Transcript for episode 72
Ryan:
This episode is the second part of my conversation with Matthew Milliner. I've moved some parts around because we started the conversation even before I was able to do the introduction. And then we kept talking and recording after officially signing off. If you've ever listened to In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg, you'll be familiar with what's going on here. You get some of the best tape outside the official interview.
So with Matt's permission, some of this is bonus material from the cutting room floor, and to signal where there's an artificial transition in the conversation, we've placed some musical interludes. You might want to go back and listen to the first part of this, if you haven't already; but really, you can just jump right in. So let's jump in.
Matthew:
I just finished Thomas Pfau’s new book, Incomprehensible Certainty—it’s just a tour de force; it's like the positive answer to Minding the Modern. And so if you want to talk Genealogies of Modernity, I'll do it.
Ryan:
Okay, fantastic. I just saw that it came out, but I haven't gotten it yet.
Matthew:
It's magnificent. I feel like I finally understand Minding the Modern, which was the first real Genealogies of Modernity initiation for me. And now that that book’s here, it helps me understand my discipline, and I can easily tie it into this.
Ryan:
Fascinating. Tell me how it compliments or completes Minding the Modern.
Matthew:
So essentially, Minding the Modern was a critical project. I think what I realized in going back over it is he attacks the nostalgia critique of people who appeal to a Platonist Christian metaphysics as itself beholden to the progressive narrative of modernity. So in so far as you say, “Hey, John Milbank is nostalgic,” you are betraying the fact that you are caught in this chronological sequence that you don't think one can return to.
I was always stunned by Louis Dupre, who says in Passage to Modernity, “You can't go back.” And I'm like, why can't you? What Minding the Modern does over 600 and some pages is use phenomenology as the forgotten ally. And of course, Pfau is tackling all that in the original German sources. He realizes that any moment you can have an inbreaking, and therefore, to in any way have this locked in chronology—toward neue Zeit, new time modernism—it's just unnecessary because of the eruption that can happen at any moment. So he sets up that possibility, and sort of just snipes off the people who, whether through historicism or other ways, can't open their minds to that possibility.
But the concluding lines of Minding the Modern are, to really understand what I'm suggesting, you would have to go through the lens of the image, in a rich polyphonic sense, to see those multiple eruptions. And then over 700 and some pages, he traces a great history of the image—not in the slavish chronological sense, but in this series of periodic eruptions from Plato's The Sophist, through Plotinus, through the Seventh Ecumenical Council, all the way through Nicholas of Cusa. And the renegades for the image throughout the constrictions of modernity, which include Cezanne, Rilke, and of course Gerard Manley Hopkins. It's just absolutely magnificent.
I really feel like I just could rest easy, and that the crisis that's afflicting my own discipline, made baldly apparent through Christopher Wood’s The History of Art History, where he says this discipline is just eating itself alive. Relativism just consumes whatever's left of art history. And he actually, in that massive book, says you have three exit strategies: Gnosticism, Hinduism—I mean like real Hinduism—or, I kid you not, the theology of Karl Barth.
Ryan:
This is Christopher Wood?
Matthew:
Christopher Wood, The History of Art History. You want an escape hatch from the insane relativism of art history, be a Barthian. Believe that the word can reveal itself and erupt into our relativistic art history. I'm flabbergasted, right?
But what's so interesting is really he just kind of presents that, and we read through it in our senior seminar for our art history students, they're all just like, what? What is this that I signed up for?
And now Thomas Pfau comes along, and you're like, okay, this is what art history is. It is a discipline that puts one in touch, intimately and consistently, with this inbreaking of the image. Which is why John Ruskin is so crucial, and why the history of art has sort of had to exile him, because he's just too close. He's too personal. And he emerges as one of the heroes of Pfau’s narrative. Not the only one, but one of them.
So anyway, it's just richly exciting. I feel like my genealogies journey, I no longer am so agonized.
And another person—he's an outsider by design, but I really think that what Michael Martin has accomplished in his sophiology trilogy …
Ryan:
Oh, I just came across that.
