00:02:40.800so i want to start off by just speaking to this topic that it feels like it's too easy to fit
00:02:49.900quote the troubles within a timeline of events that took place over a 30-year period or to just
00:02:56.580relegate it as a sectarian strife between catholics and protestants in doing so we
00:03:03.380fail to acknowledge that british and irish identity have been brushing up against each
00:03:08.180other for centuries prior. So I'd love to use this opportunity, not only to bring this history
00:03:14.880into our conversation, but to recognize generational trauma. So what is the visibility
00:03:20.720of trauma in Ireland? And how are people adapting in the wake of the Troubles?
00:03:26.320Well, you're very correct to recognize that the Troubles, kind of 68 to 98, is only the latest
00:03:33.280iteration in a complicated history regarding the presence of British power and British people on
00:03:38.500the island of Ireland. You can go back 700 years really and see the beginning of colonial initiatives
00:03:44.220from that period of time that have severely impacted the question about what independence
00:03:49.240means in Ireland, what sovereignty means in Ireland, and what it means for people to have
00:03:53.360their own governance, language, polity. For me, the very first impact of trauma is the fact that
00:04:04.460the Irish language was removed from the Irish people in the 1800s. That was done through a
00:04:09.440mixture of policy, as well as then the impact of a famine. And again, that famine was also a policy
00:04:15.140led famine. It wasn't a potato famine. There was plenty of food leaving the country, far more food
00:04:20.560then was needed to feed us. But still, many of the people who were loading food onto ships died
00:04:25.180as they were walking home. A million died in three years and a million left. The population
00:04:29.720went from nine million in 1845 down to, let me see, four million in 1880. So that leaves a long
00:04:40.340scar on the question of what independence looks like and the question about what Irishness looks
00:04:45.320like. So that is a deep trauma, not one that I would see necessarily being manifest in human
00:04:52.780action in the here and now, but certainly in the question about what would our present look like
00:04:57.340had the past been more virtuous in terms of those who had claimed power over the island of Ireland
00:05:03.120in this project called the United Kingdom. The Act of Union was set up in 1801, not with any
00:05:09.360sense of democratic voting from Irish people, which I should hasten to add. So that is one of
00:05:15.040the main areas of trauma that I see. In more recent times, you see some sectarian responses
00:05:21.980through the IRA, through various paramilitary organisations towards Britishness on the island
00:05:27.580of Ireland. Ireland was partitioned in about 1921, and you can see the deep impact of that
00:05:33.100manifesting itself throughout this last century in 1968 to 1998. Various, I suppose, Irish0.59
00:05:41.760paramilitary organisations that saw that they had a just cause in waiting a violent conflict against
00:05:48.180British targets. And then all kinds of targets, Irish, British, people who worked for government
00:05:55.820authorities, people who didn't work for any kind of government authority and lost their lives
00:06:00.160during that time, were murdered during that time. You can see once again the impact of trauma
00:06:05.560manifesting itself in the continuing diminishment of British-Irish relations through the Brexit
00:06:09.980project the question as to how brexit is impacting the island of ireland is evidenced
00:06:14.260really through protests on the borders and recognizing that the border is receiving far
00:06:19.220too much attention and sovereignty about the question of the border was given to the people
00:06:23.360of ireland for the island of ireland by the 1998 peace agreement and so that has really
00:06:29.260diminished in the last few years with all these civic questions through the british system as
00:06:35.200they've tried to make sense about what brexit means for the island of britain and then many
00:06:39.940people seem to have forgotten that Britain continues to have sovereignty and to have
00:06:45.860jurisdiction over Northern Ireland and so therefore Northern Ireland has been once again affected by
00:06:51.560processes decided on the island of Britain and that is complicated because so much of what our
00:06:57.120piece has come to mean has come to mean something really rich and powerful from the generosity of
00:07:02.760people of Ireland and people of Britain and there has been an extraordinary advance in civic
00:07:07.460relations in the last 20 years but those have been severely tested in the last couple of years
00:07:11.320through Brexit. Thank you so much for sharing with us these issues that are facing Ireland
00:07:20.680because I think especially in the United States and Canada this is not something that we hear
00:07:27.940nearly enough about or are aware about so I really appreciate hearing from you and at the beginning
00:07:34.440of your response, you just touched on the language of Ireland, and I'd be remiss if I didn't take
00:07:42.200this opportunity to discuss linguistic colonization with you. I'd love to invite you to speak more
00:07:48.780about the term Northern Ireland and the ways in which the language we've so readily adapted is
00:07:55.180marginal in its nature. And then I'm also thinking back to a passage I read in your book,
00:08:00.540In the Shelter, Finding Home in the World, where you reflect on the Irish language's connection to
00:08:06.080landscape, how, quote, there is no nation without a language, end quote. And similarly, quote,
00:08:12.540land without a language is a land without a soul, end quote. So I'd really love to ask you
00:08:18.800about the history of the Irish language and the ways in which it has been systematically erased
00:08:24.800and discredited so tir gan tanga tir gan anam is the shanak of the proverb the old saying that
00:08:32.560you just quoted there a land without a language is a land without a soul i mean i think the integrity
00:08:37.620of every language um is deeply linked to the place with that language about uh the english is an
00:08:43.380extraordinary language and i i love speaking english and it is a beautiful language to reflect
00:08:49.420on how it has become a global language how a language that grew up in the beautiful verdant
00:08:54.400hills and fields of England and the extraordinary culture of England, how that language through
00:09:02.160the curiosity and then the abuses of power, of empire, has gone far and wide and picked up all
00:09:09.180these other languages and words into it. For instance, the word taboo, I believe, might come
00:09:14.500from one of the islands of the Pacific. I think it might be Samoan or Tongan that it came into
00:09:20.040English through. So English is an extraordinary language populated by many other languages.
