody anywhere in the world.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. And he thought he would die, and then you know, within a week or two, three, he was murdered by Putin. But he was before I mean, he knew where he was, why he was, and wasn't pretending, know. He knew the terror of what was before him, and and which eventually did kill him. But it's a remarkable, you know, confessional moment of saying, this is who I am, this is who God is, this is where I lie, looking up the ceiling into the ceiling, but also into the heavens beyond, and I know just where I am, and I I want to be here because it matters.
Speaker 1:It matters in the words of Havel. It always makes sense to tell the truth.
Speaker 2:If you would speak truth to anyone listening who is in their profession, educators, medical field, housekeeping, plumbing, whatever it might be and illustrate for them where the proximate may live and and yearn in their heart. And then how is it that in your daily job you as a Christian, learn to keep moving forward?
Speaker 1:Well, the answer to your question of course is, you know, could be answered a thousand times and my mind's kind of on run here thinking which window which to give in But with again, this morning, somebody asked me a question about one of the projects I work on. Maybe I will just come back to this question. Twenty years ago, was drawn in by by by my pastor, actually, my Anglican director. He said, Steve, a person came to see me this morning. Would you talk to him?
Speaker 1:And he said, you know, he had a complex life. He had a very difficult work to do, and the question of the person to come to see the pastor was, what does what you say have to do with what they do on Monday morning? And my pastor said, well, would you talk to him, Steve? So I did and and turned out at the time he was, you know, I won't get him all global secrets here, but he was about as high as you could get in the international security world, agencies that we almost don't want to talk about because they are so secretive. But that's where he worked for a long time.
Speaker 1:Did a d field at Oxford studying British American spy acencies, essentially, and and that's what is his life. But we got to talking about, you know, what did what he was hearing on Monday morning or Sunday after with Monday morning. What does the apostle tree have to do with I do, you know, in the push and shove of a post nine eleven world. And we talked and talked and became friends. And you know, it wasn't too long after maybe a couple of years.
Speaker 1:I first of all, case, drew him into a little fellowship of my friends who I knew were theologically serious people who also knew the public square. Since Nuance is about public square life, I'll just say this, I drew a collection of some of my my close compadres whose theological instincts I trusted, but who had long lies in the public square. And I wanted them to come around him, but my new friend, and to say, you know, what you're resting with, you know, is not new. Let's talk about how the church for two thousand years has worked its way through these questions. Spent a lot of time on Augustine in the city of God, and walked away all the way through the centuries up into the modern world.
Speaker 1:His response to us as he walked away that first day was, thank you for taking my vocation seriously. It's never ever happened before. Wow. Oh my. But within another year or two, he left that agency and began working for the Mars family, the Mars Corporation, which makes M and M's and a lot of other things in the world.
Speaker 1:And we kept talking and kept talking and kept talking. Mars is a 100 year old company. We know M and M's and Dev Ice Cream Mars maybe, but they also make probably most of the dog and cat food that your dogs and cats eat.
Speaker 2:Oh, wow. I pay their light bill then.
Speaker 1:Yep. You do. And they sell about $45,000,000,000 a year worth of products around the world. But a question they've been asked by, what are the owners of the Mars Corporation, what are the siblings who own the whole company? What is the right levels of profit for us as a company?
Speaker 1:Now that may sound like a question from Mars, you know, more than planet planet in the solar system than you know anything else. You think well, isn't that an obvious I mean, why we even ask that question? Isn't the obvious question and the answer all the money possibly could make? And sometimes if Christians are answering the question, they say, well, I'll screw you, know, make all I can make and then I'll tithe what I don't think I need to first church or whatever, it is in Orlando. But this was a question saying something different, and I kept I was asked to meet with two executives to answer this question.
