transcript for episode 48
Ryan:
Gretchen Huizinga, so great to be with you today. What's the weather like in Seattle? Are you under a foot of snow like I've been seeing pictures of on Instagram?
Gretchen:
It depends on where you are, but where we are, it's just kind of rainy with snow left around. So we're on the downswing of the snow I think.
Ryan:
Well, it's 50 degrees and sunny here in Pittsburgh, which is definitely not seasonal weather.
Gretchen:
But it's sweet.
Ryan:
Well, I'm so glad that we can be here together today. It's been a practice in the past in the Beatrice Institute podcast that the hosts will have a conversation amongst each other. We were going to be joined by our third co-host Grant Martsolf today, but he was called away at the last minute to substitute teach for a colleague. So it's the two of us, but you're the most important one, because you're our newest co-host and we're just so happy to be a team with you. So welcome.
Gretchen:
Thanks Ryan. It's so much fun.
Since I'm the newest host, let me ask the first question. I want to start with an internet meme: it usually shows two pictures and it says how it started, how it's going. Just because there might be new listeners, even if there's people that have been with you from the beginning, tell us a little bit about how the Beatrice Institute got started and how it's going, both with the Institute itself and this podcast.
Ryan:
We started eight years ago as a Christian Studies Program for undergraduates in the Pittsburgh area, as a way to connect the undergrads with the best things going on among Christian Studies faculty, not only at the University of Pittsburgh where I teach, but also Carnegie Mellon University, which is right next door, and then several other smaller colleges and universities in the area.
And since then, it's grown into Beatrice Institute, which has research projects and a podcast and a graduate student program. The podcast started about two years ago, almost exactly I think, in the depths of early COVID where we were scrambling to think, how do we communicate with these people we can't see anymore?
And it's grown since then, and thanks to you Gretchen, we’ve been able to align this podcast with Beatrice Institute’s three research initiatives. The one that I direct, Genealogies of Modernity, and a lot of my interviews are going to have to do with what it means to be modern and how we got here.
And then our colleague Grant Martsolf’s research initiative that he directs, called Personalism and Public Policy, centering the human person in present and urgent issues of public concern. Grant’s recent episodes have reflected those kinds of issues.
And then we have Being Human in an Age of Artificial Intelligence, which here in Pittsburgh is anchored by our colleague at Carnegie Mellon University, John Dolan.
But we also wanted to be connected with what's going on at the, let's say, secondary epicenters of the tech world on the West coast ...
Gretchen:
We consider ourselves the primary, just saying.
Ryan:
Of course. In the Bay Area and in Seattle. And so Gretchen, we're just so happy to be joined by you. You have not only all of this former research experience with artificial intelligence and Christian theology, but you also are a far more seasoned and expert podcaster than either Grant or me. We continue to be in awe of your poise and your on the run intelligence in your episodes for Beatrice Institute, which you learned at the host of the Microsoft Research podcast. So you're slumming it here with us and we're very grateful.
Gretchen:
Not at all. I feel like I learn something new every time I listen to your episode or Grant's episode, and I scratch my head. It's like, how did I not know that? But of course you don't. You get your head down in your lane, and there's so much going on in the world. So I think it's cool that we have three super interesting tracks to plumb the depths of.
Ryan:
So can I ask you a question—you can just pass on this, if your research hasn't gone there, but—will there be church in the metaverse?
Gretchen:
I think there already is church in the metaverse. If there are people and Christians and God and the Holy Spirit, there's Church, capital C.
There's big arguments now about what role technology plays in the Church. If you go back—let's follow your genealogies thing and talk about how roads were a technology that expanded the gospel. I think what we're seeing is that every new invention, every new technology, can be used for both good and ill. So it's our job as the Church to embrace where things can be used well for the kingdom, and be careful of those places where we would get distracted.
I’ve got to say, I haven't spent much time in the metaverse, just kind of around the fringes, and I'm not a gamer either. I think there's a certain kind of person that wants to go into goggles and participate in virtual reality and that hasn't been my experience, but it also is not my demographic.