00:09:25.740The Irish language is beautiful. It corresponds very much to the landscape. And depending as to
00:09:31.540what dialect of Irish you're speaking, you can often hear the softness or the harshness of
00:09:36.100landscape through that language. Irish is a very concrete language and so regularly makes reference
00:09:41.440to the contours of hills and mountains and fields or the body. While my Irish is not brilliant,
00:09:48.780I have a deep connection with it. I think most things that I say, I tend to think through the
00:09:54.280Irish language. One of the impacts of the colonial project on the island of Ireland was that there
00:10:00.160began to be this introduction of a hierarchy of access to employment through if you spoke English
00:10:05.540and were speaking English. And then with the impact of the famine, when the population was
00:10:10.600reduced by two million during the famine and then continued to become less than half of what it had
00:10:15.360been. People flocked to the urban centres. Cities grew enormously. Dublin, the population of the
00:10:22.160island of Ireland in 1845 was about 9 million, but there was only 200,000 in the Dublin area.
00:10:28.340So for the main city, that's a very small population near the city. At the moment,
00:10:32.480for instance, the population is about 7 million and the population in Dublin is 1.2 million,
00:10:38.900I believe. And so that is a huge impact in terms of urban centres, Cork, Galway and Belfast being
00:10:47.420some other big cities then. So with the flooding of people towards urban centres, the English
00:10:54.240language became more and more important. And then there was some measures, there were some measures
00:10:58.920to criminalise the usage of the Irish language also. And so to, I meant to introduce names for
00:11:05.700places so places in dublin that are known as dunlara or in cork cove were called kingstown
00:11:11.280and queenstow um calling something something that people locally don't call it as an extraordinary
00:11:17.400act of invasion a linguistic colonization is what i've always called it for that for people to have
00:11:23.840to learn a second language in order to be able to deal adequately in their own country is a
00:11:29.480fascinating way. You make people feel inadequate in speaking about questions of power in their own
00:11:35.980place, where they have to learn a second language in order to be able to do so. I'm all for learning
00:11:40.720second and third languages, but not of the way of making people feel unfluent in circumstances to
00:11:46.800do with their own agency, individually as well as collectively. So when Ireland was partitioned
00:11:54.300in 1921, the Republic of Ireland, as it became known, established a constitution, a bilingual
00:11:59.320constitution in both English and Irish and so in the Republic of Ireland Irish is protected
00:12:05.560you have to study it in school unless you've worked hard to get an exemption you can't get
00:12:12.180into university without having passed exams in English Irish and another European language
00:12:18.960and so language is a very important thing here and yet to have to learn language most people
00:12:26.480learn Irish as their second language to have to learn the language of your locality as a mandatory
00:12:32.280subject in the school can cause all kinds of resentments unfortunately rather than it being
00:12:36.200a breathing language for many people they do love it I have always loved the Irish language but then
00:12:41.240unfortunately for many people also they might feel like it was just a language that wasn't taught
00:12:45.820well in school or the significance of it wasn't taught so therefore people haven't practiced
00:12:50.500their own fluency in it. Well, speaking of colonization, I would really like to further
00:12:59.500this conversation into the cost of empire, this reenactment of colonial empire and how we live
00:13:06.420within colonial empire. And to speak of colonization in regards to Ireland, but
00:13:12.200in doing so with the understanding and the framework of the United States as a settler
00:13:16.920colony would seem to complicate my own understanding a bit. So I'm wondering if
00:13:23.220you can begin by describing what it means to live within colonial empire in Ireland and how this
