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A book of remembrance was kept in … the Language of Adam for it was given unto as many as called upon God to write with the finger of inspiration and by them their children were taught to read and write having a language which was pure and undefiled now this was in the beginning which shall be in the end of the world”

The syntax is a little ambiguous. The question is, what does the “this” refer to? What was in the beginning and will be in the end of the world?

Eighteen months later, John Whitmer took up his pen again as Joseph made revisions to his earlier edits of Genesis. Coming to Moses 6, Joseph added a word which clarifies the vague demonstrative pronoun, “this.” His amendment reads this way: “[Adam’s] children” had “a language which was pure and undefiled. Now this…priesthood which was in the beginning shall be in the end.”

Whether the textual pairing of language and priesthood is meant as a doctrinal pairing I can’t say. However, the textual pairing is certainly richly suggestive. For priesthood, like the conception of language I want to outline today, brings two concepts into juxtaposition: love and presence. When we talk about the eternal priesthood, the priesthood of the temple and sacramentalism, the priesthood associated with Elijah the prophet, we are specifically invoking a power that turns children’s hearts to their fathers and fathers’ hearts to their children, binding them in love. Priesthood functions to conquer distance, to bridge both space and time and bring us back into one another’s presence, into communion and mutual encounter. So does love; and so, I want to argue, does language. Language is how finite individuals, bounded as we are by material shape and form and exteriors, encounter each other to constitute mutual presence, mutual encounter. This function—or at least this aspiration—of language may be why the book of Moses suggests pure language is a priesthood.

I hope to make clear today what I believe to be non-replicable about language understood in this way, as essential to our divinely authored humanity, and essential to the kind of knowledge of which organized intelligence is capable.

So what I am not doing today is to belabor the dangers of a culture overly reliant upon social media, technology, or artificial intelligence. I think those dangers to human thriving and human community are by now more than apparent to all. The benefits available via artificial intelligence are undeniable as well.

I want instead to propose a reinvigorated explication of the divinely human as our best defense against the indubitable assaults on humanity that over-reliance on technology already portend. And I want to frame that defense as intrinsic to the Latter-day Saint understanding of two dimensions of our humanity, in particular. What is special about human language? How is that language tied to love? And I want to suggest how LDS doctrine can help us articulate, celebrate, and preserve a sacred understanding of these two aspects of our humanity

That takes us back to Moses 6. Why was a paramount impulse in the Restoration—as in many traditions outside our own, this ever-present dream of an Adamic language. And how does AI move us toward or away from the capabilities of language in its most human—and I would say, in its most sacral—dimension?

Nothing is more fundamental to human nature, to human intelligence, than for one human intelligence to willingly enter into relation with another human being or beings.

In the great intercessory prayer, Jesus prays that his disciples “may be one, as we are one” (John 17:11). The Trinity has long served Christians as the model of perfect, loving community. Latter-day Saints are often quite comfortable with the general consensus that we are not Trinitarians. And admittedly we are not in the classically theistic sense. Yet the doctrine does have something to teach us. The medieval theologian Richard of St Victor (ca. 1100–1173) believed the trinity was logically necessary to love’s fullest expression. Love must be interpersonal by definition, he reasoned, so there must be at least two persons in relationship. However, in order for those two persons to be united in a shared outgoing of their love, they must have in common a third object to love jointly. Hence a necessary third person completes the divine loving community. We experience this truth at the simplest level when we say to a loved one, oh look at that shooting star! Oh, yes, I see it; isn’t that beautiful. Or with heightened significance, it is the shared love of two parents for a child that fosters a stronger bond of love between those two. The shared gaze of two parents upon a newborn that constitutes annew level of shared love that replicates the love found it St Victor’s Trinity. Two persons can love reciprocally. A community requires more than two, however, to make possible the fullest achievement of love: shared loving of the other. this is the interpersonal love that the trinity enacts. This is the aspiration Jesus bequeaths to his disciples in the prayer John records.

Paul referred to Christian communities as a “colony of heaven,” and there is more than metaphorical significance to the term. The community that followers of Christ constitute is not an incidental feature of the path of discipleship. It is the very constituting of that kingdom of heaven that many Christians have misconstrued to be the reward at the end.

Now several important insights derive from St Victor’s proposition. 1) Love can only exist interpersonally, and 2) it attains its highest expression in a community. And 3) a community consists of more than two persons.

But relationship has two prerequisites: boundedness, and a way across that boundedness. Love and language are implicated in both: Finitude and physicality are not obstacles to love—they are its precondition.

“The longing for relation” of which the mystic Martin Buber wrote, the “arrow of love” described in the Song of Songs, moves us feelingly in the direction of an imagined physical form. Love is the conquest of distance—and we calibrate love by the distance that embodied persons manage to elide. The language of affection and disaffection rely upon metaphors of special proximity: we feel “close” to someone of whom we are particularly fond, while one whose affection has waned has grown “distant.” The command to love one’s “neighbor” is rooted in the nearness that genuine charity creates—which Jesus recognizes by challenging his hearers to the more strenuous demand of becoming effectual neighbors to those separated from us by cultural or physical distance.

Some conceptions of romantic love—and some of divine union—imagine a blurring of identity, a merging into shared oneness as the ultimate consummation. However, the premium that Christianity places on embodiment (as evident in human creation and the Incarnation alike) should dispel that impulse so rooted in dreams of mystical union and romantic yearning alike. God did not conceal his divinity and majesty in a derivative material form. The Incarnation, John insisted time and again, was God’s living witness that the fullest, most perfect, most complete version of the divine IS the fleshly, material, embodied form, who weeps, eats bread, laughs, hungers, suffers, and washes his friends’ feet. (That mistake about condescension threw Christianity off course seventeen centuries ago and we repeat it at our peril).

“We enjoy being present to others,” writes Stephen Webb with counterintuitive insight, “because we take pleasure in the way that other bodies resist us and only gradually receive us. … Matter … is the means by which we come to know ourselves by engaging true otherness.”

Any love that is other than narcissistic love recognizes, celebrates, and reverences distinctness and difference from the other. Emmanuel Levinas captures the gravity of this misapprehension: “Communication [and a fortiori love] if taken as the reduplication of the self (or its thoughts) in the other, deserves to crash, for such an understanding is in essence a pogrom against the distinctness of human beings.” John Durham Peters’ commentary on that insight deserves ample quoting:

The body is our existence, not our container. … The body is not a vehicle to be cast off, it is in part the homeland to which we are traveling. … That any achievement of communion consists in a concert of differences is a blessing rather than a curse. … To view communication as the marriage of true minds underestimates the holiness of the body. … The paradox of love is its concrete boundedness and the universality of its demands. Because we can share our mortal time and touch only with some and not all, presence becomes the closest thing there is to a bridge across the chasm.

