Spirit in Action

Real Flourishing, Not Just Believing: Amanda Udis-Kessler

Amanda Udis-Kessler is not only a musician, but she's a sociologist, a social ethicist, a theologian, and a writer, and it's her writing that brings her here to us today.

Duration:: 55m
Broadcast on:: 11 Jul 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

(upbeat music) ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ - Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpsmeat and each week we bring you visits and conversations with people doing healing work for this world, hearing what they're doing and what inspires them and supports them in doing it. Welcome to Spirit in Action. I've had today's Spirit in Action guest on Northern Spirit Radio twice previously, but on my Song of the Soul program. Amanda Yutas-Kessler is not only a musician, but she's a sociologist, a social ethicist, a theologian and a writer. And it's her writing that brings her here to us today. Her latest book is Abundant Lives, a progressive Christian ethic of flourishing. And in it, Amanda helps us chart a way forward beyond the usual statements of principles and creeds, looking at real humans and where and how we thrive. Amanda's ethical and spiritual journey from secular Judaism through Unitarian Universalism and currently with progressive Christianity, when paired with her scientific expertise, make her perspective both insightful and fruitful. Amanda has more riches on her personal website, amandayutas-Kessler.com and also on her music website, queersacredmusic.com, free for your use and sharing. And of course, we have the links on northernspiritradio.org. Andrew Janssen helped out with Production Work on Today's Show and you'll find a full uncut version of this interview on northernspiritradio.org, complete with valuable minutes of interview that we couldn't fit into this 55-minute broadcast. Now let's go to Zoom. As Amanda Yutas-Kessler joins us from Colorado Springs, Colorado. Amanda, how wonderful to have you back, this time for spirit in action. - Thank you, it's lovely to be here. - Before I've had you on for Song of the Soul, has music taken a backseat to the two books that you've written since I last interviewed you? - It hasn't exactly. I'm still writing plenty of music. I actually just wrote a hymn text yesterday as it turns out. But the books have been a little bit of a priority because when you have book contracts from regular publishing companies, you try to honor their timetables. - So I know you as a songwriter, particularly, a queer person that used to be a bad word, but now it's a good word, just as gay used to be bad and it's good. But a person who has written a lot of rich music. One of the things I find interesting is you grew up, I guess, is a secular Jew. And I'm assuming that means you got exposed to all the wonderful Hebrew music because I'm an international folk dancer and because Israeli folk dance is my favorite of all of the nations. I particularly love a lot of the music from Hinei Matov and everything on. I assume you grew up with all of that? - I grew up with none of that, actually. I mean, secular Jews do not necessarily grow up with any of the liturgy or any of the music or any of the dances. I know a couple of dances just because at some point in my young adulthood, I did a little bit of folk dancing in the Boston area and that was part of the country in which international folk dance was highly prized and so people knew dances from around the world. But no, I really didn't grow up with Jewish or Hebrew music, particularly. I learned a couple of prayers, but I learned them spoken rather than sung. So I'm glad that I found my way first to Unitarian Universalism and more recently the Progressive Christianity because it's really wonderful to have access to various kinds of sacred music traditions. And someday when I am between projects, I will, in fact, go learn more about Hebrew and Israeli music and dancing. - And growing up secular Jew, I think of people who grow up basically secular Christians in this country. Maybe at Christmas and Easter, they go to church, that kind of thing. What did that mean for you? And I'm wondering how this is affecting your viewpoint on what leads to abundant lives. So what background did you have there? - Truly secular Jews do not even necessarily observe the high holy days. So I almost never observed Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur. I did eventually later in life go to some services with friends or people I was dating. I did occasionally go to Passover Saters, but when I did so, it wasn't necessarily religiously, it was more a community event. And in recent years, as I've gotten to know Jewish voices for peace, I've occasionally gone to their virtual Passover Saters kind of during and post COVID because their social justice values are phenomenal. And I really love social justice Judaism. I think it's rich and wonderful. But to sort of get to the second question, I actually think my way of thinking about having an abundant life, for someone who grew up so disconnected from my own Judaism, I think my perspective on abundance is quite Jewish in that it is not very spiritualized. It is very embodied. When I talk about the different kinds of human attributes in which and through which we flourish, I almost always start with the example of embodiment, which is a very Jewish thing to do. And because the book is specifically written in a progressive Christian context, I think it's worth mentioning that Jesus' own idea of what made for a good life was really informed by his Judaism. I mean, we call him Jesus today. He would have been known as Joshua or Yeshua or by some other name in his own time and place. But I think there's very much a sense of the kind of interconnectedness of the sacred with the material world in Judaism, which is something that some strands of Christianity I think have really lost so that the physical and the spiritual will become somewhat disconnected, which I think is a great shame. - Your viewpoint must be, I believe, also significantly affected by your studies as a sociologist and a social ethicist. Can you say that word for me? Because I think having lived in that profession, you probably can say it better. - Ethicist. - Ethicist. - Yes, so actually I do think that this approach to ethics is very sociological and it started out as a completely secular project, by the way, it started out as something I was developing while I was preaching in Unitarian