00:13:29.300history is continuously unfolding into the present. Few enough people these days would call
00:13:35.180Ireland a colonial empire. I suppose I use the lens of empire to look at the impact of Britishness0.69
00:13:42.860on ireland but people of british identity have been here for so many years now that i think it
00:13:47.740is an ungenerous and inaccurate term to use for i suppose the fifth of the population on the whole
00:13:55.040island of ireland who claim british heritage um that would certainly feel like a um an ungenerous
00:14:02.480lens and people have been here for so long that we are all part of each other now we're all wrapped
00:14:07.640with each other we can't undo the past and we need to find ways in which we can reflect on the
00:14:12.540blames that we have towards each other, the deep pains that we have towards each other,
00:14:17.400and then practice some kind of virtue in finding a way to acknowledge, finding a way to let pain
00:14:22.820be recognized and memorialized, as well as then finding a way within which that can impact our
00:14:28.180present with each other. When I think of the Project of Empire, I think of all of the layers
00:14:34.780that are part of the Project of Empire. There are the decision makers, which isn't English people1.00
00:14:39.580or scottish people or british people it's a small amount of people who made huge decisions that
00:14:43.780impacted the world those were already the ruling classes um entitled people with large swathes of
00:14:50.280land who were happy to um keep people in their own country in indentured service never mind people in
00:14:57.280other countries and so i see really that the project of empire is part of a manifestation
00:15:02.440of a project of power and abusive negative power selective power that requires the majority to be
00:15:08.760subjugated at the hands of the small entitled minority. Then I see another layer of empires
00:15:15.200that through the story of Ireland, for instance, Ireland certainly has suffered an enormous amount.
00:15:20.300However, when Irish people went to what is now called the United States,
00:15:24.100lots of Irish people were involved in defending the idea of the slavery project. So many Irish0.99
00:15:30.720people who had been treated so poorly through the colonial project at home seemed to think that they
00:15:35.360had gotten a step up on a ladder of security once they got to the United States. And while
00:15:40.340they might have been the bottom of the white ladder, they were nonetheless white. And so0.91
00:15:44.920Frederick Douglass has an extraordinary quote in one of his books where he reflects on the fact
00:15:49.960that the Irish who have suffered so much have not allowed that suffering to inform them and to
00:15:54.780inform our ethical attitudes toward those people who've been enslaved in the United States. So
00:16:01.800So that is a warning from history that just because you've suffered, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to become virtuous. And I think Irish people love to reflect on the fact that we have suffered a lot. But often, I think we enjoy forgetting that we have also been part of inflicting suffering through being secondary leaders of a colonial project when Irish people went overseas to Canada, to the United States, to Jamaica, to New Zealand, to Australia.
00:16:25.280Oh, Patrick, that is such a deep lesson that I think many of us in our ancestral lineages have yet to learn. And thank you for bringing that up.
00:16:38.600And now there's also this question here on the burden of shame, whether it be ancestrally,
00:16:45.440individually, or nationally. So do you think it's possible that in reconciling these painful
00:16:53.120histories and shadows of shame, that we can break the supposed circularity of time and repetition
00:16:59.660of history? Well, that's going to be a slow project. I mean, you hear lots of people these
00:17:04.920days say, oh, you know, I don't think I'm racist because I don't use particular terms. And that's
00:17:09.960okay, fine. It's great that a person isn't using particular terms, but any white person is going
00:17:15.360to benefit from centuries and centuries of white privilege at the expense of people of color.
