Evening Conversation with David Brooks in Washington, DC

gonna call this crowd to order we're excited to see so many folks come out please have a seat all right all right here we go it's an exciting event I'm David Correy I'm professor of political philosophy at Baylor University I want to welcome you here on behalf of Baylor's Washington DC program you can tell from the banner behind me that we are co-sponsoring this event with the Trinity forum we've had David Brooks to campus before in Waco Texas and we're grateful so grateful for the sober voice that he brings to our political conversations both through his column at the New York Times and of course through his deeply reflective books which have had such a positive impact on people's lives Baylor University is active in DC in a number of ways I just want to mention we have a robust semester program for Baylor students who come to DC and they'll and prime internships and they do coursework while they're here we also staged a number of high-profile events I know that many of you in this room have been to some of them because I've seen the list of folks who are here the events that we put on some recent ones for example include faith and the challenges of secularism a Jewish Christian Muslim trial log that we hosted with Lord rabbi sacks professor Rabi George and Sheikh Hamza Yusuf the life and legacy of the Reverend dr. Martin Luther King with Cornel West professor West and Robert P George from Princeton our latest event I think in many ways our most successful was rational disagreement in an age of polarization with the author Jonathan Hite professor Candace Vogler from the University of Chicago and a number of other prominent people our goal in staging these events is to ensure that the best Christian intellectuals are heard on matters of great national significance in fact I would say that we have demonstrated and will continue to demonstrate how vital mature Christian voices are in our national debates not only substantively but also in terms of the manners and habits that we bring to the table the habit of charitable engagement of patient toleration of opposing viewpoints of seeing the inherent dignity of our fellow citizens even when we disagree of working ardently towards the creation of a public space where we can all live as neighbors and I really mean that in the fullest sense of the term if any of you are not currently on the baler in Washington DC event email list and you'd like to be just please let me know I just come up afterwards and give me your email address and you will be on our event list like I said they're very high profile events held here in the Press Club sometimes at the Hyatt Regency off the Senate side of the house finally I think some of you will already know how active Baylor has been with what in Washington partnered with RFI the religious freedom Institute in our partnership with them we have fought against persecution religious persecution both here domestically and also overseas that has been a tremendously important project of ours we believe this too is an area where Christians can take the lead defending believers of all faiths against the violence and institutional discrimination that has become all too common around the world today we're excited to co-sponsor this conversation with David Brooks I'd like to thank Sheree harder for the invitation to collaborate thank you so much and Mollie more our operation or operational director in DC for helping to organize this event I'd also like to thank all the baylor alumni in the room there are very many and I'm excited to have you here thank you for coming out and last but not least we have our new Provost with us dr. Nancy Brickhouse and were enthusiastic for her support of Baylor in Washington DC so thank you all we're excited to have you here [Applause] Thank You David and welcome to all of you for tonight's evening conversation with David Brooks on the second mountain we all this eternity form are delighted to be able to partner with Baylor with you David Cory and Molly Moore in making this night a reality it's been a real pleasure to be able to collaborate with friends and we hope to do so in the future so thanks so much for coming out and for making this possible I also just wanted to the very outset to recognize a few special guests who are with us here tonight in addition to many of our friends from Baylor who have joined us we also are graced with our founder at the Trinity forum Oz and Ginny Guinness are here you could just wave your hand it's great to have you here [Applause] I'd also like to recognize one of our trustees Shirley hug strength who has joined us tonight we have several senior fellows of eternity form who have also joined us including Ann Schneider Michael ware and a Marc Legon as well as a couple of public servants I just want to acknowledge and thank National Endowment for the Humanities chairman John Petey who is here as well as the National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins in addition to all that yeah that deserves it we're really excited that each and every one of you are here it's a very full house I'm glad you've all had found seats we actually had to shut down registration earlier this afternoon a high-class problem so we've really been delighted by the response but we also know that there are people who wanted to be here tonight and who couldn't make it whether they were shut out by by registration or just other things so if you have friends who wanted to be here but could not make it we are live-streaming tonight's event on both the Trinity forum YouTube channel and on our Facebook page we'll also have video up from the event on both our website and our YouTube channel photos and video clips on Facebook and of course if you would like to respond to something in the moment we will have our live Twitter feed going at a hashtag TTFN tonight so it is a pleasure to see so many new faces joining us tonight and if this is your first time or you are not familiar with the Trinity forum we work to provide a space and resources for leaders to engage life's greatest questions in the context of faith and we do this by providing readings and publications which draw upon classic works of literature and letters that explore the enduring questions and connect tie the timeless wisdom of the humanities with timely questions of the day as well as sponsoring programs like this one tonight where we tried to connect leading thinkers with thinking leaders in engaging those big questions of life and ultimately coming to better know the author of the answers as I have noted at many of our evening conversations before it's often said that the big questions of life can essentially be distilled down to three what is a good person what is the good life and what is a just society and I think I can say that in all the evening conversations we have hosted it is hard to think of a work that more directly or unflinchingly wrestles with that second question as to what makes a good life then the events are the work that we have gathered here tonight to discuss the second Mountain the quest for a moral life makes the provocative claim that our public conversation is both muddled and misguided in its definition of the good life in a society that prizes achievement acquisition attainment and self-expression are increasingly ingrained if often unexamined assumption that a good life lies in individual self fulfillment but when as our speaker tonight has observed in his book a whole society is built around self preoccupation its members become separated from one another divided and alienated and this is exactly what has happened to us the rot we see in our politics is caused by a rot and our moral and cultural foundations and the way we relate to each other and the individualistic values that have become the water in which we swim in quote in the last few years we have reaped the bitter fruit of our misconceptions in the form of rising suicide and overdose rates growing distrust loneliness and alienation and a reversion to tribalism even as we continue to enjoy the technological and material advances that enables to stay ever more connected safer and healthier we are growing increasingly alienated angry and addled trapped in our divisions all alone together but the good news for an angry hurting wounded people is that there is another way one that necessarily involves commitment love and self transcendence and which is marked by joy learning to love and commit wisely and well is both the skill and a virtue and one that can help propel a summons of the second Mountain ultimately it is a deeply countercultural hopeful and inspiring argument and it's hard to imagine a writer or thinker who can make it with the wisdom winsomeness or wry wit as our speaker this evening David Brooks now yeah now well David needs no introduction he will get one anyway David serves as an op-ed columnist for The New York Times and he leads the new weave initiative at the Aspen Institute which is focused on reducing civic fragmentation and building community as well as serving as a commentator on the PBS Newshour NPR's all things considered and NBC's Meet the Press he previously served as a police reporter for the City news bureau a writer for The Washington Times and a book review editor reporter and occasional movie critic and later off edie editor at The Wall Street Journal as well as a senior editor at the Weekly Standard and a contributing editor for Atlantic and Newsweek a best-selling author Brooks previous books include Bobo's and Paradise the new upper-class and how they got there on Paradise Drive his third book the social animal became a number one New York Times bestseller as did his most recent work before the one he's discussing tonight the road to character in addition to this frenzied writing schedule David Brooks also teaches at Yale University and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences David welcome [Applause] Thank You Cherie it's good to be here it's good to be home here this is one of my homes and it's good to be here with every book and even between books now I'm I this book came out in early April and I've been speaking about it almost every night and I have an awesome book speech that if you heard it you would love it I guarantee you you're not gonna hear it though because I'm not going to give you my normal speech I want