The boundedness of our body, and perhaps of God’s, is the essential precondition for whatever bridges of love we construct.

Let me push that possibility about God’s boundedness further:

Ian McGilchrist relates how the physicist Leo Szilard announced to his fellow physicist Hans Bethe that he planned to start keeping a diary.

“‘I don’t intend to publish. I am merely going to record the facts for the information of God.’ ‘Don’t you think God knows the facts? ’ Bethe asked. ‘Yes’, said Szilard. ‘He knows the facts, but He does not know this version of the facts.’”

I love that story, in part because I think as Latter-day Saints we can detect a Restoration truth behind the wry humor.

The philosophical tradition, especially before Kant, and classical theism generally, presuppose that human embodiment, sensory mechanisms, situatedness in space and time, place limits on omniscience (whether the omniscience attributed to God or to a suprahuman technology, such as AI or ASI). The problem with this perennial misguided dream is that there is no such thing—even for God—as a “view from nowhere,” in Thomas Nagel’s famous phrase. Teppo Fellin makes the argument that it is in fact a particular perspective that actually constitutes, rather than delimits, knowledge. All “organisms operate in their own ‘Umwelt’ and surrounding. … Perception and vision are species-specific, directed, and expressive,” not “singular, linear, representative, and objective.” There is no “unique, all-seeing vantage point for perception. … Perception necessarily originates from a perspective, or point of view.” All perception, in other words, is “[directed] perception.” And as Mark Johnson convincingly illustrates, “any adequate account of meaning and rationality must give a central place to embodied and imaginative structures of understanding by which we grasp our world.”

Those “imaginative structures” are primarily the metaphors by which we constitute as well as communicate meaning—metaphors that turn out to “make use of patterns that obtain in our physical experience of the world.” The Objectivist orientation according to which there is a correct “‘God’s-Eye-View’ of what the world is really like” is no longer tenable. Innumerable ways in which we unself-consciously organize experience derive from bodily immersion in a physical universe. We think of quantity in terms of verticality (more is always up); even things that are not spatial are “in” or “out” (I let my breath out, but I also leave details out). Force, containment, linearity, balance and a thousand other schemata derive from our bodily experience and shape how we make meaning. “The body,” it turns out, “is in the mind.” Or as Ian McGilchrist summarizes, “All meaning arises from personal experience in the body…. The meaning of language [in particular] begins and ends in the body – where it ‘cashes out’ in experience.”

But doesn’t language bypass the body? Isn’t language precisely the mechanism by which bodily situatedness is overcome, transcended? That is a widespread view, represented by the physicist David Deutsch who writes that “we only ever experience symbols.” My view, to paraphrase the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, is that this statement is so absurd that it doesn’t even rise to the level of being wrong. To think such a thing is to miss the import of the Incarnation—and of our incarnation. There merest experience of the color red gives the lie to the phantasy that we have our being in a world of symbols only. One can exhaust the million words in the English language and never come within a light year of describing what it is to experience the red of a glowing coal. It is not the insufficiency of vocabulary that falls short, or the limitations of grammar that fail. The problem is in mistaking of what language does.

Physicists and biologists and neuroscientists and a good number of philosophers are converging on the recognition that reality—at its most fundamental level—is encounter; it is experiential, relational. “Sensible things” constitute “the only reality” we can actually know, wrote William James. “Process must be… fundamental” write John Dupré and Daniel Nicholson. Consciousness is irreducible and was present before matter, writes Colin McGinn; it is not emergent insists Edwin Schrödinger. Niels Bohr said physics properly aspires to track relations, not a supposed real essence; And so forth. What these statements have in common is the primacy of experienced reality over supposedly abstract unembodied truths that can be apprehended independently of the way our minds half-perceive and half create the world in a process of interaction. It is getting harder and harder to sustain the mechanistic, objectivist, materialist view of human identity or the cosmos. “Direct experience is … the only knowledge we ever fully have,” writes Bryan Magee.

So we have two general possibilities at hand. We are always at one remove from reality, and signs and texts and data transfers are the nearest we can get to it. In this view, language is a mere “instrument to encode information.” Or we can see in language a higher task of “bring[ing] about revelation-and-connection” in Charles Taylor’s optimistic vision. In this view, language has the power to fulfill our primal yearning for “Cosmic connection.” George Steiner’s magnificent book, Real Presences, is a prolonged defense of that latter idea ((as well as a rebuttal to the ethical nihilism of poststructuralism generally). Language, he writes,—that is, human language, like human intelligence generally—presupposes a real presence behind it: the birthing of relation, comic connection, a kind of priesthood of interconnection.

We can reduce language to verbal signs, or to data and simulacrums of experience: but language in its most fundamental dimension is the portal to encounter, not an endless play of signs. This premise is what Steiner calls “a wager on the meaning of meaning, on the potential of insight and response when one human voice addresses another, …which is to say … we encounter the other in its condition of freedom, [in] a wager on transcendence. This wager …predicates the presence of a realness, of a ‘substantiation’ (the theological reach of this word is obvious) within language and form.” That’s a complicated claim: let me try to illustrate.

We see the best example of what Steiner is saying in the case of scripture. And at this point I am going to rely upon a source often quoted by Elder Neal Maxwell: the Anglican theologian Austin Farrer. Some Christians, he notes, see scripture as simply the historical reactions—inspired or otherwise--of certain individuals to the fact of Christ. Others take the words of scripture themselves as constituting the truth behind the deeds and teachings. However, both of these positions would fail the test of how scripture grounds a living faith. Scripture is more than a set of propositions, or the record of past reactions to a set of propositions. Scripture must be the occasion for our own encounter with a living Christ. That is the principal function and majesty of scripture. Any reduction to historical artifact or a data stream makes of scripture just one more historical chronicle. And any substitution of the text for Christ himself is idolatry. Scripture—and perhaps this is what Joseph was reaching toward in the book of Moses with relating a pure language to priesthood—scripture is not a series of symbols we subject to textual decoding. Scripture is, ideally, the erasure of distance, a revelatory holy of holies in which we encounter the presence of God like a burning bush. Or as the theologian George Tyrell wrote, “Revelation is not a statement but a showing.” (I am reminded by his language of the fact that what I consider the greatest religious text outside the canonical works is the visionary account of the medieval nun Julian of Norwich, who called her work “the showings of Jesus Christ.)

Steiners point, I believe, is that scripture is just a limit case of language. “Any coherent account of the capacity of human speech to communicate meaning and feeling is, in the final analysis,” a wager on transcendence.