00:17:21.380And so not using racist language might be a great step one, but really there's, you know,
00:17:27.300there's a million steps to be taken. So we shouldn't congratulate ourselves for taking
00:17:30.980step one. There are shaming things to look at in our past and shame has been a term that has
00:17:38.020gathered a lot of negativity over the last while and I am not entirely sure what to do with that
00:17:43.880because I know that certain forms of shame can be like living with a cancer of the soul, something
00:17:48.820that won't die and something that keeps you from experiencing flourishing. However, there are also
00:17:55.060certain forms of shame that can be educational. Shame when it comes to thinking about what is it
00:18:00.040that in my family line, that we have done to other people in order to better ourselves at
00:18:04.860the expense of other people. I'm not sure that shame is a bad response to looking at some of
00:18:10.720the stories of our past. I really resonate with that, that I don't think it's necessary to run
00:18:20.380away from shame, although I know that it has gotten a bad rap and people feel that shaming
00:18:25.100people or feeling shame isn't productive in our growth. But I disagree with that. I think that
00:18:32.020there are shameful things that us humans have done. And we need to sit with that in order to
00:18:39.320grow and learn and to really feel it and embody it. So we hopefully won't repeat it. And I'm
00:18:45.480really happy you brought that up. So yeah, I mean, the shame can be educational. I mean,
00:18:51.000anything can be terribly negative or wonderfully positive or uncomfortably informative and so
00:18:59.480in a sense it might be that shame is amoral and the question is is what are we going to do with
00:19:05.940shame if we deny the kind of things that cause us shame well then we might deny the possibility of
00:19:11.560the practice of accountability or reparation and there are serious things that we need to be called
00:19:17.120to in terms of paying attention to the here and now and to the privileges that some enjoy
00:19:21.520and the continued deaths that other people are born into.
00:19:26.280I absolutely agree. Now, I know that you are stepping down as the leader of the Cori Mealy
00:19:32.520this month, but I'm hoping you don't mind me asking some questions that reflect on your time
00:19:37.860there. So for our audience, oh, good. Okay. And for our audience, I'll just preface that Cori Mealy
00:19:43.620as a community center that quote believes that people can learn to live and work well together
00:19:48.940end quote and it's also quote northern ireland's oldest peace and reconciliation group and ireland's
00:19:56.440oldest peace and reconciliation group from all of ireland not just in the north okay thank you for
00:20:01.640the um thank you for that now i also learned that the founder of cory mealy ray davey was held as a
00:20:08.840prisoner of war in Dresden during World War II, and that Corey Mealy very much grew out of the
00:20:15.060inhumanity Ray witnessed. So I'd love if you could share a little bit more about Corey Mealy
00:20:21.820and the existential imperative of reconciliation, and how our humanity can perhaps be most active
00:20:29.760amidst times of deep inhumanity. Yeah. So yeah, Ray Davy was born in Belfast, I think,
00:20:38.020in 1915 so he was born before this project called northern ireland was imagined so ireland was
00:20:44.680partitioned in 1921 and um the north or what some people call northern ireland or the six counties
00:20:52.080or the occupied six counties depending as to your politics depends as to what validation you give
00:20:56.640this new jurisdiction that was created um anyway that was created to the joy of some and to the
00:21:02.580sadness of others. And really the most recent iteration of the question of violence on the
00:21:08.760island of Ireland has come as a result of that partition. So Ray became ordained and then became
00:21:14.280a volunteer chaplain with the British services in World War II. And he was captured in North Africa
00:21:21.180and brought throughout a variety of prisoner of war camps, some in North Africa, then through
00:21:24.680Italy, and then finally outside Dresden. And he was there when Dresden was firebombed. The
00:21:29.720prisoner of war camp was far enough away from the city of Dresden that the prisoner of war camp
00:21:36.000wasn't affected by that firebombing, but he certainly witnessed it. And he saw that his
00:21:40.540liberation came at the expense of the annihilation of many. And he returned back to Belfast in about
00:21:46.1201945, a man of the age of 30. And that was a complicated thing to come back, being liberated
00:21:53.280by the annihilation of many. And Northern Ireland wasn't even 25 years old by that stage. Partition
00:21:59.720had happened in 21, so he got back in 45. And you could see really that the deep divisions
00:22:06.220sown by any kind of partition were seeking to manifest themselves in some kind of civic action.
00:22:11.940And there's always going to be the threat that that civic action is going to turn violent.
00:22:16.080And so he began to work with students. He became the chaplain of Queen's University in Belfast.
00:22:20.460He began to work with students to say, let's come together in groups of diverse people to talk and argue it out, not for the aim of consensus, but for the aim of relationship across division.
00:22:30.800And so for 20 years, really, he brought students from all kinds of disciplines towards each other.
00:22:37.060They took trips back to Germany, took trips to other parts of Europe that were trying to pay attention to how the hell did we let ourselves get into this?