Universalist churches over a period of about 10 years. And those churches were largely on the secular end of UUism. So they were at least not the Christian end of UUism. So I really wanted an approach to ethics that would avoid the temptation to be too entranced by particular principles such as equality or freedom or justice, not because I don't think those principles are good, but because I think they don't work very well as ends in themselves. I think they work better as means to an end or as sort of pathways to a goal, where the goal is well-being. And the reason I think that, and I talk about this a little bit at the beginning of the book, is that people can use the concept of freedom in many different ways. And some of those ways are really good for people. Some of them are not good for people. Some of them are good for some people, but not for other people. So for example, when we talk about kind of the freedom to own guns in as unregulated a way as possible, that absolutely is a kind of freedom. But what it brings with it is more gun violence in our society than other societies that regulate their guns better. Whether freedom is a good thing or a bad thing depends on how we're using the term, what we mean by it, who's using it, a different example would be that the question of rights really depends who's rights we're talking about. So when we think about women's rights, that includes kind of reproductive healthcare access. So women's rights tend to include at least some access to abortion. When people who oppose abortion talk about, say, fetal rights are the rights of the unborn, they're using the same rights language, but they're using it in a way that can lead politically to limiting women's rights. So then in the whole abortion conflict, kind of women's rights and fetal rights are kind of put up against one another in competition. And so for those reasons, I feel that language like rights or freedom or even equality and justice can be used in such a range of ways that we don't necessarily know what impact they're having until we know how they're being used on the ground. So I'd rather just go right to the heart of things and ask what makes for a good life? What allows people to have joy and fullness and gratitude and all the things they need and the capacity to contribute to the world and so on? And then once we've sort of talked about that and what that means and what that entails, then we can come back to language like rights or freedom or equality or justice and ask what does that look like in the context of human wellbeing? - One of the things, Amanda, that you did not address, well, first of all, let's be clear. The book starts out, I think at the beginning, you make clear that you're talking about things which do not depend on some kind of religious faith or identity that way. Later in the book, you try and address those things more explicitly. But at the beginning, you make clear this is not just for believers of some sort or ideology. This is for everybody. One of the things that you don't do and the discussion of abortion rights brings it up for me is who we is. And you do go through there because, like for instance, you identify as queer, well, some people will write that out of the we, right? Or only Americans matter, not people who are across our borders. So there's many different definitions of we. The abortion thing I think is one of the truest issues to be confronted honestly because the question of we, I had the experience when my son was born. My wife had this big belly. There was a whole lot of anticipation, everything going on like that. But it wasn't till his head popped out that he was a real person to me quite then. Still then he was a fetus. But then I realized one day before I could have discounted his life two months before wears this line when he's no longer a person. And I'm very aware that slavery, shadow slavery as we practice it in the United States was only possible because blacks were not considered to be people, partially people and Native Americans are not people, they're savage, right? All these things. So the definition of who is we, I'm a vegetarian. So I extended even further and there's this kind of identity. So who's we from your point of view in talking about abundant lives, a progressive Christian ethic of flourishing? - For me, for the purposes of the book, we is at a minimum all human beings who have already been born and are currently alive. I specify the already been born because that addresses a little bit the abortion issue. I don't talk about this at all in the book. There's another book I'd actually like to write about this issue in which I would like to sort of make an argument for why it is helpful to think of fetuses as potential people and maybe even sort of increasingly potential people as they go along, but in which birth is kind of the moment of full personhood. And I don't necessarily wanna side track us too much with that right now. But in my kind of aspirational sense of things, all living human beings who have been born and are living or walking or breathing on the earth are part of we. Now, obviously, I don't live that out very effectively. There are all sorts of people who see the world differently for me, who I find to be problematic because they're doing things like trying to restrict my rights. For example, people who I would even call enemies. And yet, as I discuss in the second half of the book where I kind of put the ethical ideas in conversation with progressive Christianity, I do think that people who strive to follow Jesus have been instructed to love our enemies and so I have a way of talking about what that means. But one of the things that means that I don't really put exactly in these terms in the book, though I begin to discuss it a little bit in the study guide that I just finished and made available. Part of loving our enemies is re-humanizing them and seeing them as more than just their programs that are harmful to us. So here, the us becomes, say, women or queer people or black indigenous and people of color. So any group that another group is trying to limit the rights of or harm, the sort of offending group can properly be seen as enemies. And yet, ideally at some level, our enemies are part of us. At one level, of course, they aren't. I mean, there are enemies and we and they are not the same. And at another level, because we are all human beings and because we all are infused with that divine spark in some sense and because we are all more