Transcript for Episode 75

Ryan McDermott: It's almost spring, friends! I'm on spring break; I'm here in my outdoor studio along the Meadow River in West Virginia. You might hear the river in the background. I can hear frogs across the river. There are daffodils coming up down here in West Virginia. It's also Lent. I hope you're having a blessed Lent.

We've been doing a Genealogy and Tradition reading group and the first book we read is Anne Carpenter's recent book called Nothing Gained is Eternal: A Theology of Tradition. And the reading group got to all get together and join Anne for a conversation. So we've got a lot of cohosts today, and the first part of that conversation is this episode. We'll have the second one coming up soon.

That reading group continues, and if you're interested, it is not too late to join. The second segment starts up in just a few days after the release of this episode. I believe it's Friday the 17th of March. And we will then continue for three weeks. That's reading a segment of Thomas Pfau's work on tradition, and then moving into April and May we’ll have some works in progress, including part of a chapter that yours truly is working on, on genealogy and tradition.

Anne's book begins by asking, “What is history?” And the answer is: History is what humans do. So that, of course, introduces human sin into the question of tradition, and so at the center of the book is the question, “What difference does human sin make to Christian tradition?” Particularly, Anne is focusing on the sins of racism and colonialism.

This is not your typical work of contemporary critical theology that is just seeking to expose and critique the sins of the Church. No, it actually wants to take sins seriously in order to give the most powerful possible account of Christ's redemption.

Central to Anne's argument is that tradition is not just a treasure trove that gets handed down from one generation to the next. Because history is what people do, tradition is also constituted by human action, and therefore it has to be renewed in every generation. She starts the book with a series of chapters looking to major figures of the middle 20th century Catholic movement known as “Ressourcement.” That is the retrieval of resources in the Church's tradition for the purposes of life in the present, and it's through this engagement that Anne wants to rearticulate a theory of tradition while also being in conversation with more recent theologians who have placed racism and colonialism at the center of their work. It's a wonderful book. I highly recommend it, and I hope you enjoy this conversation.

Okay, great. So Anne, I thought one way we could start is everybody can go around the room and introduce themselves…

Elizabeth Culhane: Hi Anne. Thanks for your work. I'm Elizabeth Culhane. I'm a PhD student here in Australia at the University of Queensland writing my dissertation on Eric Przywara, Edith Stein and Martin Heidegger in relation to time and eternity. I’m trying to bring them all together. I really appreciated your work and I really appreciate the time you've put into it.

Molly Lewis: I'm Molly Lewis. I am a postdoctoral teaching fellow at Baylor University where I study 19th century British poetry, aesthetics and ecology, somehow all related to labor ethics.

Jake Grefenstette: Hi, I'm Jake Grefenstette. I'm from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where I am now. I just wrapped up my PhD in theology at the University of Cambridge, and my wheelhouse is what Americans usually call religion and literature, or in England you hear literature and theology. So I especially appreciated the poem that structures the book and all your readings of literature here. I'm doing some teaching at St. Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where the theology department is almost entirely comprised of Lanerganians, if that’s the proper noun. He's always been a peripheral figure for me. So that was another thing I really appreciated about the book, getting some exposure to the thought there. But, pleasure to meet you.

Ryan McDermott: Jake is also an editor of the Genealogies of Modernity Journal.

Well, great. So, Elizabeth, can you start us out?

Elizabeth Culhane: Thanks Anne. The group was really interested in the image of the Notre Dame Cathedral that permeates the book. And a question that came up is, how would you restore Notre Dame Cathedral?

Ryan McDermott: Elizabeth, could you describe the cover of the book for our listeners?

Elizabeth Culhane: The image on the front cover of the book is an artist rendition of Notre Dame burning down, and there's huge plumes of smoke plummeting up towards the sky, and the main color there is black with a spark of orange. And Anne also wrote this majestic poem that kind of peppers throughout the book and her reflections on Notre Dame.

How would you restore Notre Dame Cathedral? How do you understand that?

Anne Carpenter: I remember they were batting around some possible plans and one was this enormous superstructure that made the roof into a garden. This offended me. Somehow reducing the… I mean, the religious space is already museum-like, and then further reducing it to a nice walk in the park offended my religious sensibilities. But I also feel disappointed that they're just restoring it to its current version or most recent version which itself was… I mean [in] the actual Middle Ages they were fine adding stuff to old churches and they added what they needed. Which might be the – this is bleak – I mean, that might be why the new designs were so weird, is, no one needs Notre Dame except to see it. So all the new ideas were “How can I make it more vacation-y?” And so there wasn't this further interpretive gesture of “how do we need what happens there?”

