Jonathan Pageau: Orthodoxy, Peterson, and the Symbolic World

[Music] hey welcome to my christ today i'm joined by jonathan budjoe jonathan cars used in orthodox and other traditional images he also designs products teaches and makes fantastic videos that explore how ancient patterns can re-enchant our contemporary life just to begin then today jonathan can you tell us a little bit please about your background and some of the key events in your life that have to form you and your love for christ in his church well i my parents uh we i come from quebec which used to be the most catholic place in the world pretty much you know the vatican had secret plans to move here if mussolini won the war that's how catholic it was uh and so in the 60s like it happened all over the 60s late 60s there was a kind of revolution uh we called the quiet revolution where everything changed and people started fleeing the church on mass um my parents in that moment converted to kind of evangelical christianity and they did it out of a real authentic desire to follow christ they felt like the church was uh the catholic church was empty and superstitious and that it just it was very uh it was just a veneer of christianity um and so i grew up in that in that world where my father was actually a baptist pastor you know recently converted from catholicism entered in a church full of people converted from catholicism so i grew up both with a very strong love of christ and a very dedicated church because it was all new it was all young but also a kind of virulent anti-catholicism which was was which was really imma like very present in the church because everybody who's there basically had converted from catholicism and so it was a very puritan form of christianity where no crosses no bells no no liturgical calendar we barely celebrate christmas we barely celebrate easter some people didn't even celebrate christmas that's how puritan it was and so that's what i grew up in my parents weren't extreme at all my father is actually a very thoughtful and uh wonderful person but it was mostly just the let's say the circumstances and the culture in which i was growing up and so but i was quite content i met amazing people really dedicated christians i've never had the bad kind of personal experiences that people feel you know that sometimes lead them away from the church i had very good experiences with with very god loving people but in my 20s i really felt like uh there was something missing and there was a kind of superficiality to to the faith and it led me in a kind of spiritual crisis and the crisis was also part it was also born in my art because i was i knew i was going to be visual artists quite young but there was a there was a kind of uh let's say an unsaid hostility towards the visual arts it wasn't explicit but it was implicitly suspicious because uh because uh a very puritan background and um and so i tried to deal with that in university you know what it does it mean to be a christian and make art what does it mean to be a christian and make contemporary art because i was in the world of kind of contemporary theory post-modernism all of that stuff being really faced with that and all of it really led me into a crisis which ended up also being a crisis of faith so my brother and i all at the same time my brother who now has written a book on symbolism uh we both kind of went through that crisis at the same time exploring spiritual traditions reading all kinds of weird stuff like you do in your early twenties um and then luckily you know i came upon the church fathers and a lot of the mysteries i was looking for a lot of the i would say the kind of world view that i was hoping to find in these these kind of weird esoteric texts or these or these eastern traditions i really found in san gregor vanessa and saying max was a confessor and my brother he found more in kind of rabbinical uh studies and we realized that what we were looking for this really integrated vision of the world this kind of cosmic vision of what that wasn't just like a faith on top of a scientific materialism but that was really this this vision of the world that went you know from the highest to the lowest that held the world together was already there in christianity it's just that i had never been in contact with it and so in discovering saint gregoria and the church fathers in general and then also discovering kind of the great medieval synthesis in terms of art in terms of architecture in terms of this liturgical experience which fills you know all aspects of life you know from from like i said from time to space you know to the way people identify themselves i really fell in love with that language and i realized that it was just the language that was already there in scripture but born out in time and space in music and poetry and in uh in visual images and so having kind of realized that that that language wasn't really still living or was i wasn't as prominent in the western tradition i was slowly kind of guided i was slowly kind of by little steps and little miracles and little surprises i was led into the orthodox church uh where my the church fathers that i loved so much saint gregory meets the same extremists um santa from the syrian are are central in terms of the cosmology and the way that things still are so that's kind of what led me to where i am to becoming an icon carver to becoming someone who's interested in symbolism and you know these symbolic patterns which we find in scripture and in art that kind of what brings it together yeah wonderful and then um were there any persons that were especially inspirational or influential along the way in that journey close to you well i would say for sure the church fathers i named were the the closest to me there are a few people along my journey i would say before i really discovered the church fathers which are part of it like this is going to be surprising to some but uh jacques had a huge influence on me in college and he was actually my first contact with apophatic thinking because people don't know his thought very well he wrote a little book called save the name in which he did a reading of the sherabini wanderer which is a 17th century kind of negative theology and uh that really struck me i never heard anything like it like i never had any sense of this notion of beyond being or this idea of of the infinite as as uh beyond the nameable you know um and so that had a massive impact on me and also the the taking down of the modern uh hegemony like let's say the the kind of scientific materialist hegemony of discourse was kind of broken down from me by postmodern thinkers and i still am thankful for them for doing that today but it wasn't enough and it and there's a there's another writer his name is renegino who's a traditionalist uh who is also kind of part of my journey because he you know when you read him as a 20 year old who's kind of wondering what's going on like he his writing is like razor blades he just he just slashes everything everything and so once you if you get through his writing uh you have a completely different worldview uh but like i said again i thought a lot of his stuff is weird and it's not uh kind of off-key but he was part of the people that led me towards the church and then finally vladimir lovski who's a who's a 20th century russian theologian russian immigrant to france his work just blew me away it was just because you could see in his in the way that he wrote in the word that he used he was trying to use even some uh a language that would appeal to kind of westerners who had a sensibility to spirituality let's say he was trying to use words to help them understand what the orthodox tradition was about and uh it really it really affected me quite a bit you know by the time i walked into an orthodox church i i was already convinced it was like it was just formality by then amazing that's um eerily familiar to my own story i guess i just want going on and stuff like that later on too but um i want to look at then some of your work on youtube as an icon carver and with things like the orthodox arts journal and more besides that so perhaps we can begin with your recent conversation with john peterson and your wonderful friendship with him and our mutual friend paul von declare has said that we can see here just how close um you guys actually are and that you take each other's work very seriously it's a really beautiful thing to witness so he's um contrasted it with other chats which different high status people have who are maybe more unfamiliar with each other's work because of a time constraints and different things i suppose but it's just not the same i don't think is what comes across in your conversation so um can you share maybe one or two reflections in that discussion and why you think it resonated with so many people yeah well it's interesting because i think it's like jordan peterson and i i don't know i wouldn't say we're we're super close in in the sense of a deep friendship that is that is i would say that when we encountered each other right in 2015 it was obvious that we were on the same we were in the same field together and we realized we recognized each other as as being