to give a speech that's really dovetail to the Trinity forum so this will be a little more ragged but hopefully at least a little raw and hopefully meaningful normally I talk about sociology and where our country is and a bit about moral formation but I thought I'd talk tonight about spiritual formation and I'm gonna talk about the person I know best which is me but I hope I'll read enough quotes and enough bits of wisdom from other people that I hopefully it'll be generalizable and useful for everyone one of my favorite quotes about writers is we are beggars who tell other beggars where we found bread and so I found some bread in some books and I'm sharing it with you and so I'm gonna quote from a lot of people now what's interesting about spiritual formation is how it differs from our public life sometimes and I'll first tell you the the very familiar story I often tell about my public life and what that looked like and then I'm gonna tell you the story about the spiritual life so the public life is very quick and easy to tell and it's very simple story it's the story of unbelievable luck and trajectory when I was 7 I read a book called Paddington the bear and I decided I want to become a writer and then in high school I wanted to date a woman named Bernice she didn't want to date me she wanted to date some other guy and I remember thinking what is she thinking I write way better than that guy so those were my values and then when I was 18 the admissions officers at Columbia Wesleyan Brown decided I should go to the University of Chicago and that was also right early very neck up kind of place my favorite saying about Chicago it's a Baptist school or atheist professors teach to a student's a Thomas Aquinas so that was my school I worked hard I was cerebral at Chicago I was a double major in history and celibacy while I was there and then I had the big break happen to me with senior year I wrote a mean parody William F Buckley he came to campus it was like Yale Buckley formed two magazines one called the National Buckley one called the Buckley review which he merged to form the Buckley Buckley it was that kind of thing and he came to campus and he gave a speech to the student body and at the end of it he said David Brooks if you're in the audience I want to give you a job and that was the big break of my career now sadly I wasn't in the audience and I was literally out I had been hired by PBS to debate Milton Friedman on PBS and they had it was Milton talks to college students and I was a socialist Bernie bro and you can go if you put YouTube David Brooks Milton Friedman you'll see a 21 year old me with this big Jew fro and these 1980s gigantic glasses which were apparently on loan from the Mount Palomar lunar Observatory and I'm debating him and he is decimating me and so most of the debate is me sitting with my mouth hanging open trying to think of something to say but I've later called up Buckley he served as my mentor he sent me off to the Wall Street Journal editorial page where I met I got to work for the first time with Midwesterners and as a New York Jew this was uncomfortable for me because they were very comfortable with silence and so they would sit there staring at the wall these farm boys from Indiana Ohio it was like going on an open casket funeral with 12 bodies and as as the New York Jew I would sit there and say I will not break this silence I will not break this I then I get a job at the New York Times succeeding bill sapphires a conservative columnist there and my joke is that being a conservative columnist at The Times is like being the chief rabbi at Mecca it's not a lot of company there and then I get this job at the NewsHour with Mark shields and Jim Lehrer and I often say we cater it's a show I love doing I'm very proud of it we cater to a certain seasoned youth a certain demographic so if a 93 year old lady comes up to me in the airport I know what she's gonna say I don't watch your show but my mother loves it and so that's and so we're very big in the hospice community and so that's one part of my life and then and then I have this other life where I write books and as I read a lot of books and I write a lot of books and I my tastes have gotten more sensitive a little more feminine as I've gotten older my I'm the only American man who finished that book Eat Pray Love if you remember that book I hate 223 I was actually lactating which was a miracle and then I wrote this book on character called the road to character and I learned writing a book on character doesn't give you good character even reading a book on character doesn't give you good character but buying a book on character does give me recommend that so that's the external life and it's pretty straightforward and I tell it all the time and it's very familiar the internal and spiritual life is very different a much more complicated so as I mentioned I grew up in a Jewish home in New York and if you grew up in a Jewish home you're raised on a story and all of us are raised in stories alistair mcintyre wrote what am i to do if i if i cannot answer the prior question of what story do I find myself apart and if you're a Jew you're part of a story and that story is the Exodus story and Jews have been telling this story for thousands of years and in fact God commands Moses to enact the Exodus in order to be told it's a thing that was done in order to be told and then Jews living into the story both in Jerusalem fleeing Jerusalem coming to America and then going back to Israel they lived out the Exodus story Rabbi kook when Israel was founded said with a penetrating consciousness we come to realize the essential events of the Exodus is one that never ceases at all Jews make it true by living it out as true and it's a story of spiritual formation rabbi sacks points out that in Genesis the creation of the universe is covered in nine verses in Exodus the creation of the tabernacle is like three hundred verses why is there so much more time to the tabernacle than the universe it's because the community is a group of people who build something together the Israelites needed to be taught how to build something together they rendered them into a people and so he needed a people capable of upholding his covenant and so he had to create that this was a people who wanted to crawl back into slavery this was a leader Moses who wants to deny the fact that he could be a leader it's interesting that the at the exact moment that Moses descends from Sinai the people are acting like children and worshiping a golden calf and Aviva Thornburg was a very brilliant writer that's that's a reminder that the passage into adulthood and the leap of faith doesn't happen when you're ready to make it it happens when you're not quite ready the leap is made by one who was hurried troubled a little nervous but still ecstatic and overwhelmed and so it's a lesson to rush into things and so I was raised in that tradition my ancestors fled the pogroms and in Eastern Europe and they came to America my grandfather opened up a kosher butcher butcher shop and we we were story of typical upward mobility my grandfather lawyer my mom and dad professors and I'm the first downward slide but my grandfather spent a day at a law firm in lower Manhattan writing letters to the editor of the New York Times dreaming to get published in there and he didn't see me live to get published there but he would have been the first call and so that was part of our story were that we were Exodus and so that was one story rattling around in my head and it captures the core of the Jewish Jewish experience which is movement toward formation toward the land of milk and honey but also achievement it's moving up and it's being aggressive my class that my favorite Jewish experience is the Shabbat dinner table I often say every church service I go to is more spiritual than every synagogue service but most Shabbat dinners are more spiritual than most church services and the trait thing I love about a Shabbat dinner table it's eighteen people sitting around the table all of them talking and all of them also listening to the 17 wrong things that have just been said by other people and correcting them so that was one story I grew up with but I where'd they grew up with another story and that was the story of Jesus there was a way to get into American society if you were Jew that was to become extremely Anglo philic that seemed classy and so the phrase in mark my culture was thinking Ishaq British and so all these Jewish family gave their boys English names so nobody would ever know they were Jewish and their names like Sidney Norman Irving Milton and within 30 years people just thought they were Jewish name so it didn't work but I grew up in that culture my parents were scholars of Victorian England and they sent me to my cent my preschool was st. George's my elementary school was Grace Church school the camp where I went for 15 years was the incarnation camp all Episcopalian and so I grew up with a different sense and sitting in that church every morning singing in the choir at Grace it's a beautiful church near the Strand bookstore a 10th and Broadway it's a beautiful gothic you the sort of the Lord announces himself on the facade then you walk through and you see the chapels and the mysteries come at you and then you're up and the apps and the transept and sort of illumination floods you in you're in your living a fairy tale when you're a kid in a gothic church and I sang in the choir and my memory this may not be true but I tell it as a joke that the choir we were about 40% Jewish in the choir in New York and so to square with our religion we wouldn't sing the word Jesus and so the volume would sort of drop down in the comeback and the Jesus story is also a story for a kid it's a pretty familiar story the city is riven by disagreement there's only one way to purge the anger and that's to find a scapegoat and the different weird thing about the Jesus story is that he actually volunteers for the job and redeems the sins of those doing the sin and which is interesting twist on the story but it's a familiar story so I grew up with that story and so two stories rattling in my brain as a child the Jewish story is very familiar to me the Catholic or Christian story had an ability to shock because we were immigrants we're Exodus we're moving in the Christian story the poor are closer to