This is the energy of electrification available type-desk high-performance variant with nearly 500 horsepower and 278 mile EPA range range. Choose from our complimentary charging packages so you can charge how you want the all-electric Acura ZDX. This is the energy of innovation, Acura, precision crafted performance. This is your local Acura dealer, till he's the all-electric ZDX for $389 a month. At McDonald's, our customers' well-being is at the heart of what we do, from how we source our food to how we deliver quality in our restaurants. And it's made possible by thousands of hard-working crew, suppliers, and the small business owners who own and operate our restaurants. Every day we help to meet the highest standards for our customers. Our commitment will never change. We will always do the right thing. This episode is brought to you by JCPenney. The holiday season is here, and at JCPenney, everybody gets more. Like for your loved one, designer perfumes from Versace or Carolina Herrera, or the exclusive messy fragrance. For the foodie in your life, a cast-iron Dutch oven or cured coffee maker. Or for the kids, all the toys they love from Disney, Barbie, Lego, and more. JCPenney, make it count. Shop in store or online. The sounds of the season can often sound like this. So, why do we get in some grandkids? But with Hilton's season to stay sail, they could sound a bit more like this. Or this. Stay and save up to 20% off when you book before January 5th at Hilton.com. Hilton. For the stay. Minimum two-night stay required excludes luxury in all inclusive properties, terms, and conditions apply. This episode is brought to you by Too Faced Cosmetics. Give this sweetest gift this holiday season with the viral best-seller kissing jelly lip oil gloss. Now in the new birthday kiss shade, exclusively at Sephora. This hybrid lip oil gloss is a sparkly candy color that smells like vanilla birthday cake, softening and smoothing lips instantly, delivering 12-hour moisture and immediate shine. And with two and from written right on the packaging, it's ready to be gifted. Shop Too Faced Cosmetics' new kissing jelly birthday kiss. Now it's Sephora. What is up nerds? This is Tripp. And today on the podcast, philosopher, long time friend in my head, Simon Critchley. He's got a brand new book called Mysticism. Say what? Tripp, how is someone who's a philosophical critic of, you know, theism, normal religion, thinking about faith for those outside? Like, how in the world did Critchley write a book on Mysticism? Well, that's what I thought. Did I read it? And it was freaking awesome. He spoke to historical reflection. It's such profound challenge to theists and atheists alike. It is an invitation to a part of human experience, a dynamic encounter with reality that we often label and dismiss and our reductive, flattened modern times in Simon Critchley and I have a blast talking about his book. Can't get to hear about some William James, some Hildegard, some Heidegger, and, you know, I think you're going to listen to this and go Tripp. I want to go check this brand new book out, and it is totally worth reading. Anyway, I love getting to talk to Dr. Critchley. Been a long time fan on the page. Let's just say the conversation kept up and exceeded my lofty expectations. If you dig this, if you want more, if you want to get all the podcasts ad-free, you want to support everything we're doing, go to homebrewedcommunity.com. It's easy, all right? Here we go, mysticism. Check out the book, brand new Simon Critchley. Enjoy. Well, hello, everyone. This is Tripp and I am joined today by Simon Critchley, author of a brand new book, mysticism. And for those of you that have followed his work, it is quite the Critchley make where you take a phenomenon of mysticism and you use both its history and the way it's taken new forms and a modern context to really unpack what it is revealing about the human experience. So I absolutely loved it. I would like to hear the origin story of the book. They get whoop, that your fascination and interest and mysticism as a modern category, it raised the kind of question that problematizes modernities or ongoing like relationship to religious and spiritual experience. Yeah, it's a good question. It goes back a long way. There's a part at the end of the book, which is called Confession. I'm using it a little bit tongue in cheek, but it's a confession of an experience I had when I was in my early twenties, which was close to a religious experience in Canterbury Cathedral, you know, around those years in my early twenties. And then repeatedly my life had been drawn facemases by religion in general, Christianity in particular. I was educated within a deeply secular philosophical world that saw religious people as kind of softheaded and weak minded and stupid. You know, that really dominated. And so the book in many ways is the outcome of a journey, I suppose, a journey where I have been able to confess, get closer to what it is about. Christianity, which fascinates me and not to be so worried about the template. Look, we've been talking before. There's a book called Faith of the Faithless, which was published in 2012. And I wrote this lecture that was called Mystical Allicism. And it was based on a reading of Norman Cone's Pursuit of the Millennium, this extraordinary book, which kind of tracks the, as were the social and political uses of the book of Revelation. And I was fascinated with it. And in particular, what he called Mystical Allicism, which was linked to the so-called heresy of the free spirits and figures like Marguerite Koretz, burns at the stake in 1310, possible links to to Good Black Meister Eckhart. And Eckhart, you know, is someone that I was reading as an undergraduate very closely and very seriously, and again, didn't know what to do with that. So Eckhart plays a very important role in the new book. But the Mystical Allicism material, and this is kind of why I thought I was onto something. When I did that, it was in Toronto at some art centre, and it was all new. And I just had these pages of notes. And it was a good night. There's a recording of it somewhere online. I found a couple of years ago, but I felt that the audience were open to it. What I would say wasn't the usual, you know, me talking about Heidi as a conception of the world or whatever. It wasn't that kind of pedagogical approach. It was really, I was talking about things that really had a kind of, yeah, technical complexity at one level, but also with addressing something very personal and deep with people. And I guess that was the first realization. I thought, oh, there's really something going on here. Then time goes on a little bit. I developed the idea with a colleague of mine, Eugene Saka, both of us kind of amateur theologians. He knows more than I do. And we formed the idea of doing a class on mysticism. But we didn't have that much to say. And so we got a lot of guests into the class. We have people like Caroline Bynum, Amy Hollywood, distinguished, many female theologians think Caroline Bynum, who I very much admire, there's a little chapter on her in the, in the mysticism book, wanted us to read Julian of Norwich, who I'd read, but not with any kind of real attention. And then the class was very interesting again, because we were taking students through these very obstrus texts, like the mystical theology of the pseudo-dionizers and texts like that. But it was resonating at some deeper kind of existential level. And the students were really a little bit enraptured by the material. And that's always great to see. And then we taught the course, I think, three more times. And I found that I had more to say, a Eugene M. More to say, so the less guest speakers. And then that was going to where it ended. And then around 2019, this is a technique I've used for years, it's when people ask you what I'm working on. I always sort of look the other way or offers to buy them a drink or something, because I hate talking about what I'm working on. And I'm happy to talk about what I worked on, but I never, I'm almost superstitious about it. But I would say mysticism, just like that, then leave it in the air. And then I often found that you would then there'd be a pause and then people would start to think, oh, do you mean this, that or the other? And then they'd begin to talk about what that meant to them, which was great conversation because the onus was on them to talk rather than on me. So it's just before the pandemic that maybe I should try and pull together the material into something on mysticism. And then that, then there was the pandemic. And then I, then they did a class called pandemic mysticism, which was very intense online. And so the material began to form when it was largely written in 2021 to 23. So in those strange, strange period of time, and also the premise of the pandemic mysticism approach was really the, in the pandemic, we all became, you know, anchor ses or anchor heights. We withdrew from the world, we living in ourselves. And there was a kind of monasticism that people were going through and strange experiences were happening to a lot of people. And that was