Matthew:
I think in particular The Submerged Reality is the only short genealogy of modernity, the first chapter of that book in particular, that I can assign to lower level undergraduates that they get. And they are captivated by it. It's not that it's not high level, it's just that he's such an accessible writer. And he puts the whole problem on the doorstep of all the traditions by tackling pure nature.
It really seems like there's been the great migration of the blame pinning. No longer is it pin the tail on the donkey of John Duns Scotus—I've kind of done with that, because I've found too many places where he defends analogical metaphysics. We all know the Analogy of Being is our friend; but now, the pin the tail on the donkey goes toward natura pura. That's the enemy. And if that's the enemy—which Michael Martin does such a good job of isolating, and of course countless people have done that as well—then all of a sudden you're like, wait a second. This is an ecumenical problem. Stop blaming one particular confession.
I mean, for goodness sakes—Michael Horton, I know he's not a flashy thinker in the sense that he's going to be read all over the place; he’s a classic reformed thinker. But in his book on justification, he just goes to town, and he finds Luther critiquing Duns Scotus. He finds all these citations that are completely unexpected. And Mark Mattes’s Martin Luther's Theology of Beauty, again, goes to town and says, here's all of this analogical metaphysics resonating in Protestant sources.
There's a brand new book called Protestants and Mysticism edited by a wonderful scholar who's now at Duke, Ron Rittgers, and someone else. And they're just like: we now have the Cusanus’s inheritance thrives most among Lutherans. It's like what? Who knew? And then you read Valentin Weigel,1533 to 1588, and wait a second—he's quoting Meister Eckhart. He's the one that's keeping it alive.
But according to the other narratives I read that are 15 years old now, I was supposed to blame all of them for being the ones who turn things. And it's not to say that the Protestant tradition is in any way to be exonerated. It has massive problems; but so does the Catholic tradition. And so does the Orthodox tradition. It's gotta be a project where we unify together.
In “The Invention of the Antichrist,” that wonderful article that was published in Communio, it’s actually pure nature.
So anyway, I think this conversation has massively shifted in a really exciting way. What does it have to do with Indigenous theology? It has a whole heck of a lot to do with Indigenous theology.
Ryan:
I was going to a conference in Edinburgh, and then giving some talks in St. Andrews. And then I discovered the Future of Christian Thinking conference, which is happening at St Patrick's Seminary in Maynooth, Ireland.
And it's all of these people; it's kind of bringing together these three strains of Genealogies of Modernity that hitherto haven't really talked to each other, and they're calling a truce and they're saying we all need to collaborate. So I added it on, I changed my flights and I'm headed there.
Matthew:
That's fascinating. I'm going to look into this. I'm glad it's happening.
Did you go to the Bulgakov Conference?
Ryan:
I didn't know about this. Where was it?
Matthew:
It was in Fribourg, but it was online. And so I attended every single session. It was electrifying. It was so wonderful. It was in late August or early September. It was magnificent, and it's all freely available.
Ryan:
Oh, cool.
Matthew:
By the way, I’m almost never on Instagram. I'm always on Twitter, and that's where I try to interact in this way. But the guy for me right now, the newest page-turn in the conversation, is Antoine Arjakovsky, Towards an Ecumenical Metaphysics.
Ryan:
Is he Orthodox?
Matthew:
I don't know. I think he might be Catholic. But here's what I found so exciting: it's a three volume project—Ron Williams endorsed, David Hart endorsed—and I just couldn't not buy it, because it interacts so adventurously with Hinduism, Buddhism. Even with Ken Wilber—he had the balls to say, all right, I'm going to read Ken Wilber, the Buddhist grand history guy. I mean, for goodness sakes, the guy’s citing Deepak Chopra. I'm not joking. But because he's outside of the American conversation, he's like, all right, I'm gonna learn from this guy.
But what I found interesting about it is [it’s] the first time that someone with academic footnotes, who's part of this conversation, and he also has a heavy sophiological twist, in a positive way. And the fact that it was ecumenical—we all need to be doing this together.