Literature and art more generally come closest to the limit case of scripture. This is because as with scripture, there is no “aboutness” in art. You can’t say what Beethoven’s fifth symphony is “about,” and you can say what a peom is about only in the most trivial sense. This is one of the monstrous fallacies of our day, a truth that is disappearing in the rush toward AI, and the operations by which intelligence and language alike are being trivialized and redefined as mechanisms of information rather than mediums of love and presence. Let me illustrate with a personal example if I may.

When I was sixteen, the first religious experience of which I have memory was reading a classic which this generation knows only as a musical. You remember the setting? A convict, now an escaped criminal, has stolen silver from a bishop’s palace. He doesn’t make it far before he is apprehended. He is dragged to the scene of the crime, so that the bishop can confirm his ownership of the stolen goods. I quote from the text:

“The door opened…. Three men were holding a fourth man by the collar. The three men were gendarmes. The other was Jean Valjean.” The bishop advanced to the group “as quickly as his great age permitted. ‘Ah! Here you are! He exclaimed, looking at Jean Valjean. ‘I am glad to see you. [But] how is this? I gave you the candlesticks too which are of silver like the rest, and for which you can certainly get two hundred francs. Why did you not carry them away with the forks and spoons [I gave you]?’ Jean Valjean opened his eyes wide, and stared at the venerable bishop with an expression which no human tongue can render any account of.

…The gendarme retired…The bishop drew near to the convict and said, “Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belove to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I buy from you, …and give it to God.”

Jean Valjean was no more bewildered in that moment that I. I was … ambushed. That is my word for the suddenness with which I experienced the same moment of grace, as did Jean Valjean.

No master plots or Wikipedia entry or second-hand experience of my encounter would have been more than a desiccated skin of the original, living entity that we call Les Miserable. (I had a comparable experience at the same age, reading Paradise Lost: but don’t wait for the musical!) As McGilchrist summarizes, “The work of art exists precisely to get beyond representation, to presence.” If you paraphrase a poem, you can capture everything—except the poem.

Language, like scripture, does not exist primarily to convey information. It can do so only as a pale derivative of its principal function of registering the particularity of experience and bringing disparate consciousnesses into relation. It is a substitute—but never an adequate substitute—for experience or relationship. Consider for a moment the telling fact that, from an evolutionary point of view, poetry, music, art in general, have no purpose. Leda Cosmides and John Tooby direct the center for evolutionary psychology at UC Santa Barbara. They find themselves stumped in making sense of the humanities.

“Almost all the phenomena that are central to the humanities are puzzling anomalies from an evolutionary perspective…. In order to navigate the world successfully, one needs accurate information. Survival depends on it.” And yet, they note, the arts are foundational to all culture. Why? Maybe Star Trek’s character “Seven-of-Nine” got it right. Survival is not enough. Survival, proficiency, competence—these are far from enough. The highest purposes of language lie elsewhere.

Marilynne Robinson reminds us that “Humanists [and the term is not limited to English majors] are the curators, in their own persons, of …, language, …, and thought. The argument everywhere now is that the purpose of should be the training of workers for the future economy. So the variety of learning offered should be curtailed and the richness of any student’s education should be depleted, to produce globally a Benthamite uniformity of aspiration and competence?”

What we want to want, what desires and ends we cultivate, depend upon our hierarchies of values. And those values are reflected in what McGilchrist calls our hierarchies of attention. What do we attend to primarily?

Perhaps the problem we should be debating is not so much when or whether AI will emulate human intelligence—but to what extent our ideal of intelligence—and certainly our educational ideals—are already emulating AI. Human intelligence depends upon human ways of constructing “hierarchies of attention.

The task of the humanities is to challenge and refine and inspire the best, the most morally and aesthetically and spiritually edifying hierarchies of attention.

That means we show preference for some kinds of experience over other kinds of experience, and some kinds of knowing over other kinds of knowing.

Most languages convey, in this regard, what English does not. Saber vs. conocer, or Wissen vs. kennen. The first is a merely propositional knowledge. Data-driven knowledge. The second is experiential knowledge; The knowledge of personal encounter and presence. This difference seems implicit in Christ’s words that many who claim to know Christ, never knew Christ. McGilchrist captures this difference powerfully in his description of left brain thinking as analytic, syntax oriented, linear and logical, in sum the left brain MAPS reality, RE-Presents reality at one remove. And right brain thinking is organic, wholistic, gestalt-driven, value-informed, meaning driven, and as such it puts us in communion WITH reality; in McGilchrist’s language, it PRESENCES reality. Our society is at present obsessed with the first. Educational systems universally have reoriented around left-brain ways of engaging the world. The Humanities presented a counterbalancing influence which is fast fading.

“this overconfidence in the left hemisphere point of view on the world has twice before heralded the demise of a civilization, and I believe it is doing so for the third time as you read these words.” He words sound overly dramatic, but I share his concern

Yuval Harari ends his ambitious history of the world, Sapiens, with this warning:

the real question facing us is … ‘What do we want to want?’… Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?

Can I put this in entirely different language? I have tried to make a foundational argument for the following principle: To paraphrase Michael Gazzaniga, we need to make the humanities the baking soda, not the frosting, of our educational systems. Obviously, education in or outside church institutions needs to be by accomplished through reason and faith, study occurring against a background of discipleship, scripture study, prayer and service. Equally obviously, one can hope, educational institutions will fulfill their educational purposes as institutions of learning—which means they cannot abdicate their responsibility to be stewards over the vital humanistic component of education. Neither can educators responsibly concede an ever-increasing dominion to AI approaches, believing that prayer and scriptures will compensate for the deficit.

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Terryl Givens is Senior Research Fellow at the Maxwell Institute and author and coauthor of many books, including Wrestling the Angel, The God Who Weeps, and All Things New. To receive each new Terryl Givens Wayfare column by email, first subscribe and then click here and select “Wrestling with Angels.”

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Artificial Intelligence is no longer a distant, futuristic idea—it’s already shaping the way we learn, work, and even practice our faith. And just this past week, AI made big headlines again in the tech world with the release of vastly improved models and increasing belief among technology leaders that artificial general intelligence (AGI) is just around the corner. Whether or not that’s the case, the exponential progress of AI is undeniable, and it’s sparking some of the biggest questions of our time. If God can speak through the written word, could God speak through AI? How do we discern when it’s a tool for growth versus a shortcut that stunts it? And if AI frees us from certain types of work, could it deepen our relationships and spirituality—or will it leave us searching for new sources of meaning? It’s worth noting that many of the people most deeply concerned about AI’s effects on humanity and society are those who were involved in creating it.

In this episode, we’ll talk about some of those concerns, but we’ll mostly explore ways we can use it constructively.