than our worst impulses or the worst harm that we cause, I would like to see my enemies as part of we or part of us. It's not easy, it's very hard, but it is definitely something that working on this book made me think a lot about and has sort of invited me even into spiritual practices around re-humanizing and re-welcoming the people who I am least likely to see as us or we into my moral community or my circle or my world. I'll mention sort of two quick examples. One is there is a wonderful Buddhist practice called loving kindness meditation or meta meditation. And sometimes when I'm feeling despairing about my enemies, I practice loving kindness meditation with them in mind. So I think about Republican politicians who are trying to take my rights away and I literally engage in a loving kindness practice in which I wish them all the good things that that practice entails. Not because I think it's gonna magically get into their heads and change their minds, but it is a way of me trying to include them in my moral community. A funnier example is that I particularly like to watch baking competitions when I'm eating meals, especially if I'm alone. And normally, especially when these are US baking competitions, they try to get a really wide range of people on them competing. And some of the people who everything in me is sort of primed to dislike because they fit stereotypes that I dislike for one reason or another. And so as I'm watching these shows and engaging with these competitors and thinking, wow, you really put me off or you really trip my trigger, I then try to send good energy toward them and wish them well as a spiritual practice of opening my own heart. So while I completely recognize that the way I think about personhood as involving people who have been born is limited in some ways and will alienate some people, all of us run the risk of having some perspectives that will alienate some people. And obviously, I don't say that to say anything about your children or the sense that they were sort of not at all people the day before they were born. I don't mean that in any sense. I just mean that I think the fullness of personhood really kind of reaches its peak when we are born and take a breath, which incidentally is a fairly Jewish way of looking at that topic as it were. - I find it really interesting. And folks were speaking with Amanda Yutas Kessler about her book, Abundant Lives, Progressive Christian, Ethic of Flourishing. I find it really interesting that you're, in this book, sometimes I feel very clearly the sociologist in you and at other times I very clearly find the spiritual person in you. There's one comment you make that one of the problems with ethics as a practice is we give too much positive weight to the power of rational thinking. And I get that. Mind you, I'm a scientist, right? My primary studies in college were computer science and physics and math. So I definitely have a strong portion of my body that goes in that way and my mind that goes in that way. But I also think that we give it too much. I mean, for instance, I can look at a table and I can know with my physics mind that the table here is mostly empty space with all of the atomic particles that are separated by a vast amount of space. When I'm functionally dealing with it, it's a table. I can put a book on it, but my scientific view may lead me to think like, well, no, that's empty space. You can't do anything with that. So anyway, what I'm saying is there can be a lived and embodied, I think as you say, experience of the world around us versus this rational, too rational. And this is interesting for me particularly because for the years that you practice as a UU, as a Unitarian Universalist, the difference between Quakers and Unitarians in my view is one of emphasis, it's not an absolute and there's a lot of overlap. And if I weren't Quaker, I probably would be a UU. As the father of one of my friends point out, difference between Quakers and Unitarians is vast oversimplification. He said, the Quakers believe in God and it's this rational emphasis. Let's have a debate about it versus the Quaker approach, which would be, let's sink into that unity of silence and find a way. You must have gone through transitions internally to move from your secular Judaism to your Uism and now your practice primarily in the direction of UCC. - Sure. And I will note that there was a little stretch in there when I was a regular attendee at a Quaker meeting. And I've also sometimes been to your Quaker meeting, not very recently, but during COVID. So yeah, I was on a kind of a religious quest or a spiritual quest, starting as a teenager. And this had a lot to do with how lonely I was, some of the ways that my own coming out process didn't go all that well in terms of relating to classmates or my parents or people like that. But at the time, I was pretty entirely a rational person. And so I wanted a spiritual experience that I think at the time, I was not equipped to even try to engage with. I was not emotionally in an open enough space that it was plausible for me to have anything like a spiritual experience. We're not even talking doctrine here, we're just talking about engagement with the sacred ground of things. And probably for a long time, the closest I came to that was at silent Quaker meetings in the process of centering down. I had a few experiences that were peaceful and profound and that was important. One reason I didn't stay with the Quakers after spending maybe a year with them as a young adult was sacred music is really important to me. I mean, as a musician and as deeply spiritually rich as I find the Quaker tradition, I have nothing but respect for it. But I really need a worship experience where I can sing. And in fact, I have an old friend who was part of a Quaker meeting in Boston and they actually recorded a little album of kind of progressive sacred music decades ago, specifically so that people who were Quaker but liked it, like that kind of music could listen to it outside of the meeting for worship. And I remember the album was called "Grace in Your Face" which I thought was wonderful. - Oh, you know those folks? - Oh yeah, yeah. - Yeah, I love it. - Yes, and their song that uses the tune for "The Boogie Boogie of Company C" where they said the name of their grew. - Right, right, no, they did wonderful stuff. But when I sort of found my way into Unitarian Universalism, the draw of it was that you didn't have to bring in a particular