And Michael Martin knows him. I interact with Michael mostly through Twitter. He's another great podcast guest—he's just a sweet fellow. He's a total battleax on Twitter—he’s anti-vax and everything.
Ryan:
What’s his story?
Matthew:
So he taught in a Waldorf school for awhile. He's a brilliant folk musician, a biodynamic farmer, totally isolated from the academic community; a total battleax on Twitter.
Ryan:
Where does he live?
Matthew:
He lives on a farm in Michigan. Sometimes Francesca Murphy and the gang will go out, and he hosts people on his farm. But he's the kindest gentlest soul, even though he's really a jerk on Twitter, because he's just so he's a Christian anarchist, like a real anarchist. But I really do think his sophiology trilogy—The Submerged Reality; Transfiguration: Notes Toward a Radical Catholic Rethinking of Everything; and the latest one is Sophia in Exile—I find he's the most accessible sophiologist I know of. And he knows Antoine. But he feels a little bit on the outs, because I think he's so radical that some of the Catholic people dismiss him. So another person to keep in mind.
Ryan:
So a lot of what we've been talking about with this history of Native American culture is the substance of your book. But you bring in G.K. Chesterton as a kind of constant interlocutor as you work through this material.
Why G.K. Chesterton? Why not just work through the material?
Matthew:
Very easy answer to that question: we have the Wade Center at Wheaton College, which has the papers of CS Lewis, the desk of J.R.R. Tolkien, the papers of Dorothy Sayers; even Owen Barfield, the anthroposophist, and Charles Williams. So we have this archive; it's our thing. And the Wade Center, run by Crystal and David Downing, it's an extraordinary small institution.
And so they have a series, the Hansen lectures, where Wheaton scholars are invited to plumb the archives and write about the figures. I was invited to be a part of this, and it was at that time that I was learning more and more about indigenous issues. And I said, sure, I'll do it, so long as I can talk about indigenous folks.
I could have easily paired it with C.S. Lewis—I mean, that's a slam dunk—but everyone writes about C.S. Lewis. I know Chesterton; he was really important to me; can I put him in conversation with the indigenous people of this land? And they're like, sure. No one knew what to make of the project, but the only way that I want to give attention to these figures is if I can update them with new concerns. The last thing I want to do is ape G.K. Chesterton; we don't need another one of those guys. We need someone updating his concerns.
And so I set about on the project, and it's really easy. The real work was learning all the new bibliography. Chesterton is just an easy match over and over again. Why? Because he's for the underdog. He's responding to H.G. Wells, who was the Yuval Noah Harari of his day, saying, “Stop it with your ridiculous progressivism. You're saying the world is just advancing—we've left disease behind; we’ve left war behind.” Harari said these things before COVID and before what we're experiencing; I'm glad he's now trying to update his data. But nevertheless, for goodness sakes, Homo Deus … Chesterton was faced with that. And so instead he writes The Everlasting Man, to put Christ at the center, the suffering servant.
And of course, Chesterton is famously for the underdog. In his visits to America, he says, I wish I could attend more to the Indigenous people. I know that Chesterton is unfashionable for awhile. He was fashionable; he'll probably be fashionable again. He never bored me; I was expecting to be bored by him, but he didn’t, once you put him in contact with the Indigenous people.
But isn't he problematic? Yes, he is; I'm well aware of that. But it's also a richly complicated conversation. If my point was just to score points with the current academic crowd, it's not a winner; but if my point is to get someone who loves Chesterton and could care less about Indigenous issues to care about Indigenous issues, it's a win. And it's working. People who care about Chesterton and think that any time you talk about Indians, that you're going to be PC—why don't I use that as a gateway point? That's the thing. It's intended to be a hospitable opening to people who might not pay attention to this otherwise.