interesting. And the book then sort of formed in it in a kind of a little bit of a frenzy in 2021, 22, I had a purple patch. And that's the second part of the book, which is really the center of that is June of Norwich. I was to read one, one major mystical work incredibly closely, some cover to cover and give a close reading of that. And then off that, there are discussions of Anne Carson, the American writer, Annie Gillard. And then T.S. Eliot, who had been on my mind for the last 40 years, as they're trying to kind of settle accounts with four quartets. And what connects all of those four authors is something to do with Julian of Norwich. And that was written in a kind of, I wouldn't say a trance state, but certainly a purple, purple patch. And then the book formed. And then, you know, my editor had died in the pandemic and publishing changed. And I sort of really lost any hope the thing would be published. And then, to my astonishment, I found it as sort of the New York Review of Books, who was interested both in philosophy and in medieval female spirituality, and through his mother and father. And we began to work on the book. And it finally is going to see the light of daily end of this month. It's a long answer to a short question. No, there are a number of things that came up in that that I resonated with, especially that working on something like this, during the lockdown experience, I think a lot of people that kind of interruption to the kind of ongoing, accelerating pace of modern existence, forced people to attend to the experience of existence in new ways that put one's finitude in front of them in different ways. And oddly, right, like you're the close reading of Norwich, there are a whole lot of people that never would have taken a vow to be in a position, to have like an encounter with a similar space. Yeah. And also the Julian was, was writing, we know very little about her, but she was writing during the period of the Black Death in, in a very popular urban environment, Norwich, was the second biggest city in England until 1600, roughly. And so she was an urban recluse. And so we were, a lot of us were urban recluses, I certainly was in those months. And also the psychological strains, pain suffering, weird symptoms, not really feeling that you're in control of your body, your body is doing weird things. In my case, it was kind of weird, rashes and eczema and all sorts of things, a lot of, but a lot of people were experiencing this. But then through that, something else was showing through. So unwittingly, you know, we became mystics. And then the focus of that pain and suffering in Julian is, and indeed, in her case, I mean, she says that she wanted to die of three wounds at the age of 30 and a half. And indeed, she is dying. And she is going to be administered last rites. A person arrives. This is before she's become an anchoress. We don't have any more details than that. A person arrives with a boy described as a boy holding a cross. And she can feel her body basically dying, basically shutting down the lower half of her body is cold, she says, the upper part is becoming cold in hers. And in that situation, a near-death experience, she then begins to have these showings, these revelations the crucifix begins to begins to bleed. And then that continues for 12 hours, 13 hours. You can kind of put that together from laser details of the text. And then she spends the rest of her life, which is a long life, surprisingly long life, trying to figure out the theological meaning of that. To Julian is very important, because if you mention mysticisms of people, they'll immediately start talking about drugs, or they'll start talking about people that experience visions. And so the non-mystic who's curious about mysticism thinks that mystics are in this state of constant, you know, constant visions and seeing things of our florid psychosis. And that's not the case. I mean, Julian, as Mike, kind of the heroine of the book, she has 12 maybe 13 hours of visions. And she becomes an anchor heir since she then spends her life on presumes, giving advice to people that come to see her, one of which is Marjorie Kemp. And then figuring out what this meant,theologically, and what the implications of it for the Christianity that she knew. She comes to some astonishing conclusions, basically, rewrites the fool. So the mystics are in this ultimate reality. They are people that perhaps have experienced something extreme, but their theologians, their philosophers, that are engaged in an activity of reflection, which requires discipline and or stericism. One of the things you do at the beginning is it's helped the reader understand how our kind of contemporary modern framework, how we understand the self, how we investigate knowledge, make truth claims, how we see reality, kind of post kind of scientific imagination, is created concepts that ultimately limit our imagination, unless the inherited framing of modernity is problematized. And you do something similar with mysticism as a lot of religion scholars do with religion is like mysticism and religion and modernity function as these kind of like abstracted categories, where you take cultural artifacts from different contexts and traditions, and then you group them together like, this is mysticism, this is religion. And that kind of alienating of the experienced embodied reality from its context is something you're trying to push beyond without, right, like assuming the religion, qua religion or mysticism in and of itself is the most fruitful or accurate way to get at the experience. Mysticism is a is a misnomer. The book is therefore a misnomer, the people that I'm talking about, Julian Norwich, Maester Echar, Marguerite Pereira did not think of themselves as mystics, could not have thought of themselves as mystics. The category was not available. They were intensely religious people, spiritual people, contemplatives, let's say, contemplatives who saw themselves very, very clearly as within Christianity, Julian in particular is very, you know, very clear on the teachings of Holy Church, Marguerite Pereira, less so. There's a kind of reformist zeal in someone like Pereira. But very much, this is all that they were doing is trying to articulate the meaning of Christianity. And so, we begin with this real problem that mysticism is a category that develops in the 17th century, and it develops in the French, in the Francophone world by the time that scientific modernity has already, you know, caught fire and his beginning to dominate everything. So mysticism is, you know, a name for what modern, secular, scientifically-minded people have to be wary of. It's that kind of bullshit nonsense that's over there, and we need to protect ourselves from. And then mysticism then becomes identified as a thing really in the 19th century, along with, that's also when we find discussions of spirituality, and then that gets back projected onto a tradition, a mystical tradition. So the whole thing is a misnomer, an invented tradition, and a kind of category mistake. So you have to kind of work through that. And the first thing to say is that mysticism is not religion. It is a tendency within religion, a tendency that I think all religions that I'm familiar with have, whether they're, you know, Amerindian cosmologies or Buddhism or whatever it might be, there are always these mystical tendencies, which are often linked to a kind of rigor and a desire for purity and the essential truth of that tradition. A tradition that's invented a misnomer, and you have to kind of deal with that smokescreen. And the other thing, which I try and point out in the book, an axe that I'm grinding and I ground it in other books is the way in which modern philosophy sees itself, firstly, as I'm under laborer to science, as John Locke said, and the purpose of philosophy, this becomes clear in someone like chance, is a critical, a critical course of judgment where the claims of religion have to be assessed. So, Ken's terms religion within limits of reason alone. And Ken sees himself very much in opposition to the mystics of his day, like Spadenborg. And the purpose of philosophy is to kind of ward off that mystical mumbo-jumbo. So, it's very clear that the word mystic or calling someone a mystic is a form of abuse in all sorts of lines of life. And so, I'm trying to dig back into that and tell a different story, and also to try and show how that modern secular, critical, rational approach to philosophy really is an impoverishment of philosophical activity. And it makes most of the history of philosophy unintelligible, because, you know, philosophy, you find people having all sorts of interesting wild experiences, whether it's place, so Platonus, or wherever it might be. So, I really try to, you know, I'm at war with that, that critical rationalist idea of philosophy. Yeah. And I think that's one of the reasons the figure of William James and his radical empiricism is helpful, because the empiricist tradition that kind of formalizes a kind of knowing that bifurcates nature in a lot of different ways, like the quantitative and the qualitative aspects of reality, and