Ryan:
I'm in the same position. I was just talking to my colleague, James DeMasi, who's the director of Beatrice Institute here. He was telling me about his 20 year old cousin who is extremely excited about the metaverse, and his explanation was that when I look at a tree in real life, it is just so complex. There is always going to be so much more to that tree than I can possibly comprehend, and that makes me very uneasy and uncomfortable. And in the metaverse I'll look at a tree, and I'll be able to fully comprehend it.
Gretchen:
Really? I don't know, maybe so. It's so new. I think there's a lot of people who don't even know what the metaverse means. I would struggle to define it. But it does fall in this augmented/virtual reality space where there are things that you would get that you wouldn't normally get, like the glasses that Google came out with before the world was ready for them.
I don't know, my big question is, is it ever a point where it's too much? Do I really need to know everything? Isn't there part of life that's the mystery of that tree and not fully comprehending it, and living in that tension?
Ryan:
Exactly. When James and I were talking about this, we were like, well, yeah, that's what we love about trees. Even a tree is so rich in its reality that it exceeds our capacity as created beings to comprehend it. Ultimately only God can fully comprehend any of the phenomena that he created, and that is the mystery of created life. But it's funny to think that that would be anxiety inducing. I mean, I guess it's not too surprising.
Gretchen:
It doesn't induce anxiety in me, but I like living with a little bit of tension. I'm embracing the things that I don't know, in tension with the things that I do. And again, maybe that's just a phase of life thing. I don't know.
Ryan:
Tell me about your phase in life, because you're very close to completing this major PhD project, but you're also not doing a research PhD at a traditional stage in life, as I understand it.
Gretchen:
No. In fact, what I'd call it right now is my kick lap, where you finish strong and leave it all on the track. The idea here is digital wisdom, and that's been kind of a focal point of mine for more than 10 years. I started this sometime ago and took a break to do work. And that work has been a godsend, literally, to fill in some gaps that I didn't have filled in when I started.
But yeah, I'm at a stage in life where people look at me and say, why are you doing this right now? You're not going to go into a career in research at a university. And no, I'm not, but I do think this research is important. So what it is is a qualitative interrogation of the Christian voice in the ethical artificial intelligence conversation.
Currently, there's a lot of concern about AI, both its promise and its peril and its power. The concerns are falling along political lines, mostly. I thought, what we're not looking at is what is the impact spiritually? Now I'm not actually interrogating the spiritual impact of AI—there's a lot of people that are writing books about that. More what I'm concerned about is the lack of voices of faith, as it were; voices of religious faith, when it comes to worldview and how to fix what's wrong with AI. So, that's what I'm bringing to the table at this time. It's at the University of Washington, and I've got an incredible committee. I just think this is one of those things that its time has come.
People are calling—even Brad Smith at Microsoft is calling—for other voices at the table, recognizing that we can't just do this with computer scientists alone. Some of the voices that have already come have been legal, and academic, and social, and so on. I think if we exclude the religious voice, particularly the Christian one, we’re missing a lot.
Ryan:
In your recent interview with Bob Marks, he distinguished between design ethics and other kinds of ethics. Design ethics, it seems to me, is mostly what I encounter when I read about AI ethics. I think maybe the most famous example is about algorithmic bias. So how do you get an algorithm to do what it's designed to do without also having these knock on deleterious effects on society?
But that is more about making sure that the technology is doing what we want it to do and not other things; it's ultimately not ethics. What does a Christian ethics have to add to these kinds of questions?
Gretchen:
Well, having just finished more than 20 qualitative interviews with people who are both AI professionals and professing Christians, some of the themes that have come up are that any technical tool we have ultimately rests on the ethics of the person, whether it's the person who designs it, or the person who uses it.
I also think we need to establish that it's not just a person, it's persons: entities, institutions, governments, and so on. If you get a powerful tool, it's going to be attractive to a lot of different kinds of people, including what we call the bad actor.
One of the best lines I got from one of the interviews was that Christian theology posits that we're all the bad actor. We've all sinned and fall short of the glory of God. There's this temptation to put other people in the role of the person that's going to use it badly or design it badly.