creator doctrine. It was sort of a place of spiritual exploration where being in community and listening and learning and taking care of one another was what was important. I still really value that. I mean, I think that is rich and important. But my journey out of UUism began actually with a book published by either Beacon Press or Skinner House. So it was actually a UU publication called something like "Beyond the Good News" and the book asked or the author asked, what do we do about Unitarian Universalism when we are no longer so optimistic about human capacities? When the world looks like it's not going well, you know, UUism is great for relatively well-off, liberal white people whose lives are pretty good. What does it have to say when the world is really a mess? And the person who wrote the book had some answers and that person remained a UU. But when I read the book, I thought, you know, I can't kind of go with this person's answers. I find this to be a much bigger problem. So in a way, I kind of deconstructed from being a UU in some regards. I will always be a person who thinks there is no one true religion. I will always be a person who thinks many religious paths are rich and wonderful and healing and generative of abundance. So I will always kind of be a universalist. And I will always believe that there is no conflict between religion and science. And I will always believe that engaging with religion rationally is important. But what I think has changed is, as I kind of fell away from UUism, I realized that I needed something that was gonna be more demanding on me. I needed something that was gonna kick my, you know what, a little bit more. UUism is so much about freedom of thought and acceptance and considering all sorts of different things. And that there's nothing wrong with that. But it just wasn't what I needed. I needed to be part of a story that was more of a story. I needed something that was more demanding of me. And so I found that in progressive Christianity, having said that there are still Buddhist practices that are meaningful to me. I will probably still go to Quaker meetings from time to time. In fact, I'll be in Philadelphia in July. And I may try to go to a Quaker meeting while I'm there. But kind of joining myself to the Jesus story in a non-exclusivist and non-triumphalist way and not even a very doctrinal way. But just saying, here was this person. He said these things. He clearly had an amazing relationship with the sacred as he understood the sacred. I think there's wisdom and possibility in what he had to say. And I want to try to live into that path. So I'm trying to be very careful how I say this, because it's really important for me not to say, this is the one true right path and other paths are wrong. It's merely the path that has sort of called to me on and off for a long time that I'm finally trying, however imperfectly, to follow. There's a really interesting line in a Paul Stuckey song called "For the Love of It All." He occasionally wrote music and writes music about sort of his Christianity. And there's this line, one learns to bend and finally depend on the love of it all. And for a long time, I really fought with that line in the song and resisted it. And what I've realized is if you think of that as describing an angry, demanding, rigid, restrictive God, it's kind of a problematic line. And it's not really a great message. But if you think of it as we learn to stop running from our fears and try to be in relationship with the depth of things, whether we encounter that as a personal God, or as a source of life and love and being, or whatever our kind of understanding of it or he or she or they is. Now I actually find that line from the song really meaningful because if I strive to live in relationship with love and ease and peace and generativity, that enriches my life and helps me enrich other people's lives. And so all of that is to say, it really has been quite a spiritual journey, but certainly not one that looks like kind of a traditional conversion to Christianity. It has been much gentler and slower and more subtle than that. And it has not led me to suddenly start believing a lot of doctrines that I didn't previously believe. Instead, it has more been about trying to be in a kind of relationship with reality. - And folks are speaking with Amanda Yudis Kessler. Her website, AmandaYudisKessler.com, is one of the websites where you'll find her. You also find her at queersacredmusic.com because she's a abundant producer of music. Both of those are linked on northernspiritradio.org where you'll find links to all my guests of the past 19 years. I've been doing both spirit and action and song of the soul. Today we're talking with Amanda about her recent book, Abundant Lives, a progressive Christian ethic of flourishing. On our site, when you do visit, please post a comment with these interviews, whatever program you listen to, give me feedback, make our communication two way. I value that so highly and you can help me by posting a comment. There's also a place to donate for Northern spirit radio when you visit. We do this sustainably only because you support us. We can't do it on our own. That's one of the things that I think we lose when we get to very individualistic in the United States. We lose the power of community. And so things like unions in the past, I happen to believe are actually spiritual or religious devices because there's actually community involved along with the beliefs. So anyway, please do donate when you visit our site and remember to go to and support with your hands and with your wallet, the community radio stations across the United States. Of course, our programs are both broadcast at some 35 stations and they're available via any number of podcast concentrators along the net. You can also get them directly from our website, northernspiritradio.org, northernspiritradio.org. Again, Amanda, you just, Kessler is here. We're talking about abundant lives. There's so much we can talk about in depth. And again, Amanda is both sociologist and she's also a spiritual being. And I want to ask you some more about specifics about the spirituality that you've experienced. For me, Amanda, I'm a very rational person, a good scientist, right? I won't give that up. That's certainly part of me. But one of the things that I found is when I met my most beleaguered state and this ties into what you had just said earlier, in most difficult times in my life, I have found myself