God the meek are blessed the leper the wounded those who bear pain are closer and that's an inverse logic that was not in my culture and not in American culture it's super radical Jesus boughs down in order to rise up he died so others might live Christians are not saved by works but mostly by faith and what I was confronted with was not only two stories but two versions of goodness the Jewish form of goodness that surrounded me Wiscasset was loving kindness Bubbe bringing people into her home the way in Israel all of Israel pivots no matter their divisions when one is killed and they all feel part of one thing and that's a Hesed loving-kindness the christian story of serenity and grace had the ability to shock me at this camp there was a guy named West Whitman horse who was my counselor and colleague who was a man later in life who'd become an official and priest and worked with the poor in Honduras and domestic victims of domestic violence he was a holy child he's voice was all intonation and pop and whistles and he was excited about everything his voice somehow never grew up no matter how deep the sadness that he sometimes inherited was and he was just a man for others and always forgiving always grateful always good and so there was a seer cheerful pure overflowing joy that came out of the gift of love that flew out Wes and it had the power to inspire as it has the power to inspire others and so I was used to Jewish good Christian good surprised me as Dorothy day once said Christians are commanded to live in a way that doesn't make sense unless God exists and so it is shocking and it's shocking today even now and we were all mourning the passing of Jean Vanier and people thought the founder of all our communities I was told that people he could be difficult to be around because he was so good and because he really appreciated the power of weakness he wrote weakness carries within it a secret power the care and the trust that flow from weakness can open up the heart the one who was weaker can fall forth powerful love of the one who was stronger she saw that Fred Rogers musical Rogers meets this boy in a wheelchair and asked the boy to pray for him and a writer who's with him says that was so clever you asked the boy to play for him relay for you when normally you would pray for him and Rogers told the writer no he what he suffered he's much closer to God than I am I need his intercession and so there's that capacity to shock and that you thinking of L'Arche I was thinking about my favorite Henri Nouwen story after now one was at large he would came to came to speak invited to speak around the country and one day he was invited to speak at Crystal City here in Northern Virginia and when he would come he would run one of the men from the community who are mentally disabled and one this time to Crystal City he brought a guy named Bill and when now and mounted the stage to give his speech bill also mounted the stage and when now and did a familiar part of his speech bill would tell the audience I've heard that before and when now and was done he got a standing ovation and then bill said I would also like to speak and a crib it of panic crept across now it's mind what is Bill gonna say and so what bill said is this last time when Henry went to Boston he took John Smeltzer with him this time he wanted me to come with him to Washington I am very glad to be here with you thank you very much and that was it and he got a standing ovation and then bill went after the speech and worked the room shaking everybody's hands you know making pressing the flesh with everybody and then the next morning in the breakfast room over the conference was Bill walked around and said goodbye to everybody and as they were leaving they were flying home bill asked now and if he liked the trip and now and said oh yes it was a wonderful trip I'm so glad you came here with me and and bill said and we did it together didn't we and at those words now and thought of Jesus's words where two or three meet in my name I am among them and if that's a that's a beauty and so I lived with these two stories in these two forms of goodness rather than around in my mind and I became what a lot of our friend a guy named echo Fujimori calls a border stalker Richard war has this great concept on the edge of inside people are within a group that's sort of on the edge and so I guess I worst October tuned to these two things which didn't really matter because I didn't believe in God anyway so it was just like two rival philosophies and so I went through that through adulthood occasionally and I kept a kosher home I lived organizationally Jewish but not faithfully but occasionally Christianity would come into life so Michael Cromartie who's Jenny is here I heard it over her the name at some event this name john stott and i never heard of the guy before so I called up Cromartie and I said who's this guy john stott and Cromartie told me well if ventriloquist had a pope it would be stopped and so I did a little Google search of the New York Times stocks name had not been mentioned the New York time since 1954 or just one of the lists so I wrote a column called who is John stock and I just read his book and his many books and the bluntness with which he confronted Jesus was sort of shocking and powerful at one point he wrote I am here because of you and this is Jesus speaking it is your sin I am bearing your curse I am suffering your dead I am paying your death I am dying nothing in history or in the universe cuts us down to size like the cross all of us who have inflated views of ourselves especially in self-righteousness until we visit a place called Calvary and so I was found him a very attractive person and I wrote this column and it had a little effect and he came to Washington years later or maybe months later and he invited me out to lunch and I've since learned from a friend mark Laverton that he thought a lot about this lunch and I of course was going thinking I will talk about John Stott but he just hammered me with where am I in my faith journey what are you doing and these were questions I could not answer and did not want to answer and was not able to answer so that was a crack and then we wrote a book the road to character and st. Agustin appears this magical character the most brilliant mind I've ever encountered in any form and then we wrote about Dorothy day and Dorothy day had a devotion to her faith that lived out in poverty which is simply inspiring I assigned her book the long loneliness to my class at Yale and at the end of the class I told you can pick any of the 14 books I've read and write about it and apply it to your own life very secular Yale class 24 kids 19 of them chose Dorothy days long loneliness and because her life is such a model and there are moments of beauty that sort of seep in late in her life and I should mention Ann and I have done a Trinity forum booklet on Dorothy Day so you should definitely order that it occurs to me Cherie is nodding at the end of her life she was asked by Harvard Robert Coles did you ever think of writing a memoir she's beautiful right or what a make sense and she said he I did I sat down one day and I wrote I got a blank piece of paper and I wrote it on the top of it a life remembered and then she said I just sat there and thought of our Lord and his visit to us all those centuries ago and I said to myself that my great good luck was have had to him on my mind for all that time and she didn't need to write anything and there's a tranquility in that which is very alluring and very arresting and so I would say in those days by then by the 2000s I was like a typical neocon I supported faith for other people I thought it was good for society and my heroes were you know nerve and crystal and with he was definitely in that camp and then life sort of kicks you in the rear and I went through a dark time in 2013 and my marriage had ended my kids were leaving home some of you were conservatives but I my kind of conservatism was not the prevailing kind of conservatism anymore I sort of just drifted out of those circles and so there was a time of great loneliness and I did what any idiot does faced with a spiritual or emotional problem he tries to work through it just by covering it over with workaholism and so if you went to my apartment on Wisconsin Avenue and he pulled to the drawer where there should have been silverware there was just post-it notes and where there should've been plates there was stationary and I was just trying to work my way through the problem and then Jesus floated through the wall of my apartment and said come follow me no I'm kidding that never [Laughter] but the world did become a little more porous there was one day I was in the subway at Penn Station in 33rd Street in New York the most spiritually uplifting spot on the face of the earth and suddenly I had a sensation which I've I've since read in another person's book whose name I've not forgotten that the realization that all the people trudging through these tunnels around me had Souls and that they were Souls degrading or lifting they were so striving yearning sick Souls and I thought well my job is to write about people I'm not gonna write about spend my life writing about people if they're just sacks of genetic material it only makes sense to think of them as souls and now I say them my audience is you don't have to believe in God to believe in soul I just ask you to believe that there's some piece of you that has no size shape color or weight it is of infinite value and dignity and that we all have that our souls give us our moral responsibility a tiger is not morally responsible or morally responsible a soul gives us our equality we're not equal in brain power we're not equal in income we're not equal in strength but where our souls are all equal and that's why human beings are equal and as Souls explain our yearning are yearning for goodness which all human beings have and so I began to see that there's not only the play that we cover in the newspaper but there's sort of an under play and there's a different way of seeing the world rabbi heschel says that o is not an emotion it's a way of understanding he writes all is itself an act of insight into a meaning greater than ourselves and so when you think of souls you're naturally struck with awe and then a few months after that I had a experience in Aspen