Carl brings a sharp and thought-provoking perspective to these questions. He challenges us to approach AI with both curiosity and caution—seeing how it can deepen connection or drive isolation, spark creativity or dull our own discernment. Rather than dismissing it as just a tool or blindly embracing it, Carl pushes us to wrestle with its real impact on our thinking, relationships, and spiritual growth.

This is a conversation full of nuance, curiosity, and a lot of open-ended questions, and we hope it sparks new reflections for you. We’ll have links in the show notes to tools we mention throughout the episode, so be sure to check those out. And with that, here’s our conversation with Carl Youngblood.

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Ross has spent his career bridging worlds—explaining faith and conservatism to a largely secular audience while also translating secular ideas back to religious readers. In this conversation, he makes a compelling case for why belief isn’t just a leap into the unknown, but a rational and maybe even necessary response to the world as we actually experience it.

Zach and Ross also explore some of the major barriers that keep modern, intellectually serious people from embracing faith—things like the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions, which many see as having displaced humanity from the center of the universe. But Ross challenges these assumptions, showing how science, rather than disproving faith, could actually deepen the mystery of our existence in a way that makes belief more compelling than ever. And he points out something undeniable–– that even as religious affiliation in the West declines, people across all backgrounds continue to report profound, life-altering encounters with the divine. Ross suggests that these experiences, far from being irrational, may be one of the strongest indicators that something real is at work in the universe.

This conversation was a fascinating mix of theology, philosophy, and cultural analysis, and we think Ross offers an important and thought-provoking perspective—one that invites both skeptics and believers to take faith seriously.

And with that, let’s jump into our conversation with Ross Douthat.

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“Though genetics and circumstances influence our baseline, we have significant agency over our happiness. It’s a skill we can practice and improve. He says that happiness isn’t about avoiding suffering and he shares how negative emotions can actually serve as signals that help us grow.”

- Zachary Davis

This week, we’re honored to welcome Arthur Brooks to the podcast. Arthur is a renowned social scientist, Harvard professor, and bestselling author, and we’re excited to talk with him about his latest book, Build the Life You Want, the Art and Science of Getting Happier which he co-authored with Oprah Winfrey.

In our conversation, Arthur offers some profound insights on happiness, emphasizing that though genetics and circumstances influence our baseline, we have significant agency over our happiness. It’s a skill we can practice and improve. He says that happiness isn’t about avoiding suffering and he shares how negative emotions can actually serve as signals that help us grow.

This episode is full of advice for creating a life of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. and lots of practical tips for exactly what to do when you are feeling overwhelmed by negative feelings. We’re so grateful to Arthur for joining us. We think you’ll find his insights on happiness and purpose inspiring and practical. So with that, let’s jump into our conversation with Arthur Brooks.

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Where we sit now in 2024, we can see that the New Atheist movement fell apart due to internal disagreement and concern about its own influence on the world. According to our guest Justin Brierley, public opinions towards religion are complex and mixed, not nearly as negative as the New Atheist movement would have anticipated. In fact, there are many signs that a Christian renewal is underway. From notable conversions of high-profile individuals to the rise of secular thinkers defending Christianity to the increasing skepticism that science and atheist worldviews can answer our most important questions, Justin observes that the Christian story is far from dead.

Justin Brierley is a writer, speaker, and podcaster committed to building dialogue between Christians and non-Christians. His first book was titled Unbelievable? Why, after ten years of talking with atheists, I’m still a Christian and in September 2023 he published his second book, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God.

Zach interviews Justin in this episode, and the conversation ends with several fascinating questions: will there be a renewal of Christianity and belief in God? If so, are the churches prepared for it? How can the Christian world transcend tribalism and culture wars to welcome a new batch of seekers?

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Dr. Lisa Miller is a Professor in the Clinical Psychology Program at Columbia University, where she founded the Spirituality Mind Body Institute, the first Ivy League graduate program in spirituality and psychology. She recently published “The Awakened Brain: The New Science of Spirituality and Our Quest for an Inspired Life” which “takes the lens of science and focuses it on the impact of spirituality in human life.” Her research has been published in top-tier psychiatric journals, and she is the Editor of the “Oxford Handbook of Psychology and Spirituality,” as well as the Founder of the American Psychological Association’s journal, Spirituality in Clinical Practice. After finishing her undergraduate work at Yale, she received her doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania.

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To that end, he’s written a new book called Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life.

The book was not only moving, fascinating and thoroughly researched, it also raised lots of really important questions for us. Among the most important was what implications his research on awe has for religious people. It seems like what Latter-day Saints call “feeling the Spirit” has a strong connection to what Dacher refers to as awe, and we were able to ask Dacher about that. While he’s not a traditionally religious person himself, his exploration of awe has led him to believe that there is a realm of understanding and human experience that is beyond scientific explanation.

On a really practical level, Dacher’s book, and the conversation with him, helped us understand how we can integrate awe into our everyday lives, and illustrated the astounding benefits that an “awe” practice can have for each of us.

Dacher received his PhD from Stanford University in 1989 before joining Berkeley’s psychology department in 1996, where he’s been ever since. Over 500,000 people have enrolled in Dacher’s EdX course, The Science of Happiness, and he’s the host of the podcast also called The Science of Happiness.

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Terryl also shares some other really meaningful moments from his life and career. In one of our favorite moments, he says “I have come to know the love of God as it is manifest in a community of people working to keep one another from drowning.”

We imagine that almost all of you know Terryl by now, but as a reminder, he’s a Neal A. Maxwell Senior Research Fellow at BYU’s Maxwell Institute. He formerly held the Jabez A. Bostwick Chair of English and was Professor of Literature and Religion at the University of Richmond. He is the author of many books about Latter-day Saint history and culture, including, along with his wife Fiona, All Things New, which was published by Faith Matters in 2020.

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For today’s conversation, Zach Davis sat down with one of those scholars, Charles Stang, the Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School. Zach went to grad school at HDS and Charlie was one of his very favorite professors.

In the conversation, Charlie discusses his life as a scholar of religion, the path his own spiritual life has taken and shares details about the exciting new research initiative he is leading at Harvard called Transcendence and Transformation.

Charles M. Stang is Professor of Early Christian Thought at Harvard Divinity School and the Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions. His research and teaching focus on the history and theology of Christianity, in particular asceticism, monasticism, and mysticism in Eastern Christianity. His most recent book, Our Divine Double, was published in 2016 by Harvard University Press.

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In this episode, Zach Davis spoke with Makoto Fujimura, an artist and writer who has reflected deeply on the meaning of kintsugi and more broadly about the relationship of art and faith. In their conversation, they explore how beauty can help us draw near to God, the role of creativity in bridging our differences, and how we can live with hope even in times of despair.