accessing something that otherwise my kind of stubborn intellectual pride would not allow me to access. And it's been a great release, great opening to me. Have you had that kind of experience? Is that what leads to abundant lives? - So I have had that kind of experience as a hymn writer more than as a book writer or sermon writer or essay writer. I should say here that I began writing songs because my father, who was a songwriter, taught me to write them. And he really taught me to think about writing songs in terms of craft and problem solving and understanding what you're trying to do and maximizing your toolkit and your rationality and your knowledge to make the best decisions to craft the best song. And in my own life, I've sort of spun that out in writing books, writing sermons, writing liturgical materials and other things. So there absolutely is a rational component to creativity. It's hugely important, I wouldn't understate it. Having said that, what I've learned over the years, and again, this has been more true for me in writing music than it has been in writing say books, is that there are times when my rationality and my problem solving capacity hits a bit of a wall and I have to stop and breathe and be open to inspiration. So undoubtedly, you have heard people over the years or read over the years, the idea that creativity is this mix of inspiration and perspiration. And I completely believe that. I actually call it grit and grace myself because I find inspiration and perspiration a little cliched. But I actually have an example literally from yesterday because I was writing a new hymn text from my own congregation yesterday in which I clearly received a message from my creative spirit, which I think is the creative spirit of the sacred at work in me. I cannot explain my creativity without some understanding of creativity that is bigger than my ego because I could not create the range and kinds of things that I do if it were just me and my ego. So that is really spiritually important for me. But I had this particular assignment and I had to pick a well-known and public domain hymn tune to which I was gonna write a new text because very often these days when I write new sacred music, if it's for congregational singing, I often write it to tunes people know because that just makes it so much more accessible. So I still write some original music but less and less so over time. And so my pastor shared the particular biblical passage she's gonna use on a particular day and how she wants to talk about it. And I went and looked in hymnory.org and in a few other places and I could not find a good hymn out there that really matched well with her approach to this biblical text. So I thought, fine, I'll write one. And I thought, well, I'm clearly gonna write it to existing music. So I contacted her and said, what hymn tune would you like? She didn't get back to me. So I started going through my pile of hymn tunes that our congregation uses regularly 'cause that's a pretty safe approach. So far this is all super rational, right? So I come upon the tune beach spring. Some people might know that with a hymn text called as we gather at your table. It's I believe kind of an old Americana tune and it's very lovely. And I'm sort of going through the pile and I come upon this particular tune and I stop and something in me says, stop looking. Do not go through the rest of the pile. Now, this is a pile that's an alphabetical order. So beach spring is really early in the pile. And I forced myself to look through a few more pages and then something in me, I think that sort of sacred inspiration said, Amanda, stop, you found the tune you're gonna use. You have it, stop. Now you're just fighting with me. And so I said, okay, I give up and I stopped and I pull that beach spring, I sat at the piano and played through the arrangement of it that is commonly used in hymnals. And then instead of immediately trying to write the lyric, I then felt inspired, there's no other word for it. I felt inspired to just let the tune settle into my head for a while. So I didn't do anything. I went about my day, but I let the tune play in my head over and over again. It was as though, to use Quaker language, as though the tune were centering down in me and deepening into me. And once the tune was deep enough in me, I went back to my computer and I looked at the biblical passage and I looked at my pastor's notes about what she wants to do with it. And I started just knocking out some phrases. So again, that is the rational part of my brain. You know, coming up with ideas. And then I sort of looked at those ideas and went, okay, how does this hang together? What is the flow here? And I stopped and I was silent for a while and I let that work on me. And then I believe I wrote the whole hymn text in about an hour once I had done those things. So yes, there certainly was perspiration or grit as part of the labor. I mean, there was problem solving. I used an online rhyming dictionary at one point. So it's not that there wasn't rationality, but all of that was really enriched and enhanced and deepened by my ability to be silent and listen to what the piece itself was telling me it wanted me to do. And for me, that is among the most profound kind of spiritual experience I ever have. I can't explain it. Rationality doesn't explain it. It makes no sense, but it has happened to me so many times as a songwriter and a hymn writer and a sacred music composer that I frequently have to just kind of give up and let the creative will of the sacred be done in my own creative process. - Thanks for that beautiful description, Amanda. That's really insightful and how it manifests for you. I have my own, again, to get my rationalist side out of the way takes really big emotional wallop and of relationships or other existential threats that can sometimes get me to realize that there's, I think as AA folks say, you know, realizing that there's things beyond our own power that we couldn't do it alone. And what that is, you and I don't tend to put in any kind of a box, right? It's wide open. So people who are thinking that it has to be this way, some people are much more comfortable with doctrine and boxes than I am. Again, coming back to Abundant Lives, a progressive Christian ethic of flourishing by Amanda Yudis Kessler. The starting point for this is to say, and you put it in your own words, not mine, please, that you're uncomfortable with ethics which are based on principles and