Speaker 1:And anyway, Grace, it's so long. It's twenty years of history now, but we talked and talked and talked and talked that morning. Finally decided to name our breakfast conversation within a few months, the economics of mutuality. Economics of mutuality. I would say substantively, it is a serious, surprisingly serious effort to rethink the business of business, the world.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:And I have really grown to appreciate their resources.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'll put them in
Speaker 2:the show notes for anyone interested, but it they produce some great stuff.
Speaker 1:And you know, if if you think about what a Mars family is looking for, it's not It isn't in the business of getting situated to sell next year. It isn't a morally bad thing to choose to do, I would not put it that way. But if you're family owned and privately held, you actually have a different question. You wanna keep making money over the long haul. You wanna sustain profitability.
Speaker 1:And so that's where it works at, and it's now moved from Washington DC and the large headquarters there to Geneva, Switzerland. Been there for about eight eight or nine years now, and and
Speaker 2:The economics and mutuality, not Mars.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. Yes. This project. I was with the team of these people in Seoul, South Korea in the fall to, you know, do some work there and make some presentations, and to engage in a to create a new partnership with a major business school of Seoul in South Korea, Hongyong University, which now wants to teach this new paradigm to their students.
Speaker 2:Wow. That's great.
Speaker 1:And I would tend to underscore, I mean, you think, well, come on. Business is best to ask Steven, you know, and I know God is God, you should trust God. But I mean, when we get into business, it's just business, isn't it, really? And I would say, well, don't think that it it must be seen that way. If the kingdom of God is the prime reality of human existence in the world, it does call for a different set of questions to be asked, different sets of loyalties to be addressed.
Speaker 1:Yes. So I would say that there's nothing parochial about the project. Business of somehow, there's a little, not this would be a bad thing to do, but there is not any quoting of a Bible verse on your little bag of M and M's is there. Because the Mars family doesn't see the world that way, from what I all I can understand. But there's a conscience, maybe an unusual conscience, asking harder questions, more complex questions like, what's the right level of profit?
Speaker 1:How much money should we make this year? Right? And if you're really gonna rethink the business of business, and if you understand that to do that, you have to be willing to acknowledge a more complex bottom line than simply have you made the most money you possibly can make. Right. Right.
Speaker 1:Then other things are gonna become important to you. I'll just finish this with this case, but you asked about the proximate here, and I've never ever ever thought of this project as heaven come to earth in all of its fullness. You know, like, somehow if we get the numbers right this year, we get the right paper argued for, we get the right, you know, person we talk to, you know, then somehow, you know, the kingdom of God will come in all of its fullness here and now. I've never ever saw it that way. I have seen it though as could we work our tails off to create a signpost of the way business could be done in the world?
Speaker 1:Maybe the way business should be done in the world. And I'm content with that, to work for a signpost, something proximate. So a reality, it's true, it's honest, it isn't everything, but it's not nothing either. And that's I think the the life that all of us are called to, whatever kind of work we do day by day.
Speaker 2:Wow. So good. These kind of conversations I I never want to end and I'm sure those listening in feel the same. Well, we're gonna pause here and pick up next week as Stephen and I continue to look at our public life together in politics, the marketplace, the church, and and where the proximate plays a role in that. Friends, you can find Hints of Hope, essays on making peace with the proximate wherever books are sold.
Speaker 2:You can also go to its publishing webpage, paracletepress.com. Learn more about Steven's work at Washington Institute dot org. You'll find those links and others in our show notes. Steven, thank you for your time.
Speaker 1:It's good to be with you, Chase. Thank you.
Speaker 2:Friends, thank you for inviting us into your day. If this conversation has, moved you or made you think of a friend or a colleague, share it with them and, bless their day. Leave a review, like. It will help us to reach even further. Go to our website, wecolabor.com.
Speaker 2:Wecolabor.com. Drop us your email, and I'll send you a copy of Zeitgeist, our latest journal of faith, work, and culture. I'm grateful for today's sponsor, the Magruder Foundation. Join us next week for part two of this conversation with Steven Garber. I'm Case Thorpe, and God's blessings on you.