creates a kind of, I don't know, there's an enlightenment engine of sorts to reason that you see at that same time period where mysticism becomes a concept used to dismiss part of human experience is the same time you see the distinction between natural and supernatural migrate from its origin within biblical studies to then the study of nature as text. And so the natural supernatural distinction starts in a religious context for textual and then migrates to how we read the book of nature, right? And this kind of bifurcating move. And this is something else that came up in it just in thinking about Protestantism. Protestantism has a kind of iconoclastic energy to it that in many ways, it helps generate Charles Taylor calls like the buffered self of the modern context, where you end up creating a buffered self, a disenchanted world, and then are trying to figure out what to do with all these experiences. And William James, the kind of radical element of his empiricism that you draw throughout really well, is what we shouldn't have like this a priori commitment to flattening reality to what's calculable to what's just, you know, quantitative elements and such and so his varieties of religious experience play a kind of function as like a philosophical interjection to that kind of modern engine. And it begins by looking at experience something that is, in many ways, it's transcultural, but it's one that includes things that, at least in the modern self-reflection, has already kind of been bifurcated out and, you know, not being attended to. I agree. That's very well put. I think I didn't intend this in a way, but you can read the book. There's a condemnation of Protestantism, the reduction of religion to some individual belief in existence of God reveals through its rescripture. And that God having a peculiarly transcendent character in relationship to a world that is mired in sin and fallen and wretched were the characters that are used in the book briefly, but it made a big impact on, I read it, I read it after the, I'd largely written the book, was David Bentley Hart's book, or The All Shall Be Saved, where he tries to describe or does describe a Christianity without Augustine, without the Augustinian emphasis upon in wretchedness, skills, and less alone, and hell, and let alone the idea of predestination. These are horrible, horrible ideas. And, you know, so the emphasis is responsible at Julian, is that for Julian, all shall be well, and all manner of saying shall be well, meaning that we shall all be saved, that if there is hell, that hell is ours, it's our egotism, which is hell, but we can push that aside, and we can be healed, we can be lifted up. So Protestantism is a, you know, a really, by which I mean, you know, Calvinism largely Luther, just also, but the idea that, you know, this 144,000 people that were destined to salvation, and the rest of us are doomed, the activity of grace is unforeseeable, and know what does really matter, what we do, we just have to hope that things are going to work out, and, you know, the huge majority of human beings who's been burning in hell for eternity, that's a very strange thing for a Christian to, to believe it seems to me, and I'm, I'm deeply opposed to it. So the, I guess, one another thing, it's not explicit in the book, there's a kind of catholic focus in the book, you know, it was written also in Midtown Manhattan, in overlooking St. Patrick's Cathedral, and I spent a lot of time in St. Patrick's, which is a, you know, a strange, kind of similar picture of a cathedral, but nonetheless, there it is. But also I had some experiences, I spent some time in monasteries in Mount Athos, in Greece, and one of the things that I was doing in the years I was writing this book was to learn more about Orthodox Christianity, Orthodox Greek Christianity, and it's a very, you know, there are all sorts of similarities, obviously, with, with Latin Christianity and with Protestantism and Anglicism, in particular with Anglicism, but very sharp differences of emphasis, particularly when it comes to issues around sin, guilt, damnation, and the rest. So there's a kind of crypto, orthodox side to the book, I think, if I were to, which I, you know, I didn't, it didn't really cross my mind as I finished it. I'm looking, I'm looking back at it and thinking, oh yeah, this is, this is very much steeped in that, in that Orthodox milieu, and also, but the stuff at the end of the book about music is really, you know, a way of thinking about the centrality to song in orthodox devotion and everything happening through, through, through song, and the role of icons and visual images, the kind of Marian devotional aspect to orthodoxy, and also the, you know, the very clear focus on, on the incarnation in, in orthodoxy. So I think that, so there's that, to put my, not my cards on the table, but to make a slight additional confession. And James, I mean, William James is everything I think a philosopher should be, which philosophers overwhelmingly are not. There's an open-mindedness and inquisitiveness about James in whatever he decides to work on, and no feeling of his superiority over the, the talk, over the, the people that he's addressing, or investigating. He has this open-minded tolerance, and he, he's presented with a phenomenon, and he tries to understand it. And so the varieties of religious experiences, you know, it's a book that could be criticized. It has been criticized, but, and at the center of that book is the, the chapter-long chapter on mysticism, but it's such an open-minded, tolerant, warm, embracing approach to a set of texts and traditions, you know, that James is unfamiliar with, doesn't believe, but he's trying to make, make sense of. I think that's what philosophers should do, make sense of phenomena that are, that are aliens of them, in an open-minded and empathetic spirit. And so James's approach is really important. And also the book in many ways is you could see it in the context of James's late work on radical empiricism. And radical empiricism is fascinating, because, you know, James is against classical empiricism, because he thinks it hits obsessed with gut static objects, and those static objects producing sensations, the, you know, ideas that, which we understand, the sort of locky and human view, rather we need an idea of the empirical field as relational, alive, moving in time and space, like a malleable relational empirical world. And he's also opposed to any idea of absolutism that there is, you know, there's an anchor in some transcendent ground, the absolute haggle or whatever it might be. And I find that radical empiricism in James is really amenable, and I feel very, very close to that. And I think it, it also presages a lot of what happens in 20th century philosophy in, in phenomenology and elsewhere. Like, you know, so to James is, to us, the radical empiricism in James is something which he thinks is these, these are suggestions in his late work, and none of this is finished. We just had, you know, handfuls of papers, which were put together after his death. He doesn't write the book on radical empiricism. This would have been a view that would have been consistent for James with a kind of panpsychism, which is kind of also back on the agenda in the last few years, which is interesting. So the idea that the cosmos, the slow-breathing cosmos that it folds us, as James said, is, it's alive, and it's insold. That's a tremendously refreshing approach. At McDonald's, our customer's well-being is at the heart of what we do, from how we source our food to how we deliver quality in our restaurants. And it's made possible by thousands of hardworking crew, suppliers, and the small business owners who own and operate our restaurants. Every day we help to meet the highest standards for our customers. Our commitment will never change. We will always do the right thing. The sounds of the season can often sound like this. So, why do we get into grandkids? But with Hilton's season to stay sail, they could sound a bit more like this. Or this. Stay and save up to 20% off when you book before January 5th at Hilton.com. Hilton for the stay. Minimum two-night stay required excludes luxury in all inclusive properties, terms, and conditions apply. This episode is brought to you by Too Faced Cosmetics. Give this sweetest gift this holiday season with the viral best-seller kissing jelly lip oil gloss now in the new birthday kiss shade exclusively at Sephora. This hybrid lip oil gloss is a sparkly candy color that smells like vanilla birthday cake, softening and smoothing lips instantly, delivering 12-hour moisture and immediate shine. And with Too and From written right on the packaging, it's ready to be gifted. Shop Too Faced Cosmetics' new kissing jelly birthday kiss. Now it's Sephora. Something's coming. Bonhoeffer, a thrilling new film from Angel Studios coming to theaters November 22nd. The harrowing tale of one man's shift from preaching peace to plotting resistance. As the world teeters on the brink of annihilation, Dietrich Bonhoeffer is swept into a deadly plot against Hitler. From the producer of Elf and director of Soli, this