flourishing an embodied way of seeing how good things are happening is much more important, that the principles, the ideas, equality, freedom, et cetera. My perspective is that most people who value freedom, equality, et cetera, that they are doing it because they think that leads to flourishing, that some people think that capitalism leads to flourishing. Some of us disagree. So I think to some degree, it's something of a straw man to say that these principles are not based on flourishing. So I'm criticizing you there, but in a very soft, Quaker way, because I love you and I don't want, because I think you've got a lot of value in Abundant Lives. What do you see as that difference? Again, you gave an example, gun rights, people, second amendment, it's the principle, therefore, you also mentioned in the book, the people, it's like, I have my freedom to employ who I want so I can discriminate against gay people, right? So you give examples like that, which I see as a misusing of the principles. I think there's some principles that are rock bottom for me. One of them is truth. I have to look at things honestly, and I can't even see flourishing if I'm not looking through truth. Do you have fundamental principles that are maybe better than the Bill of Rights? - So first of all, I'm not actually sure how to answer the question you just asked, but let me assure you that I don't necessarily disagree with your perception that people who tend to rely on principles like freedom or equality or justice, that for them at some level, those principles are principles about flourishing. So I actually have no issue with what you said there. I think you're absolutely correct. Most people, and I think there are some exceptions. I mean, I think there are libertarians out there for whom freedom is essentially the highest good in almost a religious kind of way. So I'm not really talking about them, but for most people, I do think that when they rely on these principles, they are doing so because they perceive that these principles will help them to flourish. So I actually think we are in agreement about that. Where I find that perspective somewhat limited is because so often people don't actually articulate the connection between those principles and flourishing. So first of all, very often people will talk about freedom or equality or justice, as though that's the entire goal. Even though I agree with you that even for them, that isn't necessarily the entire goal. They, even for them, the point of these things is human wellbeing. So part of what I'm trying to do is simply articulate that, surface it, make it legible, make it explicit. Let's clearly say that what we care about here is human wellbeing. The other place where, and I'm not sure I'm exactly disagreeing with you, but where I would sort of take your observation and then try to extend it and query it a little bit is the question that you actually asked quite a while ago about who is us. So I think very often when people say we need freedom to flourish, I don't actually disagree with that. And in fact, there are a couple of places in the book where I argue that yes, we actually do need certain kinds of freedom and autonomy to flourish. Like for example, we need the freedom to use our own bodies in ways that are good for us, as long as we're not hurting someone else. So I agree with that, but I think quite often, those people have a smaller account of who us is or who we are. For example, if I can go back to the gun rights example, just because I think this is so clear, people who really believe in maximizing the deregulation of gun access and gun use, clearly for them, that deregulation and freedom helps them flourish as they understand flourishing, because they wish to own and use guns as they see fit. And that makes their lives more joyful or richer. I'm not necessarily arguing with that fact, but now to sort of be a sociologist again for a second. If we take the camera and zoom out so that we are now not just looking at that person or that community, but looking say at our society, it is not deniable that our lack of gun restrictions has led our society to have more gun violence than other societies. That's not the only reason we have more gun violence, but it is a contributor to it. So again, here I am bracketing my ethicist, my inner ethicist, and I'm putting on my sociologist hat and saying, what do we know about the relationship between gun deregulation and human well-being? It's a sociological question. It can be answered with evidence. And you and I are both big fans of evidence. And so the evidence I think is pretty clear that maximal deregulation of guns may help certain communities of people who like to use guns be happier and feel freer and have more enjoyment in their lives. I'm not arguing with that fact, but when you zoom out and take the society as a whole, I think you can make a case that maximal gun deregulation actually leads not to flourishing for everyone, but to a lot of what I call avoidable suffering. There are more gun deaths and gun injuries than there should be in our society. And the fact that we are so deregulated around guns helps us understand why that's true. There was an article really recently, I don't know if it was in the Times or the Post, that it was somewhere fairly substantial that noted that a lot of people who own guns, even when they have children, do not lock their guns up properly. So again, this is just a recent empirical finding that there are all sorts of people who may wind up putting their own children who they love very much at risk because they do not keep their guns secured. And again, I just saw this article, I didn't write it, it's not my own research. So in a way, I think you're right that most people see whatever their own political and social agenda as being, it is intended for their own well-being and joy and comfort and so on. I'll go so far as to say that for conservative Christians who are anti-gay, their attempts to restrict my rights, I don't mean that they know who I am as an individual, but just as part of a community, their attempts to restrict my rights from their understanding those attempts help them flourish. Where I take issue with that is, it might help them feel better about themselves, but A, it doesn't help me flourish and B, I would argue, and this is where the kind of the Christian piece comes in, I would actually argue that it doesn't really help them flourish at the end of the day. It may help them be a little more