Makoto Fujimura is a leading contemporary artist whose art has been described by David Brooks of New York Times as “a small rebellion against the quickening of time”. Fujimura is also an arts advocate, writer, and speaker and was recently awarded the Kuyper prize for his religious engagement in matters of social, political, and cultural significance. He is the author of several books, including Art+Faith: A Theology of Making.

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We’ll let Adam explain the major theses of the book, but we’ll just say that in many ways it entirely upends traditional understandings of concepts like justice, suffering, mercy, punishment, and, of course — grace. For anyone that has ever felt that they simply aren’t good enough, Adam mines Latter-day Saint scripture and teachings to show that it was never our job to “save ourselves.” As he puts it, “grace-filled partnership with Christ” was the plan all along.

Adam even shares some recent scholarship that shows that one of our faith’s foundational scriptures about grace — “it is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do” — has been misread and misunderstood so widely, and for so long, that its original meaning has been almost reversed.

Adam Miller earned a BA in Comparative Literature from Brigham Young University and an MA and PhD in Philosophy from Villanova University. This book, Original Grace, was published by BYU’s Maxwell Institute and Deseret Book. Adam is the author of several others, including some of our favorites like Letters to a Young Mormon and An Early Resurrection.

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One scientist on the cutting edge of this research is Michael Ferguson, a BYU grad who is now researching and teaching at Harvard.

For Michael, the most exciting result of all this new knowledge of the brain is how it might transform our spiritual lives and help us connect more fully to the divine. He is a pioneer in a field called neurospirituality and his research has been in part inspired by Latter-day Saint theology, in particular the idea that spirit and matter are on a continuum, not radically different substances. In this episode, Michael was interviewed by Zach Davis and Terryl Givens about these fascinating subjects, and the most important insights he’s gained from his research.

Michael is an Instructor in Neurology at Harvard Medical School, a Lecturer at Harvard Divinity School, and a neuroscientist at the Center for Brain Circuit Therapeutics at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. He earned his Doctorate in Bioengineering at the University of Utah, after which he completed post-doctoral fellowships at Cornell University and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

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Jared shares with us a really important concept he calls “proving contraries,” —something we’ve talked a little bit about on the podcast before using the term “polarities.” He spoke with us about how recognizing these polarities can help us understand our own strengths and weaknesses, how attributes that are positive, taken too far, almost always become problematic, and how wrestling with contraries is essential in a life full of growth and meaning.

Jared Halverson is an associate professor of Ancient Scripture at Brigham Young University, and has taught religion courses at the high school and college level since 1998. He studied history and religious education at BYU and earned a PhD in American religious history at Vanderbilt University, focusing on secularization, faith loss, and anti-religious rhetoric. He is frequently involved with interfaith dialogue, has been a featured speaker in both devotional and academic settings across the country. He also hosts a popular YouTube channel and podcast called “Unshaken.”

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To get some perspective on these challenges, and on how broader Christianity has faced these same challenges, we decided to bring writer, teacher and public theologian Brian McLaren into the conversation by inviting him on our podcast. Brian is well-known within evangelical Christianity. Once a prominent pastor, in 2015 he was named by Time Magazine as one of evangelicalism’s most influential figures. He became a leader in the “emerging church movement.” These days, in addition to his speaking and writing, he works with Father Richard Rohr at the Center of Action and Contemplation.

For McLaren, as for many Christians, his relationship with the Bible itself has been an integral part of his faith journey. We were curious to hear how that relationship has changed over time, how he reads the Bible differently than when he was younger, how he sees people sometimes abuse the Bible (especially the Hebrew Bible), and where he continues to find beauty and inspiration in its pages. He explains how much of the Christian world arrived at the idea of Biblical inerrancy, and why we need not just re-translation but continuous re-interpretation of the text.

We found his thoughts on the creation narrative of Genesis particularly fascinating. He even shared his thoughts on a famous story from the Book of Mormon. We think you’ll enjoy this conversation with a wise and good soul, our friend Brian McLaren.

Among Brian’s outstanding books are Faith After Doubt: Why your beliefs stopped working and what to do about it and The Galapagos Islands: A Spiritual Journey. You can check out all his work at brianmclaren.net.

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This week, Faith Matters begins a series of conversations with prominent scholars from outside our faith. What are we learning about the nature of spiritual experience and the value of a religious life? In coming weeks, we’ll be traveling to some of America’s top universities—starting with Harvard, Yale and Princeton—to sit down with thinkers deeply engaged in this fascinating topic.

We’ll start this week with Dr. Lisa Miller, a Professor in the Clinical Psychology Program at Columbia University, where she founded the Spirituality Mind Body Institute, the first Ivy League graduate program in spirituality and psychology. Dr. Miller will share insights from her recently published book The Awakened Brain: The New Science of Spirituality and Our Quest for an Inspired Life. In her words, Lisa “takes the lens of science and focuses it on the impact of spirituality in human life,” with some surprising results. She talks about the truly remarkable real-world benefits of a personal spirituality that leads to a lived relationship with the divine, and calls for a spiritual renaissance to help solve some of our society’s most troubling issues.

Dr. Miller’s research has been published in top-tier psychiatric journals, and she is the Editor of the Oxford Handbook of Psychology and Spirituality and the Founder of the American Psychological Association’s journal, Spirituality in Clinical Practice. After finishing her undergraduate work at Yale, she received her doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania.

This conversation also introduces a new member of the Faith Matters team, Zachary Davis. We’re extremely excited to be joining forces with Zach, a graduate of Harvard Divinity School, where his work focused on intellectual history and philosophy of religion. Previously, Zach has been a producer at HarvardX where he built open online courses in the humanities. He’s also a highly experienced podcaster and host of shows like Ministry of Ideas and Writ Large.

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Terryl’s new book, Agency, explores some of the most profound and challenging questions about what it truly means to have agency. For centuries, theologians and philosophers have debated whether free will truly exists or if what we call agency is merely an illusion— our choices predetermined by the unfolding of the universe, or so shaped by our biology and past that we don’t have real choice. Terryl’s work in this book finds that Mormonism has some compelling and unique insights on that central question, and explores some others: what role does community and authority play in expanding—or limiting—our agency? And how do we navigate the tension between obedience and authentic personal choice?

In this conversation, we explore the dangers of turning scripture or prophets into idols, how our perception of God can sometimes become so skewed that it’s actually a “false God,” and why Terryl doesn’t believe that we’ll ever be judged based on our beliefs alone. We also get into some fascinating intersections between agency, neuropsychology, philosophy, and even Darwinian evolution.

This discussion left us with so much to think about, and we hope it does the same for you. So with that, let’s dive in!