That's where I'm exploring, thought-wise: how do we embrace the idea that, in a fallen world, this is a tool that can be used for ill? How do we channel it for good? And these are big questions; they're not easily answered. But that's where we are.
Ryan:
Yeah. You talked about how it seems like politics are dictating the questions that are being asked ethically in many of these spaces. But if anthropology is allowed to dictate the questions that we're asking—so, what is a human person?—then: A) any ethical account is going to assume some kind of anthropology, so we need to be reflecting on what is that anthropology that we're assuming; and B) Christianity has a very distinctive anthropology, and that's going to be on offer.
Going back to the question of the metaverse, and will there be a church in metaverse: one way that I imagine a Christian anthropology would inflect an answer to that question is that if the human person is a unity of body and soul, and the embodiment of a religious experience is attenuated so much in the metaverse, at what point does it end up distorting the religious experience that should be a full unity of body and soul? That's where I would go with that.
Gretchen:
But you know that this question has found its way into the conversation at every turn when a new technology arises and finds its way into the Church. Televangelism was one of the big things that everyone said was going to ruin it. Right now we see multi-site churches, mega churches that have a charismatic, talented, gifted speaking preacher/pastor, and they want to replicate. So instead of having the pastoral role, it's more of an entertainment role. I use that term loosely because I think the Gospel can spread in many ways and gifted preachers are one; but any place that there are people and technology, we're going to have the Church, because the Church isn't just a thing you go to on Sunday, it's the Body of Christ.
So my take on it is, yeah, we're going to have church in the metaverse. Yeah, it's going to have a weirdness, and questions on incarnation, and body/soul/spirit questions, what's reality/what's not. But those aren't new questions. It's just a new way that we're experiencing those questions.
Even the radio did it, when you could have church disembodied from a distance. Zoom church, Zoom prayer meetings—we're living it right now.
Ryan:
As a Roman Catholic, we've seen some very clear articulations of where these questions go since COVID. The Roman Catholic Church has always held that you can't fully be in communion with the body of Christ without actually, at the very least, eating the Host. And yet there's a long tradition of spiritual communion: this idea that if, for some reason, it’s impossible for you to have access to the Host itself, then there is a way in which, by desire and by intention, there can be some kind of spiritual participation there.
On all of the Zoom Masses now, after the Eucharist is consecrated, there's always this prayer of spiritual communion. There are various different versions of this, and they'll put it on the screen and everybody prays along. But the question that remains, that I think is occupying a lot of theologians and pastors, is it necessary for people to actually go to Mass? What's the difference and what are the limits?
Gretchen:
These are such deep questions. We should do a podcast just about the Eucharist in a digital world. And the whole Incarnation of Christ is deeply rooted in theology. He had to come and be one of us. There are times obviously when technology aids in spiritual formation. Does it encompass the whole thing? I don't think so.
Ryan, I want to flip the question back over to you and start talking about what you're doing. We've talked about technology for a while, so we can also move over to the Genealogies of Modernity, which is your current line of exploration, even though you're an English professor and you have deep roots in medieval literature. Talk to me about what you're doing in the Genealogies of Modernity, or GenMod as you call it. I want to explore that a little bit more. Even though I've listened to your podcasts, I haven't heard you talk about what you're interested in.
Ryan:
Really the project works on both sides of that title. So it's an investigation into what does it mean to be modern, and especially what are the historical sources of modernity as we know it, and what are the stories that we've told ourselves about what it means to be modern?
And then on the other side of that, it's an investigation into genealogy. Genealogy has taken on this very technical sense in the academic historical humanities. Our major analogy for thinking about the past has always been story. What is history? It’s the story of the past; it’s this narrative that we tell. But I would say that since the 1990s, when the academic humanities switched into a consensus suspicion of grand narratives, story has ceased to be the kind of monolithic analogy for thinking about the past. So we needed alternative concepts to analogize from, to think about the past.