very similar in terms of uh thought patterns and in terms of approach and sensibilities and so in that way we really connected very quickly and so it would be i would say we became friends rather quickly um but then he became world famous like i had when i talked to him then i hadn't talked to him in two years i think or maybe even a little more um and i think that i think that jordan's off like authenticity i think is is really transparent and that really touches people that he is not afraid to show his struggle his doubts um that he is also in a situation of deep suffering i think really resonated with people and i think it also to see him teetering on the verge of of of seeing this these this mystery you know seeing the mystery of of the incarnation uh resisting but being tempted and everybody could kind of feel that hesitation and temptation in him i think that's why it really connected with so many people in a way he he is kind of manifesting this moment this moment which is that there's a large amount of young people who had been told that christianity is just stupid silly superstition and now through a series of completely surprising events or jordan peterson but you know through these these movements in cognitive science and these different things that are going on have suddenly found themselves strangely capable of understanding what it's about and connecting to it on a personal level so there are hundreds of thousands of young people that are kind of standing in the position that jordan peterson is standing and some of them even watch him hesitate and in that hesitation gives them the courage to step forward and to kind of move to move more than jordan is even willing to do and so i think that that's that's what's going on yeah marvelous and then um personally for you then what have you most enjoyed about the kind of wild journey that really kicked off with jordan since he blew up well it's been really a surprise i didn't i didn't expect this you know uh i've been working on all these symbolic ideas for years i mean since i was in my early twenties and you know i'd written i'd written about this kind of symbolism um a little bit in the orthodox arts journal you know since we started it in 2012 but to be honest i've almost never talked about this stuff just because i felt like nobody would even understand what the subject is not only understand what i'm you know the the the specifics but even the frame and so and so what happened is that jordan kind of blew those doors open up just blew those doors open and all of a sudden i found myself surprised to have people that can not only understand what i'm talking about but deeply resonate and be willing to kind of jump in and engage into this rediscovery with me and so i think that that's really been the most exciting thing is that i'm not i don't feel alone in that world anymore and i i you know there's i would say maybe like about a thousand people that are really involved that are you know that are posting that are just kind of involved in the discussion participating in the the comment section but also on you on facebook and these groups and to me that's really that's the most exciting and i'm trying hard now to get the let's say the cream of the crop of those people to now get involved more which is why we have a blog on the website now and you know people have their own channels and so i'm trying to kind of go on people's channels as well to try to create this sense that uh that this is more than just me it's not about me it's really is something which is happening a movement which is which is taking place yeah magnificent thank god for that and um i do love the central emphasis that you place on theosis and jordan when he talks about the call to adventure in christ and things like that that was one of the first things he really caught me and um sat me in fire with the christian theo drama and the beauty of iconography so it's funny you might ask me that was he was very formative in me becoming a christian as well and just regarding jordan then as a friend and someone that you have been in the same way that with in some ways what would you like to see next for him then i mean it's not it's not hard to know what i would like i mean i i have been had the joy of watching uh his his wife tammy move very much closer to christianity and find a great relief and joy in that movement and so you know i i really hope that that jordan will find the place in him you know find that spot in him where he can recognize uh christ and and kind of enter into a communion like actually enter into into the body of christ i think that that to me i think that he's kind of at the he's at that door i mean he might never he might never make that move but it's obviously i think that that's what i would would hope so yeah god willing and um as you say he's certainly acting as kind of moses figure kill like c.s lewis even though he led people to the catholic church he led people to christianity in general and it's great so um you personally have i've managed to to draw young people into the christian story as i was mentioning with you before at schools in london and um i'm most grateful for what you're doing in that respect and exploring films and things like logan to batman and beyond and if you point that almost upon there why then is the medium of film is so helpful for you in opening people who are maybe outright secularists and even lukewarm christians up to the symbolic world and the christian story well i mean if you want to know where our stories are right now that's mostly where they are they are in film on tv shows um and so once you understand the pattern let's say or once you kind of live in the pattern the pattern of the bible and the pattern of christ then you realize that that's really what the world is made of and so it's once you kind of get what you i don't know what to say is once you kind of get it it just now it's just a matter of like how much energy do you have to put your attention on different things in order to talk about them so once that spotlight gets shown on one or thing or another then it reveals itself in that pattern so i i knew that talking about movies would be a way for people to quickly understand what i'm talking about and also help people understand because people are so alienated by religion and i understand why there are so many reasons why that happened but it i it seemed to me like one of the best places to help people see that this is talking about reality this isn't just an arbitrary thing you have to believe to go to heaven or whatever or you know all this kind of nonsense it really is a description of reality and i need to i want to find ways any way possible to help you see that it's actually talking about reality so if i can give you the key to a movie that you love or to a tv series or to to something that you that you connect with if i can give you a key that you and surprise you with that key uh you know a good example would be like that batman video i did where i'm i try i show people that the story of batman traces onto the garden of eden which is something people wouldn't necessarily think but once you see it you can't unsee it you're right once you've seen it it's like that that's it you've seen it and so that's what that's the kind of thing that i was hoping to do is going to provoke this this change of thinking yeah that's magnificent and then one of my favorites was the logan one you touched upon the sound of the mountain animality the gowns of skin and really landed isn't gregory vanessa for people like me i want to ask you next then ken essentially hard is that what you're doing differ from say what joseph campbell talked about or even jordan and his more darwinian and archetypal approach um so i think that like this is something that people maybe criticize me can criticize me about but my understanding of joseph campbell and and jung and all of them is that they really want to place the pattern in the psyche the human psyche and see it as as the pattern of the human psyche and so the idea that the the this is your pattern of as a human person this is kind of the story that you engage in and if you engage on that story then you will find a type of fulfillment my contention is much bigger than that my contention is that the this pattern is the pattern of attention itself it's the pattern and because it's the pattern of attention it ends up being the way in which the world lays itself out just that just that and so it's not just only in your own personal stories it's in every single thing you can recognize as having unity any any perceptual any perception of unity in the world will follow the pattern of the mountain the the pattern you know that is in in the in the beginning of scripture and so i think that that maybe is the difference and it takes a while for people to kind of get it to get that that's what i'm talking about because it's not just about cyclization cyclization it it is psycho the psychological part is is there but it's not just that it's actually much more than that and and so it's like it's the the pattern of a story is also the pattern of a city the pattern of a family is the pattern of a house it's the pattern of all these