00:22:44.180how did the churches turn their eyes away from what was so obviously happening in terms of the
00:22:49.760anti-Semitism that was so rife across Europe and so then in 65 he heard of a plot of land on the
00:22:57.940very north coast of Ireland coming up for sale and he had been chaplain for 20 years he was a
00:23:03.340charismatic man and he had a whole bunch of students and a whole bunch of adults in the city
00:23:08.840all part of the ecumenical movement and together they fundraised and purchased this piece of land
00:23:13.580every little kind of plot of six fields in Ireland is called a townland and all those townlands have
00:23:19.400a name and so they found out that the name of this plot of land that they purchased that had
00:23:23.300an old house in it the name is Coramila which is an old old Irish word somebody naive told them
00:23:28.340that it meant hill of harmony and so they took that as a lovely sign for the Coramila community
00:23:32.780to begin and about 10 years later after which time the Troubles had already the latest iteration
00:23:37.780of the Troubles had broken out Troubles broke out in about 68 and people had been murdered
00:23:42.500terrible, terrible things had happened. So in about 1975, an actual etymologist of Old Irish
00:23:47.820said, well, the real meaning of Cormilla is unclear, but it's definitely not Hill of Harmony.
00:23:52.180It's probably something closer to Lumpy Crossing Place, by which stage there'd been 10 years of
00:23:58.500the attempt at being a reconciliation community. And they thought Lumpy Crossing Place is a far
00:24:03.500more accurate term for this attempt, this essay, to be a community in reconciliation and reconciling
00:24:11.240towards each other and reconciling does not mean to arrive at consensus reconciling does not mean
00:24:16.860that you all believe the same thing about who is to blame for the circumstances that we're in
00:24:21.120reconciling is some kind of practice in person and in policy to pay attention to the society
00:24:27.300that's pulling itself apart and that is painful and the imperative in it certainly in the context
00:24:33.200of ireland has been to be in deep relationship with people who represent the thing that you
00:24:37.440considered to be the opposite of your point of view and that is costly, it's painful, it might
00:24:44.760cause you to be called a traitor by some of your own and you will find yourself in all kinds of
00:24:50.720unexpected circumstances where you find empathy and sympathy for people coming from different
00:24:55.760points of view than you and that has been a mandatory thing really for us in the question
00:25:00.680of what reconciliation means between Britishness and Irishness on the island of Ireland. For 700
00:25:05.920years the question of Britishness has impacted life here linguistically in power in land
00:25:11.380distribution in questions to do with the famine and questions to do with sovereignty and questions
00:25:16.420to do with power all of these areas have been impacted enormously that is a long-term relationship
00:25:22.100we are never going to move away from the fact that to be Irish is going to definitely require
00:25:27.120navigation and hopefully generous navigation with the question of the British impact on Ireland
00:25:32.500And there are so many things about Britain to be celebrated, rich, rich culture, rich arts, rich, extraordinary contributions to the human community through the British project.
00:25:44.560And for us in Ireland, part of the question is to work alongside those who are British and to look at the ways in which we can celebrate shared culture.
00:25:53.680We can celebrate different culture. We can find ways to mark deep pain, find ways to lament and protest very seriously the things that have been denied and then find a way to say, but we are still with each other and we will need to be with each other.
00:26:09.140It is impossible for people to simply leave. We can't undo the past, so we need to find a way to practice something called society with each other in the present and find ways in which all of that can be to our mutual flourishing and beneficial co-living together.
00:33:10.920All of these things are necessary in circumstances like Ireland, where there is so many different
00:33:16.620versions of the past that we can't agree on who upon whom the blame lies often we idolize the
00:33:22.440past in a way where we think that there can be certainty about the past but the past is always
00:33:27.160plural and there's always different places where we can begin the question of blame and blame can
00:33:32.060be equally spread in the context of the irish british relationship you can look at all kinds
00:33:36.160of reasons why irish people are to blame and all kinds of reasons why british people are to blame
00:33:40.140but blame won't solve anything it's an important question to land where you might apportion blame
00:33:45.520But then there comes the civic question of, okay, and now what? Even if you believe that your group is less blameful than the other group, fine, now what? What are we going to do? Are you just going to imagine that the other group is incapable of moral or civic action today? How can we coexist in a way that's flourishing and mutual? So all of these things are vital for us and to pay attention to.
00:34:10.200mm-hmm oh i hear you padrick now i'd really love to candidly ask you about the language that comes
00:34:18.220from the earth i feel very connected to this and i've read that you take qualms with the
00:34:24.180oversimplification and overt romanticization of the landscape and that it neglects the
00:34:30.760practicality of a place and in a chapter you wrote titled the place between in timothy carden's
00:34:37.280neither here nor there, the many voices of liminality. You talk about how landscapes can
00:34:42.640have rage or fury, and they hold stories of everyday life. And I'd really love to open this
00:34:49.060up to you on the implications of language and our relationship with the natural world. And
00:34:53.780so perhaps our severance from the natural world is reflected in this obsession with reflecting
00:35:00.120the spiritual onto the landscape, rather than the pragmatic.