is one winter release you don't want to miss. Visit angel.com/spy to get your tickets today. Hey friends, I want to invite you to come with me and Andrew Root this June to Berlin, Germany for the rise of Bonhoeffer travel learning experience. You'll be able to explore theology, culture and faith through the lens and story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It will weave together an integrative mix of lectures tours, conversation, experiential learning, and guess where our classroom is at Dietrich Bonhoeffer's very own home. So if you've loved thinking about us like, then consider joining us for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity perfectly constructed for anyone seeking to have a deep encounter with Bonhoeffer and wrestle with his piercing insights about faith for the modern world. We're going to explore these themes in Bonhoeffer's family home, visit various museums and sites, get to see his neighborhood, tell the story, and do it all in a small group of people, right? Just the number of people that fit in the man's living room. So come join me, Andrew Root, and it's going to be a good old time. For more information head over to bonhoeffertrip.com. bonhoeffertripwith1p, not likemyname.com. And I think that the kind of maneuver contemporary radical empiricists use for kind of like returning to panpsychism or pan-experientialism or different forms of dual aspect monism, the part of it is they kind of radical empiricists move of your own first-person experience as something you have to include in your account of reality. And one of the things I thought you did kind of masterfully with James and then setting up this collection of adjectives that mysticism brings up is it's like some modernity in a rationalist or an empiricist mode wants to create mysticism as a concept so that then you can bracket it and move it over here before you talk about reality. And James is going just like our account of reality has to include our experience of first-person experience. Our account of reality should actually include the varieties of religious experience that we often alienate our self-understanding, our anthropology from as rationalist by using mysticism this way. And you do with mysticism with a lot of contemporary panpsychists are doing in resisting the either supernatural dualist account of consciousness or it's all epiphenomena or internal fan fiction of genes or something like that. Yeah, that's good. I try and define my terms in the first chapter, which is tricky, but then there's a chapter called seven adverbs that God loves, which is the old purist in saying God loves adverbs. And I argue that mysticism is best understood adverbially and the adverbs I list are, let's see, obliquely, also biographically, vernacularly and performatively, practically, heroically and aesthetically. And you can just quickly run through the obliquely is that God is incomprehensible. We begin from, you know, this is where the apophatic tradition is so central. God is incomprehensible and can't be addressed directly in propositions. So we can only approach God negatively, apophansically, by cussing things away. Secondly, autobiographically, the origins of autobiography, certainly in Europe, in the high middle ages are bound up with mystical writing, in particular, the writing of women. And that's a major concern of the book, the way in which the autobiographical voice, the first person perspective, arises in relationship to a God that cannot be addressed directly, but can be approached obliquely. And then vernacularly, the mystical tradition within Christianity is one where the vernacular language is really come to prominence. Oh, German and Eckhart English in Julian Dutch medieval French with others. And also, it's something performed. It's not a question of belief in some propositions that are going to have frozen, desiccated idea. Do you believe in God or not? It's a performative idea of mysticism, something that's done, which I take from Michel de Cerso and a couple of others. It's practical. It's not theoretical. It's really a question of that mysticism is, it's not a theoretical belief in the existence of God. It's the commitment to participate in a set of practices that might allow something to emerge in practices of really what we, I think now we're called practices of attention, of radical attention, which are done through, largely through reading, you know, what the theologians call lectio-divinos, divine reading. And then, erosically, I mean, everything in the mystical tradition really moves through the Song of Songs, and the interpretation of the Song of Songs, and the extraordinarily erotic relation to God that you can find in so many of the mystical writers, which again is, I think, alarming to products and traditions. But erosicism, which is also ascetic, you know, the erosicism is not, it's a disciplined idea of love, a disciplined idea of eros, which is to be cultivated through ascetic practices, practices of discipline, purgation, so on and so forth. I think if you look at the whole phenomenon adverbally, you get a richer picture of what's really going on, rather than saying "mystism is this" or that, I can hear someone at the trunk door up, and the door has been turned so that's fine. One of the things that came out in that section is how, just how different God talk functions in mystical writings than how almost any modern person reads a religious text. There's a kind of sensitivity, both which you described as the way of negation, and the way of exaggeration, a sensitivity to the actual limits of any objectification of a creation that humans have, namely language and the way we use it to get at our own kind of reality. And I think there's a kind of modern prejudice that you problematize where, like, you know, when you think of the kind of medieval mystic, how they do theology was before there's this transition in early modernity of beliefs, primarily orienting one in a kind of second-person way of trust to then late medieval, there's like implicit belief becomes a category to then explicit belief where the individual justification of their experience is intimately tied to like their affirmation of the truth or falsity of particular beliefs. And so the genre of mystical writings becomes something you attend to both in how language functions in them, and then the actual practice of mystical texts where you pick up, you know, the image of mysticism primarily with the image of the mixtape and this kind of thing, like in the classroom, and you're trying to invite people to read how to read mystical texts. And, you know, the last philosophy class they were in, they may not have even known they were reading one, say, like, when we do the ontological argument, we in the West will take out the proof for God's existence out of a monk who puts it in a confessional text. The whole thing, right, like, Anselm's a dressing God for the brothers to read and think about how this activity of reflection on the divine generates a kind of participatory encounter. And so to me, one of the fascinating things is someone is that there is something to reality to be gained that we have kind of at your feet by understanding the theological task or the interpretive task or the critical task of modernity that those things leave it behind. Yeah. No, I agree. Yeah. I mean, Anselm is, I mean, we have this kind of, you know, Wikipedia version of the ontological argument, which always seems a bit ridiculous when someone explains it. But if you read Anselm, it's a long time since I did, it's wrapped up in a whole literary conceit, you know, of what the fool should say to God. And it's, and it's not clear how seriously Anselm is intending it. It's a piece of, you know, exquisitely performative theological reflection for people who are very familiar with that playful. And you to reduce that to a set of arguments and propositions, you know, in the, usually in the context of discussions of Descartes is really a miss that missed the whole point. I mean, the way mystical God talk is, is really strange and compelling to us, because our God talk is, you know, we're so remote. It's, you know, it's an affirmation of some transcended deity, who is far, you know, whereas for the, the mystics, particularly the Christian mystics that most interests me, the incarnation is central. So God is, God is radically human, is radically, radically human. And it's that, it's that human God that you can fall in love with. And that human God who, whose gender is also up for grabs, a man and a woman or both or neither. And also one's relationship to God is, a number of the people I talk about in the book, but Madame Guillaume is one, there's another, they keep up, maybe it's hard of a, anyway, but God is oral, right? The one's relationship to God is a relationship through, through the mouth. And the central religious practice there is, is eucharistic. It's the focus on the Eucharist. It's when you are with God, when you can eat God, or be eaten by God. And so the orality and eroticism and sensuality of mystical God talk is, is extraordinarily striking. In the context of, I mean, as I said