In our chapel here at St Mary's, you can tell what the newest part is because it's this large, glass, lit-up representation of our Lady of Guadalupe. And our mascot is the Gaels because we had a lot of Irish immigrant population when we first started off here in 1860-something, which is historically correct. And then you've got this addition in this art deco church of Our Lady of Guadalupe and that's, I mean, that addition is very – it's very old to interpret something in a new way by adding. And so I want something like that, even something that clashes. I love the way our Lady of Guadalupe, she even clashes with these deeply art deco angels, because she's so bright in her colors and lit up. And that's just great because it means new people came to the church and needed it. And so I would want that.

Ryan McDermott: Molly, would you want to go next?

Molly Lewis: Sure. I would just start with that first question that I asked in our discussion, which is: the argument of your book, where its heuristic responds to the heritage of colonialism or colonial sins. And I'm curious how you think it would play out if applied, or when applied, as it seems like there's the expectation that it would be, to other historical vulnerabilities, sufferings? You seem to invite that very much in the text, and I'm curious how you would get started with that.

Anne Carpenter: Yeah, so I've actually been thinking a lot about this in, for example, the classroom, talking with students about the preferential option for the poor, and how, a friend of mine, Jess Coblentz, another theologian, says it's an option for the vulnerable and that can take many shapes.

Furthermore, and I think Shawn Copeland does the best job with this, colonialism itself creates or institutes several kinds of vulnerabilities systematically, and not just the economic disproportion that constitutes a lot of racial categories. And so in principle, we can think further about the renewal of tradition along her lines, right? Turning toward persons, preferential option, but also her, I think her gesture toward the mystical body of Christ is essential, because it's the transcendent notion that itself is doing work and drawing us toward it eschatologically.

But I'm hesitant, whether with my students or in this group, to say what the specific judgments would be for different vulnerable groups. Like I think I mentioned really briefly that there's obviously a sexual undertow to the colonial task and that points at various problems, right? Whether gendered or otherwise. But I actually think because each contact is specific, I would have to know exactly the vulnerabilities in play to make the correct judgments about what to do.

And so I want to affirm that yes, I hope others do this work with, say, gender and sexuality, but I don't have the answers because I haven't done the research on those particular issues to be able to make sound judgements. And so that's the gift and curse of heuristics, right? They can be deployed, but they have to then be deployed by each individual.

And so I don't want to sit in my sort of seat and speak judgment onto all these many problems, because I think that would be to undo this arduous introduction to context and history that I've attempted in my own work, for my own sake. I cannot see all things, and in a lot of ways I'm learning how to do theology under the auspices of that insight.

Ryan McDermott: Do you think that the arguments about tradition that you make could apply to a literary tradition?

Anne Carpenter: Yes. To the degree that I'm talking about human beings in history, with a horizon of implicit and explicit interpretive measures for their own action, then yeah. Anything that is that falls in that category.

So, theater traditions also, right? Dramatic traditions. I was telling students this morning how long songs can last in a culture and that's also a function of tradition. Yeah.

So, the tricky part of course is heuristics are maximally wide in their possible application, but are not the actual tradition themselves. And that would require particular challenges. Like, I mean, one of the reasons dramatic theater traditions are so complicated is because so much is not written down, but you do have plays that are written down, things like that. Like I was reading about Kabuki theater and it's hard to track which parts happen when. And that's very interesting cause it's alive, right? It's textual and not textual.

So, yeah. Yeah, theoretically. But, you know, Kabuki theater also is not talking about living history according to Christ. And so there you're going to have a heuristic that doesn't apply that is central to my book. So, yeah.

Jake Grefenstette: Anne, I just want to say I loved your response to Molly's question. Had I written a book that's as good as this, I would be very tempted to do what you say you're resisting there, to resist passing judgment on particularities outside the sphere of this great introduction. So the fact that you resist that, I think, is this great signal that you're living the book, and I love that response. 

My question might point to a similar response, and if so, that's great. But, we had two non-human participants in our group. We had Beatrice the cat, and my dog Frodo Waggins, who has eaten my headphones. And they prompted the question of the definition of history as human action and thinking about how, or if, this argument applies, to creation beyond humans: non-human animals. So I wonder if you think that that's in the scope of application or if that's something that you're interested in tackling more broadly.