where I go to get in touch with America and I had walked up to this lake this mountain lake and I had brought up a bunch of Puritan prayers and I've got sinless Lake and I started reading them and the first prayer I came on the book was called the valley of vision the first line is Lord high and holy meek and lowly and so I looked around at the spirit the the majestic beauty of the mountain peaks and then a little round like badger type creature crawled right up to my sneakers so I Thoreau high and holy meek and lowly that has brought me into the valley of vision and I was in a bowl shaped by the mountain top where I live in the depths but see thee in the heights hemmed in by mountains of sin I behold thy glory and then the poem goes on with the whole series of inversions the broken heart is the healed heart the contrite spirit is a rejoicing spirit the repenting soul is the victorious soul life and my death joy and my sorrow grace in my sins riches in my poverty glory in my valley and I just had a sensation of things clicking into place like the closing of a Mercedes door just like a nice click and it was not a sensation that necessarily one religion or another but a sensation that we live in a created world and there's a moral order to it and I sort of now study these transcendental experiences mine was extremely meager but the one that resonates most is in Jaber Crowe Wendell Berry novel the guy there's a hero is walking through a basically a hurricane across a bridge and the earth is a torrent and he writes and I knew that the spirit had gone forth to shaped the world and make it was still alive in it I just had no doubt I could see that I lived in a created world that was still being created I would be part of it forever there was no escape the spirit that made was in it shaping it reshaping it sometimes lying at rest sometimes standing up and shaking itself like a medic like a muddy horse and letting the pieces fly and so I began to study and learn about mystical experiences the times when life seems a little porous and there's a great one I don't have time to read it from vaclav havel and wash cidade all these people a lot in prison Viktor Frankl also in prison when it gets sense that the angels are singing with glory and a lot of my atheist friends have never had that sense about 75% of Americans say they've had a sense of set touching something transcendent and but a lot you know a lot of my friends say no I've never it was material world this is the world right here and Chris Wyman my friend the poet who wrote a beautiful book called my bright abyss who teaches at Yale says to them really you've never felt overwhelmed by and some sense inadequate to the experience in your life you have never felt something in your life staking a claim beyond yourself some wordless mystery straining through the words to reach you never religion is not made up of these moments religion is the means of making these moments part of your life rather than a merely radical intrusion so foreign and perhaps even fearsome to you that you can't even acknowledge their existence afterwards religion is what you do with these moments of over mastery in your life and so one of my struggles through faith was thinking that you had to believe all the time and reading wyman was permission to not believe all the time I'll get back to that he says the odd thing about these moments this is wyman it is not only as if we were suddenly perceiving something in reality we had not perceived before but it is as if we ourselves are being perceived and so that's a shift and a shift in mentality and I would not say it was a religious conversion didn't feel like that it felt like a religious deepening the story is suddenly coming into life and suddenly being real stories in both stories becoming real stories and maybe the soul story the soul underneath is the real story and not that first surface story we tell and of course that is more awe grab I heschel writes wonder or radical amazement is the chief characteristic of religious man's attitude toward humanity in nature one attitude is alien to his spirit taking things for granted and so I was sort of over struck by all by just deeper levels of reality that's still reasonably unformed I didn't take this journey alone I threw myself on a lot of people I came to trini forum events Cromartie was the someone who changed my life a lot of people there was a friend of ours Jerry rude who flew in from Chicago Christians were all over me I got about three or four hundred books given to me in this period only about 250 were different copies of mere christianity by CSS and one of the people was an and we were working on road to character we were sending these memos and i was trying to understand Dorothy Day and Saint Agustin and the thing I couldn't understand was grace sometimes I think I experienced grace before God but there was still it was a very challenging because growing up in American culture we earn it we earn everything we get and people like us because we're successful and it was hard to understand that and hard to give away agency and remains hard to me now and I was we were writing these memos and I was like writing dan you know I think it will have participatory grace where God meets me and then I meet him halfway which is sort of not unrelated to the Jewish notion of co-creation that people in God co-create the world when I was still struggling with that and Ann wrote me a bunch of emails and texts and memos for this book and sort of giving me the radical notions that were all unfamiliar to me one of her emails was I want to read it reiterate that yes grace is the central thing Christ offers but that is the doorway and it is to know him I see lots of emphasis on striving in your note and I appreciate its antidote to cheek grace but the foundational fact is you cannot earn your way understated grace this denies Grace's power and subverts it's very definition grace must reach out to the broken and the undeserving he must reach out to those recognizing plainly vulnerably their own need and emptiness it can only find welcome in those sitting still and that is kind of a radical notion if you've grown up in the meritocracy which I had and so all these things sort of happened over a period of months and moved away to Houston because she thought of so beautiful apparently lived there for three or four years and gradually things happened and there was never a blinding moment where I said oh I'm a believer the metaphor I used and I think I got it from somebody but I don't remember I got it for us this was over 2013 2014 2015 is imagine you're sitting in a train and you're staring at your phone there are people sitting next to you there's people across and everything seemed normal nothing seems to be moving you're just all there together and you look out the window and it occurs to you with no great surprise but simply an obvious recognition of what's obvious that you've traveled a long way and that you've crossed over some invisible border between being an atheist and a secular person to being a believer and what strikes you is not what's up ahead which is a complete mystery but how much ground there is behind and that you can't go back there and you're not going to go back there and so I sort of had that realization of crossing over the border and I now feel more Jewish than I ever did in my life because the Exodus story is actually a coven ental story but I can't unreal and that's where my favorite quote about Mathews from the Catholic intellectual Romano Gardini and the Beatitudes something of the celestial grand jury crew they are no mere formulas for superior ethics but tidings of a sacred and supreme realities entry into the world and if there's a God of love then that seems to me the purest expression of it and the final thing is to get permission to acknowledge the change and I admit a lot of time in the Catholic and Christian worlds I feel I don't resonate with the way it's at least described it's like people say you know I spoke to God about what I should get the cheeseburger this app told me to get the salmon and I've become an admirer of just of a few people who acknowledge the change and the differences of it one of them is Wyman one of them is spread Bikaner he says faith has changed it's clear one moment gone the next it's exactly for the time and space that I would describe faith as faith is change and I don't want to use my doubt as a badge of honor to show a more sophisticated but I do think it's comfortable for me to be around people like that Wyman again Lord I can approach you only by means of my consciousness but consciousness can only approach you as an object which you are not I have no hope of experiencing you as I experience the world directly immediately yet I want nothing more indeed so great as my hunger for you or is this evidence of your hunger for me that I seem to see you in the black flowers mourners make make beside a grave I do not know in the bare abundance of winter trees every limb is lit and fraught with snow Lord Lord how bright the abyss inside that seemed and so it's people who acknowledge the mystery one of my great quote favorite quotes is from Bikaner he says you should wake up every morning and say can I believe it all again today and especially if you wait he says read the New York Times and then say can I believe it all event about and I think he meant it like should I see that see the day's news but as someone who works in the New York Times like if anything is gonna cause you doubt and then he says if your answer to that question of belief is yes every single day then you probably don't know what believing in God really means at least five times out of ten the answer should be no because the know is as important as the yes maybe more so the know is what proves you're human in case you should ever doubt it and then if there's some more went morning the answer happens to be really yes it should be yes that's choked with confession and tears and great laughter and so commitment to faith is persistence in faith in doubt through suffering anxiety and through disillusion Richard Rohr says the church is both my greatest intellectual and moral problem and my most consoling home she's both pathetic and frequent bride and so I think that's how inner transformation happens it happens as a slow surrender to something and a slow sense of being