Here's the other challenge: how about you write about race without talking about wokeness or critical theory or white supremacy. Just as a mental exercise—I'm not afraid to talk about any of those things. Right. But the minute I say those words, everyone's hackles are up—what team are you on? I don't want to approach it that way. And so instead of going to critical race theory—which I can do, I don't have a problem with it, I'm aware of it. I trained in that ethos—instead I said, why don't I go to Indigenous myth instead? Why don't I let Indigenous mythology inform the history of racism in this country?
And that was what the attempt was: to take Indigenous myth of the Thunderbird and the Mishipeshu and let it inform the history of racism. Frankly, I find it a lot more humiliating as a descendant of settler colonialism; I found it a lot more challenging. It forced me to plumb my own ancestral history, and those discoveries were not pleasant. My wife jokes, “you were depressed for a week when you found this stuff out. You were mopey because you were like, gosh, this is horrible, what my ancestors participated in.” Did I demonize them? Do I villainize them? No, I don't; I have more sympathy and compassion for them. But I know the truth about what happened in the conquest of this territory that they were beneficiaries of.
Again, it's not that I can't talk in the ways that people want to communicate, and the kind of things that get talk show hosts animated. I can do that, but my attempt was to circumvent all of that and say, let's do it this way.
I’m not going to do this, but it would be so interesting to play the experiment forward. John Ruskin and, and the Arapaho, or John Henry Newman and the Pueblo. Wouldn't that be cool? Wouldn't it be exciting to say here are thinkers that everyone knows about and talks about and thinks about; now let's put them in touch with these people. In both of those, you would find surprising contact points.
So that's the idea. But again, the problem is it takes so much explanation. And trust me, the press was like, I don't know if this is going to work. I don't get it. No one got it. Even if I gave the lectures, they’re like what? What, are you doing? And I'm like, just trust me, this is gonna work. Anyway, who knows if it works, but it's written now.
Ryan:
It works. I think I was skeptical as well, and I came away really convinced.
Matthew:
Oh, good, I’m so glad.
Ryan:
You do talk about the subject of your academic work in art history. It comes up in this book, specifically in Our Lady of Perpetual Help. I grew up in Salem, Virginia, and basically catty-corner from my house was Our Lady of Perpetual Help Catholic Church.
Matthew:
Oh really? I was hunting for her all over Virginia. I wish I knew that. That’s exciting.
Ryan:
It's still there. And I regularly attend daily mass at St. Paul Cathedral in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh, and there's a fairly new, massive icon of what you taught me to recognize as Our Lady of the Passion, or Our Lady of Perpetual Help. I had not realized that that is who that was, and I had not realized the history of it, which is Roman Catholic Crusaders wiping out the Orthodox inhabitants of Cyprus, and Our Lady of the Passion is written as a lament of this atrocity.
You have this fascinating concept in the book of activation. So you said, what if we activate that history in this icon? And that was a fascinating way to come at history. And maybe it has something to do with the inbreaking of the past that you said Thomas Pfau’s work enables. Say a little bit more theoretically; expand on how we can activate the history of an image.
Matthew:
I think Pfau would say, it's not even of the past, it's of the invisible behind the visible. Because what we're talking about breaking in is not the past; it is ever present, at any moment, at any time. What is required is simply enough reverence, wonder, and patience to permit the saturated phenomenon to saturate; and for one to at least be present enough to attend to it.
Ryan:
Conversion of the gaze.
Matthew:
Exactly. The idea being that Pius IX almost certainly did not know this history. I don't see how he could have known it. And some of you may be asking, why am I mentioning him? The great Pio Nono, that the defender of tradition, the Pope that all the trads would appeal to as the height of papal supremacy: he's the one who spreads this icon around the world—by the way, referring to her as Virgin priest. That source checks out. Trust me, I know; I've pinned a lot on it in this book, and I dug, and he says it in a preface to a book on the sacredotal Mary in 1870, right before he died. And the fathers of the church have rightfully called her the Virgin priest. And immediately after that it got a lot of attention, and then it was aggressively suppressed. That devotion was not permitted in the early 20th century, it was tamped down. But the cat's out of the bag. One must reckon with that. How one reckons with that—there are a variety of strategies?