Anne Carpenter: Yeah, so the definition of history that I give (so, history is human action) what that does is it says that what tradition involves in the book is the way humans are involved in temporality and temporality itself would be the larger term that clearly includes all of creation.

Whether cats have history, right, whether cats have action is sort of, yes they do. I don't know whether it's intelligent action in quite the same way, but it's not non-intelligent action. But in that sense, what we're talking about is cat history, and again, only heuristically, right?  Clearly cat history and human history cross paths. Cats are domesticated for so long and so so seated with Egypt that a lot of European languages, their word for cat is the Egyptian word, even English.

And so I think everything is involved in the cosmic work of Salvation. Christian tradition is a particular quality of the human participation in the work of redemption. So I'm not denying cats a certain participation in the work of God, but when we're talking about tradition, we're talking about a particular quality of the human and ecclesial participation.

Ryan McDermott: I love it that you actually know about the history of cats.

It is so unabashedly anthropocentric. And I don't have a problem with that, as a Christian humanist, but I can definitely see colleagues of ours in the humanities whose sense of – well, take colonialism for a great example – whose sense of the dimensions of colonialism are very different, such that the human is actually not at the center of colonialism. So, human agents are responsible for colonialism, but they themselves are responding to the non-human world, to the exigencies, or perceived exigencies, of resources and lack thereof. Their patterns of colonialism are shaped by climate and the effects of colonialism from one perspective are more profoundly felt in what let's just call sloppily “the climate” than they are among humans. And arguably, because humans are the guilty parties here, we shouldn't be giving an account of history that centers the human, because, really, our true reparative options here are better off decentering the human. How would you respond to that?

Anne Carpenter:  One of my instincts is that that's perfectly fine and another question. It's a separate question in as much as it deals with the global shape of colonialism and its material drivers. That is a question. It is not a question that I ask because I am interested in what human beings have done and in how what human beings have done is repeated by human beings such that this global shape is constantly again implicated.

I am interested in that question. That is one of my governing questions, particularly because I'm interested in tradition, which again is a human way of being historical. And so I want to know how our human way of being historical damns the world and us and possibly can be redeemed. Something I'd like to write about more, something that I'm kind of obsessed with, is this idea Péguy has that places outlast people. Geographies have a kind of memory and existence beyond human beings. I think that's very interesting in his poetry and I'd like to do more with it.

I think it's a different question than tradition. And if I wanted to ask it in terms of tradition, I might ask: what human acts of meaning and human actions, actual deeds, shape our determination of what a resource is and how it ought to be treated? Right, which is one of the questions Pope Francis asks. That, I think, is one way that tradition is implicated.  I suppose you could say, maybe fairly, that my question about human beings itself repeats the damning anthropocentrism of the colonial task, in which case I might say, “Well, that could be true. If self-transcendence is possible, it need not be true. It need not always be true.” Human beings themselves might be intended to get over themselves. Whether we will has yet to be seen.

So yeah, there's a lot going on there and I find the cosmic gesture very interesting. But yeah, I made a decision while working on the text that I wanted to live through the Catholic anxiety about history, and see where it could take me. And that definitely shapes the direction of the book, permanently.

Ryan McDermott: Wait, say more. How would you describe the Catholic anxiety about history? I can totally see where you're coming from but I would just love to hear you express that.

Anne Carpenter: Yeah. So in a lot of Catholic churches, there are all kinds of representations of saints and even representations of the saints moving toward the altar, which is, yes, the altar, but also the end of history. And so, even in the architecture of churches, even in catacomb spaces, there's this sense of lives that have come before you, that have made your life possible, that in a certain sense you live. And it's comforting. It's a kind of a familial gesture. I'm not alone. I'm never alone. And in Catholic contexts, that's formalized with discussions about tradition and about our connection to tradition, which is our connection to our own past, the past that makes us possible.

And so the emergence of the modern idea of history, which is that context, to speak very broadly, contexts permanently give to people a meaning that you can't just simply rip them out of right? Anachronism is born in a new way with the birth of modern history. And what that does is it introduces this cesura between the modern Catholic and the past.