One of those is genealogy. Genealogy is different from a story. You could think of it as a species of story, but it's different from a story in a few ways. One of the ways that it's different is that it focuses very specifically on a kind of genetic causation, or at least conditioning, of one point in the history to the next, and to the next. So the focus then becomes more on causation than it is on story.
So you could think about genealogy as being maybe a more scientific or positivistic way of understanding causation and history. But at the same time, when you look at the actual practice of human genealogy, what do people do when they get on ancestry.com? Well, they often try to just trace their ancestry back to royalty. So it’s like, okay, I got back to a 16th century king in Denmark or something. Success!
Gretchen:
Everyone's a princess.
Ryan:
Exactly. So in that case, we see genealogy as actually being manipulative and self-interested and distorting the past. Those two competing understandings of genealogy—one is history as a kind of science of causation, and the other history as a distortion of the past through the will to power—those are the two main forces in the historical humanities today.
Gretchen:
The word you said, “consensus suspicion”: dig in a little bit on that. What do you mean by that?
Ryan:
The suspicion of grand narratives is that, if we tell a really big story, say about the rise of democracy and capitalism: we tell this story in which a liberal democracy is supportive of capitalism and the free market, and vice versa. As you get a rise in free market economics, then you also get a more developed liberal democracy. That's one of these standard grand narratives of modernity. And yet, I think we can see in the history of China since the 1990s, that it's not necessarily the case that liberalizing markets leads to liberalizing government and society. So that's a grand narrative that is proven to have major problems with it. Then the suspicion becomes maybe the problem is just that we're telling these stories and they're too big.
Gretchen:
I want to stick with this for a minute, because I'm actually fascinated by a couple of threads here. One is this idea of embellishing the narrative to be grander than perhaps my roots would be. No one ever goes back and says, “Yay, I found a criminal in my past and my great-great-great-great grandfather was a murderer. And I'm so proud!” We also see this in the DNA tests people are doing now. It's like, well, I found out that I was one-third Norwegian and I thought I was Swedish, and blah, blah, blah. But all that aside, Ryan, one of the most famous groups on the planet for these genealogies, this idea of finding out who's in your past, is the Mormon Church. Mormons are really noted for having the most prominent databases of lineage. What do you know about the Mormon Church's role in our interest in this, and what can you add to that conversation?
Ryan:
I am fascinated by Mormon genealogy. I haven't researched every single world religion’s approach to genealogy, but I've done a good bit. And as far as I can tell, the Mormons have the richest and most supple genealogical imagination of any of the world religions. It's really beautiful. I find it really beautiful, and as a traditional Christian—mainstream Christian, as the Mormons would call me—I am often put to shame when I encounter the Mormon practices of memory.
Really, it's memory of the dead. I'm writing a book on genealogy, because my wager is that if we're using genealogy as a major analogy for how we do historical inquiry, then the more we know about literal genealogy and its various forms, the richer that analogy can be, and we won't get locked into a kind of reductive analogy that I think is happening in a lot of parts of the historical humanities.
That's why I ended up spending the entire last semester learning about Mormonism and their fascinating genealogical practices.
Gretchen:
Why is it so important to Mormons? Obviously we dig into things that we find important. That's why I'm doing what I'm doing. What have you found about why the Mormon faith is so interested in the history of lineage?
Ryan:
It's because the major innovation that Joseph Smith made, far more than the discovery of the Book of Mormon and that revelation, was the revelation that you could retroactively save your dead—your ancestors. It is the teaching of vicarious baptism. This is actually something that Paul mentions in first Corinthians 15:29, and he's making this argument about the resurrection of the body. And he says, if the bodies weren't resurrected, then why would people be baptizing on behalf of their dead?
So he was kind of just assuming this Christian practice, and Joseph Smith read that and said, indeed, why not? Why shouldn't I be able to go and be baptized on behalf of my dead grandfather, who either rejected the Gospel in his life, or did not have the advantage of knowing the fullness of the truth (as it's been revealed to Joseph Smith) in his life. So the idea is not that you're there magically saving someone against their will. It's that through this vicarious sacrament of baptism, they are making available to their dead relatives—who are still existing in the afterlife, or beyond the veil, as they would say—we're making that available to them anew. And here and now, with the new information of the afterlife, we expect that they actually probably will accept this.