things and in a way i think that jordan is surprisingly enough comes closer to what i'm saying but i also believe and you can see it a little bit in my conversation with him that i think he doesn't go to the end of his own theory like he doesn't completely acknowledge or live in the conclusion of his own theory and so you can see in my conversation with him where he says do you think that the the narrative level and the objective level meet and my answer is to remind him of the things he said himself which is that not only can they meet but they inevitably meet and there's no other way for reality to exist except they meet because every act of perception implies a a hierarchical pattern and so it implies the good to know to notice anything is to already evaluate it you're always evaluating and so because you're evaluating you're always aiming you're always aiming towards the good and that aim that that's the mountain that's the that's the pyramid that's all those patterns that are it's the pyramid it's the it's the pattern of your own perception if you stand there and you notice that on the edge of your perception everything is hazy and whatever it is you focus on becomes clear it's like that's it that's the pattern and so so so i think that that's the difference but i think i don't know it's like that's the thing that i'm always trying to convince jordan but you can see that he it shatters sometimes it's shattering for some reason for him so so he he said at the end of the conversation he said he said there's so much i can handle talking to you it's like there's just so much i can handle talking to you which which is which was which he had said even at the outset before we started recording i noticed he was he was weird and i thought you nervous he said yes i'm nervous i said why are you nervous he said well because i know what we're going to be talking about and so so i think that you know so i think that's that's would be the difference with with what i'm presenting yeah that's most interesting thank you jonathan um i hadn't really for sure saw this question at the moment but i don't know if you want to it's okay i can't go down the street or move on but um is there a difference then so rabbi jonathan sex used to talk about them the mean the meaning of the system lies outside of the system and then obviously we're coming from from it at it from a small orthodox they understand in the very least that god is outside of the cosmos itself or the universal multiverse and reveals himself through these patterns and things like that whereas i guess is jordan following that's um kind of secular age imminent freedom where the the unconscious and conscious things all come together but it is within the human memory and it's still a self-enclosed system that um is darwinian and plays a longer game but uh is still a kind of form of cantianism or something like that does that make sense maybe i i don't know like i don't know if that's the that's the hiccup with uh with jordan um and so but in a way i think i i think that jordan understands that all things point beyond themselves like they just do and so i it's like i don't i don't like using i don't like saying god is outside of the system um i'd i'd rather i rather like saying that god is let's say beyond the system and contains it like the system is in god there is there's nothing outside of god like there is no outside of god um um and so and so i think that he understands that things point beyond himself but i don't know if he understands also what that where that involves let's say yeah thanks for that jonathan yeah that's a good nice insight and um i'd love to hear a bit more about your experiences with people like you know and the perennialist school i had a somewhat chaotic background in dublin with sanatandarma islam stuff like that yeah and what is good and bad in some of those persons now you're looking back on it as a question yeah well okay so i i mean i think what's good about the the the parent list especially in my opinion uh gino is that guinea is a great tool against the modern illusion i mean he's the best tool if you read a crisis of the modern world it will just it smashes you know if you're if you read that with an open mind it will it will smash so many of your of your presuppositions about about the modern about modern reality and its accomplishments let's say so i think that i don't know if there's anybody better at doing that than than he did you know the rank the quantity is just a ruthless book uh i even warned people i said don't be careful like you read that it can drive you crazy because it it's like if you smash if i smash your world view i can leave you teetering i've seen people reading those i've seen people reading you know become insane like become paranoid and become uh like just weirdly paranoid because it really does smash smash something which is holding the world together so i think but i think that that's still what's good about the work in the sense that we need that especially if you're like in your 20s and you're you're exploring and you have a lot of space and time to think then it can really be helpful um i think that the negative part of the work is that what ended up happening and i don't know if it's if that's what gino wanted uh well first of all there's a lot of remainder of weird occult stuff in his stuff in his work just like you know you can imagine like origen he fought the he fought the gnostic so much that he was tainted by them you know and i think that that's something you see in guinea as well you know he remained a martin martinis his whole life um and he had he had he had uh let's say um suspicious uh relations let's say and and so i think that that's one part and then the second part is that what ends up happening with perennialists and this is something i've seen especially in the kind of type perennialist is is that they don't realize that they're part they're participating in the breakdown of the world they don't realize that they are actually part of they are fueling the kind of new age mush and new age breakdown that they themselves oppose because they they the the perennialists act as if they stand above all these religions and we were wondering like where are you standing like you they stand above these religions and then they look upon the religions and then they they they compare and contrast them and they they you know they point to all these different things as examples of the transcendent principles but they do so in a way that ends up being almost like another religion it's almost as if it's a religion in itself and they obviously would deny this they would say that's not what they're doing but that's the result that it ends up ends up causing and it fuels the universalist mush like the kind of i believe in the universe's thing therefore i'm nothing and i and i've seen it happen and i really and i really do think that that's a serious problem and that it leads to uh it it's fueling the chaos and it's fueling it's fueling weird things like it's fueling weird things like the idea of it's feeling the opposite of what gino said like yeah the perennialist seemed to be somehow part of globalization like there seemed to be a paralysis thread in in kind of this globalized culture and this idea of a one world one world government one world this there seems to be some perennialists that are in that that thing like prince charles is a good example of that where prince charles is obviously a perennialist but he's keeps talking in these weird globalist terms that are weird and surprising and he speaks as if he is again above and and appreciates islam and appreciates christianity and appreciates all these different traditions as if he he's floating above all of this and so that's the problem with friendliness and i and i and i don't see uh i don't see an easy solution about it um thanks for that jonathan and what then um are some of the lessons that maybe we should take away from the fact that people like us really look to these figures before we actually turn to our own christian riches then well i mean it's it's just like anything on the way that can that can feed you in the sense that i think truth is true that truth you get your truth get the truth wherever you can get it i don't i always tell people that like i don't think that i don't like people who tell me something like uh like a good example is origin it's like okay so origin says some heretical things but then people if you quote origin or if you if you if you make a gesture towards him or if you've read something in his book then all of a sudden you're suspicious like no origin said a lot of amazing things a lot of amazing insightful powerful things so much so that the fathers you love are the ones who published his book his books and so but he there there are things that he said that are wrong and let's point to those things and and you know and i i feel i think it's fair that he's not a saint and all these things i think are fair but it's the same for everybody and so whatever gino said which is true i think is fine to recognize and whenever he said that's not true there is problematic i think it's fine to just set aside because i don't identify with them it's