And there's a formal quality of this that has to do with what does the Church really know about Jesus? That's one very formal way that this becomes a crisis. But it's more general too, right? If I'm divided from the past, because in a real way I'm permanently different from it, then what makes me alive? What makes my life possible? And Catholics really feel the pressure of this anxiety, I think, throughout the modern era even when we're very busy trying to pretend it's not the modern era. And so, as an inheritor of that anxiety, I want to confront it and feel it. I mean the modernist crisis, et cetera.

Ryan McDermott: This might be a good place to redo a question from an absent colleague. Do you have the book with you, Anne?

Anne Carpenter: I do…

Ryan McDermott: Because I was thinking maybe you could read a passage from it and then I'll ask you a question about it.

Elizabeth, do you have our question document open? Would you be able to read Lillian's question about the passage on page 174 to 175? Anne, so it's really the last paragraph on 174 going on to page 175.

Elizabeth Culhane: “Every day seems to witness the rise of programs and institutions designed around restoring attitudes and systems of a really rather recent Christian past. I see the articulation in words, but also in organizations of devotion to the “true” liberal arts, to “real” Catholic theology, to the “glories of the Western tradition,” all perceived under threat. And what is under threat most often are norms and apparatuses no older than the 19th century, even if the vintage number on the bottle reads ‘Medieval Christendom.’ It is so often the bluster of a false history, for the liberal arts Catholic theology and Western tradition have never been self-enclosed, monolithic or stable. The threat of loss and change here is the threat of allowing these to be what they have always been, but always of their own temporality: that is, to be what the logics of a more recent histories conceal. Yes, it is true that many Christian institutions are now this, and now that desperate effort to appeal and to survive in a succession of so many events. This failure of intelligence hardly warrants another. An intelligence says that keeping our past requires no less than changing our relationship to it.” Lillian asks, “How do you pragmatically pass down tradition? How do you develop the personality of culture? How do you love it?” She talked about Irish culture and how Irish Christianity is being appropriated and propagated everywhere.

Anne Carpenter: Mm-hmm.

Elizabeth Culhane: And then she also had a follow up question about how do you teach theology in this way without allowing decolonialism to warp the gravitational field of theology?

Ryan McDermott: Yeah, and to give some context, Lillian is an undergraduate at the University of Mary, which is one of these institutions that you're talking about. I mean, Beatrice Institute is one of these institutions. I read this and I think, gosh, so many of us are part of these institutions where one of our primary goals is just to purvey Catholic tradition or Christian tradition, right, because otherwise it's not going to be there. But at the same time, what are we purveying?

Anne Carpenter: Yeah. I really like this question because the great chasm in my soul is the part that just loves old stuff so much. I never liked new things. Reading the dead has always made me more sympathetic with them than the living, always. And then there's this other part of me that knows that simply repeating them, thoughtlessly, isn't really loving them. That the acts of preservation that we've committed ourselves to themselves contribute something to these things that we love.

I have this very natural sympathy for the dead, I think. I love how different they are than me, and I think their alienation from me speaks to a part of me that is alienated from the world around me. I joke to students sometimes that I'm secretly a dead Frenchman from 1893; I just don't look it. And it's partly true, partly untrue. 

And I think – so, something it took me a while to learn was the way that a lot of the critiques Balthasar has at these 19th century people whose names I had to learn – like he really likes to bring up Catholic Restorationism, and then also this huge fad in 19th century France that was basically a kind of Medievalism. He doesn't like those, he stands against them because I think he thinks they don't really love the past. They just like safety and they don't like the world around them. And so you get this amazing gothic revival that's also a kind of violence to gothic churches straight up. 

And it took me learning about that for me to realize that Balthazar has this deep love for the past, obviously, but a deep suspicion of not loving the past enough, and I say love enough because I think it's going to require being alive today, making tough decisions; that's what's going to preserve the past, even when we repeat it.

And so I don't always know the answer. I get very annoyed when people don't know simple things about the Catholic past.

I read Ovid this summer in Latin because I missed him, which is weird, but I just, I love the sound of him. I love how weirdly bloody the Metamorphoses are. It's just so visceral. But I don't want to love these things in a way that's a zero sum game with my love and new questions and new problems.

Something that really stood out to me when I was reading Edward Said, who writes about Orientalism, is how much he loves certain early 20th century German thinkers and how much they shaped him. And he loves them so sincerely that he helps them be available to English-speaking scholars. And I think if, I think if he could have a heart that big, right, to point out this incredible blindness on the part of Europe that was sort of always naming the Occident and the Orient and never encountering its people, and he could love these German guys; if he has a heart that big, then I'd better too.

