{"id":31998,"date":"2014-11-04T16:42:34","date_gmt":"2014-11-04T21:42:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=31998"},"modified":"2014-11-04T16:49:07","modified_gmt":"2014-11-04T21:49:07","slug":"qa-with-myself","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2014\/11\/qa-with-myself\/","title":{"rendered":"Q&A with Myself"},"content":{"rendered":"

Q. Are you an apologist or neo-apologist?<\/strong><\/p>\n

A. No, I\u2019m just a philosopher. Others have said I’m an apologist, but I\u2019ve never been interested in apologetics. Mormonism can stand on its own two feet and it doesn\u2019t need me to defend it.<\/p>\n

I am intensely interested, though, in what it means to live a religious life. This question is my almost exclusive concern. This is what\u00a0Letters to a Young Mormon<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>is about.<\/p>\n

What does a religious life look like? What kinds of beauty or liberation does it foster? What kinds of costs does it impose?<\/p>\n

More, I\u2019ve always been sensitive\u00a0to something that prophets, saints, and mystics of many traditions (Mormonism included) confirm: that there is a paradox or inversion, a kind of Mobius loop, at the heart of a religious life that looks like moonshine from the outside and that can only be verified by tracing your very own finger along that same twist in the path.<\/p>\n

I want to trace this loop with as much of my body, heart, and mind as I can manage. Writing and thinking about the loop can look like a new\u00a0kind of\u00a0apologetics, but\u00a0it\u00a0will always fail on that score and that\u2019s not what I\u2019m after.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t want to defend the weird topology of this knot, I want to think<\/em> it.<\/p>\n

Q. Are you a Mormon? Why?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m Mormon because I was born and raised a Mormon. It\u2019s in my blood. It\u2019s in my bones. Mormonism has me by the brainstem. That\u2019s not a defense, just an explanation.<\/p>\n

Also, I\u2019m Mormon because I\u2019m a well-educated, American, heterosexual white-guy. I\u2019m a privileged member of the tradition and that privilege makes it easy to stay and harder to leave.<\/p>\n

But, too, I\u2019m a Mormon because of spirit. Mormonism introduced me to spirit and spirit keeps me in the pew each week.<\/p>\n

There is a live current running through Mormonism, a subtle but palpable current of electricity that occasionally arcs in spectacular ways but that mostly, humming in the line, is just strong enough to regularly jar me out of my daydreams and into caring for the ordinary run of daily life. Ordinary life is the place \u2014 and I\u2019m increasingly convinced that it may be the only <\/em>place \u2014 where the twisted ends of the transcendent and the immanent join to justify the costs and effort of a religious life.<\/p>\n

This electric spirit is not unique to Mormonism (and Mormonism doesn\u2019t claim that it is) but Mormonism\u2019s way of configuring and distributing this current \u2014 it\u2019s manner of boosting and converting it \u2014 has some unique and obvious strengths.<\/p>\n

Q. It seems like you\u2019re asking \u201cspirit\u201d to bear a lot of weight. Why hang the whole tradition on a subjective, psychological phenomenon like “spirit”?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Spirit is the thing. There\u2019s no denying this.<\/p>\n

But I would deny categorically that spirit is a subjective or psychological phenomenon. It’s a basic but common mistake to think that spirit is subjective or psychological.<\/p>\n

Spirit is, rather, fundamentally a relational phenomenon. It manifests only to the degree that I\u2019ve gotten outside of my own head and am, as a result, more tightly intertwined with\u00a0the people and objects around me. In this sense, spirit is more objective than subjective.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s also true that, in the end, spirit defies objectivity as much as it does subjectivity. This is why it’s really hard to talk about.<\/p>\n

Spirit depends on my being exposed to the\u00a0root that’s common to both the subject and the object. It depends on my being exposed to the original ground they share. Spirit shows itself at that ur-place where world bleeds into mind and mind bleeds into world.<\/p>\n

Spirit is that place where the ends of the loop join.<\/p>\n

It sounds mystical, but to arrive there, you just have to do the most ordinary things.<\/p>\n

You have to be still and pray. You have to sit and read old scriptures that you don\u2019t understand. You have to sing a song in church while you hold your wife\u2019s hand. You have to find your great-grandmother’s\u00a0tombstone. You have to bake a pie and go home teaching and knock on a stranger\u2019s door. You have to play checkers with your children for half an hour on Monday night.<\/p>\n

This is nothing special. And it\u2019s tempting to think that you don\u2019t need Mormonism to do these things. Maybe you don\u2019t. But I wouldn\u2019t be doing any of them without Mormonism. And the way the tradition configures my relation to these ordinary things, though subtle and pragmatic, is what makes them crackle with enough life to wake me up again and again.<\/p>\n

Q. What is grace?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Grace is what you didn\u2019t choose, didn\u2019t earn, and couldn\u2019t deserve. Grace is a name for the give and take of life, for the costs and gifts involved in even our smallest exchanges with the world that embeds us.<\/p>\n

Grace can save us, but it can do so only because that\u2019s what it\u2019s always (already) doing. Grace is another name for spirit.<\/p>\n

This may sound like a pretty idiosyncratic definition of grace, but I think it’s consonant with both Mormonism and the broader Christian tradition.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve written a dissertation and published two books about this. They\u2019re a little technical, but you probably prefer that kind of thing anyway. The devil’s in the details.<\/p>\n

If you’re interested, try my book Speculative Grace<\/em><\/a>, published by Fordham University Press in 2013.<\/p>\n

Q. It\u2019s your view that people should be quiet, stop asking hard questions, and just do their home teaching?<\/strong><\/p>\n

People should do their home teaching. And I think people should spend more time being quiet. Spirit shows itself in silence.<\/p>\n

But I don\u2019t think people should stop asking hard questions.<\/p>\n

In fact, I think a\u00a0problem many people have is that they don\u2019t ask\u00a0enough<\/em> questions. They\u2019ve got a handful questions and then stop with those.<\/p>\n

We\u00a0tend not to\u00a0range far enough with our\u00a0questions. We\u00a0just ask the same handful of comfortable questions over and over again, regardless of who we’re\u00a0talking to and what we’re talking about.<\/p>\n

The questions themselves start to feel safe. That’s a bad sign.<\/p>\n

Ask your questions. Ask more questions. And then ask your questions even more seriously than you already have. Stop assuming that you already know the answers to your questions before you even ask them. And, especially, be sure to ask really hard questions about your really hard questions.<\/p>\n

Always work to ask even better questions than the one’s you’ve already asked.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t stop halfway with your questions. If you stop halfway, you\u2019ll just\u00a0lose what you had and <\/em>fail to find what you could’ve.<\/p>\n

Whatever you do, once you start asking questions, don’t\u00a0stop. Keep going. Keep going. Keep going.<\/p>\n

I think this is good advice.<\/p>\n

And it’s\u00a0advice\u00a0I need to hear as much as anyone else.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Q. Are you an apologist or neo-apologist? A. No, I\u2019m just a philosopher. Others have said I’m an apologist, but I\u2019ve never been interested in apologetics. Mormonism can stand on its own two feet and it doesn\u2019t need me to defend it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":135,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31998","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-politics"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/135"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31998"}],"version-history":[{"count":28,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31998\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32026,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31998\/revisions\/32026"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}