it's actually easy it's like if i read um it's harder for for things that i actually identify with so if if let's say uh i don't know if saint basel the great says something problematic it's actually more of a difficulty for me than if genno says something problematic because i'm not in his body like i don't have i'm not in a body with him like i'm not he's like a he's like a spice on the side that i can kind of sprinkle on and i can really see inside into uh but i don't i don't feel like i have to follow him in any way and so i think that that's the way that i approach all these thinkers like i can i still have insight from uh from uh from uh from jagdehidah or or or different you know or heidiger for example like i get a lot of insight from heidegger but i wouldn't i'm not gonna spend my time talking about heidegger and so that maybe that's the thing it's like what i i tend to talk about things that say through christ and then once in a while i'll mention this as an example something odd or something off as an example just to help people see that this is a universal pattern and it appears all over i think it's the same for other traditions i think it's like sometimes you you encounter christians that weirdly talk about other religions more than they talk about their own christianity because they want to show like they they constantly want to show how these other religions are okay but it ends up making a weird upside down uh thing and but i think it's fine to to to once in a while say oh you know you know even rb said this very powerful thoughtful thing or you know like in the the bhagavad-gita there's this this interesting uh this interesting idea that is worth considering but i do so not as it not being my own right it's not my thing it's it's something i'm pointing to on the outside let's say and um then kind of internal to christianity i don't really like that word but we'll go with it anyway for um for our purposes so what is it really that's missing in the way it's developed in the west as it were that isn't landing with people so even from my own perspective whenever i was going up it really never landed with me because is this conception of jesus is it kind of weakling and enemies on the cross bleeding it doesn't contextualize the whole story so whenever i discovered a lavsky and people like that i was drawn to the christus vector model of atonement for example as primary you should say not exclusive and so we can really appreciate people's lack of zest in that respect and um i want us sort of how figures like maximus the confessor for example bring us back to that cosmic drama and how do they help us to see the patterns of reality laying themselves out and in ways that transcend our dominant secularist freedoms yeah well i think the one of the big problems has been moralism you know the reduction of christianity to to morality in terms of uh and obviously the the there is a there is a difficulty of the the notion of uh of sin also of understanding sin mostly in a kind of moral offense type of thing you know the idea of we've offended god we've offended uh and what it does is there's a sense in which there all of this is kind of arbitrary um and it's it's still it's still there i think it a lot of the potential of integrating it all together is still there but sometimes somehow it's as if some of the threads aren't connected together but when you read someone likes a maximus then you really understand that this is first and foremost like a metaphysical vision it's first and foremost you know this is the pattern of reality it's not arbitrary i can explain it to you in a way like i always kind of joke that if i can't say what i'm saying to a secular person like i haven't said anything if when i say it it just sounds completely ridiculous and you know so when you tell people like you've done bad things and you deserve to go to hell but then god sent jesus to die for your sins and if you believe that then you'll go to heaven like to me that doesn't mean anything anymore that doesn't mean anything it's a it's a it's a complete it's a complete um it's a it's a whitewash it's like a it's like it's just but i mean the thing is that i how can i say this it's like on the one hand i say that but i can also understand because it is still the story of christ and so it can still connect with people in a in a in a kind of weird intuitive or uh you know surprising way but i i think that that that presenting things that way really is is pulling the meaning out of it and so i would much rather use this you know the athanasius's uh incarnational vision of of of the world and seeing christ as this idea of assuming things and embodying them and and taking them into god by by descending into them let's say so the descent of god into death becomes something much more than just you know the a place for the wrath of god to find its to find its its uh let's say and the the vision for example of um the vision of hell as the love of god which you see in in the the syrian fathers for example is extremely convincing and it's like it's a very powerful way of explaining that and and i think it's not just orthodox because to be honest like i was reading c.s lewis and it's like it's all there in c.s lewis c.s lewis gets it very deeply in terms of understanding what hell is and what it means to to suffer because of your sins um and so so that's really been the way i've been trying to to present it it's first of all understand that this is really talking about reality you know it's not an arbitrary thing you need to believe uh to to get saved it's a it's an actual description of the world and it's a way you can participate in the world that will save you in the sense that it will heal you from your passions it will heal you from you know your your nihilism it'll it'll do all that so yeah marvelous and um funny enough did you mention that my friend lou marcus one of the guys that was with me for the the talk that jordan peterson retweeted he is extremely good on lewis and his views on hell and things like that and um he was orthodox and he's not an evangelical i was like interesting so um i want to ask you next then about our dominant scientism if we may call it that and um how may people maybe on the margins come to see and see through that as a crude story say with the likes of pink pinker's naivete which i think you pointed out nicely in your critique well it's very it's very it's really the science of consciousness which is helping people understand this or the science of perception and i think as an artist i i come to it so intuitively because when you're an artist and you make an image you realize that you are actually you have to synthesize what you're looking at because there's too much of what you're looking at and then once you realize that you have to do that for an image you actually realize realizing that you're doing it in your mind all the time that so the idea is that the world has too much stuff in it that's pretty much it the world is indefinite in in uh in detail you know it scales all the way up and scales all the way down to you know to quantum possibility um and so because of that in order in order for you to even notice anything there has to be a reason for you to to to notice something that categories are bound up in reason that there's a meaning for them and that that if i consider things and i put them in hierarchies of importance and i have to or else i would bump my knee into the table if i didn't have a hierarchy of importance like i would you know i would eat dirt i would like we all have this like irony we have a natural hierarchy of importance and that hierarchy of importance is what precedes the scientific world it precedes scientific perception that is you need a reason to look at something for it to then become a category that you can analyze so science doesn't give you the categories enya doesn't give you any category actually it can only analyze pre-existing categories it can only give you can only and it does it very well it can describe it it can quantify it can predict it can make even help you reproduce an identity but it doesn't give you the identity ever identities are already given and those and the and the place from which that comes is the very deep structure of being that we participate in through meaning it's a it's the it's the revenge of aristotle it's the revenge of plato it's like all of a sudden you realize that when aristotle talked about potentiality and the connection between the actual and the potential it's like that's actually how the world exists like it really does exist because the in front of you is a field of it's like an indefinite field of potentiality and you have to contrain constrain it in order to engage with it yeah that makes sense thanks jonathan and is there also the problem that baked into a lot of those conceptions you have this myth of progress that is taken as an axiom as it were and which i think you see in liberal types like pinker like sam harris and so on and um that progress initial progress doesn't make any sense to me well because it's like a it's a it's hilarious the progress is the funniest thing in the modern world it's one of the it's one of the biggest most hilarious