And so I can't just love Ovid for Ovid. I have to love him in a way that redeems him. And that's much harder. But I think I can do no less. So, yeah.

Jake Grefenstette: Thanks so much. I wanted to ask – I'd love if you talk about this loving relationship to the past as something redemptive. One poet that I've read a lot through graduate studies has been Geoffrey Hill, who loves Péguy, and he talks about…

Anne Carpenter: Crucified Lord who swims upon his Cross, right, and never moves…

Jake Grefenstette: He’s a great person for thinking through that idea of atoning for history, that’s the language he uses. But I can't pass up the opportunity to ask: beyond the poets and writers named name in this book, when you're talking to your undergraduates and when you're recommending further reading, are there any particular poets, especially, but any artists that you tend to recommend to undergraduates, in 2023?

Anne Carpenter: I've actually had considerable success reading Péguy with students. Particularly his Charity of Joan of Arc. I've had really good discussions with them about Mary in that poem because she cries so hard she becomes ugly and blinded, and they're really intrigued by the kind of sorrow he's describing, the way he relates it to a kind of earning of her eternity and end usual depictions of Mary.

But, let's see, it depends. I really like reading… I've read some Bernanos with students. They find him very interesting because he, again, has an unusual relationship with suffering, which I think speaks to them because they've been through a lot, unfortunately.

Who else? What other artists? I'm kind of overwhelmed by how much I like poetry and so I'm not able to come up with examples if that makes sense. I'm so excited, the rest of my brain went away...

I think, so I studied James Baldwin for the book, and I think the way he speaks about black music, African American music as this sort of checkmate to Europe makes attending to black music really quite important. He means jazz and blues, but of course the tradition has continued after his death. And so, sometimes I'll play students some Janelle Monáe we've done. So that's like Afrofuturism and I've also read Toni Morrison with them and she's much more plainspoken than Fanon and so they really really like her reflections on why she does art the way she does. And so I'm a little bit obsessed with her lately too because she's so effective in the classroom.

So those are some thoughts.

Ryan McDermott: Molly Lewis, you have a series of questions. Can you just run the interview for the next 10 to 15 minutes?

Molly Lewis: I can do my best. Well, this does seem to be a good bridge for maybe jumping ahead to my last question, which was: In your own process of writing – this is kind of an invasive question if you answer this personally, which is part of the question – if you're in your own process of writing this, how have you changed? And, if you'd like to answer that personally, you're welcome to. But, you've already talked a good bit about your teaching so that that might be a safe haven if you'd rather not. But, I'm curious in both ways, in part because in the process of reading, it felt like there was a kind of urgency for transformation, personally.

Anne Carpenter: Yeah I had a student say to me a couple years ago, she and I met at a conference and she had known me when I first came to St Mary's and so she was like, “I feel like when I first met you, you said ‘liberation is important,’ and now you're saying ‘liberation is important’” which I found funny which is probably true.

So the murder and then police murder and then protests in Ferguson, Missouri happened shortly after I came to St Mary's. And I was very moved by the way my students were moved by it. And they were a kind of indicator to me of something that was important. One of my students who was black didn't come to class and told me about it, because she went to go be with other black students on campus. And the rest of the room asked me about it and we had to talk about being in solidarity with Ferguson even though we were in California, right, because their practical question was “How is she implicated?” And so we had to talk about that. And so it was on my mind and I had Ovid to help me. But I was moved by them first.

And then I remember – and I have this imprint forever – so I was on this syndicate panel with Andrew Prevot and I took issue with his reading of Balthasar, which included the supposition that Balthasar's Canon does not include the Underside. And so I, being true ride-or-die Balthasar scholar, disagreed with his metaphysics, his metaphysical read of Balthasar, and then also this issue, which I read as an issue of culture primarily. He pushed back hard. And I remember in the middle of writing my reply, reading his reply, I realized: he was using technical language. He was in the realm of theory when it came to this word “the Underside.” And so I actually didn't understand what he meant. And you can actually see me admit that in writing for forever, which of course scholars are not supposed, admit weakness. But I think it's funny in retrospect cause you can see me poetically perceive that I've got this problem of not understanding, and then totally doubling down on the metaphysics. “No no no. I understand the metaphysics. This part I'm good at.”