00:35:03.420well so for me the spiritual and the pragmatic are possibly both sides of the same thing
00:35:08.700i always think that spiritual and i remind myself that spiritual comes from the word spirari
00:35:13.660and meaning breath and that i am dead without breath and so spiritual is an intensely bodily
00:35:20.360thing and for me that is where celtic spirituality begins i have and sometimes found myself very
00:35:26.760frustrated when i read what people write about celtic spirituality it is the most airy fairy
00:35:31.980disembodied, impractical, unincarnated language possible. It just seems misty, and I find that
00:35:41.340to be deeply boring and deeply denying of the linguistic tradition of Irish, which is so
00:35:46.360earthy and bodily. The Irish language takes so many metaphors from actual carnal reality.
00:35:54.400meatiness is so important so uh kind of a small story of my own rage was told in that chapter
00:36:01.700where i was once part of an event where somebody looked out over a valley in county wicklow which
00:36:07.520is just south of dublin and county wicklow is called the garden of ireland its valleys are
00:36:11.660beautiful and filled with the most gorgeous heathers moss green purple yellow brown stunning
00:36:19.440stunning colors it looks like a it looks like a beautiful turner painting sometimes when you look
00:36:25.760and somebody said oh god you can just sense the spirituality from the landscape there and i just0.98
00:36:31.400thought what kind of bullshit is this people have to live in this valley and heather while it's0.99
00:36:37.120beautiful is terrible for eating what poor sheep cut their tongues on the thorns of heather heather1.00
00:36:43.840in Irish is frayach, which means rage or fury. And so there's somebody understood this linguistically
00:36:52.200that they called their surroundings, beautiful as they were, they called the plant rage. And so for
00:36:58.600me, finding a way to pay attention to the fact that all that thrives around us is also in conflict,
00:37:06.540that plants, that animals have had to fight for their own survival. And to be close to nature is
00:37:12.840to be close to the question of survival and survival can be cruel and Annie Dillard writes
00:37:18.540about this really powerfully in Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek and other others of her works where she says
00:37:23.220you know people who talk about wanting to get close to nature don't seem to have spent too much
00:37:28.140time thinking about what that means it is a demanding survival tactic and it requires an
00:37:34.480enormous amount from us so spirituality that doesn't pay attention to the muscular meaty
00:37:41.820ways than which we need to pay attention to our body to our landscape to the earth
00:37:46.680to my mind is spirituality that is not paying attention to the question of being alive
00:37:51.100that was so beautifully spoken Padraig and I feel that that the land holds many
00:37:57.520stories and representations and it's not all just beautiful or lovely you know it does it kind of
00:38:05.980strips the depth from the land. It strips the stories. It strips the identity of the land to
00:38:12.780just oversimplify it like that. And I really love you speaking about that. Now, I have this
00:38:18.320question on my mind on the theologies of both joy and sorrow. And I haven't quite figured it out,
00:38:26.200but I'm thinking also about the role of religion and how we can recognize the complacency of
00:38:31.840structures that have failed us, but still hold a deep sense of faith that extends beyond its
00:38:36.920failings. Say a bit more. I'm fascinated by what we were saying, but I'd love to hear a little bit
00:38:43.480more about what's in your mind with that. Yeah, well, I guess just, well, I guess today I see
00:38:49.800a lot, especially in the United States, this agnostic or atheist movement. A lot of, I feel
00:38:56.220like people are being just so detached from religions of the past, feeling frustrated by
00:39:04.240what religions have done within power structures and how they've failed us in the sense of
00:39:11.540bringing peace or health to the land, health to humans. But at the same extent, I do see there's
00:39:20.120a deep disconnection when we live this type of postmodern secular life where we don't
00:39:27.880we don't hold spiritual values within our lives within our actions and so there's really nothing
00:39:33.960to be accountable to whether that's traditions family religion practices lineages especially
00:39:42.700in America, this kind of homeland of orphans from other places. So yeah, I wonder as we're,
00:39:50.680especially the young ones are stepping into this world where so many of these power structures and
00:39:55.600religious structures have failed us in many ways. But at the same time, how do we reconcile
00:40:01.840with that and hold ourselves within something beyond just a postmodern capitalistic framework?