thing for scientific materialists because progress it takes for granted at talos there's no way around that for you to progress you have to be progressing towards something but if you tell me that there is no telos in the world then i don't understand even what you're talking about and what happens with these people with sam harris and pinker and weinstein is that they have a moral structure and it's actually it's given to them exactly in the way that i'm saying it's given to them it precedes their perception but they're they're they don't have the capacity to notice that and the thing is that most people don't and it's fine like most people don't like you know the regular people you find on the street they they can't perceive their given moral pattern they can't perceive it and it's actually probably better that they can you know it's like most people shouldn't be able to do that but if you're the guy attacking moral precepts if you're the guy attacking spiritual reality if you're the guy who's mocking ritual and who's mocking the idea that there are these d patterns in the world yet you're acting with a given invisible to you set of of moral patterns then i have no patience like i get really impatient with that stuff yeah i remain um in line with what you're saying there too i think from and from my experience this kind of liberal um seems to think that the enlightenment ideals are all still fine and because it's failed um doesn't mean that it can't succeed it's like the kind of um that wasn't really socialism myth and um i don't think that things like align with what tom holland for example talks about things like human rights make sense ultimately if they're just going to steal a part of the judeo-christian story and the difference i think between a seed and top when he in his book and say yvonne ilitch who's really powerful and deconstructing some of this stuff as um david kelly describes in his article too would you like to speak a bit to that and the mistakes involved in that kind of dominant ideological faith that they have yeah tom holland really tom holland's dominion book is amazing it's really astounding because there's also like a it's also like uh there's there's some parts of of uh of uh that book that there's some mischief in it like you can see tahal is being very mischievous because one of the figures that appears right at the outset of the enlightenment is the makida sad and and oh my goodness like steven pinker wouldn't like to talk about that guy uh and what happens is it's interesting because pinker and these people what they've done it's really a wonderful trick is that their the enlightenment happens and then as soon as the enlightenment manifests itself all the dark dark aspects of what that implies come to the fore right uh says right away there they are like right the worst of everything torture you know like all the worst sexual uh things you know this idea of power over others and and all of this like just comes right out and what stephen pinker and them do they just say oh that's the counter enlightenment and they have a weird like they have a weird strategy which is to somehow connect the counter enlightenment with the dark ages that they are opposing so somehow it doesn't make any sense but somehow they they they don't see like the rise of irrationality has nothing to do with the middle ages the middle ages like read thomas aquinas like read read they were the most rational people that have ever existed right it's just that they understood that reason came from first principle they understood that the system of reason had axioms that could be seen as culminating up into something infinite but they were extremely reasonable um anyway so that's their strategy but it's a it's a it's a really annoying it's very annoying and very silly uh it's like what is it that book uh what is it that that book against post-modernism i forget the name of it understanding post-modernism you know in that book he basically places post-modernism into kant like he has to put it all the way back in the enlightenment in order to say to kind of justify his position but these two opposites are part of each other you know i i pointed to the um i pointed to the goya's famous uh engraving that everybody's probably seen which is you see a man sleeping and you see all these kind of monsters coming out and it says it's written on it the sleep of reason produces monsters and i trying to point to that and say there is a normal human cycle of being which is awake and sleep what stephen pinker is telling us is if you just stay awake all the time then you won't have any problems and then if you fall asleep then i can get angry at you and say hey i told you to just stay awake like if you just stay awake then you'll have none of these problems like the monsters come when you fall asleep so don't fall asleep but this is absurd that's not how human beings work this is a this is a complete misunderstanding of reality and so and so to me it it just it anyways we'll see we'll see how it plays out but for sure right now we can see the the the reappearance of the monsters have been kind of bubbling up since world war ii was like a reprieve because it was a massive shock like it was a it was like it was almost like a it was a massive shock massive human sacrifice and then all of a sudden there was this reprieve which lasted a generation but now we here we are we're at the end of that reprieve and now we're seeing the monsters come out of the closet again and you can you can scream reason all day long uh that's just not how the world works and um going beyond that can accrued conception of progress and things like that how might we return to a more coherent appreciation for time itself and what seems to be an image of constant distraction and especially through things like even cleverly designed technologies and things like that i mean i obviously i think that and i say this but i struggle to do it myself because i'm just a must modern everybody else but i you know i think that reorganizing or re recreating rhythm in our in our life is a way to do that and you can do it in all kinds of ways you know but i think that obviously doing it in a way that is connected in terms of religion is better because the pattern that you enter into you know the liturgical life or the surgical pattern it also scales and becomes the way in which you're bound to other people as well so it's not just about some people do it like set up rhythms in their own life you know like they meditate or they do this and so they're able to recreate a rhythm which holds them together which is a different perception of time but i think that that we need to to do it in a way that also scales and i think that prayer and liturgical celebration is the is the proper way to worship basically because one of the problems the the opposite of distraction is worship you could say uh in a way distraction is uh is actually worship too it's just uh it's just quick succeeding gods like it's like rotating gods you know that kind of appear on your horizon uh but i think that uh deliberate worship is the solution to the to the the problem let's say that is focusing on something which is beyond the movement beyond the the beyond the the spinning that we have and just that like just actually focusing on something which is beyond this fitting for enough for enough of your time and your and your attention will settle a lot of these a lot of the chaos that is underneath yeah thank you for that jonathan and um some people from secularist backgrounds even have told me how much that they have been moved by your work and i'm not saying the name because they don't want me to but a someone i mentioned you before said that they were drawn to work because of how you betray the christian story is genuinely inclusive of all people fall intellects and all backgrounds it's a real and meaningful universalism how does this same universal orthodox christian faith differ from the phony universalism that we mentioned before whether inside or outside the church yeah well i think that i think that there there is an there is a recognition of the particular in christianity which is very important and there is an idea that the body of the church like let's say the body of your parish that your actual parish that's it like that's where you encounter everything and so the problem with a lot of universalism is that it deals in in abstractions and it deals in abstractions for reasons that are that are sometimes not the right reasons so i would say i mean i might disagree but i would say many universalists that i've met they they are universalist out of a kind of embarrassment at a kind of embarrassment of being christian and so they every like i'll give you an example like if someone asked like i i you probably had that experience all the time like someone comes up to you and asks you well what about muslims that's what they ask you it's like do you think that muslims are also saved and that question that's that's that's a that's like that's the devil that question that question is the devil because why are you asking me this what is your purpose what are you trying to accomplish right if i if i if i'm if i see myself as a