The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat has spent his career bridging worlds—explaining faith and conservatism to a largely secular audience while also translating secular ideas back to religious readers. In this conversation with Zachary Davis, Douthat discusses ideas from his new book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, which makes a compelling case for why belief isn’t a blind leap into the unknown, but a rational and maybe even necessary response to the world as we actually experience it.

What kind of spiritual moment are we in?

I think we’ve passed through a period of crisis and decline for a lot of institutional forms of Christianity in the US and the larger West, and we’ve passed through a kind of high tide for atheism and outright skepticism and secularism that peaked with the new atheists, figures like Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens. There was a kind of maximal point of what you might call secular postreligious confidence, and I’d say it was pre-Trump, so about ten years ago.

And then the last decade has been quite hard on concepts of secular progress and optimism about what a world without religion looks like. There was a powerful narrative during my twenties that held that the big problem in the world was the persistence of religious fundamentalism, whether it was Islamist or Evangelical Christian or anything else, and that once you swept away creationism and biblical literalism and fundamentalism the world would enter a new era of science and progress and reason and enlightenment.

I think people have slowly but surely given up on that vision and have recognized that whatever the problems in the world, they are not essentially just about people being too religious. That politics after Christianity’s influence looks just as polarized, if not more so. The forces that have emerged as religion has declined—wokeness on the left, different forms of populism on the right—do not seem marked by great devotion to reason and tolerance.

And then there’s a lot of deep existential uncertainty and unhappiness pervading the secular world right now, to a greater degree than ten or fifteen years ago, some connected I think to technological changes to screens and social media and the retreat from reality into virtual life, some connected to Covid and its aftermath. But some of it is connected to people losing a kind of metaphysical horizon, and maybe wanting to have that back—feeling nostalgic for religion, feeling intrigued by religion but also feeling a stopping short.

I think a lot of people who have been reared without religion or who let their religion slip away over the last ten or fifteen years might like it back, but feel that as a serious, enlightened, educated, modern person they can’t really go all the way to embracing a traditional form of faith.

And so they’re in this zone of either personal uncertainty, hovering on the threshold of belief, experimenting with churchgoing, but feeling like it contravenes their reason, or they’re doing a kind of spiritual experimentation, a kind of dabbling that I think is very commonplace right now, people playing around with astrology or magic or psychedelics, forms of spirituality, or of quasi-Christian practices that don’t add up to any kind of formal practice or belief.

And so my new book is written to try and help people who are in that zone and encourage them to take religion seriously as something not in fact contrary to reason, modern science, but rather as a way of being that I think is basically obligatory for people if you take seriously what the universe presents to us, including through the findings of modern science.

There are two scientific revolutions that for many people remain powerful obstacles to belief. The Copernican revolution, which displaced us at the center of the known universe, and the Darwinian revolution, which displaced us atop some special hierarchy of being. But you argue there is a way to incorporate the truths of these stories as a believer.

Prior to the sixteenth century, there was a widely shared perspective on where Earth sat in the universe, the different hierarchies that planets represented, and so on. And this matched up with a biblical-cosmology vision of heaven and hell. And the Copernican perspective made the universe appear bigger and wilder and stranger than the cosmos as perceived in 1375, so it’s not surprising that that would have some unsettling effect on the worldviews of people in that time. And then Darwinism goes a bit further, raising some very pointed questions for Christians about both the historicity of the early books of Genesis and about the doctrine of the fall, how the story of Adam and Eve relates to the role that, in a Darwinian narrative, death and suffering seem to have already played in the emergence of complex life on earth. So if Christians say that sin and death entered the world with Adam and Eve, well, what does that mean if Adam and Eve are themselves the result of a long process of “red in tooth and claw” competition on earth?

With all of that said, neither Copernicus nor Darwin remove in any way the basic fundamental evidence for the universe as an ordered, fashioned, and complex system whose order and symmetry and complexity seem to strongly bespeak some kind of conscious intelligence as the point of origin. This is true of the Copernican Revolution, which reveals a bigger and wilder and stranger universe, but one that is governed in all its size and scale and splendor by deep and beautiful mathematical regularities that are totally amenable to scientific investigation and exploration by rational minds on a much greater scale than anything that was possible in the Middle Ages.

And Darwinism essentially asserts a kind of algorithmic origin for human life, a system running over a long period of time generating a diversity of complex forms of life, itself the structure of an ordered and regular and consistent cosmos.

And so the idea that Darwinism supposedly displaced was that a life form is a bit like a watch that you discover in a forest—a complex machine. And so you assume, well, if you found this complex machine somewhere, there must be a watchmaker.

And Darwinian atheists say, Well, no—we have explained where the watch comes from. It’s through this complex, million-year process of natural selection. You don’t need a watchmaker, you just need this process. But in fact, what you have now described is the equivalent of a watch factory. You still need a watchmaker, the ordered system in which that process gets started and plays itself out. And Darwinism doesn’t do away at all with the question of where that system came from, why it is so beautiful and orderly and mathematically precise and complex.

And further, that underlying order makes it appear not just remarkable, but frankly miraculous that it exists in the form that gives rise to you and me and plants and animals and everything else. What appears to be a kind of cosmic “fine tuning.” The extent to which there are many, many millions or billions of possible universes with all manner of potential laws and regularities and systems of order. And the odds of a universe like ours capable of generating complex life, to say nothing of conscious life, those odds are incredibly low. And by low, I don’t mean 1 in 10, I mean 1 in 10 to some absurdly high power of probabilities. In the words of the physicist Paul Davies, our universe looks like a cosmic jackpot. Basically, we have more reason than anyone did in the Middle Ages or the ancient world to think that the initial conditions of the universe were set with life-forms like us in mind.

So even if Darwinism to some degree has taken away one sort of obvious argument for divine intervention and special creation, the larger progress of science has given us more evidence of some kind of intentionality and special creation than we ever had before.

Earth is a very small place in a very big universe. But it’s the only place we know of where the thing that the universe seems to have been fine-tuned to do has actually happened.

You point out that given what we know of quantum mechanics—the way that observer and then the reality that emerges from that observation are so strangely interlinked—you could imagine that the universe as a whole functions that way with God’s mind as the universal observer.

One school of thought about the weirdness of quantum mechanics postulates the relationship between observer and reality, where the observer’s consciousness and knowledge is what collapses potentiality into reality itself.

That raises the question of what was going on with reality before there were conscious observers, and the religious answer is that in fact, mind precedes matter, and there’s been a conscious observer and creator all along. It seems, I think, to follow in a fairly reasonable way from that particular strange feature of reality as science analyzes it today.

How do you make sense of religious diversity? Why does the existence of many religious expressions not mean that they are false because they seem to be in many ways mutually exclusive?