overwhelmed a sense of astonished reverence that just won't go away now so I wrote this in the book and it's been interesting over the last few weeks to sort of go public with it and I was always nervous about it and I have to say my Jewish friends have been great they probably think it's a temporary madness that will pass some people have been hostile but that's fine you know atheist religion that you're sort of used to that argument the hardest part has been people who may be sympathetic but treat it like it's politics the expression of faith is so internal and so mysterious and so changeable and so o some that it has to be handled with a certain spirituality and depth and occasionally well one time I gave a interview to The Washington Post to be honest a religion writer there and I was ready to really talk about it because I thought she would have some background or to induce a certain humility but it was treated as if it was the interview was just made me clam up and made me feel intensely uncomfortable because she was treating it like I'd switch from being a Republican to being a Democrat and I felt that was not true to the experience and the true mystery and depth of the experience and then frankly her article reflected that - and that was sort of the worst - not it was it's okay to be opposed it's hard to be superficial iced and so you know that that I can talk forever I'll stop in a second believe me but I think I think the Christian world has sometimes been magnificent but sometimes it's like there's intrusive care it's like the God put it on my heart to invade your privacy and talk about you it's like but then there are just moments of grace and God's presence I have a friend and colleague with this weave program named Emily yes but honey Swift Smith who got into her argument with her husband really bad one and they made up afterwards and they went out to run some errands together and they stopped by a CVS and she was still feeling very teary and worn out and sort of traumatized by the the fight they'd had and as they're checking out the guy at the checkout counter starts talking to them about their lives and he says to them you know you two you two are really good together and she says well maybe there are angels and maybe there's angelic in all of us and then final I'll end with the mystery of faith itself which is the mystery of God which is so beyond our understanding Muslims have a say whatever you think God is he's not that and I go back to where they started or one of the places that started one of the sources which was st. Agustin who is really one of the most magnetic human beings ever he's as cerebral as it's possible to be and yet every third page of the confessions he's got tears washing down his face and there's a poetry to his writing which has always been inspiring and touching of what the beauty of God and one of my favorite poems which I'll end with is what do I love when I love my god a prayer of his he writes it is not physical or temple glory nor the brightness of light so dear to earthly eyes nor the sweet melodies of all kinds of songs nor the gentle odor of flowers and the ointments and perfumes nor mana or hunting or limbs welcoming the embraces of the flesh is not these things I loved when I loved my god yet there was a light I loved and a food and a kind of embrace when I loved my god a light voice odor food embrace of my inner man where my soul is floodlit by light which space cannot contain where there is a sound that time cannot cease where there is a perfume which no breeze disperses where there is a taste for food no amount of eating can lessen where there is a bond of love that no CCD can part that is what I love when I love my god and he points us to just an ultimate and serene beauty that will never cease on this earth but was out there loving us thank you well thank you David that was fantastic we'll take just a few minutes to talk and then we'll turn it over to the most dynamic part of the evening which is questions from the audience but Sheree assured me all the questions will be about the mullah reports where do I even start anything in the introduction to your book you talked quite a bit about joy and you say throughout this book isn't life enjoy is a no North Star a navigating point and you encourage your readers to steer towards joy you also claim that our societies and a conspiracy against you why do you believe joy to be a reliable navigational beacon in life and if it is why on earth is society conspiring against it well these are big questions so I distinguish between happiness and joy I'm not the first to make this Lord knows but happiness is when you get a promotion when things are going your way you're moving toward your goals your team wins the Superbowl you feel big about yourself and happiness is good I'm not against happiness I checked my Amazon score every 15 seconds but so joyous our happiness expansion of the self joy is the transcendence of self joy is when you forget your exist even when you're so lost in work or in love for somebody or in a spiritual experience or out of nature where you're it's like you you're not there time passes and you're not there I remember once I tell this story often I was coming home from the NewsHour I was living on Bethesda at the time and I pull into my house and it was 7:30 on a summer Sunday and my kids were then like 12 9 and 4 were playing in the backyard they were playing with a little ball kicking it up and chasing each other around the yard and they were laughing and giggling and tumbling all over each other and I just drive into the driveway and I'm confronted with the scene of perfect family happiness and the Sun is coming through the trees and for some reason my lawn looked amazing and I remember sort of reality's spilling outside of its boundaries and just sort of melting into a joy that's better than anything we get at work and that joy is when you disappear and we've all experienced that in profound moments and it comes through deep relation and so we think of individual happiness as something to strive for but self-forgetting relation is really better happiness is good joy is better Miroslav Woolf who writes about joy quite a lot says joy is not joy is the crown of a well lived life it's the reward you get for giving away gifts and you don't give away gifts to your spouse or your kids or your cause because you want a reward you give them as out of sheer lovingness but the roar'd you get is joy the subtitle of your book is the quest for a moral life but as you've spoken about this evening interspersed in the quest for a moral life was a spiritual journey that you were on how did those two different journeys relate to each other and with the quest for a moral life had been possible or looked the same if there wasn't a spiritual journey going on at the same time yeah that's a very excellent question I was just thinking about a few hours ago because they're not the same are they first when I started writing these books we went up to Random House to my top editor there and she heard the pitch for road to character and she thought David is going into his woowoo phase she was nervous but and so a lot of the the titles we give our attempt to pin it down for a second audience and so road to character I'm not sure the book character appears in the road to character but it was how do we how do we take a group a culture that's not the most morally articulate culture in the world and sort of clarify it for them so this is what this book is about I will say that while I think at the the heights of virtue a lot of the people I think are some of the most beautiful people on earth tend to be religious the median is disappointingly similar to those who are secular that religious people talk about holiness and service and love and agape a lot you'd think their behavior would be a lot better than secular people and I find it's maybe better but it's a puzzle to me why that is well let me ask you about that if you have theories because as you said in the outset we're all people of a story and in many ways as Christians we believe we're immersed in the greatest story in the world and it's a story of grace and of love and yet there does seem to be an appeal within Christendom towards quite the opposite as a recent someone on a spiritual journey observing these different manifestations of people living out their stories why do you think that is yeah well one of the things Christians give to the public square' is a spiritual awareness and that Christians never fall for pure materialistic explanations which is something that a lot of people fall for Shirley's here she runs the Christian college organization and I always I spoke to her group and said sometimes you think you're besieged but to me you have the secret that everybody's looking for you have spiritual language spiritual vocabulary you have a practical ethos to have at least talk about having a good life that's a tremendous resource in a country hungry for meaning but there are as I put in the book there there are barriers that sometimes Christian build around themselves that make it harder to become a Christian and they make it harder to respect Christians and a lot of those barriers is a combination of a spiritual superiority complex combined with an intellectual inferiority complex and the combination of those two things creates a lot of bad categories and then the final thing and this is no secret it's very hard to be good when you're fundamental mentality is besieged and that if you feel under assault then you're gonna react in a tribal nature and I don't know if an invented this or somebody else did but the the transition of the word evangelical from an adjective to a noun was a significant thing a way of being versus a tribe you belong to and I you know to be honest I do think that's created a lot of behavior that has ends justified the means which is not a sort of style of thinking I saw in the Beatitudes that same spirit of being besieged is of course not only limited to evangelicals in America but growing there's growing distrust across demographic sectors and I think you even said in your book the distrust actually tends to increase as people get younger each succeeding generation is more distrustful than the one preceding it and that there's good reason for that the behavior online actually shows that there's less trustworthiness and