as a sick person that is going to the hospital and i'm going around and i'm and and and and then i let's say i have a way to get to the hospital and then you come to me and you ask me how do you get to the hospital and i tell you i'm like this is how you get to the hospital and then you ask me well isn't there another way to get to the hospital and i'm like what what did you what what are you trying to accomplish like what is your purpose it's a it's a it's a very subversive type of attitude and so that's what i see in a lot of universal moves and a lot of people who who want to who want to have that uh type of stance because it makes them socially acceptable and it makes them it makes them palatable to the modern thinking um but it's not a good it's a it's a i think i think i think people who are tempted by that i think we need to kind of look at our own reasons for doing that like what is the why am i asking myself the question if others are saved like do ask yourself if you're saved like ask yourself what are you doing like what are you urgently praying to god like are you trans are you sacrificing your passions to something beyond you are you are you loving your neighbor are you is that what you're doing but if you're asking me like i want to know if some some child who dies in india if they're safe is tell me what you think of that and then they look at you smugly like they've trapped you into some kind of like moral dilemma i just this i really that to me is the is the worst and so the idea is that christianity christianity formulates its its universalism or its universal story from within the christian story and there's no other way to do it and and it and it does it through the the manifestation of the incarnation as something which can reach to the end of the world and participate in in bringing together all of reality and we recognize that we don't know how that works completely like i don't and it's also not my the specifics of how someone in somewhere else is going to be saved or not is really not my problem like it's just it's just it's a dishonest question it's a distraction uh to what you really need to ask which is you know do i love the people around me now like am i involved in in the in the community that i'm bound to you know i don't that i hope that makes sense yeah that does make sense thank you jonathan i think that's one of the things like i don't agree with a lot of what say father star from rose says but i think he's right over that kind of spirit of the age and jackaloo i think talks about that too with this kind of world opinion which is kind of pure abstraction as it were and actually dehumanizing in that respect then and um i think another thing that i read this article the scandal of christ by this nuclear scientist from sri lanka on the theologian and he talked about those other world views don't even offer salvation so it is a trick question even in that respect they're offering maybe nirvana or things like that it's not salvation that they even offer themselves within their own stories there's a ridiculous question all those levels and um moving beyond that then if we might look at some um positive stories so i've been most moved by our mutual friend thomas's story who we mentioned before and must thank you in part for that and i appreciate that i've got to be a part of his journey and i've actually learned a lot from him and been encouraged to become a better christian through our friendship over the last few years now and um i want to ask you what are some of the greatest stories that you've heard of people who've come to christ through jordan and yourself i mean it's so funny because i'm really surprised at how many um there a lot of the stories are actually quite similar and i i think it's uh the thing that pops out i think the thing that that comes out of the stories that i hear if i can maybe point to an element which which which strikes me is the surprise it's it's the here i am doing my thing you know i'm somewhat miserable or you know i'm struggling with meaning and i'm kind of nihilistic uh and then i'm surprised to find that i'm a christian it's like what happened and a lot of people are like like am i a christian now like what what what just happened like what is this thing that happened to me uh and i think that that to me has really been the most um the most surprising and kind of joyful to talk to people who have had that that experience which is that it's almost like they followed these little breadcrumbs and they didn't realize what was going on and by the time they realized it was like it was too late their whole world view had changed and now it was there was no turning back um and that to me has been has been very as very exciting to see and people from from all over the world strangely you know a lot of people from yeah from northern countries um and then canada and in us especially so a lot of you it's always kind of it's it's a lot of young people too in their 20s that are just that are kind of pulled into and i talked to a guy uh recently i hope i won't say his name but he's a category right now in the orthodox church and uh and he was funny because he he was almost kind of doubtful of what he was what was going on in himself because he said he said he said i feel like i'm in some kind of secret club right now it's like i feel like i feel like i'm part of something that nobody can see but that's happening kind of like i'm in i'm in the cool group i'm in the i'm in the like i'm in the elite or not the elite but i'm on the like i'm on the the point of what's happening in culture in a movement that no one can see yet but that is coming and and he was like he's like i'm worried that i'm doing things for the wrong reasons because i want to be in that cool group and i just thought it was really hilarious because like who would have thought that someone some like shaggy guy in his 20s wearing like a plaid shirt could tell you that like even 10 years ago could say like i'm going to become a christian and i feel like i'm in this really cool super elite group that is discovering this and no one knows about it and it's just like it was really amazing it was really a wonderful uh surprise thank god that's amazing and um regarding then yourself again jonathan what are some of the central ways that you've been formed and reformed in orthodoxy over the years coming from that evangelical background and so on i would say the two major ways is mostly obviously like a kind of metanoia that i experienced in reading the fathers and kind of this change of of mind let's say and that was actually the easy part i mean the harder part is that is the is the embodying of that that is a lot harder my goodness and you know living the unorthodox life um in the modern world is already very challenging um but then also doing it as a kind of newbie as someone who who is you know who doesn't come from that uh tradition has been i think that's been the hardest and i it's still something that i that i struggle with in terms of really having that it's like when i the things i talk about in many ways i'm trying to convince myself too i hope people understand that that i'm not speaking from a place of uh of like enlightened enlightened peace and and just you know this illumination i really i really am trying to embody these things really in my life through prayer through remembrance you know through you know uh connecting to the stories of the saints and all these are strange still to me too and so the bible is easier because i grew up with it and so that i feel like i can really live in that story but but everything else although i recognize it and find it very powerful and beautiful it's harder to it's a little harder to to to embody so i think that that's the transformation which then proceeded from my first metanoia and is still going on now like it's still it's still becoming you know in certain aspects certain certain practices which at first you on you know orthodox kind of engage in and that you just think oh well that's not for me and then slowly you start to understand what they're for and try to understand the kind of balm that they're playing or the kind of medicine that they're applying and you're like you know what actually i i think i need to do this i think i need to do this not because for some just kind of external moral reason but because i can see almost like the therapy that it's bringing to me like the the bone that it's offering me you know yeah that's beautiful i feel your pain with that and father schmemann has been really really helpful even in his works and pointing to what you're talking about the treasure he always focus focuses on christ as the treasure and that's what it's ultimately about and not to get caught up in this kind of ideological conception of orthodoxism or whatever i think he calls it in his journal yeah um as a teacher because a lot of people get disappointed because if you if you're not careful orthodoxy is messy messy like it's messy and you have to understand that it's messy it has a lot of there's a lot of stuff going on in terms of the politics there's a lot of things happening and and you will have bad experiences like it's gonna happen one day you're gonna