And so you can sort of see like I'm making these judgements about what's happening. And I didn't realize at the time but it was important that I was able to actively understand I don't understand. And so I went and I read every single thing that Andrew Prevot footnotes in this critique of Balthasar. Every single book. I spent a Christmas doing that, like a good crazy nerd. And I became very frustrated because I couldn't quite assemble at all in my head what it meant. I had some of the insights, but not really the insights that would help me organize it.

And I was at the time colleagues with Joseph Drexler-Dreis, who does a lot of decoloniality and theology stuff. And I decided, I was like, “All right. Well, back to basics, at least for me. I need an artist to teach me what it is like to be them. And through their art I will be able to hopefully understand what the critique of coloniality is.” So I picked Janelle Monáe because I really like her work anyway. I was like, “I'm going to do a Balthasarian read of Janelle Monáe and I want to understand what she's telling me in Balthasar.” And Joe helped me. He gave me books to read. I told him some things about what I saw in her lyrics and in her music and he gave me different stuff to read. And so it was kind of like going back to Balthasar’s Germanist literary roots, but having this artist testify to me about what it's like to be her. (I believe Janelle Monáe goes by “her” and “them” now just so we're… at the time she didn’t.) And so I wrote my first article on that and it was really only artists who could help me really put it together and think about what it is like for Janelle and me to be racialized persons. What racialized in this deeply asymmetrical way that ends up doing violence to us both, but the violence is mortal in her case, right, it's killing. And so once she helped me to do that, I felt morally obligated to be true to her and what she taught me. And so I did more reading and tried to continue to put it together with where I come from, which is Balthasar, Ressourcement, Western art, that kind of stuff. And yeah I think for, I mean in Lonerginian terms it was a kind of moral and intellectual conversion, aided no doubt by grace, but also by the grace of this artistic work.

And so yeah, I did my best. I think she does better. But yeah, that's what I would say.

Molly Lewis: I can follow that with another question unless there's something… Okay. I mentioned when I asked that reading your text left me with a sense of urgency. I'm wondering, we're academics, so maybe the urgency is to write and read and teach in certain ways, but practically speaking, I'm wondering what do we do now?

What will you hope for your readers that we do next? It feels like it's outside of my distinctively individual capacity to transform Christian tradition, right. But…

Anne Carpenter: Who else will? Who else is there?

Molly Lewis: I don’t know.

Anne Carpenter: And who else is there but us who are Christian? “Alas,” Péguy says, right, “It depends on us.”

Molly Lewis: So is that the hope? That we just each individually are transformed?

Anne Carpenter: Hmm. Yeah so, that's good. I think on a kind of meta level, one of the things that I was trying to do actually is say that we actually have to do a lot of stopping and thinking. We have to turn to theory, if we want to systematically and practically deal with the problems of tradition, most of all its sins, for sin cannot be treated systematically and still less should be treated haphazardly.

And so one of the urgent things I do want actually is more theory, more theorizing. I think we need that. And in a certain way, the urgent question, “What do we do next?” requires what judgments do we need to make, right? What do we need to understand? What data do we need to understand? And then what can we affirm and deny? Those will make our actions actually intelligent. And that's very necessary, because mainly we're happy to continue without thinking.

And so yeah it's a little existentially, I think, paradoxical but to me makes a kind of sense. Yes, we must pause and think really hard, especially since there is a deep existential cost to the problems that beset us.

But the other thing that I think the modern situation of theology makes clear is that scholars have to collaborate in order to have the appropriate insights. And so I don't want us to work alone. I cite a lot of people in my book and I told a friend that it's kind of friendship, the book. Everyone alive that I quote I know. I know Erin Kidd. I know Joseph Drexler-Dreis. And they changed me. And that's the necessary thing, I think, is collaboration in this immense task that requires thinkers and not only doers, because we want our doing to be effective.

Ryan McDermott: So, assuming much of our audience, as far as I'm aware, are not academics – in fact I think many people who listen to the podcast listen to it because they don't have time to read – would the answer be the same for them? Or what would you say to our imagined podcast listener?

Well, that's a nice cliff hanger to stop on. I'm going to leave you hanging there. Anne has some fantastic answers to that question and many more in the second half of our conversation, which will be coming up in a forthcoming episode. Wishing you a very blessed Lent. Thanks for listening.