But the argument I make in the book is that the Virgin of the Passion/Our Lady of Perpetual Help, which is the name she gets under Catholic auspices, is the single most popular and pervasive instance of Mary as a priest. Everyone hears that and you get nervous. I was like, no, no, no, no. It is ubiquitous in mainstream, not heterodox, Christian sources. So that's a whole other story.
But activating the icon, when one understands the history which Pius IX would not have understood because he didn't have the scholarship that we have to realize that it emerges as a result of Crusader conquest of Cyprus—we have to remember that Pius IX, he's also losing territory. He also wants to claim and hold onto his rights, that is the papal states, and those are being taken from him. And he has to come to terms with that. So unconsciously, perhaps—or maybe I don't need to just appeal to the unconscious, I can appeal perhaps the Holy Spirit—is gravitating him toward the icon that can help him attend to this reality that is inevitable. And we all in retrospect celebrate, I hope, that constriction of the papal states to Vatican City. But that is happening, and he needed some help. And he intuitively gravitates toward an icon that is not a symbol of conquest, but of passion of the loss of territory.
You mentioned you grew up kitty corner from it. I'm not surprised, because I'm tired of surprise. Surprise is a condition of the soul that can be wearisome, and so one settles into a kind of beloved expectation. Of course Ryan grew up across from it. When the Ukraine war started, of course Our Lady of Perpetual Help shows up in a bomb in Kiev—of course she does. When I saw that on my Twitter feed, I'm like, of course, where else is she going to show up? And of course the Russians are using a militarized Virgin Mary to try to endorse this war, as Mary has always been used. And of course the version of the passion would emerge as the response to the conquering violence of Neo-imperialist, Russia.
By the way, I don't want to forget to say this:in Pittsburgh, Makso Vanka—you know what I’m referring to. Beautiful.
Ryan:
Yes. St. Nicholas Croatian Catholic church in Millville has these spectacular murals that place Christ and Christ’s Passion in the first World War.
Matthew:
And it's that image in that church of Mary destroying the weapons. That's a contemporary application, and it's a stunning image. That's the Mary that we need to bring forth right now. Not a militarized Mary to counter the militarized Mary, but the Mary that transcends it. But it just so happens that the Virgin of the Passion is the first.
In the book, I tell the story going all the way back to the miracle of her surfacing in the Twilight of Byzantium, and how she became an emblem of a military defeat. So she's like the anti-Putin Mary. And she has presence in Moscow, by the way. But in the book I tell the long case; but in The Everlasting People, I simply applied it to Indigenous history, which is the easiest thing to do. Because of course the Indigenous people are losing their territory, and this is a protest of sorts. This is a lamentation. I just found her everywhere among the Indigenous People. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. You go to a place of settler colonial violence, and there's an OLPH church, and you're like, of course. That’s just a settled expectation.
I remember driving to the Black Hills, and I had this feeling like your advisor's voice in the back of your head: why are you studying things that are not your specialty? Right? You have that voice. And I got the kids in the car, and I get off, of course, at Wall Drug, the great stop on the way to the Black Hills. And I go in, and there's a whole church dedicated to Our Lady of Perpetual Help.
Ryan:
Really? Inside Wall Drug?
Matthew:
In Wall Drug.
Ryan:
I missed that.
Matthew:
I know. It's in Wall Drug; there it is. And I'm just like, okay, maybe this isn't irrelevant. It was this slow exiting from the academic silo of your specialization—which of course you should never leave, or then you won't be a good scholar. Right? You slowly get up, and then you look in both directions, and you're like, oh—no one cares. And then you keep leaving, and you go into this other realm, and you humble yourself before the history of a scholarship that you need to learn about. And lo and behold, she was there.
Ryan:
Wow. Wall Drug also has a small museum or exhibit that is all black and white photos of U.S. Calvary, and I think that some of it is from early Western films. So there are these native, tribal actors, essentially extras. And what they're acting out is the violent conquest of that very territory.