before, maybe Protestantism is the gateway drug to modern atheism. And, you know, Protestantism has really solo scriptura. It's really, it's you reading St Paul over and over again, nothing wrong with releasing Paul. I'm very fond of St Paul, but it's an evacuation of the other senses, right? Whereas for the mystic, there is, God is, is, is a question of taste, a question of sight, a question of, of touch, Andrew Foligno climbing inside Christ's side wound. And it's amazing stuff. To us, it feels very almost like a kind of horror movie or a slightly grotesque, but that, that says a lot about what religions become in the modern world for us and how remote we are from most of its traditions, I would say. And the mixtape idea is really, it's something I, I'm fond of because in philosophy, certainly, you know, the way I, I tend to teach philosophy the way philosophy has been taught in the context I've been is, and all talked about, it's all about the book and the big book and the big book read in the original language, reading Plato in ancient Greek or Kant's first critique in German or whatever it might be. And with the mystical texts, the texts that we then come to call mystical texts, they often only existed in copies and translations and copies and copies of translations and translations. And they, they circulated in, in compendia. And those compendia were going to pass hands to hands. And so there is very, there's very often there's no, there's no original text. It's the whole thing is kind of derivative and, and past all. And what that testifies to that they mean, he's something really deep. He's that at the core of mysticism, which I think is why it's still a challenge for conventional religious thinking and for secular liberalism is that it's, it's populist. There's a populism to mysticism. These things, we only have these texts because people treasured them and then passed them on to somebody else who copied them and passed it on to somebody else. And, and they did that because there was something going on in these texts, there was something powerful being articulated that addressed ordinary people. Like you see, other side of this is that mysticism is not a university discourse. It's not a high level theological discourse. This is a very common everyday understanding of religious practice. It's often the most, you know, ordinary, you know, let's say uneducated people who have the most ferocious attachment to mystical practices within the churches that they follow. And that's not something to be laughed off as these people are kind of, you know, unmentionables. They don't really understand the sophisticated heights of theology. There's a powerful truth to that. So the populism and the fact that these were texts that were made possible because they're resounding within audience unless they survived, I think is really important. And it's not the book, it's the mixed, mixed type, it's the, it's the sample. So mysticism is more of a playlist. The things that, you know, that it's a double concept album. Yeah, no, I found that to be a lot of fun. And just it made me even think of how you could introduce that kind of knowing and reflection in the classroom, right? When you're teaching medieval religion and philosophy in the book, at some point, I put my little post it and said it would be fun to for like a midterm or something, hand everyone one of those giant pieces of paper. And each one has taped a different line from a different mystic in the middle of it. And your task is to essentially do electio de Vino with that passage. And you have on one side of the paper, your own reflection and the other past is other passages that you want to set alongside this one to read with it, right? Where, you know, because, because even that tendency, people can be a scholar of mysticism without ever practicing its form. And religious traditions in modernity can become defenders of particular expressions of its concretized belief without ever having their own existence addressed and challenged by those, those very same concepts and that kind of engaged kind of knowing. It reminds me that, Oh, John Coddingham talked about it where our temptation in modernity is that the rationalist, theist and atheist are sitting there leveraging facts and reason, thinking everyone's ultimately going to come to their place. And yet, when you engage any of the wisdom traditions, no one knows what the invitation looks like until one practices it, right? Right. And I think what you invite us to do, both people within religious traditions and those outside of it is like, don't let the theist and atheist God's planers of modernity keep you away from attending to these deep depths that exist in humanity. And that's why I just love this book. I've been telling people, oh, you got to go read this. This is, I mean, I like your, I like your writing style already. But in some sense, it's going, our God talk is so atrophied or we have like a, a hypophatic theology problem where the, the art and theist have already flattened the potential of God talk and the ardent atheist are just arguing about other flattened versions of God talk. And the mystics are a bit oblivious as to the flatness and our protest of sorts. Yeah, it's the flatness that you often find in. It's, you know, most God talk is a kind of dayism, really. There's a God, a God that's out there and people will proclaim their faith and faith in some transcendent God. But that's not really a God that intervenes in the world and turns over the tables of money changes and, and, and smashes shit up and does things. And, and Christianity is a much a wilder God. It seems to me. So I think that the, the deep depths of a human experience are, are addressed by mysticism in ways that I agree with you in ways that contemporary God talk or anti God talk simply, simply miss. And, and that's why we need, I guess the other argument would be that all the other example would be that when we're really engaging with something that we love, in a deep way, because it means a lot to us, then that's a, that is a mystical practice too. And the example I end the book with is, is music. I say something like, you know, it's impossible to be an atheist when you're listening to the music that you love. And I think that's right that whatever that music might be, your relationship to that is some corner of experience that is deep. And you know, it's mediated and it's artificial, you're listening to it on a streaming service on your computer in, and all of that. So it's a completely, it's, it's wrapped up in its own in authenticity. But you are still, you're, you're, you're being addressed by something that, that moves and transforms, and which, and which opens the world up in a way that is not propositional. It's, it's, it's, it's experiential and, and very hard to explain, which is why it's so nice to meet someone who likes the same music as you, because you don't have to explain it. You can just say, well, you like that too. Oh, that's great. Let's put it on and listen to it. I think there is a way which something like mystical practice lives all in a very ordinary way, you know, you know, experience of music. And that's, yeah, and, and, you know, thank God for that. When you think of how you, you, in the book, that kind of invitation to the places, modernity hasn't flattened or, or dulled our senses, right, to, to the depths. How do you imagine this text being read well for those that are within and those without, without religious traditions? Like what are you hoping different, different readers who, who may be homeless in the sense of a historic wisdom tradition, or even those, maybe their wisdom tradition is humanism or this kind of thing. How, how do you imagine Delm hearing it and receiving it positively in a different way from those who, when it's like, hey, look at, look at Critially doing this beautiful reading of the medieval mystics, who doesn't like a little time with the Rhineland mystics? How do you imagine those audiences receiving it? I'm not sure. I really am not sure. But when you mentioned people that were could be homeless in a wisdom tradition, I think there is traditional religious practice, you know, whether we do we say in crisis, all of decline, whatever, you know, the amount of young people in Saint North America, who they might accept that there's some kind of spiritual dimension to life, but they're not going to go to church. And they say you don't know much about the Bible or, or other Christian texts. I think I see, you know, there's a void there for a real void that doesn't really have a name. And into that void, you can kind of fill that void with, you know, astrology and tarot and East as Herroker and so on and so forth. And again, I don't dismiss that. I think that's that addressing some, some need, some metaphysical need that people have. Yeah, I suppose the hope would be that, or it's, or it leads people towards the East, right? They'll end up, you know, how many times in class when I'm explaining something that so that people say, oh, that's just like this thing in Buddhism. And it said, well, yes, and no, it's just like this thing within your very