Gretchen:
This does get into theological murk, as it were, in terms of speculating what can happen after someone dies. The Catholic Church has the idea of purgatory. Other expressions of Christianity, mostly Protestant, say you have your opportunity in life; God knows all of the things that you know and is the judge of all, but you had to have done that on your own, of your own volition.
So this is an interesting path. Given what you said, and understanding that's what the Mormons believe, then the genealogy part of it—how does that connect to why it would be important? Just so that you could go back and find the people that needed to be saved according to your belief system?
Ryan:
Right. And I think this gets at something really important about Christian baptism in general, that I didn't fully appreciate before this, which is that baptism is very much of an individual person. It's a way of bringing that individual into a larger body. So you have to know who the individual is, and the way that we are given to know individuals, according to the Christian tradition, is by their name. And the way that we bring them into the larger body is in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
Gretchen:
Ryan, you referred to the book you're writing, and I think in a previous conversation, you called it a speculative history of the world from the perspective of a new earth, in which you compare the difference between the genealogical and the geological scale. That is deep and dense and academic. Can you unpack that for me?
Ryan:
Actually, this is not the book on genealogy. This is a short story that I'm writing that I'm using to try to tease out some of the implications of these questions of genealogy.
Gretchen:
Oh, so this is fiction, this isn't the academic book.
Ryan:
Yeah, this is my TheoFi. Instead of SciFi it's theological fiction, inspired by the genre of The Great Divorce by CS Lewis; these speculative fictions of the afterlife. The idea here is that in the new earth—how is everybody who's ever lived going to fit on the new earth?
Gretchen:
Well, if it's a rock, they won’t.
Ryan:
I recently went to an evening of recollection, and the retreat leader asked this question, and he said, “Well, maybe the earth will just kind of be expanded at scale.” And, and I thought, “Ooh, that would be cool,” because I'm a rock climber. And I thought, wow, if the earth were expanded at scale—let's say 10X—then all of the features that we climb today, like El Capitan would become the size of Mount Everest. And the cliffs that I tend to climb on would be the size of El Capitan, and the little pebbles would become boulders. What would that do to the actual culture of rock climbing?
And then at the same time, what happens in the afterlife, according to a Christian perspective, is that we are going to encounter presumably all of our ancestors at the same time. So that sense of genealogical distance that we have when we do genealogy is actually going to be collapsed, and it's going to be made on this horizontal plane. And so the other question is, as you're trying to figure out what becomes of rock climbing in the new earth, what also becomes of your relationship to ancestors as that scale is exploded.
Gretchen:
I just watched The Alpinist. It featured Alex Honnold, who was the star of Free Solo. I'm not a climber, but I was just fascinated by these climbs. So I share that fascination with you, if not the physical working out of it.
But here's another thing: what you've just said is something that I've come up against in my mind, this idea of time and space and that God put us in time and space; but to Him, it's nothing. He is not bound by time or space. So this idea of both collapsing and expanding, we just can't comprehend it. So I like the fact that you're going there with your, as we call it, sanctified imagination, and exploring that. I love that.
Ryan:
Partially sanctified—hopefully sanctified!
Gretchen:
You're in the process of sanctification.
Ryan:
In the Microsoft Research Podcast, you would often ask these researchers you were interviewing, what gets you up in the morning, and then what keeps you awake at night, which is a great contrast. Can you step back and make any kind of aggregate judgment about what is getting your typical, cutting-edge AI researcher up in the morning?
Gretchen:
Most of them—and I say them, because I think we're all kind of this way—see the reality of a fallen world, whether we call it the fallen world or whatever else we want to attribute it to, and want to make it better. Technology has always and ever been an attempt to transcend human limitations. I’ve called it the frictionless existence, where we have less pain and more pleasure; less work, more leisure. I don't think this is a good thing by the way, because we're built in a different way by God to do work, and have pleasure in that work. The fall kind of ruined it. But I feel like most technologists see what they're doing as an attempt to reverse the curse. And so that gets most of them up in the morning.