Matthew:
That's troubling. I'm sorry to hear that. But I will say that there was a humble little exhibition when I was there. It wasn't in Wall Drug itself. It was just an attempt to respond to that. It was a Wounded Knee museum. And I walked in, and this tender, silver-haired, Boomer white guy just hands me a turkey feather painted like an Eagle feather with a little Wounded Knee sticker on it. And he just said with sadness, yeah, you need to know this history. I still have the feather; and I walked through, and it was harrowing. I knew a little bit about it; I learned more, I visited the sites. And so there is a tender, mournful counter expression to that.
Which of course is the Pine Ridge Reservation itself in comparison to the Black Hills. It's funny; the Black Hills, in like 1980, the Supreme Court, eight out of nine, said “Yeah. It was stolen. Shady dealing. America should give it back.” And they gave it back in financial form, and the Lakota said: “We don't want the money. We want the land.” And it's been sitting accruing interest ever since. That's the status of the Black Hills right now.
Ryan:
Are there any updates on the status of Wheaton property in the Black Hills?
Matthew:
That's part of why I wrote the book, is I wanted to have an honest assessment of this. In the concluding chapter I wrestle with the Black Hills. And some agitated undergraduate—and I don't blame them—will say, oh, stolen land! We're on stolen land. I'm like, well, are we in Illinois?
Second Treatie of Prairie du Chien, 1829. The Anishinaabeg sold this land as they sold Chicago with the Treaty of Chicago. And I do my research there, and I talked to my friend, John Low. And he'll be like, “Yeah, don't tell me that we were duped. We did the best we could. I'm Potawatomi. My ancestors did the best they could in the circumstances delivered to them.” They weren't ideal; I don’t think it was perfect conditions, but it's a legitimate sale.
And again, complicated question in regards to each territory in America needs to be assessed in that way. You can't just throw around the word stolen land, because you're actually insulting Indigenous people. However, the Black Hills is pretty clear. That's actually stolen, because in 1868, the treaty of Fort Laramie, this is set aside in perpetuity for the Indigenous people. And then when we discover gold, we can't stop the influx of settlers. And then we try to protect the settlers, and then Custer gets killed, and then all right, now we're going to revenge him. And that's what Wounded Knee is. It's revenge for what happened at the Battle of Greasy Grass/the Battle of Little Bighorn.
And then we took the land back, and then how do you justify? Let me just do this real quick: so if I was to move into your house and just eject your family, and I didn't want people asking questions, I would just put my pictures where your family's pictures were, and all the McDermott regalia would be tucked away, and it would be Milliner land, and I’d be really aggressive about that. You see where I'm going, I'm sure.
Ryan:
Mount Rushmore.
Matthew:
Yeah, exactly. But it's not just Rushmore. It's Independence Hall, a replica slapped in the middle of the Black Hills—which is one of the weirdest monuments. It's Reagan and Kennedy—there's fake little Mount Rushmores as you drive through the Black Hills as well. It's bronze statues of all the presidents through Rapid City, for goodness sakes.
And then the greatest miracle—not the greatest miracle, I don't know what the greatest miracle is. One of the finest and most stunning developments in my lifetime and yours has been the renaming of Harney Peak. Black Elk Peak—what more can you ask for, that Harney—the butcher of the Lakota is avenging the horrible massacre that led to the Sioux wars—at Ash Hollow, he just guns down all of these Lakota, and then he gets his name on top of the highest peak in the Black Hills, where Black Elk saw Christ.
You may be like, “Well, he didn't see Christ. I've read John Neihardt just says he saw this man who was neither Indian, nor was he white, and he was filled with rainbows. Don't say that’s a Christian vision.” The reason you think that is because John Neihardt deliberately omitted the part where there were holes in the palms of his hands. Why? Because John Neihardt was a lit professor who didn't want a non-exotic Christianity to intrude upon his cool, epic experience with Black Elk. I know Neidhart is a complex figure—I should be more respectful of that. I understand that. But when you literally bury the fact that Black Elk saw Jesus, that's a little bit troubling.