go to confession and you're going to stand up from that confession you'll be like what happened like who is this priest what did he just say to me like what the heck you know it's like everybody's gonna have those kinds of experiences uh and and and if you're not careful and if you idealize things too much then then those can really be uh they can be a turn off but if you see it more kind of holistically and you see it like this kind of slow messy healing that's going on in your life and it's then it's easier to to take on yeah i'm in and certainly agree with that and i want to ask you next because as a teacher in ireland here i think it would be amazing if we could introduce children to your work in the symbolic world early and attend to them as whole persons rather than our dominant sectors model how do we then begin to inculcate an awareness and discernment of some of the these patterns in schools and in our communities then yeah i think that i think that it's not it's probably not the like for young children it's not a good idea to try to you don't need to tell the the children what things mean especially when they're young but you definitely need to expose them to their stories i think that that's what we need to do is rather like as people who understand the role of of fairy tales of stories of myth of and the bible stories and the stories of the saints then i think that exposing the children to those stories and making those let's say the stories that they that they consume rather than just the stuff on tv or the you know the the kind of popular culture then i think that's already doing a great job in creating that uh and and i would say also celebrating like not st you know it depends where you live but some places it's become harder to celebrate like we don't we just have lost the tendency to celebrate christmas to easter to remember pentecost to remember the feast days um and just remembering them or just mentioning them even just at the dinner table or whatever and say you know or just to remember them so that people so that it becomes like this pattern in which they they live uh i think that's the best thing you can do for kids especially young kids and then as they get older then one of the things that i would do with my kids is i would just i wouldn't tell them what something mean but i would i would ask them questions like if uh like let's say i'm reading a fairy tale and then there's something in the fairy tale like there's an apple that someone eats and then they die let's say snow white and then i would ask them what other story do you know where that that happens do you know another story where someone eats a fruit and then they die and then they would be thinking and be like yeah that's oh adam and eve that's the story where they do that is there a connection between the two dad uh and you don't even have to spell it out so much but just i would always kind of point to these connections and just say you know did you notice that that that for a certain throat like especially if you if your kids go through a lot of fairy tales at some point you can't avoid the tropes like did you notice that it's always the godmother like why is it the godmother uh you know why is it the stepmother sorry um and so so that kind of thing i think can be helpful when they see patterns first and as they see patterns then the meanings will start to to uh to appear more and more and they'll notice them on their own you know excellent thank you jonathan and in the past you've spoken movingly about christ and his parables can you tell us a bit about um that whole way of speaking and how we're to attend to what god's revealing in this unusual way at least unusual by our modern secularist and very didactic biases i suppose well i think i think the best way to approach scripture i would say is first of all is to approach it typologically and this is really counterintuitive for moderns because it's really about it's really about perceiving and participating in patterns and so like let's say you know how people get excited about marvel marvel superheroes and when they they read marvel superheroes and they have crossovers where this marvel superhero appears in the other marvel superhero thing and people get all excited because they have these cosmo these cosmologies and they interconnect and they they they have points of contact with each other and i think that that is way more exciting than like telling people what to do like they're just telling people how to how to how to be a good little boy right and you do need to tell your kids how to be a good little boy but the excitement of seeing patterns is actually what makes us human and so to understand scripture typologically is a way for people to kind of find joy and beauty in the in the story and be amazed at how interconnected scripture is and i think that that's probably the best the best way to kind of reawaken excitement about these things rather than them just being you know some some external finger wagging or whatever um so i that's that i think that that's the way to do it in terms of the terms of the parables it's just an extension it's just an extension of that christ's parables are are very rarely about morals you can try to make them about that but you're going to run into a lot of problems that's why if you notice like there are there are some parables that no one tells because people don't know what to do with them because they they aren't simple moral lessons you know it's like the parable of the the parable of the of the wedding feast where the the the important people refuse to come to the wedding feast so they go out into the street and they invite all the people from the the outside to come to the wedding feast but then one person doesn't come dressed for the feast and gets thrown out into hell basically it's like nobody tells that parable because they don't know what to do with it it's like that parable just like uh anyway so i i think that unders so i think that understanding that what christ is telling us first and foremost is he's tracing a pattern of being he's tracing he's telling you the shape of reality before he's giving you a moral lesson and there is often a moral lesson you can get from it but there is a higher meaning there that if you can't access that some of the things he says are just going to be gibberish to you or just going to be so weird that you won't ever you'll pretend like they don't exist which is what a lot of christians do yeah that makes sense and um then i want to speak with you next if we may about a few of your upcoming projects so you mentioned recently i believe about your fourth common book can you tell us about what to expect and what you hope to achieve with that well well i one of the things i'm working on i've been working on for years is 10 years ago my brother and i wrote a screenplay uh called god's dog um and it's about it's a very loose retelling of the legend of saint christopher very very loose like in terms of it it's it's what it is it's really a story that is trying to dive into christmas christian cosmology and tell a story from that perspective as if the christian cosmology was really like a like a mythological backdrop for a story very similar to what you see in paradise loss or in dante but then more recently that kind of writing has actually been taken up by very anti-christian people you know and you see that in you see that in neil gaiman and you see it in alan moore and that kind of that kind of those kinds of writers and so we tried to create a story that seemed subversive at the outset but that ultimately was not in any way that because it has monsters it has a dog-headed man it has leviatha it has the leviathan and giants and all these kind of weird stuff all the weird stuff in scripture and in tradition we just kind of jammed into one story um and so that's that'll be coming out this year i don't know exactly when because we're still working still working out the art but that's one of the big projects that are kind of that's kind of on the horizon and i do want to write a book on symbolism but it hasn't uh it's like i'm just too busy right now it'll come it'll come yeah wonderful and um regarding the orthodox arts journal then would you like to tell us a bit about what you've done and what you hope to do with it now in the future well the i the orthodox arjun was started by andrew gould and i in 2012 i think and uh at first i was really really involved kind of until the jordan peterson thing and to be honest for the past three four years i've been much less involved uh which is kind of too bad but at the same time you know there's we still put out articles once in a while i would really want i really hope that it would be a place for a kind of resurgence of liturgical art but at this particular time i i don't have a lot of it i don't put a lot of energy into it sadly um but it's it's the the resources there are wonderful if you want to discover about traditional art if you want to discover about kind of how it's embodied in symbolism um there are hundreds and hundreds of articles there that uh that kind of deal with that yeah amazing and i also love jesus the imagination which you contributed to for dr michael