I also think some people just love math. I'm not one of them, but I love the people that do. And so that's, I think, the motivation: what can I do to make human life better, increase human flourishing?
And I think we all want that. Jesus wants that, right? He just says there's a different way, ultimately, to get there. But God does, from the beginning, tell us to be fruitful, multiply, and have dominion over the earth, meaning: discover, explore, use what I've given you, raw-material-wise, to make life better and more interesting and more joyful. So that I think is the motivator. If I'm speaking on behalf of people, they're optimists. They say, I can do something to help the world.
Ryan:
That makes sense of my journalistic experience of Silicon Valley. One of the other things that I gather from reading and listening to podcasts about Silicon Valley is that utilitarianism seems to be the dominant philosophy. In your experience, is that true? And if so, why do you think that is?
Gretchen:
You'll probably cringe when I say this, but it goes back to this idea of the trolley problem. When you get into an ethical dilemma, the straw man argument is that there's always going to be a situation coming up where there's two absolutely wrong choices, and you have to make one of them. It's the Sophie's choice thing; it's the Heinz dilemma. To someone who doesn't pray, and doesn't believe that there's a sovereign God in charge of things and that He never gives us the temptation that we can't handle or find a way out of, the default is: Well, let's do the best for the most, right? The greatest good for the greatest number of people. I think that is where we land—by we, I mean, sort of the tech community lands. And I also would say the vast majority of the tech community is not a Christian community. It's secular humanist. So that makes sense.
Ryan:
How many of the people you interviewed on the Microsoft Research Podcast, would you guess, believe in or hope for some kind of artificial immortality?
Gretchen:
Gosh, I have zero idea. Most of them were head down in their lanes in particular technical problems and solutions. I would say that question moves over into these institutes that address big questions of life.
There's one in England, Leverhulme, Nick Bostrom’s academic home. You see these big names—Ray Kurzweil has come up a lot—but most people that are doing technology aren't necessarily thinking, “Hey, this is my big end goal, to upload my brain into the cloud and be immortal that way.” There are a lot of people like that; I think most of them go by the title of transhumanist, and if you look back to my Christian Transhumanist podcast with Micah Redding, you'd see a Christian answer to that. But I think fewer people would say, “That's what I'm thinking about when I go to work.”
Ryan:
I think the rest of the country, at least my perception from being out here in Pittsburgh is, that we have gotten whatever kind of crunchy aesthetic and ethics that we have from your part of the country—specifically from Seattle and Portland, and maybe from Berkeley—this preference for farm-to-table dining, for organicism. And yet this is also where a lot of this craze for artificial intelligence is coming. It's the question you raised with Bob Marks, but you didn't get to explore it. What do you think is going on there culturally, that in general the educated, cultured elite in this country really prize the natural, the authentic; and yet now, also it seems that the future is artificial?
Gretchen:
I think it goes back to semantics. The term artificial intelligence was coined decades ago when things were different in terms of both the science and the culture. There's a lot of people that say it isn't artificial, and it's not intelligent. The idea of artificial intelligence is more of an extension or an expansion of human capabilities, mainly in terms of speed and accuracy, machine-like. I prefer to call it machine intelligence rather than artificial intelligence.
But one of the places I'm exploring in my study, Ryan, is this idea of rightly ordered intelligence. I think Augustine talked about rightly ordered loves, and that if we get them out of order, that's where vice comes in. A virtuous life puts God first and humans next. I think what we're seeing over in the intelligence lane, is a tendency to put human intelligence at the top, but still to see that it's deeply flawed. So we've got to fix it; and what's our fix? Well, if I'm a technologist, my fix is technology. I'm the guy with the hammer and everything's a nail. That particular approach to it doesn't include God, and certainly not Jesus, as the fix for the problems with human intelligence. So we better use a machine to fill in the gaps that we have. And then what we find, as you started out talking about, we find that there are problems with the algorithm, because it takes human knowledge. That's a whole other conversation.