local traditions, if only you understood them. So the hope is that maybe those people that are homeless in a wisdom tradition can find something radical and engaging in what is, you know, what is most local and most obvious in a particular Christianity that they can find something that which can shake them up and they'll think, oh God, this is, this is fascinating. I didn't realize this. I thought it was just, you know, some old guy with a beard, you know, with a stick kind of telling us what, you know, things we can't do, but Christianity is this multi-valen, extraordinary tradition, spondler traditions that if people were more easy and familiar with that, I think it would, it would help. I also think that the way I get so, I mean, yeah, hopefully to do something about the religiously ignorant, you know, there are people just religiously ignorant and it's an easy thing to solve. You can read books on the history of Christianity and you can read the Bible and whatever, and then you can become a master in a very, in very short order. So hopefully some people will pick these things up and do something with them. And I do think that, you know, the point that you're making about modernity, flat-ming, both God talk and atheist talk is really the problem. And the aim of the book is to go back to the rough ground is to find some little ditches and hills and at least some kind of landscape that will allow us, some features on that landscape that will allow us to wander and run because in my view is basically that, and to do that through reading, I mean, I was thinking about this the other week in terms you know, what I think mystical practice is, say, for someone like me. And I think it really is reading, close reading is the practical discipline. And why does one do that? It's really, it's not in order to extract information. It's not like reading Wikipedia entries or trying to read in order to find some resonance pattern set of arguments in a difficult text, which is not you. It's not what you think. And so reading closely, attentively, soberly in that sense is a way of pushing yourself out of the way. And that's how I've always seen without wanting to sound too lost to you. That's what education is about, you know, trying to get people out of their heads and reading and looking and observing and not to keep falling back into this internal monologue, which is always dreary and dull. So I hope that some people will find some affluence of something interesting, some messer out there that will maybe they'll hear something and then they'll go on their own way. That's the case with the, well, we'd teach you this material that people will say, well, that's that's that's June of Norwich and very interesting. And now I'm going to find my mystic. I think that's that's very much what I hope hands people find their own, find their own journey and write their own book. I'm interested in how you see this connecting to some of your other engagement with Heidegger, because you know, there's that passage in Heidegger where he's doing that riff on Bernard of Clairvaux, who goes, oh, well, here's the book of nature, right? And then there's the book of scripture. Bernard goes, but let us open up the book of experience. Yes, the Liba exterior. Yeah. And knowing that you've spent plenty of time on kind of the continental philosophy, continental tradition and phenomenology, are there are there kind of like particular connection points that that you discovered in this kind of attentiveness to mysticism that kind of amplify or orient your your kind of previous work with within continental return to religion? Yes. Yeah, multiple, multiple points of connection. And I mean, I see chapters three in part one called released existence, which is on the apof, it's on negation and love. It ends up as a reading of my sarakha, some of the sermons of my sarakha. Obviously, Heidegger is on my mind. And a released existence would be one where there is a attachment where thinking and that which is take place in a common space, you know, what are you called declaring? And the basic thought in Heidegger's work, for me, is very simple. It is that we are ecstatic that we are not in our heads. We're not in our heads with kind of brains in our heads. And then with some cognitive apparatus, which is filtering representations and placing them under concepts in order to produce knowledge that that picture, the Cartesian picture, the Kantian picture is wrong. First and foremost, or proximate for the most part, as Heidegger will say, we are out there alongside with things. And that withness with things and witness with others. Ultimately, what he'll describe as kind of releasement, clearing ecstasy. And that's where we are in a very everyday way. So, indeed, I'm teaching Heidegger again this semester. And the difficulty in teaching Heidegger is trying to get students to unlearn things. It's lessons in unlearning. We're so good at switching on or viewing the world to move through these Cartesian spectacles. And I'm playing that Rassio Senesa reflective game that we simply don't see what Vickish Dine called the Hurley Burley, the Hurley Burley of Life, the background practices, Dreyfus called them, the stuff that we do. And William James uses the buzzing. The buzzing. Yeah. Yeah, the buzzing of blue and confusion. Yeah, absolutely. And how do we, we navigate, we orientate ourselves in the world, ecstatically. And we do that in the most masterful way, the vast, vast majority of us, what it is to sleep in a room and go from that room, the past room and then to go from that room to, you know, to make coffee and then to go out in the world and use the subway and go to your job or whatever. These are incredibly complex sets of practices. And when we're engaging with them, pre-heoretically, non-reflectively, we're in a kind of ecstasy. And So, Heidegger wants to give, I think for Heidegger, there is a, there is a mysticism to, to every day life, which we continually pass over because it's just so obvious and so familiar. So, it becomes a question, is what Merlot Ponce called the perceptual face that we had this perceptual face in the world? And then, and then we adopt the standpoint of reflection. We become Cartesians and we begin to question things or think about things. How do I know that the other person is person and not robot or whatever? Is it an AI or is it a human voice? And once we're at the standpoint of reflection, then we lose the perceptual face. So, how do we go back to the perceptual face? And Merlot Ponce has this other concept of what he calls hyper reflection. And hyper reflection is really a reflection on the limits of reflection, which is trying to get back to that perceptual face that we've lost. I mean, the, if you like, the tragic side to this is that, you know, we, we live and we will live within the flattening of the modern worlds, right? We live in, you know, we live in work spaces where human beings are resources and there's a human resources to, to, you know, to run things and, and that's, that's horrendous. But we can still, we can still experience the limits of that, you know, engage in lessons and learning. And I think that's what a static experience can do in a particularly powerful way. And music, I think in a extremely powerful way. So, I don't really talk about hiding in the book. I don't think much at all, but it's, it's everywhere. Yeah. Well, one of the reasons, I mean, you just drew the connections there. I mean, I understand why you wouldn't want to play the, let me also introduce you to all my favorite phenomenologists and run through that in this book. But those connections, I think, are really helpful. And, and it kind of raises a question for me when, you mentioned before kind of like the migration in a sense of the holy and in a, in our more modern context has his little eruptions and kind of eclectic esoteric spiritualities and such. You got the revival of psychedelics and things. And one of the, one of the parts of the book that it didn't really get forced on me till the end is a way in a sense like mysticism when understood poorly is extracted from human experience. Because the modern reader reads it as something verifying a particular traditions, you know, like code of beliefs, like there's this tendency, the moment of religion is about its like explicit beliefs, then mystical experience is some trump card that's now beyond the discourse of reason to problematize. But when you, when you read mysticism deeply within traditions, but asking the question of anthropology in a sense, it points towards a kind of spiritual or religious, these spiritual religious technology that's a potential of human beings. And it's just, it's like advocating that our anthropology has a dignity of depth that we don't give it anymore. Yeah, I agree with that. It's very, very well put and with you on that. I think the psychedelics thing is, is, I don't know how interesting that is, but it's, it's certainly, I mean, psychedelics seem to be, you know, a path for people to rediscover their being in the world and to switch off their Cartesianism. I think that's, that's true of the case. And also the, the, I