that's probably part of the reason that the very behavior that often leads towards deep friendships interpersonally grace and transparency and vulnerability is exactly what will get you crushed online so since technology is not going away what hope do you have or what advice would you give for essentially being able to conduct yourself wisely in your online communities but still have the kind of relationships interpersonally that allow for that that deep friendship that grace and that communion that you talk about yeah one of the things I think about is whether bad online behavior is a product of being online or just bad behavior and I do think the lies of our culture feed particularly acutely online and the lies are successful make you feel fulfilled I can make myself happy I can have my own truth that I can earn love and that the real love is conditional love and if you put people in a hyper individualistic culture that's about competition and it desires of the ego when they get online and untrammeled by personal contact they'll go wild and so I think we're all causing each other a lot of pain because of this and the most scary statistic in American society right now is that since 27 to 2011 the teenage suicide rate is up by 70 percent and I give talks about suicide a lot around the country and it's always somebody comes up to me I was at Goldman Sachs and you think that would be a pretty privileged spot and it is but a guy came up to me afterwards and said I lost my son at 14 and then he he face began to crumble and he ran out of the room and so that's in part a social media story and my only hope and it is a real hope is that we get technologies sometimes we we thought this was going to be a great technology which would bring us all together turned out we underestimated sin and and but then we figure out how to use it and I'm pretty sure Andy Crouch was here at trudy forum he's got a book call the tech wise family and Andy has a couple techniques and one of them is before he turns on any screen he goes outside every morning and looks at the sky it's like put it in his place and then he's got other things he's got a Sabbath ritual one hour a day one day a week forgets one week or one month a year is he's got built-in rituals and I am the last person to be preaching on this because I'm the worst but we'll figure out rituals to control the technology and it won't be perfect but it'll be better than it is right now in your book you talk about four commitments as being essential to the good life maybe you could share a little bit about that yeah so the book is really the two mountain metaphors between two moral systems one based on hyper individualism of the meritocracy and the desires of the ego and the other moral system which is based on giving yourself away and I say the the the second mountain life is the committed life the first mountain life is let's keep our options open but the second mountain life and when I was at my pits in 2013 the first thing I learned was freedom sucks that political freedom was good economic freedom is OK social freedom just sucks all my married friends were projecting their fantasies onto me what I would do if I were you be a big swinger and all that but I was like no this sucks because the person who's socially unattached is not only lonely but unremembered and so that's why isolation is so painful to people as erotic themselves and so the in practical terms the life that is not about self is a life given to commitments we're not going back to the 1950s I defer to Authority that culture is not coming back so a culture we can move forward to to me as a life of I commit to you I promise I make promises and most of us not all but most of us make one or more of these four commitments to a spouse and family to a vocation to a philosophy or faith into a community and the fulfillment of life is how well you're going to select those commitments and how well you execute upon them and so I was teaching this class at Yale called the four commitments figuring college students over the next 15 years are gonna probably make at least three of those four commitments and how do you do it well and the one they could their assist of course the vocation how do you choose a vocation the one I could not get them to focus on was marriage one of my students said marriage is a box that'll come in the mail when I'm 35 I was like it's the most important decision you're gonna make think about this one read Jane Austen recharge Elliot learn from the Masters and so we ran through practical advice on how to choose a marriage partner how do you choose a vocation because it's not only saying on for relationship it's knowing how to do it and having the life hacks to be well to be good at relationship and frankly that's one of the reasons I think Christian or Jewish behavior is not so much better is because every we're all stuck in the culture of individualism we're living in two relationship well is really super hard because we're so detached from each other some of the advice I pass along it's not my advice it's advice I've passed along like in a marriage partner marriage should be a 50-year conversation pick someone you can talk with forever and then the bits of advice I give on how to stay in a marriage I pass alone one I got from the internet just like it cuz its light-hearted sometimes they say when you're angry your spouse you should never go to bed angry sometimes just go to bed you're tired you'll wake up you'll feel better another piece of advice this woman lived Metzger gave is if you're a wife and you feel inclined to about your husband to his mom and not yours because his mom will forgive him yours never work over the last couple of decades and perhaps with men in particular it seems like often the call to renew one's commitment to relationship to your family comes through a call to renew your commitment to your faith and I'm thinking perhaps most particularly about the Promise Keepers and it meant 20 years ago that often that is the way it happens to what extent do you believe a religious revival is necessary for the reweaving of the civic path fabric it would help be helpful you know I'll say two quick things first if you look at the one time in American society we really do turn ourselves around both morally politically and specifically it was between 1890 and 1910 and Robert Putnam was writing a book on this and he says this happened in three phases and the first was religious we went from the social Darwinism which was super individualistic to the social gospel movement then it was civic in the 1890s you had the creation of all these civic organizations the Boys & Girls Scouts the Boys and Girls Club the environmental movement the temperance movement the settlement house movement in double-a-c-p the unions so you had the Civic revival and then eventually decades later they all put themselves together and created a political revival progressivism so he said it went religio cultural civic political and that seems to me a very convincing now are we gonna have a religious revival people who work for the magazines and newspapers I write for have been waiting for that for 50 or 60 years and sometimes I think I see it like if you go to New York City you see tree Grace churches you see all the Redeemers Keller's 19 churches or whatever and you see all these churches they were at a church in in Brooklyn which was like the most beautiful hit stirs on earth were all at church I was like this looks like the beginning of something but then you could frankly you go out into the places where we think the Bible Belt is in high school educated America and there's really no evidence of it in fact there's going backwards and so I I just look at the data and I don't see I see the rise of the nuns if you ask Americans do you pray the number of Americans who say they pray is very constant over the decades the number of Americans who pray around other people is in decline they pray alone out on a walk they have a religion that's their own religion that nobody else could possibly believe in because they're so in the Euro syncretic because they made it up and so it's it's hard to be optimistic but I do think there will be a cultural revival and it may not be a rival of faith but a revival of community and relation so one last question before we go to audience questions which is you talked quite a bit in your book about the importance of moral ecologies and you also cite this completely depressing study that I think Harvard did where they interviewed I think it was 10,000 middle school students and high school students and asked them essentially what is more important in your household that you achieve or that you be kind and over 80 percent of the students said that they achieve so given that that is the norm in terms of moral ecologies of students what advice would you give both to those students as well as to their parents in terms of discerning and developing a moral ecology that actually values and virtue over attainment yeah first thing I would say is obviously put relationship at the center of your life putting your friendships at the center one of my students said to me my life is about putting out fires if I have a test that's a fire if I have my girlfriend is sometimes a fire my friends are never a fire and so you tend to under and rest in your friendships and so the way to avoid having a first Mountain Valley there's probably no way but the best way is to over invest in your friendships the second thing is don't create a more ecology join one and so you don't have to do it on your own so like I'm the way I Ellis traited moral ecology is I work for the NewsHour and my first 10 years there there was a guy named Jim Lehrer and Larry was reticent on the air but very expressive when the camera was not on him and so when I said something that he liked his eyes would crinkle and pleasure and when I saw it said something crass some cheap joke his mouth had turned down and displeasure so for 10 years I tried to get the eye crinkle and avoid the mouth downturn and he never said a word to me but in that way he communicated to me a proper standard of behavior and he not only communicate to me crew we've kidded everybody else around the program and so he's been retired for four five or ten years but the Jim Lehrer moral ecology is still there on the NewsHour and I think one of the greatest things