But I do feel like we need to get back to acknowledging that there is a Divine Intelligence, and that's at the top, and it's incomprehensible; and then there's human; and then we can use machines to help us to augment the places we're not good at. And that's okay; it's just not going to fix it. It's not going to fix us. Only Christ fixes us.
Ryan:
And where does the Impossible Burger fit in there?
Gretchen:
You mean a vegan burger, fake meat?
Ryan:
Yeah, they're very high tech fake meat.
Gretchen:
I don't know. I don't want to eat that. I just don't want to eat that. Do you?
Ryan:
No, I don't. But when I speculate on the motivations, it seems to me on its face as a kind of hypocrisy: that we care so much about the natural world, that we are going to technologize food in a way that is actually extremely carbon intensive. But in terms of why it is that the Impossible Burger has become, as far as I can tell, wildly popular and at least economically viable, is that if you don't really think it through, you're doing it because you care about nature. You're doing the artificial thing because it's going to ultimately save what we view as natural.
Gretchen:
Now that's an excellent thread, Ryan, because I think you're seeing a pendulum swing or a backlash to some degree. Not just the Impossible Burger, but the electric car and these giant data centers, are really bad for the environment. The footprint that they think they're fixing is actually, you push down here, it comes out there.
Kate Crawford wrote a great book called The Atlas of AI, and she really uncovers the lithium strip-mining that feeds these giant car batteries and what that does to particular areas of the earth. I think you're bringing up a great point, which has been part of what I've examined as well: why artificial is better than natural only in some places.
It's like margarine, right? Everyone said margarine was better than butter, but it turns out it never was, either health-wise or taste-wise. And so I think we try to explore areas that might be better in that idea of “I'm going to make the world a better place, I'm going to make the body healthier,” et cetera—only to find out that what God made at first is probably pretty good.
Ryan:
Stanley Hauerwas’s magnum opus were his Gifford lectures published under the title With the Grain of the Universe. I think that's such a beautiful analogy for what ultimately does natural mean? It's going with the grain of the universe. Now, what is the grain of the universe? That's hard to perceive. Given the complexity of late modernity—or who knows, maybe we're still an early modernity—given the complexities, it could be that ultimately the Impossible Burger is with the grain of the universe. But I think so many of us intuit that sustainably farmed beef is more in line with the grain of the universe.
Gretchen:
Speaking of dead bodies, Ryan, your book that you alluded to earlier has a title already right?
Ryan:
This might be another book that I put on the back burner to do the genealogies book: Theology of Incorruptibility. Is that what you're referring to?
Gretchen:
Yes! So talk to me about what you're thinking. After the colon—which is my favorite line right now in academic writing—after the colon: On Dead Bodies and the Eschatology of Traditions. What's your thought process here, even if it's not written?
Ryan:
Part of it is written, but the thinking on it is that tradition is not, and never can be, the perfect preservation of the past, and a wonderful image for this is an incorrupt saint's body. Now, not all Christians are going to believe that this is a legit phenomenon; but if you do believe in the incorruptibility of saintly flesh, in the Eastern and Roman Catholic traditions, it doesn't mean that these things don't change. You look at some of the bodies that the Church is affirming to be incorrupt—like St Bernadette Soubirous, the most recent one—and she doesn't look like she could just wake up and walk away. I mean, her flesh has definitely changed, right? So there is a corruptibility going on there, but it is a corruptibility that's happening at a different pace, sort of happening “on its own time,” as I like to say. And in that autonomy of incorruptibility that these bodies have, we see a witness to the way that traditions can also change, corrupt, and be witnesses themselves.
Gretchen:
That's so interesting. As you're talking, I'm just taking notes and thinking. There's different traditions about what is a saint. Protestant traditions say we’re all saints: “Cheer up ye saints of God, There's nothing to worry about.” And yet the Catholic Church has its tradition of certain, particularly holy people who achieved sainthood. But you also see the Scripture that we’re sown corruptible, but raised incorruptible. And then my mind went to code, and the corrupted code, and this whole idea of the fall and how corruption enters in and what the fix is. We've been trying to patch things, to use a technical term, to patch the code corruption. So I like this idea that you're exploring that from a human perspective. I think there's so many crossover themes here.