think the, in the book, there's a, yeah, I kind of a soft plea for anthropology, as opposed to philosophy, that if we want to engage in a phenomenon, understand a phenomenon, then we have to do that like an ethnographer, you know, and that's, I mean, I guess that's sort of how I'm lucky. I'm, I mean, how close I am to some or all this, all of this material, I don't know. It depends what, what day is, I, I, I treasure it, but sometimes I doubt my own capacity to, to measure up to it, but my kind of duty as a, as a riser is to ethnographically lay it out as carefully as possible in order to let that resonate with, with some imagined reader. I just got back yesterday from a conference at Princeton with Hartmont Rosa, the German sociologist. Oh, no, huh. Oh, well, then this, you said the word resonance at the end of your last, at the end of your, it's your last answer. At the conference, Rosa was engaging theologians and philosophers, kind of doing these interdisciplinary engagements from like religious soci, sociology of religion to the people that in different parts of religious traditions, this kind of thing. And the, his concept of resonance as it gets developed over against, I guess, kind of a definition of modernity and his, you know, work on acceleration and, and resonance functions as a similar invitation to open up, attend to these places of uncontrollability, these kind of encounters of hospitality. And it was fascinating how in his most recent book, when he's talking about resonance and politics and religion, that the very reductive alienating move that you're reading mysticism against has really problematic con con outcomes for how we engage and relate to nature, each other economically, politically. I'm interested in how you see what kind of connections you see, because he's describing something similar sociologically. And it comes with a critique or an account of modernity. Are there connection points that you see between y'all's work and how this engagement with with mysticism might kind of reorient our account of modernity that normally gets right, like rendered in a, let's talk about epistemology only, because mysticism has a lot thicker tension with modernity than just its epistemology that us philosophers end up getting hung up on. I mean, basically, I'm on my toes, he's skeptic, you know, and, and he discovered about 20 or years ago, Bruno Latour's work, which I found incredibly, the negative work is brilliant, the positive work is less interesting and the whole Gaia stuff gets a bit dreary, but the, when he's smashing the modern worldview and the claim that, you know, we've, we've never been modern. And actually, you know, what human being, where human beings are is in the middle space between subjects and objects, between thought and things where we have agency, but things have agency too. And we're, and we're part thing and part age and things are part thing and part asian. And that idea of the, the middle kingdom in, in, in, in, I've always found very interesting. And that is, and that is the pre-modern worldview, let's say. I think we're still there. I think we've just, you know, we've, we've been forced into a kind of modernity talk. I mean, the worst most of this, I mean, I, I, I've seen a lot of this in the new school and elsewhere over the years, which is that the, well, frame something as being in modernity. And that means that we can forget about all sorts of questions, like religion, because obviously, modernity means secularism and all of that stuff is just guff and nonsense. And we can just forget about it. And I think that's, you know, ridiculous because it makes, it makes the philosophical tradition illegible. So I think we've, we've never been modern though there is something deeply archaic about human beings. And what you can see in a phenomenon like mysticism is one of the ways in which that archaic character of being human shows itself. And I think, when going back to the pandemic, I, I think that there was something, the best thing about the pandemic was that it revealed something really archaic about human beings, right? They were, they were, they were forced back onto themselves and living in a world of kind of primal fear of death and pestilence and decay. And yet finding something else there that was facelacing and maybe transformative, maybe I think people changed. Yeah. So we, so we found ourselves in the pandemic, you know, in the company of all the other plagues, which are beset humanity, suddenly you have the Justinian plague and the bubonic plague and the various plagues of beset human beings seem tremendously relevant. When we discover, actually, you know, we're not that different, we are. And I see also the lesson of ethnography of anthropology is one of showing that sure, there's a modern worldview, there is, there is the crushing, leveling force of, you know, a, you have, of rationalization, uniformity, the commercial imperatives that drive that capitalism has the expression of that, obviously. But there are still archaic reserves within us, which need to be, need to be brought out. And so I, I really disagree with, I really disagree with philosophical forms of periodization, the idea that there was something ancient and there's something in the middle and then something modern and then something postmodern. I think all forms of periodization or of epochs are ridiculous. And I just premised upon, I think, forms of ignorance. If you, sorry, I wrote a book on ancient Greek tragedy. And if you look at what the 5th century Greeks were doing with their myths, with their stories, they were, they were seeing those stories through a very modern lens with it, with the modern technology of theatre and with the modern practices of the democratic city and deliberation, reason and the rest. And those two conceptions of the world, a mythic conception and a modern conception, we're kind of shattering against each other. So I think, so I think modernization happens as an aspect of what is archaic, repeatedly. So I think there's not one, there's not one step into modernity. I think it's something which we continually kind of oscillate back and forth between the model and the archaic. And I think to understand things like politics, I think you have to understand it in terms of things that are archaic in what can be really quite disturbing to, or disturbing to rights thinking liberal persons, because people are working people, the election, November the 5th, is going to be decided on resonance really, it's going to be about which faces, which words, which things are able to resonate in a way with a certain constituency of people that would lead to one outcome or another outcome. And so I think there is, yeah, resonance is really important. I think the acceleration is, I mean, I'm not seeing it happen for years, but the subtle speed was really good. I've always been looking for the emergency break in my work. Tragedy, I think, is an emergency break. I think mysticism is an emergency break and music is an emergency break. There are ways of slowing things down. I think slowing down is really important. I was thinking that resonance is a political factor, can be, I was talking about before in terms of the US presidential election, but I think also in terms of how resonance can be a way in which you can form, yeah, what? Well, the anarchist used to call affinity groups. The affinity is something that works not through argumentation or reason. It works through resonance, whether you can hear something in something that said and that resonance leads you to come together in a certain way. So I think it's pretty important. So I'm very, but I think I'm very, yeah, I'm very skeptical of modernity talk and periodization talking in philosophy. And well, actually, philosophy is usually outside of philosophy that things get even worse. People talk with self-confidence about where we are historically. And I don't know where we are historically, but we're much closer. We're much closer to what is really archaic than we imagine. Yeah. When you think of the context that lots of mystical texts come from, they usually originate in some kind of devotional prayer, this type of place. How would you describe the invitation to that kind of orientation or attention in such for those without home in particular religious traditions? What is a prayer when you know not who or to what or if there is a direction for it? Right. You have to learn that. You have to you have to open yourself up. Prayer is a form of talk, which addresses itself to something outside of you. I think I think the mystical texts are deeply invitational, right? And you can get people hooked with something really quite, quite a small passage from Marguerite Porret. We have to hack and hue away ourselves to make a whole that's large enough to love to enter in. Yeah, that will do it. So the self is the problem. There's carapace of the self that we imagine that we live in. And that carapace is largely pretty dull and predictable and full of doubt and guilt and shame and hellish thoughts. The task of the invitation that these mystical texts offer you is a way of breaking that open and opening