00:40:09.140work? Well, I think the stories of the pastor are very important. It can seem to some like this is
00:40:16.800the age when people began to move away from religion. And the imagination, I think immature
00:40:22.300imagination, is that moving away from religion, especially toxic religion, would be the thing that
00:40:27.440leads us towards virtue. But all you have to do is turn the clock back 100 years and look at the
00:40:31.560story of the eugenics movement in Australia to recognize that people have been thinking that
00:40:36.660they've been secular for a long time and been doing terrible things to each other so um there
00:40:41.980is no movement that can claim the corner on virtuous practice so science alone will not save
00:40:48.820us um because people thought that eugenics was science and that eugenics was a non-religious
00:40:53.780approach and that it was free from um supremacy and was free from everything it was just done for
00:40:59.680the benefit of humankind and terrible things were done through eugenics this idea the science of
00:41:04.760better breeding. So people were sterilized because they were deemed to not be the kind of people who
00:41:11.320would give birth to virtuous children. Children were stolen from families and forced into marriages
00:41:17.780to breed the so-called indigenous problem out of Australia. So there's all these ways within which1.00
00:41:23.940war was being waged on people in the name of this scientific secular project. So I don't think
00:41:30.300there's anything alone that will save us um religion has claimed for a long time that that
00:41:35.300might be the thing and we know enough to say that religion has been extraordinarily beautiful and
00:41:40.180creative for so many endeavors and extraordinarily destructive in so many other endeavors but um
00:41:47.360science too has a lot of blood in its past and we need to pay attention to that the secular project
00:41:53.780i think is often misunderstood secular means to go into the world with your ideology to take your
00:41:58.880ideology and to be in conversation with the world. Secular does not mean anti-religious or
00:42:04.220irreligious. Secular means to be in dialogue. So I consider myself to be a very secular person.
00:42:09.560I have the things, the ideologies, the hopes, the faiths that I try to hold in myself,
00:42:14.960but I consider it to be a virtue and a demanding practice to be secular about those, to be in
00:42:21.120conversation with people in the world who think very differently and to ask, what does this mean
00:42:25.640now? Who benefits? From whom is this taken away? I know you've had John A. Powell on your program,
00:42:31.900and he asks these beautiful questions, demanding questions. Who decides who wins, who loses?
00:42:38.140Those are the three questions that he asks. And I think that's a secular question to ask when it
00:42:42.860comes to my ideology, an ideology or spirituality that I might feel is very nurturing to me.
00:42:48.320Who decides who wins, who loses, who pays? These are serious questions to ask. And I think
00:42:53.920every worthwhile endeavor should be open to asking itself that. Snoopy has an extraordinary
00:43:00.520question in one of the cartoons. Snoopy is sitting on top of his kennel typing, and Charlie Brown
00:43:06.880comes along and says, I hear you're writing a book on theology. I hope you have a good title.
00:43:11.280And Snoopy looks up in his fairly pontifical way and says, I have the perfect title. And the title
00:43:17.120of his book of theology suddenly becomes etched in typeface in the sky. And it is, have you ever
00:43:21.640considered that you might be wrong. And I think there is such brilliance in that. The scientific
00:43:27.500project, I'm from a family of scientists, and the scientific project is not frightened of asking
00:43:32.180itself that, and thrives really on asking itself regularly, are we wrong? Are we limited? Have we
00:43:38.240reached the final answer? Is there another answer beyond the answer that can improve us? But science
00:43:43.380has shown in the past that it can be devastating when it chooses to end itself in a certain place,
00:43:49.360and religion also has shown itself in its past that it too can be devastating and a power of
00:43:54.580terror when it doesn't continue to ask itself that it itself might be the place where repentance
00:44:00.860is needed rather than projecting repentance onto other people. I'm glad that you made the mention
00:44:08.120that science also has blood on its hands or something like that because I do see when people
00:44:15.000move away from religion and kind of bring that fanatical feeling into science then and then
00:44:24.860science is the one true god or science is in a sense yes it's about questioning but it's not to
00:44:31.140be questioned as the authority and i think that's also extremely limiting and i've really been
00:44:38.200questioning science so much these days as much as i i've studied science and i've it's taught me so
00:44:45.400much and really helped me identify what i care about in a lot of ways but i i see this this
00:44:52.320savior mentality with science especially with the environmental movement and climate emergency
00:44:58.320and the anthropocene extinction there's there's this energy that somehow science will save us
00:45:05.400science has the answers and and the scientists in a sense have become to me like the priest
00:45:11.120when the bible was in latin and the lay people couldn't read that language it's like a similar
00:45:16.980thing science has this language uh the papers are so inaccessible to most people and then there's