comfortable, but that's a comfort based in fear. In fact, if we think of all people as equally important and valuable, if we think of all people as us, if we think of all people as deserving of good lives, then again, we have to say certain values or certain actions or certain political programs are problematic because they only help some people. And so we have to ask, and these are hard questions, I do not have all the answers, I probably have very few of the answers, but I think this is the right way to frame the questions. What ways of being in the world would help everyone flourish? What do we have to do to answer that question? And sometimes answering that question is gonna mean that we ourselves are going to have to use some of our freedom to be a little selfless or to give up some privilege or whatever. One of the things about the Book Abundant Lives is that I have, and it says this in the book, I am dedicated to donating half of the royalties from the book to an organization called One Nation Walking Together in Perpetuity. This is an organization that supports indigenous, native and First Nation communities in the Rocky Mountain region and beyond, advocating for them, collecting supplies for them, and so on. I am using my freedom and my resources to give up some of my resources to support this community so that they can flourish a little better. To me, that is an ethical choice. I do need to have the freedom, but an ethical thing for me to do is to actually give away some of my resources to help people who are needier than me. And in the same way, if someone who was a big supporter of gun rights read this book and was sort of convinced about its argument, they might say, well, yes, of course I think I'm happier when I have unfettered access to guns. But I also recognize that when our whole society has unfettered access to guns, it leads to more violence. So am I willing to make some sacrifices so that other people can flourish well? Obviously, we don't have time for me to do this topic justice, but I think that it's deeply important to recognize that we do need freedom, we do need rights, we do need justice, we do need equality, we do need to value these principles, and we need to ask how they're being used in whose service and with what consequences. So I bet you and I don't actually disagree on this as much as it might initially appear. - I don't think we disagree in. And there's some reason that I've been drawn to your music. And again, her music website folks is queersacredmusic.com, links on nordinspiritradio.org. There's another way in which I think we're connected in this book for no good reason at all. I think there's a comment that you made on page 22 that was for me specifically. On page 22, as part of a sentence in parentheses you say, and perhaps they're terrible puns, though not everyone would find those such a gift. I thought that was for me. - So let me put that phrase in a little bit of context because it actually is connected to exactly what we've been talking about, which is the issue of gun deaths. And so that the actual sentence reads, "Each person's spared death by shooting "would continue to offer the world their beauty and kindness, "their creativity and cleverness, "their spiritual wisdom, and perhaps they're terrible puns, "though not everyone would find those such a gift." I'm so glad that that is meaningful to you, but I have to admit that when I wrote that sentence, I was thinking of my father, who was, in addition to being a great songwriter, a really bad punster. And also I wanted to lighten the sentence a little bit because it was a very intense kind of heavy sentence about the tragedy of gun deaths. And so I thought it needed a little levity. So I thought, you know, mentioning puns is a good thing. I've tried to sprinkle the occasional moment of lightness through the book because it's not a particularly easy, but it's not, you know, summer beach reading. - That's true. And again, the book, folks, is Abundant Lives, a progressive Christian ethic of flourishing by Amanda Yudis Kessler. We clearly do not have the time that we need to delve into so much of this. I'll tell you folks that flourishing needs to be defined and explicated and Amanda does that in the book and talks about the various aspects of it. So these things are delved into in significant detail that you'll have a good insight about alternatives and choices and possibly a clearer way to a better world. She mentions also Brian Sergio's music in the course of that one of his songs is called "Dream God's Dream." I've had Brian as my guest for "Song of the Soul," so you can find out more about him. But this mixing of music, which for so many of us lifts our being, it points at a better way, is so important as part of what Amanda writes. Just because I'm a contrary person, no, I'm not really. Because I also think it's important to wrestle with the fundamental issues we're dealing with. In chapter three, which is buff flourishing, suffering and inequality, I'm pretty sure you're pointing out there that inequality is one of the problems in our society. But then you produce a list of inequality processes. You start from white supremacy, which we've already talked about a little bit, but you include sexism, heterosexism. And in that list, you include ableism. And I think ableism is actually a reverse case where I happen to believe that our society should do things to help people who don't have abilities. They can't walk, they can't speak, see, whatever any of the issues that people have, cognitively different people. I believe we should stretch. So I'm on board with you about what we need to do in terms of addressing these things. But I think it's opposed to equality, because if I was doing really quality, I would say, no, that person can't walk, this person can, this person can produce only this much. This equality would require that I treat them lesser. People have talked more about equity these days, which I understand. But equity is opposed to equality frequently. And, well, anyway, I see it as different than the other items in your list. Because sexism is actually about treating people differently because of that. Ableism actually says I should do something to help them be equal. - Okay, so first of all, I do agree with you that equity is often a more appropriate term than equality. And even though I didn't have as much space to write about this in the book as I wanted, the idea of equality can, in fact, be misused to limit people