and that's usually what is described as love, that breaking open of the carapace of the self. And the form of discourse that would correspond to that is prayer. Prayer is that address that can break one open and open one to something outside of yourself. And I think that makes evidence sense to people in a very practical way. I think when people are, I remember in, I remember in, I was in Athens, living in Athens in 2019, I was writing a series of pieces about Athens. And the last one I was going to write, I didn't actually write it, but I did the, I did some research, tiny little church. I mean, really tiny of the size of a bathroom, really, dedicated to John the Baptist, I think, or, and basically this church was a column. It was just a column inside a tiny little box of a church full of icons. And the column was concealed behind a door. And there was a guy, of course, and it was his job to take, you know, a euro from people to allow people to go behind that door. And if you went behind that door, you saw ribbons. And those ribbons, you, people would tie those ribbons onto bits of string around that column, around that simple Corinthian column. And they would say a prayer, they would make a wish. And, you know, he turns out from, you know, the reading that I did that this column sits on top of one of the very small rivers that used to the so-called the ancient city of Athens. And people have been tying ribbons or making offerings at this spot for probably three and a half thousand years, probably longer. What they're doing in that is that they're, they're engaging in an act, tying a ribbon on a piece of string in a column, in the hope that someone they love will not die of cancer, say, or someone they love will not die of a thief or whatever. It was particularly connected with fevers, that's right. So that kind of hope and expectancy and that kind of prayer, I think, is really important because it, because it, those people are not crazy that they don't really think that this is going to work. But it's the act of doing it and opening oneself up to that, which, which shows something, which I think is, is important. I think mystical texts are like that. They're invitations to open yourself up to something beyond yourself. You can get rid of yourself for a while, de-create yourself, as you know, they would say, and attend in a different way. And that thing, if people can do that, it's very simple. I think that would be great. Oh, yeah. No, that element of where prayer becomes a kind of technology of exposure. And in a culture that has a crisis of callability for the self, it becomes a subversive act, in many ways. I'm trying to find this passage from Chia Celia, which, where it's a course that won't be able to find, but I don't want you to. It's one of those where he talks about the validity of prayer. The point for Elliot is to kneel is not to assess or her respite and scry and made judgments, but to kneel somewhere where prayer has been valid. He says, kneel somewhere where prayer has been valid. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, this is, it's, this is from a little gidding. He says, if you came this way, taking any roots starting from anywhere, anytime or any season, it would always be the same. You would have to put off sense and notion. You are not here to verify, instruct yourself or inform curiosity or carry reports. You are here to kneel where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more than an order of words, the conscious occupation of the praying mind or the sound of the voice praying. And what the dead had no speech for when living, they can tell you being dead. The communication of the dead is told with fire beyond the language of the living. And it goes on like that. But I think that idea of, I mean, this is a, probably a quite reactionary way of putting it, but the invitation would be an invitation in a way to genuflection. Here's something that you can, you can kneel in front of, accept, open yourself towards. And that's, that's always been hard for human beings, but it's harder because the carapace of the self is, is tough for a more resilient than arguably it's ever been. Yeah. Oh, that's beautiful. Yeah. Okay. I absolutely love the book. Well, thank you. And really appreciate you taking the time to talk about it. I have, I'm just glad I didn't manage to just tell you all the things I like about it. Sometimes when I read a book and enjoy it too much, the interview turns into me telling them what they wrote because I liked it. And, and with you, it's either a problem of liking multiple of your books. This is the first time we talked. So I'm glad I didn't give you the cliff notes to all my favorite books. Well, thank you very much, tribute. It was, it was a great pleasure and I wish you well, and all shall be well, an all manner of things shall be well. Hey, you made it all the way through the episode. Congratulations. If you would like to help make this possible, I would absolutely love for you to head over to homebrewedcommunity.com. There, you'll be able to join the substat community, process this where you get ad-free versions of all the new episodes when they come out. You'll be able to get invites to live engagement, zoom hangouts and such. And it's a real easy way to help make this happen, or you could join theologyclass.com. That is a place where you get access to the 45 plus online classes we've done and we keep adding to it. I'm just saying, I'm just saying there are lots of ways to support the podcast, get access to extra content and interaction. And I deeply, deeply, deeply appreciate all of you who've helped make this apart. So head over homebrewedcommunity.com and share the brew. Smoochie-boochie's friends. Hey friends, this is Tripp and this Advent. You know, the journey up to Christmas in the year 2024 is strikingly similar to a time in the early 20th century, one where there is economic turmoil, political tensions, challenges to the burgeoning democracies, war on the horizon. And in that context, there are a host of theologians that wanted to resist the attraction, the popularity rising up in the church to right wing despots, resistors of authoritarianism, challengers to fascism, theologians who saw this crisis and said, what is the word of God today? Those theologians, Carl Bart, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Paul, Tillic Rudolph Boltmann, started a movement that theologians of crisis. And this Advent, I'm going to be joined by friends that are happened to be theologians specialist on each of these scholars to wrestle with their faith. What was their understanding of the times and what can we learn from it in hours? And not just that, we're going to look the way these brilliant theologians proclaim that message from the pulpit. That's right. You'll get an intro lecture to each one of these scholars. Then you'll get to have a live Q&A with me and a specialist in that theologian. And we will be discussing their larger vision and looking at some of their sermons from Advent and Christmas, places where they picked up the tradition and brought the word of the coming of God to a time of crisis. If you want to join up, then head over to oh, God, what now.net. Oh, g-o-d-w-a-t-n-o-w.net. This class is donation based including zero. So head on over, join the community. And let's wrestle with theologians who have a word for their time and how it speaks to ours. [BLANK_AUDIO]
In this episode, I got to talk with Simon Critchley about his new book Mysticism. We delve into Critchley's journey towards exploring mysticism, his reflections on modernity, and his discussions on key figures like William James, Julian of Norwich, and Meister Eckhart. We also discuss the importance of reading and understanding mystical texts, the role of prayer, and how modernity has impacted our perception of faith and spirituality. His engagement with mysticism beyond the confessional boundaries in which it so often emerges makes the topic and the book a timely reflection for our contemporary spiritual crisis.
Simon Critchley has written over twenty books, including studies of Greek tragedy, David Bowie, football, suicide, Shakespeare, how philosophers die, and a novella. He is the Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York and a Director of the Onassis Foundation. As co-editor of The Stone at the New York Times, Critchley showed that philosophy plays a vital role in the public realm.
You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube
_____________________
This DECEMBER, we will be exploring the 'Theologians of Crisis' in our online Advent class - Breaking into the Broken World. Join us to learn about Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Rudolph Bultmann as we explore their thoughts and timely reflections in their Advent/Christmas sermons.
Join my Substack - Process This!
Join our class - THE RISE OF BONHOEFFER, for a guided tour of Bonhoeffer's life and thought.
Spend a week with Tripp & Andrew Root in Bonhoeffer’s House in Berlin this June as part of the Rise of Bonhoeffer Travel Learning Experience. INFO & DETAILS HERE
Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