And the atheists just go one god further, right? There are a couple different ways of looking at this. Obviously when you get to a certain level of theological granularity, there’s a really large array of religious choices.

If you go a step further, though, I think there are some pretty obvious patterns in religious history and development, a general movement that you see in human societies from early forms of religion that are very focused on an immediately enchanted cosmos, with any kind of god or creator gods sort of distant and inscrutable forces, to what I would consider forms of religion that are more focused on the higher God, the higher reality, and whatever he or she or it demands.

And that the more immediate expressions of spiritual encounter to that higher reality tend to envision not identical, but convergent, moral codes. Buddhism and Christianity are quite different in many ways, but the Noble Eightfold Path and Jesus’s ethics in the New Testament are not worlds apart. You don’t read them and conclude that these are completely different visions.

And there’s also convergence in perspectives on the nature of the cosmos. Hinduism and Buddhism both believe that you can die and go to heaven or die and go to hell. They also believe in reincarnation. They don’t necessarily believe in permanence in those experiences, but there is overlap in those perspectives between Eastern religion and Western religion.

And then obviously once you get into Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and so on, you get more convergence and more overlap. I actually think that the would-be religious person is facing not 1,472,000 different options, but a smaller group of evolved religious traditions that have important distinctions, like monotheism versus polytheism or reincarnation versus resurrection.

These are real choices, but I don’t think the diversity you are presented with is so wild and complex as to make some kind of orientation impossible. I think there are four, five, six big religious choices a reasonable person can make. So one can analyze where those religions differ, make some very provisional judgments and try and let Providence hopefully work on their decisions.

Also, the different religious pictures are not mutually exclusive in an impossible and fundamental way. A devout Muslim does not believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God. But a devout Muslim believes in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and believes that Jesus was one of his greatest prophets. So if you’re doing a Venn diagram of beliefs, there is some crucial overlap in terms of perspectives on reality.

To go a bit further, a devout Hindu doesn’t have to believe that the god of the Old Testament is a myth or a confabulation. A devout Hindu might believe that this is one expression of an ultimate divinity, just as the gods of the Indian subcontinent are expressions, and that the Jews may have overrated how important their God is, but it doesn’t mean those experiences are unreal. Similarly, a Christian looking at pre-Christian religion doesn’t have to believe that it’s all just made up. Christians can believe—and early Christians certainly did believe—that non-Christian forms of polytheism anticipate Christianity in certain ways, and that there are things implanted in those religions that look ahead to Christian belief.

I don’t think that Christianity excludes some weird religious possibilities that we don’t fully understand. You can say, I’m a Christian. I believe in this revelation. I believe in these specific teachings—and also say, you know, I honestly don’t know what’s going on with this category of spiritual encounter. And that’s OK because maybe there’s something that hasn’t been revealed to us.

I like this approach to religious diversity—you have this phrase, “it’s true-ish.” That you don’t have to accept every single aspect of another religion, but you can assume that it is pointing its followers towards a greater fullness. Latter-day Saints believe that God does indeed speak to all of his children, in language that they understand and in forms that they need, even while we embrace Jesus as the fullness of the revelation. I think it’s very generous to think of other religions not as false, but as localized expressions of God’s love for all of his creatures.

It’s a tricky point because, as someone who is a convinced Roman Catholic, I do want to insist on the importance of the differences between religions, and I agree with everything that you just said. I also think there’s a tendency to slide from that perspective towards a kind of soft assumption that all religions are basically the same and that God sort of created them all for different reasons, and the differences will just appear insignificant in the light of eternity. And I don’t think that can be right. I think it has to be the case that the arguments matter.

To take an example, either most souls are reincarnated or they aren’t. That’s a big question that has eternal consequences, and somebody’s getting it right and somebody isn’t. And, similarly, for Christians, either Jesus of Nazareth is who he says he is, allowing for some debate about what exactly that means, or he isn’t, and a lot turns on that question.

So in making this argument, I don’t want to suggest that the arguments between religions don’t matter. But, if you just look at the variety of religious experiences around the world, there are these fundamental similarities. There are visions of Jesus in the US that look a lot like visions of Krishna in India.

Some people argue that there are just incredible levels of spiritual deception out there, that demons are just out there tricking everybody. But I don’t buy that argument. The universe is not a trick. The evidence that we should follow is there for those with eyes to see, and I think you do have to take something like the LDS view you just expressed, that, even if Jesus is the son of God, God is still speaking to people in India sometimes in the terms that their religion gives them to understand the world.

And that if you are Chinese or Japanese and your religious practice is more focused on ancestors, you are going to see an ancestor when there’s a divine message for you, whereas a Catholic might see a saint or an angel. That is part of whatever the divine economy is and not just some sort of deception.

Why are you betting on Jesus?

Sometimes you have to just cast down your religious bucket where you are—if you read the Quran and have a powerful conviction that God is speaking here in a way that God isn’t speaking to you when you read the New Testament, then that’s a good sign that you should start there.

And my view, conditioned by my own religious upbringing, no doubt, is that the New Testament, the Gospels especially, stand out among all religious narratives for a combination of unusual historical credibility and unusual personal narrative plausibility. They do really feel like memoirs written by eyewitnesses, and I think there’s a very good historical argument that they are joined to the extremity of the miraculous claim. What’s striking about Jesus is that he does seem quite different from the merely prophetic figures who lie at the point of origin of a lot of different religious traditions.

And then just the absolute strangeness of the crucifixion and passion and resurrection among the religious narratives of the world. Out of all the religious stories available in the world, this seems like the most likely place where there’s a full divine break-in, if you will, a kind of controlling revelation, a controlling message, and a story, text, and person through which you then would read the rest of religious data.

What’s your prophecy for the next few years of Christian life in America?

I think we should expect weirdness. And I think weirdness definitely means there are more possibilities for serious religious and Christian revival than would have been the case ten or fifteen years ago. But you have to see them as possibilities, and the weirdness could go in a lot of different directions.

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Ross Douthat is a columnist at the New York Times. His most recent book is Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.

Art by Lisa DeLong.

Charles Margrave Taylor is professor emeritus at McGill University and the author of many notable works. Zachary Davis invites Taylor to reflect on the development of Taylor’s own faith and the impact faith can have on all of us as we act in the world.

What are your earliest memories of your spiritual and religious life?

Well, a lot of the early experience was negative. I was brought up in Quebec, in the French-speaking Catholic Church in Quebec, and at that point it was extremely clerical, extremely authoritarian. So when I was very young, I don’t remember being impressed one way or another. Although I was impressed by the rhetorical culture that came with the Dominican sermons. It’s a kind of rhetoric that I can still conjure up in my mind. It wasn’t until I was well into adolescence that I felt called upon to take some kind of stand towards religion, and it seemed to me to be very negative.