Ryan:
I hadn't thought about the corruptibility of code, but now thinking back to conversations with my software engineer friends, apparently it's impossible for a code not to be corrupted.
Gretchen:
Right. That's a huge part of the research that's going on at Microsoft Research. I talked to a lot of people who were very concerned about software reliability and how you could prove things, but also making sure that it didn't crash. When you get into AI, you're talking about really dense, deep, layered code, and just trying to figure out where the problem is, is incredibly difficult. The more technical we get, the harder the problems are to fix. I think there's just so much there to dig into, both from a Christian perspective and an academic perspective and a technical perspective and a genealogical perspective. It's just Venn diagram overlap.
Ryan:
Yes. Just to go back to this question of modernity, that's a great analogy because we have come to this point where you're never going to be able to just tell one particular story about history, change some of the bad ideas or some of the bad conditions, and fix it all. We actually need to be engaging in a sustained exploration of the possibilities of the past, of the conditions of the past. It's that sustained hermeneutical endeavor, that sustained ethical reflection, that's going to be the way forward. It's not going to be an answer; it's not going to be a solution. It's going to be a habit of being in the world.
Gretchen:
I love that. As I think of the Beatrice Institute and my newly minted addition to it, I feel like what you're doing in offering Christian Studies in a largely secular and hostile environment in the modern academy is a wonderful thing. I start to think well, it's not very big. You talked about it earlier being a small thread for Christians to be able to engage in this academically. But then I think of Christ's analogies about the mustard seed and the yeast. It doesn't take much to grow something big in the kingdom.
I feel like there's this great opportunity, right now at this inflection point in history, of modernity, for us to bring back some of the ideas that have been kicked out of the conversation—just disqualified because it's metaphysical, not physical. I say don't be fooled by the physics and metaphysics. We need to bring our voices forward. That's all we're ever called to do in our various endeavors, is to say, I'm going to speak Christ into this. We will get told to shut up, but so did they in Acts chapter two. Be quiet; no, we're not going to. So I love what you're doing, you and your colleagues there, and I'm really honored to be part of it.
Ryan:
I should also say that Beatrice Institute started as a way to make more visible and to amplify the voices of scholars who are already doing the kinds of things that you're talking about. In a way we are just building on communities that are already here in the academy. At its highest levels, the academy—for sure in the humanities, to a certain extent in the social sciences, and as far as I can tell, also in the hard sciences—is actually surprisingly well attuned to truth, beauty and goodness, or at least open to it when presented in terms that they can understand.
Gretchen:
Because it resonates all the way. The other side of what you just said is that you're amplifying the voices that already exist. I would say in the study that I've just done my interviews for, there are a lot of Christians working in technology. They're just not all that overt about it. Some really are, but it depends on where you are and what you say—that dictates your career, obviously, in some areas.
I think also what we're seeing, as things have been amplified by COVID and this disembodied nature of what they've tried to do to keep people from getting sick, has amplified how much we need each other physically and the limitations of what technology can do. Even as it enables us to do certain things, we find that we're missing something deep and rooted, and it almost took this to make us understand that.
Ryan:
Yes. As many of us liked to say in the very early days of COVID, let's not talk about getting back to normal because normal wasn't good enough. Let's think about what we want the new normal to be. So that's where we're at, right?
Gretchen:
Opportunities abound.
Ryan:
This has been such a pleasure to speak with you Gretchen. It's always a great pleasure to hear you interviewing, but to have a conversation with you is the best.
Gretchen:
I always say the podcast is sad, because you can't see the grin on my face when you're talking. I'm going, “Yeah, that makes so much sense! I love that!” So thanks for inviting me on the host-host podcast, and we'll continue to be amazed and surprised by each other's work.
Ryan
Wonderful. Enjoy the snow.