00:45:24.240this uh power structure that comes into play let alone the fact that so much science is being bought
00:45:30.280out by big corporations and so on and so forth and then this intense need to collect data collect
00:45:36.980data collect data in order to prove something when i feel like so much of what is being proven
00:45:42.760we already know because we can see it observationally we know it intuitionally we don't need
00:45:47.940to have data for 30 years on how you know something is being poisoned it's being poisoned
00:45:53.920period and we should look at that and put our energy into stopping the poisoning so i i have
00:45:59.620so many feelings around science not that i think it should be thrown out but not given the amount of
00:46:06.800i don't know i i don't think it should be given the amount of power that it's given and i would
00:46:13.960say science and technology are one and the same for me with that oh yeah with that feeling i mean
00:46:19.680they are all practices of power and power is amoral i mean when you love the word physics
00:46:25.060phusus meaning nature from greek physics is profoundly interested in the nature of things
00:46:31.060the laws of the universe and i mean i think that's such a worthy and brilliant endeavor
00:46:35.860and the physicists that i can understand which are very few is the ones who do great work of
00:46:42.240translating themselves to make themselves intelligible to someone like me and they are
00:46:47.000filled with the mystery of what they don't know and filled with the question of the unknowability
00:46:52.320of certain things and the question of saying we need to continue to pay attention to how we do
00:46:57.860these questions needs to be guided by the best of virtue that we can practice in the here and now
00:47:03.560and I think that's a very humble practice and I am so moved by listening to physicists that I know
00:47:08.560who practice that in a way to widen wonder and to open up the question of what it means
00:47:14.160to be human with each other in the here and now.
00:47:52.320I'd love to be able to close on this question
00:48:18.640around hunger and spiritual decay, and I'm trying to find this connection that I'm feeling in my
00:48:26.180mind about them both. There's this one part of me that's really wondering about the hunger of our
00:48:31.820time and how hunger can propel creativity and foster community. And within that community,
00:48:37.800I'm thinking about peace and how we can be in that place moving forward in this hunger.
00:48:44.520And there's a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. that says, quote, a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual decay, end quote.
00:48:57.440So I'm curious about the notion of uncovering our spiritual decay.
00:49:01.920And then more specifically, what does this practice of peace look like during this time?
00:49:07.780You know, how is building peace in our communities imperative alongside this said uncovering?
00:49:13.380And where does our hunger fit in to propel us into this work?
00:49:20.020Well, there's so much in that question.
00:49:23.700It really interests me to imagine what a response to your question about what current hungers might be.
00:49:30.900I think one current hunger is a desire for accountability.
00:49:34.820And there is also a current hunger in a desire for purity.
00:49:38.900Accountability is something that really interests me.
00:49:41.800Purity is something that frightens me somewhat because I've seen so many attempts over centuries
00:49:47.720to find a way of purity, and we can look back on some of those centuries-old attempts for purity
00:49:54.200and see the violences that they inflicted. We hope that the attempts for purity now might be
00:50:00.060less violent, but nonetheless, we've shown ourselves over and over how quickly desires
00:50:04.680for purity turned sectarian. Accountability, I think we are filled in an era where there is a
00:50:11.940desire to reckon with the past, and that the past is truly present in the here and now. I was in
00:50:19.880England a few weeks ago, and I mentioned something about the partition of Ireland. And somebody said
00:50:24.960to me, oh, for God's sake, you're going way into the past now, aren't you dragging that up?
00:50:28.680and they had no idea it seems like that that very week i'd gotten a green card to say that
00:50:35.780so that i can drive my car across the border if brexit happens so the past is not the past for
00:50:41.560us in ireland the past is very present we have two jurisdictions in a place where not everybody
00:50:46.400wants there to be two jurisdictions and so the the privilege of being able to say oh god that's
00:50:52.400way in the past seemed to me to be lacking in accountability of paying attention to the history
00:50:56.880of a nation that hadn't paid attention to its history. So I think that there is a desire for
00:51:02.300accountability in the here and now, accountability of the impact of the powers of the past on the
00:51:08.140here and now, and the privileges that benefit some at the expense of many are being called
00:51:13.760into question today. And I think that is a profound thing to practice. Certainly in the
00:51:19.100English-Irish question, I find myself regularly wanting to hold things up regarding the question
00:51:23.660of the impact of Britishness, but then I look at myself as a cisgendered, able-bodied
00:51:28.840white man, and grand I'm gay, and so I've suffered personally on that level.
00:51:33.740But on so many levels, I am filled with the inheritances of privilege at the expense of