a person can do is leave behind a moral ecology and different schools have different ones different organizations and they're they're the fabric of character the fabric of what we do this is what we do this is how we are here and you can have a really great moral ecology that has not no faith at all most have no faith at all but a country can the standard of behavior can change very radically one of the ultimate experiences of my early boyhood was Super Bowl three and that Illustrated to me a shift in culture on one side of the field was a guy named Johnny Unitas played for the Baltimore Colts 1950s guy crew-cut boring a certain attitude of the way you're supposed to be on the other side of a field was a guy named Joe Namath Namath grew up five miles from Johnny Unitas but ten years younger and suddenly Namath was a guy with long hair $5,000 fur coats his memoir that he wrote was called I can't wait until tomorrow because I get better-looking every day and so suddenly the whole culture had shifted we're one decade reticence was admired next expressiveness once institutions next rebel once old and experienced young rebellious and so the culture can really shift all at once and my experience we shifted in relation to pain and we're in pain now and we're in the middle of a very bumpy shift we're gonna turn now to what's always the most dynamic part of an evening conversation which is hearing questions from the audience those of you who have been to a Trinity forum evening conversation before know that we have three guidelines for questions we ask that all questions be brief all questions be civil and all questions be in the form of a question we have several different microphones all ready to go please wait till you are called on and the microphone actually reaches you if you would just stand state your name that would be great we'll take the first one back here in the corner hi my name is Molly Gill thank you so much I enjoyed your book I was really excited to see you mention Richard Rohr in your book I'm a big fan and I think you even cited following upward which is a book where he talks about the true self versus the false self and I couldn't help when I was reading your book but make the parallel connection between the first and second mountain and the true and false self and so I wanted you to comment on that and ask if that was intentional and you saw it the same way and also maybe just talk a little bit about how his writing has influenced yours yeah so it has influenced mine there are certain though a lot of people are writing have written similar things that book falling upwards it's like it's more first and second half of life so it's a little more chronological and mine is I think you could be on the second round at any age but then now and has says you we all build an ego ideal for ourselves and then at some point in life we find out we're much more beautiful than the ego ideal and so we put away the ego ideal it's a similar process of how this transformation happen and I think roars are very beautiful first of all he's a very beautiful man we went out to New Mexico to meet him and just he lives the life he he is one of those inner light people I've had a chance to you meet so many of these people who just radiates joy and grace from our weave project at Aspen we get to work with yo-yo ma and yo-yo ma is just he's happy all the time he's he's just giving he's delighted by every person there's a phrase in weight of glory that if you didn't meet if you'd never met a human being and you finally met one you'd be very inclined to worship this creature because people are so amazing and roar carries that around with him he's got a new book out the universal christ which i think is probably the most radical book and it really some will find it to universalistic but he's a someone who preaches love and and lives love and is he's yeah the concept I mentioned earlier on the edge of inside is one of his concepts the one thing I've trouble with he's a big believer in the Enneagram and I'm not saying I've trouble with the anagram I can never remember my number questions right here second row good evening in in dealing with the perception of your conversion from republicanism to a Democrat how do you or do you sometimes perceive that you're the victim of a knife fight and all you have is a rubber hose and how do you react to those perceptions that I've converted from Republican people's receptive people's perceptions as to how you you express yourself yeah and your philosophy well I I have two philosophical heroes one is Edmund Burke who teaches that life is really complicated we should be very cautious and understanding it and therefore change should be incremental gradual and constant and my second hero is Alexander Hamilton who's a Puerto Rican hip hip hop star from the height [Applause] and and he believes in limited but energetic government to enhance social mobility and so those became my load starts by the time I joined the Weekly Standard and maybe before that Burke I discovered in college and they tend toward a certain sort of dispositional conservatism which existed when I was working in National Review with Buckley and has been more and more replaced by first a free-market fundamentalism to put it one way which I was fine with because I like markets but then it's been replaced by something else that I don't recognize and so I'm politically homeless right now and like a lot of nevertrump errs and so I don't know if that's made I've never called one of the things Buckley was very astute about he said we're not Republicans or conservatives there's a big difference and as I went to college campuses over the years that difference was no longer present in the way a lot of young people spoke but that was something he's distilled in us it's a system of ideas not a political party because when it becomes a political party thought ceases and so I still call myself a conservative though in any real taxonomy I would be a moderate and I don't think it's because you know what when I went to the New York Times I was and remain even with Ross and Brett there in in the mind of a lot of our readers as conservative as it's possible to be so I invite you to read the comments under any of my column like the idea there's a distinction between me and and culture is not it's lost on not most of our readers but some of our readers and so my 6 months on the job were super hard because I'd never been hated on a mass scale before and but you sort of get used to that and in your to it and it hurt the first six months but there for a little while frankly you realize that this was before any faith that you just have to love your enemies that you have to treat them as people bringing you gifts no matter how vicious they can seem and that's the only way to psychically survive it Francis right oh you're second row hi Francis Collins David you've been very open and honest about the doubt issue which I think it was troubling to a lot of believers because you're not supposed to have those things and yet as you've articulated it's anybody who's really honest with themselves has to struggle with that every day and Paul Tillich says doubt is not the opposite of faith it's an element of faith but doubt is a opportunity to go in several directions perhaps for some people it's a scary one sort of an open doorway towards loss of faith if the doubt becomes greater than the faith for others it's like oh well I gotta live with it for others it is like an opportunity okay what is it that's bugging me about faith that I need to understand better how do you deal with doubt you've been very clear about it what does it do for you yeah I I think one thing I've felt and I've actually learned this I ran is the it's but sometimes doubt is expressed as nearness and close or farness as as the presence of the ineffable or the seeming absence of the ineffable and is in what state is your soul feel close to it and or does it feel far away and sometimes when I'm especially when I'm reading a book especially your book I by the way I being Francis has been destroying to my any faith by the way that the word winsome is overused in Christian circles I think it should be banned but except for in regards to Francis Francis so sometimes it's it's not even an intellectual doubt it's just his God closer as he feel absent and so that's why I keep a spiritual book going all the time and I'm I'm emotionally sixteen so I listen to a lot of Hillsong and Bethel music totally works for me it's like Handel's Messiah and all these songs that say oh god you're my best boyfriend ever but I find approaching nearness sometimes with that spiritual with a book that really lifts you up and experiences though lifts you up and sometimes in a religious service but it's that the soul is everyday being degraded or elevated depending on what we do and I will say that one of the things that's hardest her faith is going on book tour because I'm in selling mode and it's it corrupts you it's never it's never goes away and I don't know maybe when Richard roars out on book tour he's like holy but I don't know I hated the way Ellen treated my book yes like so I do find the world is a it's it's it that seems to be a little the wrong word actually thinness of air or something just a spirit presence or absence these are moods and spiritual states more than intellectual positions will take two more questions mark last row over there thanks I'm mark legen and among things senior fellow with the Trinity forum David I was not going to ask a question about politics but the door has been opened especially with your subtle gentle graceful discussion of evangelical as adjective and noun you're a neoconservative in the 1980s neoconservatives helped longtime conservatives see some things with new eyes so to talk about this heart of Christianity and the idea that everybody is a value of equal value what would you share that connects your own faith journey with this moment for Christians and remembering that the other is of equal value at a moment that that's really being challenged do well you know one of the things and this cuts both ways so are in 2015 I wrote 900 columns with the same theme don't worry Donald Trump will never get the Republican nomination for the presidency and having done that I figured and partly I was living here I spent a lot of time in New York and I taught at Yale so I