in exactly the way you're talking about. So you're actually giving a wonderful example of how people can use what we often kind of think of in a knee-jerk way is a good term in ways that turn out not to be all that useful. The reason I include ableism in that list, and I say a little bit more about this actually in the second book, the book that's just about to come out, which is literally called Cultural Processes of Any Quality, is that one of the ways that any kind of inequality works is that the world is sort of constructed in ways that benefit or make life easier for the valued group and make life harder for the devalued group. And there are many ways that can happen. But if we look at, say, physical disabilities, now, since we met, I have developed pretty bad degenerative arthritis in my knees. And I actually have a handicap placard for my car now. I know a little bit personally about disability to some degree. And when we build societies, say, in terms of engineering and construction, in ways that work pretty well for able-bodied people that make life harder for, say, people in wheelchairs or people who use canes or seeing eye dogs or people with other kinds of functional or physical disabilities, that is actually a form of inequality in just the same way. We have highly valued sports, and yet until recently, made sports a very male domain. So until fairly recently, the only kind of sports that got a lot of attention were sports that men played, and women and girls were not particularly supposed to engage in sports. So here's this really high-status popular phenomenon that for a long time was all about men. And in the same way, we have societies that are physically built in ways that work fine if you're able-bodied, or at least reasonably well, but that don't work very well at all if you use a wheelchair or a cane or whatever. I agree with you about the equity versus equality language. And I think there are ways in which, you know, if we had the time to discuss it and we don't, though, I'm happy to come back on another day and talk about the second book, 'cause I actually think you'll find that of interest too. But there are ways in which ableism does actually look like other forms of inequality. The last thing I'll say about that is, just as we so often expect women to protect themselves from sexual assault and so often, women get blamed for being raped. In the same way, there's this sort of subtle kind of blaming of disabled people, not necessarily that they chose to be disabled, but that if they can't navigate society, it's kind of their problem. So I think that's another way, and we have to talk about that at greater length than we have time for now, but it's another way in which people with disabilities wind up getting a little bit less benefit of the doubt than able-bodied people. So again, there's much we could say there. What's very helpful about your point about equity and equality is we do have to remember how complex these things are and there are differences as well as similarities between them, so thank you for reminding us of that. - Well, we are gonna leave it there. I just point out, by the way, in the book, Abundant Lives, Progressive Christian, Ethical Flourishing, we've all got about halfway through the chapters talking about anything. We touched on something in chapter five, but chapter six and seven are crucial. Chapter six is called Co-creating the Kingdom of God, our individual work, and seven is creating the Kingdom of God, our collective work. And there is also a study guide that goes with this book, and we haven't even touched on those. We've talked very little a bit about Luke 6, 27, 28, where we're supposed to love our enemies. We've talked very little about the religious spiritual depths that lead to Abundant Lives, that motivate us to work and support us to work in that direction. So that's on me. That's not a new Amanda. So I want to say, I so much appreciate you being here. I appreciate your music. Pretty typically you have your music performed by other people than yourselves, feeling that you're a better writer than perhaps you are a performer. - Yep. - I would like to end our visit with one song. So we're gonna do that. It's a song that you wrote called Do All the Good You Can. You didn't write the words though. You stole them from someone. Are you gonna page on Wesley royalties on this from the grave? - Since I write a lot of free use music for Methodists, I think I've probably already paid back, but let's see. - And the performer for this song? - This is Ken Janssen, who was a brilliant musician, keyboardist and singer. So that's who we're gonna be listening to. - But first we're gonna thank you, Amanda Yudis-Castler. It's been a joy to get to know you over the years that we've been connecting. And again, folks, come to northernspiritradio.org. And if you search for Amanda, you'll find my interviews with her for Song of the Soul, the shareings of her music there. The gifts you do in the sociological and spiritual and transcendent world are all very valuable. Thank you so much, Amanda, for joining me today for Spirit in Action. - Thank you so much for having me on the show. Have a blessed day. - And again, here's a song written by Amanda Yudis-Castler. It's called Do All the Good You Can, Words from John Wesley, but Amanda delivering her gift to us through music. We'll see you next week for Spirit in Action. (upbeat music) ♪ Do all the good you can ♪ ♪ By all the means you can ♪ ♪ In every way you can ♪ ♪ In every place you can ♪ ♪ At all the times you can ♪ ♪ To everyone you can ♪ ♪ As long as ever you can ♪ ♪ To all the good you can ♪ ♪ By all the means you can ♪ ♪ In all the ways you can ♪ ♪ In every place you can ♪ ♪ At all the times you can ♪ ♪ To everyone you can ♪ ♪ As long as ever you can ♪ ♪ To all the good you can ♪ ♪ You might all the means you can ♪ ♪ In all the ways you can ♪ ♪ In every place you can ♪ ♪ At all the times you can ♪ ♪ To everyone you can ♪ ♪ As long as ever you can ♪ - The theme music for this program is "Turning of the World" performed by Sarah Thompson. Check out all things Spirit in Action on northernspiritradio.org. Guests, links, stations, and a place for your feedback, suggestions, and support. Thanks for listening, I'm Mark Helpsmeet, and I hope you find deep roots to support you to grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. ♪ Oh ♪ ♪ With every voice, every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our evening ♪ [MUSIC PLAYING]