A lot of Quebecers had this experience, which eventually came out roughly in the 1960s, what we call the Quiet Revolution, where so many people left the church and there was a de-clericalization. So that could have been my story, but what happened is that a lot of the theological work that underlay what later became Vatican II was being written by French-speaking Jesuits and Dominicans, people like Henri de Lubac and Yves Congar. And because the French and Quebec communities of these orders were so closely linked, some of these texts, some not yet published, some even under ban, got into my hands. And I was really deeply moved and carried away by this completely different picture of the faith in history. It was not focused on worrying about one’s own personal salvation, whether you obeyed the rules and so on, but that Christ came to save the world. It was something that was for all of history and for all humanity. I saw a certain vision of a kind of love and self-giving that could really transform not just oneself, but the world. And it had a tremendously powerful effect on me. This was the crucial, decisive turning point in my life.

If you had a grandchild come to you and say, “Grandpa, I just think Jesus and Christianity is a myth. I’m just going to follow science.” How might you respond?

I think I’d say, “Find your own spiritual path, but ‘just science’ can’t be the source of that spiritual path.”

And if that same grandchild says, “Well, Grandpa, spirituality isn’t real. Science is real.”

I think I would try to point out that all the things that deeply move us in ethics, in music, in art—science in no way explains that, or even comes to terms with that. That there is another level, another dimension to human experience.

What relationship should Christians have with doubt?

My whole life’s been accompanied by doubts and uncertainty. I believe faith can be a sister of doubt. You have a sense of the direction you want to move in, and then moments when you don’t really move that easily in the direction you want. Faith is a challenge. You can think that it’s an intellectual challenge and try to find reasons. But by prayer and by thought—I practice a certain kind of Christian meditation—you can get beyond this, and there’s some kind of purification of the faith that happens. That you’re reaching out beyond these doubts to a deeper, richer, fuller connection. Faith means that you sense that there’s something—and here the vocabulary fails in a certain sense—I was going to say something out there, or I could say something is up there, or I could say something is down there because it’s deeper. Or deeper in there. The whole field of ethics and the ends of human life are only available through metaphor.

Here’s another very powerful experience I had when I was an undergraduate at McGill. There was a remarkable teacher called Wilfred Cantwell Smith, who did a lot of work in India. He became one of the foremost people in the Christian world who studied Islam. I signed up for his course in comparative religion and it was an absolutely extraordinary experience. He didn’t have great rhetorical skill—he kind of walked up and down holding his toga gown while almost mumbling, but he evoked what it was to be a Buddhist or to be a Muslim in an extraordinarily rich way.

And I immediately liked him. There was an ecumenical spirit which only came to fruition and broad acceptance later on in my life. A desire not only to want to understand, but to exchange with other faiths. From Buddhism, for instance, the intuition of sunyata—emptiness. That a lot of the things that you’re attached to are getting in your way, and if you can kind of fall into an abyss when you detach from them, that is what opens up the gates to something bigger. And so that very Buddhist idea makes sense for me in a Christian perspective. That these kinds of doubts hold you back, and somehow, if you can get beyond them, if you fall into the pit they’re threatening, it can allow the greater power of the force and agape that I feel is somewhere there in the universe because of the life and death of Christ. So that’s the kind of relationship faith can have with doubt, and why I think it’s the good sister, not the bad sister, of faith.

The way you described this world religions course models a way we can hold on to our own faith commitments without being threatened by those that are different.

Our faith is even enriched by that difference. It’s very paradoxical. And to certain people it’s totally incomprehensible to think positively of something that is different, or in terms of propositions, contradictory. That to think positively of other faiths must mean you are in the process of moving out of your own faith. But it doesn’t have to work that way. It’s a great mystery. It’s something that I don’t claim fully to understand.

Do you think it has something to do with an intuition that though there are very divergent expressions of the divine or the sacred they point to some common source?

Yes, yes. Point to is maybe too strong, but obviously they must have some kind of common source. And then when you factor in other things, such as the ethical growth in human history, starting off with what Karl Jaspers identified as the Axial Age, these changes in Greece, Israel, the Ganges Plain and China that occurred. They’re very different in many ways, but there are certainly very powerful common features. Then you look at the continuing development of ethics over time so that now, for instance, we have an ethic of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, which is way beyond the demands that existed earlier.

And this has obviously been the work of people from all these different traditions. You get the great breakthrough of nonviolence against unjust regimes with Gandhi, a Hindu. And then that is picked up by Martin Luther King and John Lewis, Christians who recognized the resonance of what Gandhi was doing for Christians.

A compelling reason to me for why we are in fact spiritual (and not merely material) beings is that we do respond to the call to love. And the way that you describe this ethic of love moving across cultures and traditions, being particularized, but nonetheless finding resonance and response in each seems important for understanding the spark of the divinity which is within us.

Yes, absolutely! We often translate the Greek word agape as something to do with the love of parents for children or caring love. It’s not quite the same as erotic love nor even the love for parents. I think of this love in terms of Paul’s kenotic love, a self-emptying love, a reaching down love. That is the force and that has the power to move people very deeply. So you are right, if you think of pictures of the human psyche which stress the search for power, wealth, and control, etc.—which undoubtedly also exist!—but if you think that is the whole story, the Marxist, materialistic accounts just seem to leave out terribly important facts about human beings.

We’re in an age of anxiety, a pessimistic age, a challenging spiritual age. But at the end of your book A Secular Age, you encourage readers to be unafraid of the future, to trust that the Christian witness can be renewed for each generation. How can we live forward in faith and not be overcome by worry or nostalgia?

You have to look back on history and take off the blinkers. Some traditionalists in the Catholic Church, for example, believe that the church starts at Pentecost in Israel in the 30s AD and it’s continually saying the same thing. Which is obviously absurd when you really know the history. That’s what Vatican II really recognized. What we’re called upon to do is to continue this history in a way that connects with and makes sense of what we have become. Great saints, such as Saint Paul writing in the New Testament or Teresa of Ávila or Saint John of the Cross or Meister Eckhart still speak to us, so there is a certain kind of continuity, but each age is tremendously different, and the spiritual realities are very different.

So instead of seeking to recover the original Christian experience or message, we should think of our own lives as part of an unfolding message?

That’s right.

What does it look like as a Christian to be responsive to our own time?

Whether you like it or not, you are the time. So when something really holds you or pulls you, you may not understand why, but if there’s some genuine contact, God is speaking to our time in you. The original experience is not figuring out, but being pulled. Only later may you develop reasons you can explain to someone else.

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Charles Taylor is a professor emeritus of political science and philosophy at McGill University and the author of the acclaimed book A Secular Age.

Art by Augustus Vincent Tack.