martin too that that was i never i i didn't i just i sent a drawing i think or was it an image of a carving and so i don't think i didn't write for the the for the journal i just i just he just asked me if i could send in a an image and so i sent in a carving that's great and um why should people know the likes of george curtis then and elena i don't really know how to pronounce the lina's second name is romina nick murray where are you and um what's best about their work for you then well there i think that what we're seeing we're seeing this in greece and in romania we see it in russia we've seen it in america too um we're we're seeing it we're seeing top level artists who are giving themselves to to orthodox arts and so we're no so there is on the one hand there's a kind of frenetic energy which is there sometimes experimental sometimes too experimental it's possible um but but there is a kind of bubbling inside the liturgical arts that have been going on for for about a decade um and i think that it's it's interesting because it is really recreating a living art it's a it's a communal art it's something which is engaging uh scripture taking all of that very seriously the tradition scripture and so someone like cordes for example who is more on the experimental side but cordis is a is a absolute master in terms of drawing i mean he is uh he really has let's say internalized the language of byzantine uh art and so someone like that to watch him draw to see him uh to see him make his his painting is is quite it's quite astounding and it gives you hope kind of gives you hope for for art in the church so amazing and um what are some of your own favorite artistic pieces from history and why do they resonate with you so much i'm definitely i mean i'm definitely a big fan of the middle ages i think that uh let's say there's a moment like that what what's known as norman sicily uh is a moment that i really appreciate because i feel like something we can do right now because one of the problems of the modern world is a is a kind of uh mixture a kind of confusion you could say where even with the internet because we're bombarded with like all these different stimuli that aren't related that are completely there's a sense in which the narrative or the the pattern can break down because because it's it's too much and there's everything but i feel like in that moment there's also a possibility of creating synthetic arts that are capable of actually joining different elements together into coherence and as an example of that uh norman sicily is a moment where that really happened where the best of western medieval art you know the kind of strong graphic element that was there in in a western manuscript tradition for example gets joined with kind of the glory of byzantine mosaics and the color of byzantine mosaics and at the same time joined with the genius of islamic patterns and so those those churches are really a testimony to what can be done in a moment of mixture to create to create synthesis rather than give in to the kind of fragmentary idea of reality yeah amazing somebody that um completely i think contradicts that is terence malik and i know thomas and i love him thomas got me really into him and i want to ask you about him just to satisfy my own curiosity what do you think of malek and his work i haven't see everybody told me to see i haven't seen his last movie uh and so i saw true of life i remember and i found it difficult like i i i find that i haven't seen the latest one so i don't look i i have to see it but i know that what i found difficult what i've seen of him is that i feel like narrative is a really important aspect of christianity and i feel like he kind of gives up on narrative in a way and or at least that there's that there's kind of a broken narrative or a very diffuse narrative um and so so i'm not sure but i like i said i i haven't also seen that many of his movies because the ones that i've seen have not really have not really grabbed my attention um yeah sorry no i hate in life i watched first and it blew me away but i think he only returned to using the script for that movie actually because he hadn't used as you say for the other ones so i think you would maybe enjoy it more everybody says see you hidden lights so i will watch it just for you so that i can i can i can have a way of interpreting thank you jonathan i know we're kind of closing in there time but um [Music] can i ask you one more thing or as you want to sure yeah yeah in advance yeah okay so um something that i think is real i'm curious about after reading dr richard back and um following your work and hearing with some of the the things that the lord of spurs podcast guys are doing well i wonder can you help us to understand this tag between our fear of death and um our kind of hero projects as it were and demons because richard beck for example and those guys in the podcast seem to be hidden on the same point in different ways by sort of suggesting that uh psychologically and theologically that these hero projects which promise this illusion of immortality are actually false gods and perhaps even demons and i wonder could you help us maybe join some of the dots there um yeah i'm not sure about the first author you you mentioned i i i'm not aware of them um with the lord of spirits one of the things they're tapping into is that is a very ancient story um and it's i don't know if it's so much the idea of the hero project it's mostly about the the idea that that techne or that this kind of technical technological society that we live in that somehow it has value in itself and that somehow it is going to be the thing that will save us and and what they've been pointing back to is the idea that in the book of enoch and in the the traditions surrounding the kind of more apocalyptic vision of the flood there's a sense in which the demons are the ones that taught the sciences to humans and they just like in the greek uh tradition of the titan who brings fire to the to to people and so the idea is that it there's a kind of you see it in scripture it's already there in scripture in the descendants of cain where it's the descendants of cain to develop technology and develop civilization but in doing so they actually increase the fall and they increase conflict and and animosity isolation and this leads to to death it leads to it leads to the flood um and so the what they're trying to i think trying to point to is that this is something which seems to be going on right now the same kind of of approach and we're actually seeing i would say people are going to freak out because maybe they won't know what i'm talking about but we're seeing demons uh reappear on the horizon and they're using they're using different methods to kind of let's say kind of reintegrate the world and one does seem to be even something like artificial intelligence uh and so we seem to be building idols right now and those idols are being possessed by by corporate beings that are out of control that we don't that we don't control and that we end up worshiping um and so i think that that's maybe that i don't know if that's what you mean but i think that that's definitely something that that is happening and the the the the idea of you can see it like people take for granted that somehow technology is just a good and you see it all the time and they think that that being human is making technology like that that's hilarious i mean it's a lesson i mean i i don't actually disagree that it's part of what it means to be human but that's not that's not what makes someone human there's an amazing like uh there's an amazing quote from token in um in his book on fairies where he says when he read when he read these kind of science fiction stories that were there at his time he said he didn't understand the interest of them he said all these people they all had the same horrible passions and like you know disastrous uh let's say spiritual reality they just went a lot faster and had bigger guns it's like this is this is actually what are we doing like we're giving ourselves like infinite power and we're just running out of wisdom we're running out of of of that which is actually what which which is actually what makes us human so so in that sense you can see this kind of uh and it's and it's showing itself in all kinds of storytelling like the the these this the trope of the watchers and the trope of the nephilim is just is constantly is now everywhere in popular culture it's like it's just popping up in all these different all these different stories so yeah thanks for that jonathan um two things i should say malek harmonic in his movie and life touches on those things okay they were talking about it and number two then just i should say that we've given people that black people your work is a huge white pill that people should follow i appreciate so much talking with you today and hope you have a lovely evening over there in canada it was great to meet you mark you too jonathan god bless you all right [Music] you

Channel: More Christ

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Id: lsvUFQhmAvU

Length: 79min 10sec (4750 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 04 2021