wrote the Acela from here to New Haven that was my life so how could I get out of touch with America [Laughter] and so I so from that I went to I spent really often on the last three years traveling around the country first just as a personal project and then with weave in Trump country and beyond and the one thing you learn in politics and political journalism is that the people you think of as part of a type never fit into the type so you go to a trump rally and you think oh I know what Trump voters are like well the first person you meet is a feminist lesbian biker who does macrame and joins the NRA like they cross all your categories and that's true on the right and it's also true on the left and so with this weave project that we look for weavers we go around the country looking for people who are creating community and some of them have been through horrible valleys and one of them is a woman named Sarah in Ohio Isabel's here we she and I went to visit with Sarah and she her husband killed their kids at himself one afternoon and she now gives away her life to women who suffer from violence she is a free pharmacy she teaches and the depth of goodness at the same time there's a lot of she says I'm a woman on the edge so the depth of goodness in any human being is so much deeper than their politics and that's true with my colleagues at the New York Times more likely to be on the left frankly and it's true with Trump voters and virtue is is distributed in my view evenly across political boundaries and one of the reasons I'm a moderate is because I think pullet politics is a limited activity Samuel Johnson has a couplet of all the things that human hearts are endure how few are those that kings and caws can cure Kings can cause and cure so most of the important parts of our life are the quality of our souls the quality of our relationships and I've almost never lost a friend over politics because it's just not that important and having been on the left on the right on the atheists on the believer I hope I'm I have many weaknesses but one of them is the ability to sympathize with the other side because invariably I was on it at one point I'll take one last question from the audience in the back there Dave David coffin in the older Christian tradition thoughtful folk would reflect on the nature of the world and produce a natural theology concerning the existence and attributes of God it strikes me that your book is a kind of natural theology of the existence and attributes of the human soul and is luminous in that but when you move from revelation in the world to redemptive revelation you come in to additional issues take for example original sin have you had time to come to grips with how that doctrine of though Edwards said it was the only empirical appearently demonstrable doctrine of Christian revelation have you had time to come to grips with how original sin deals in the second mount yeah that's a very excellent question yeah I know on the drive home with my wife she's gonna say that was a really good question and she's gonna say your answer was only so you know I sinned of course doesn't go away and I guess the first distinction you make which I hadn't thought about was between writing a book sort of about the soul versus the divine I think the honest answer is I'm not anywhere close to being ready to write that book you write the book from where you are in your spot on your journey and as a journalist it's a lot easier to observe people than to experience the divine and so other people that I would love to be able to do that someday but we'll see as for sin on the second mountain of course it doesn't go away but I do think you know one things that's been part of my understanding is deepening an awareness of human goodness at the same time you deepen awareness of sin during radical on both ends one of my favorite definitions of sin is an infinite allegiance to a finite thing and I think I got that from the something weird Empire nevermind I was gonna say Shawshank Redemption it's but that's guilty book about China being in a prison war camp in China and so that is ever-present and of course selfishness is ever-present and since I'm an a fan of Augustan disordered love is ever-present but I would say one of the essences of being in this second mountain is people who've fallen into themselves and that the thing about being in the valley is that you can either be broken by it or you can be broken open by it and the people who are broken turn angry and harder and resentful and they make themselves impenetrable because they've been hurt and they lash out at people there's a great phrase pain that it's not transformed gets transmitted they make people around them hurt but the people who are really made it to the second mountain have fallen into themselves and fall and found what Annie Dillard calls our complex and inexplicable caring for one another which is the complete relationality Francis and I have a friend whose wife said when her first daughter was born she realized she loved him more than evolution required loved her more than evolution required and that's become such a essential thing for me because some things we do for our genes some things we do to pay the rent but there's an enchantment to human life that goes beyond and frankly an enchantment to the world and so the the people on the second mountain have fallen out of love with the desires of the ego or at least they've come to seem a little smaller and have put more central emphasis on the desire of the heart which is fusion to one another and is their the soul which is desire for fusion with the good and I do so I do think it makes they have better loves and they love them in better ways and does that mean anybody ever achieves the point where they give away selfishness I never met such a person I Mother Teresa journals are bitching on this front or Dorothy Day if ever there were people who gave themselves away utterly it was them and yet Mother Teresa went decades without experiencing faith and had to preside to pursue her life even though she'd lost all contact with God for like 80 percent of her life and then somebody explained to her that well the poor suffer a loss what's most dear and you have suffered a loss of what's most dear and this is part of your burden of sharing the burden with the poor and this made a great impact on her and so I'm sure did make her a saint but it made her pretty close so I hope on the second mountain that your average of behavior is at least oriented to your proper loves [Applause] we highly recommend the second mountain it will be available for sale right there you can probably get David to sign a copy of the book that you buy as well we would come in that to you we also want to come in to you an invitation which should be on each of your chairs and look a little bit like this which is an invitation to join the Trinity form Society where we try as a community to wrestle with the questions that matter most in life and in an embodied way offer an alternative to a culture so often a wash and triviality distraction alienation and anger we try to provide an intellectually rigorous warmly hospitable place to discuss together what matters most and so if that is our mission as well as our joy and we invite you to join us join with us in that by joining the Trinity forum Society of course there are many benefits to joining the Trinity forum society perhaps one of the most important of which is the first in people who join tonight get a free and signed copy of David's book the second mountain so skip the line join the training form Society will save you a lot of time in addition to that you'll receive our quarterly Trinity form readings David mentioned one of them earlier the long loneliness where he and his immensely talented white and Snyder Brooks basically introduced some of the writings of Dorothy day provided context and background all readings also have discussion questions in the back that is so they will function as a book club and a bag as a subtle encouragement to all of you to join book clubs and essentially replicate some of the conversations you've found here you'll also receive our monthly podcast as well as our daily list of what we're reading recommended reading feeds throughout the day so we really encourage you to take advantage of that we hope that you will join us in those efforts if you are interested in also serving as a sponsor of a future evening conversation we would love to talk with you and in fact if I could have my colleague Elissa Abraham stand up and wave her arm just so everyone can see who she is feel free to talk with Elissa about that afterwards if that's of to you we hope that you'll join us for future evening conversations our next one is actually in Atlanta on June 10th where we'll be hosting Robbie George and Cornel West in a conversation on deep friendship across deep difference and then shortly we will also be releasing our fall lineup so stay tuned for that in terms of events in DC as we wrap up it is always appropriate and with thanks an evening like this does not happen without many people contributing to it so we'd like to thank again our collaborative partner Baylor University and all that they did to make this happen with a particular shout out to David quarry and to Molly Moore who is here somewhere for all the work that went into that I also want to thank our volunteers who have helped out tonight Phillip towels Nancy Ritter Emma Ayers Elise Abbas draws and Matthew McKnight thank you to all of you I want to thank our rockstar photographer clay Blackmore with clay and company the staff at the National Press Club who are always just consummate professionals we've really enjoyed working with you my fantastic colleagues newly promoted ELISA Abraham who is now our director of advancement office manager Becca noise our crackerjack interns Kristen Hairston Christopher par and first day on the job intern Katherine hi SCA's finally immense thanks again to you David for your characteristic deep and thoughtful comments and what a joy it's been to talk with you thank you to each of you for coming in your presence tonight and good night [Applause] [Music]

Channel: The Trinity Forum

Views: 16,611

Rating: 4.8579884 out of 5

Keywords: faith, politics, commitment, family, vocation

Id: Rh5lQrhGECQ

Length: 95min 44sec (5744 seconds)

Published: Wed May 29 2019