He wanted an exotic, non-Christian Indian. That's not who Black Elk was. Black Elk Speaks ends by saying the hoop of the nation is broken. And now all the research, whether it's DeMallie's The Sixth Grandfather or Jon Sweeney's wonderful little book on Black Elk is saying, yeah, he didn't die. He kept living and converted 500 Lakota to Catholicism. So can we attend to that part of Black Elk as well?
And that's what I mean by one of the greatest moments that we're living in, is that the miracle is that that was through the legislature. It's now called Black Elk Peak. I know it's Lent, but for those of you listening, it might not be, so I'm going to say it: hallelujah. Oh my gosh. That's incredible. And that happened.
So the question is: Wheaton, what are we going to do about it? Well, you might say this institution is dragging their feet. They're never gonna do anything about it.
Ryan:
And is it like a campus there?
Matthew:
Yeah, we have a small patch of land. I had a board of trustee call me, and say, talk to me. We need to think this through. And I said, absolutely. So when we went to Pine Ridge, we went to Oglala Lakota College. So we were staying in the Black Hills, we drove the van down there. And we got in, and a woman there told us the history of Wounded Knee, and about Harney, who my ancestors are connected to. And I tell the story in the book, which is why it was such a gut punch to hear that. She told us the story and we just looked at her with horror. And we're like, wait, but you're Lakota, and you've got this land here at Pine Ridge, but the sacred land of the Black Hills—we're a suburban Illinois college, and we own it? And she looked at us without a word, and her looks said everything. We just walked out of there stunned. What do we do with this?
Now granted, I'm not saying it's villainous. I'm not saying that every single person who has a home in the Black Hills needs to be evicted today. There are creative solutions and ways to think through this. But what happened was, I kid you not, we got back in the van, and we had just gone to a Lakota radio station. And I turned on the radio, and we had a long drive ahead of us, and I found this Gospel station, and was listening for like 30 seconds to this preacher. And he was preaching from the Gospels about Jesus saying, give away everything you own. And I joked to the students in the van—I turned it off and I said, well, I better turn that off! If we're a Christian college that owns land in the Black Hills that might intrude upon our possessions.
Here’s the issue: Who do you give it back to? Because the Lakota weren't always there; they were pushed in that direction. And I don't think I'm speaking out of school here; these are open dealings where we've got to have these conversations. And so what I recommended—I don't know what's going to happen, but I want to respectfully make these suggestions—is the way forward is a partnership with a Oglala Lakota College. Say, look, how do we work together here? The land is used well by Wheaton College. We honor it, we let it lie fallow. We use it for educational purposes, for geology—the very experiences that I just described to you are possible because of the small little patch of land we have there. But of all the places that should be thinking creatively as to how to move forward, owning a little place of “the heart of all that is,” according to Lakota cosmology—we need to think creatively.
And that's what I hope we're going to do. Just like I hope we can have interesting conversations about why the Winfield Mounds is called the Winfield Mounds. These are all local questions. You go up to Ontario, to the great Bruce Peninsula; the people at Manitoulin Island have to ask that question in an entirely different way.
Wherever you are, stay put and have a lifetime conversation with the Indigenous people in that area. Because they're there.
Nobody wants to live in the Quattrocento, because they wouldn't have anesthesia. But in an intellectual fantasy, wouldn't it be great to live in the Renaissance in Florence? And you get that, with anesthesia. You get that today if you live in North America, if you're lucky enough to live here and not in young Europe. I get it—they have old stuff too. Nathaniel Hawthorne: “Oh, there are no ruins here. I can't be a writer. I've got to go to Europe. I've got to go to Rome.” No, there are ruins here. You just missed them.
The beautiful thing is that you're living in a Renaissance. You're living in an awakening of a centuries, millennia old culture that is coming to life before your very feet. What part are you going to play in that? I think the Christian faith helps you with that journey. I don't think it hinders you. I think, properly understood, it means that Christian should be the first in line to ask these rich questions. And so I dragged Chesterton along to ask them.
Ryan:
That'll be a great way to end the actual podcast.