https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=2_xGootl5ww
in your work on your podcast, you’re talking to a lot of non-orthodox Christian people. I mean, you have a sizable audience. We deal with this too. How can you reconcile, what do you do with the vocab? How do you manage the vocab? Because what I find in modern people is, is there’s a place you go with certain words, you shut everything down. Yeah. I really, what led me to your show was you did this thing that I feel like I’ve always been trying to do in my classrooms and now with the found, and I loved it. You’re both and. Is there a reconciliation process you had to go through? Did you have to decide what you’re doing in terms of that space and your faith? Well, I think it’s weird because I didn’t really decide to do this, like this whole thing, this whole YouTube thing. I was kind of thrust into it in a strange way. You know, but I feel like when it happened, in a way I had been mentally, I realized that I was often mentally playing a mental game with myself, where I would always ask, I was trying to explain something to someone who doesn’t believe in God at all. It’s like, how can I say this in a way that someone who has no idea about Christianity could even know what I’m talking about? You know, and so I think that I had kind of done these weird mental gymnastics to try to find ways to talk about it. And it seems like it has some connection. Yeah. And so there is, and it’s also, I think, the reconciliation in you is important in the sense that one of the problems we have when we’re inside the church is that at some point, we have this vocabulary, this kind of self-referential vocabulary. And sometimes it can actually make you feel like you know what you’re talking about, but you don’t. It’s just because all these words fit together in a nice way. And you can just quote this father and use phrases that you’ve heard the priest say and everything. And so you actually don’t know what you’re referring to. And so one of the things that I was always trying to do is to say, what is this talking about? Like, what is deification? What are we talking about? What is, you know, what are the passions? What are the, what is all, what is noetic? Like all these words that we use that are very technical, trying to try to find a way. And it’s like, if I can’t explain it to an atheist, then it doesn’t mean anything to me. Like if I can’t, because it’s supposed to be about our experience, right? It’s supposed to be about the real experience of the world, not some theoreticals, just theological thing. This is the teaching part of you that I just am thankful for. When you’re pressed to try to give answers to folks outside of the Orthodox community, and you’re pressed to try to understand, you know, who am I to them? How do you prepare the conversation in a way that maybe it invites people in to the symbolism? Do you consciously think about this? Or is it in the end something that really, it’s coming out of you now through your reading? And here’s one more, and who do you love to read? And who brought you into this type of thinking in terms of books or teachers or? Yeah. Well, I think that I definitely do think about it. Like I definitely think about it because I’m constantly faced with this world. And I also went through the frustration in college of not knowing what to say. And so I remember I have a very distinct memory once where I had just finished college and I was living with a friend in an apartment. And he had a friend who was like this postmodern activist, really, really, just like a cliche of this type of person. It’s like really kind of angry, but she was a great person. Like I really liked talking to her. And she, of all people, came to me one day and she said, I’m teaching this class. And there’s this young guy who grew up Catholic who now is discovering science and he wants to completely reject everything he was taught. And he’s saying how stupid Jesus and Mary is and all of this is all stupid. And he said, it’s science, it’s science, it’s science. And she asked me, she said, what should I tell this guy? Like, what should I answer? She knew I was a Christian, you know? And I had no answer. I had no answer for her. And I just looked at her blankly. And I think I pointed her to some creationist thing or whatever. And this was like when I was 19 or something. And that memory, and I remember that feeling of being there and her like sincerely saying, I don’t want this person, even despite her own desire to kind of, this kind of activist desire, she could see that this person, she didn’t want him to throw everything away. She’s like, she needs a way to reconcile himself with what he grew up with. And she was there sincerely asking me this. And all I could say was, I don’t know, I don’t know. And so it’s like, since that’s one of those moments where after that, I was like, that can never happen again. It can never happen again. Philip Sherrard did much of that bridge work for me. Rape of Man and Nature or the Eclipse of Man and Nature, they changed it in some of the editions, Sarah from Rose. But Philip Sherrard actually inspired not only the First Things stuff, but even this podcast, because that book, what he does, what he explains in terms of history and really the, this was it for me. And you just described it, is how theology is real. Yeah. It’s real. Like it actually matters what’s being said. And he shows how it’s united in history in terms of the manifest like physical form. And that, whoa, that flipped me. Yeah. But the thing is, we’re in a great moment right now. It’s actually a really exciting moment because a lot of people are perceiving that. And a lot of the questions that are being asked in the different fields, even the scientific field, the philosophical field, are all related to the problem of how intelligence or how, they use the word consciousness, whatever, how consciousness is, how consciousness participates in the way reality lays itself out. And it’s like they hit a wall with scientism. And now they realize that intelligence is actually part of how reality exists. And so, but they don’t know how to place it yet. They have all these different theories. They have different theories of emergence. They have different theories, like there’s a mathematician named Don Hoffman who’s trying to reformulate reality through mathematical formula based on levels of consciousness, let’s say. Oh, really? Okay. And so, there’s a lot of, and this, he’s getting massive funding from like scientific institutes. This isn’t like a woo-woo new wage thing. These are real university types that are talking about this and asking all these questions. And so, it’s a great moment because you realize, no, that’s what the fathers, that’s what St. Maximus is talking about. Yeah. These are the things that, that’s what Logos is referring to. It’s like referring to the manner in which intelligence participates in the way the world lays itself out and how the human person as the being with Logos is a laboratory for things to join within him. And so, there is no world without man, or at least you can’t conceive of it. It’s just potentiality, or it’s just like a quantum field or whatever you wanna call it. And so, all of this is like, it’s happening now. All these people are asking these types of questions. And I’m seeing papers come out recently more and more of even people talking about St. Maximus or St. Dionysius, the Areopagite, and saying, this is actually very relevant right now because of the questions asked in science. Weirdly scientific, right? Yeah. Yeah, it’s intertwined with the rational theories. The theorists are finding that it’s already been said. Exactly. And it’s super interesting. Yeah. Yeah.