MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

• SUBSCRIBE to Amy Julia’s weekly email
• Praxis
• Culture Making by Andy Crouch
• “Where the Magic Doesn’t Happen” by Andy Crouch
• “The Trump administration’s rhetoric about disability diminishes us all” by Amy Julia Becker
• “Embracing the Mystery (more than the magic) of Christmas” by Amy Julia Becker
• Breaking Ground essay | “Wrestling with Sovereignty in a Kairos Year” by Amy Julia Becker
• Ken Myers and Mars Hill Audio
• Playing God by Andy Crouch
• Strong and Weak by Andy Crouch
• The Tech-Wise Family by Andy Crouch
• Philippians 2: 5-8
• Marc Andreessen: The Techno-Optimist Manifesto

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CONNECT with Andy Crouch on his website: https://andy-crouch.com/

WATCH this conversation on YouTube by clicking here. READ the full transcript and access detailed show notes by clicking here or visiting amyjuliabecker.com/podcast.

ABOUT:

Andy Crouch is partner for theology and culture at Praxis, a venture-building ecosystem advancing redemptive entrepreneurship. His writing explores faith, culture, and the image of God in the domains of technology, power, leadership, and the arts. He is the author of five books (plus another with his daughter, Amy Crouch).

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Let’s stay in touch. Subscribe to my newsletter to receive weekly reflections that challenge assumptions about the good life, proclaim the inherent belovedness of every human being, and envision a world of belonging where everyone matters.

Note: This transcript is autogenerated using speech recognition software and does contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

Amy Julia (00:05)
I’m Amy Julia Becker, this is Reimagining the Good Life, a podcast about challenging the assumptions about what makes life good, proclaiming the inherent belovedness of every human being, and envisioning a world of belonging where everyone matters. How does language shape our world? What’s the connection between social status and the words we choose? How does technology influence our understanding of culture and control?

I loved the conversation I got to have with Andy Crouch where we think about all those questions and more. Today, you will get introduced to some of those ideas through my friend Andy, who is a partner for theology and culture at Praxis. If you don’t know about Praxis and you’re interested, we’ll have a link to them in the show notes and I highly recommend just checking out their work. They are a venture building ecosystem, advancing redemptive entrepreneurship.

We don’t actually talk very much about that in the show, but again, I highly recommend checking out what Andy and the team at Praxis means by redemptive entrepreneurship. Also, we do talk a lot about Andy’s writing and that writing explores faith, culture, the image of God in all sorts of domains, including technology, power, leadership, and the arts. He’s the author of five books. We talk about a lot of them today, as well as another one with his daughter, Amy Crouch.

Three final notes before we get to this conversation. So one, Andy and I make direct and indirect references to a lot of books and essays. So the show notes are filled with links and these include some really great additional content. So if this show, this podcast episode particularly interests you, I highly recommend the show notes, which leads me to number two. If you subscribe to my newsletter, that’s amyjuliabecker.com backslash subscribe.

You will receive those links in your inbox and you’ll also receive a weekly reflection from me. I would certainly love to see you over there. And then three, I recorded this episode while I was visiting colleges with our son. So the audio quality might not be the same as usual, but I’m sure we will all enjoy it nevertheless. And now to my conversation with Andy Crouch. Andy, I’m always so happy to sit and talk with you and

to do that today with an audience is fantastic. So thank you so much for being here.

Andy (02:29)
it is a pleasure. Thank you, thank you.

Amy Julia (02:33)
Well, so I’ve given our listeners a little glimpse into the work that you do by my introduction. But I would like to ask you to start with a little bit more. And I want to go all the way back to, at least for me, the beginning, which is to say your book, Culture Making. Obviously, that was not the beginning of your kind of intellectual journey into ideas. But I would say that that book, I still remember reading it, talking to people about it.

making some changes in my life in response to it that have continued. It just has been really formative for me. And so I thought maybe we could introduce your work by going all the way back to the starting point and asking you to talk a little bit about that book and take it wherever you want. But I was thinking about just the questions of like, what is culture? What is culture making? Like, why does this matter? And I think it still matters a lot. So I wanted to start there.

Andy (03:24)
Wow, well, I’m happy to. That book began as an idea in about 2004 and was published in 2008. It took a while to get the idea to turn into a book. And the idea came from really a decade, it was like a 15 year history behind that idea, which was my dawning conviction that especially my fellow Christians

lacked a vocabulary for what we were doing in the world. That is we had vocabulary for evangelism and for mission narrowly, though I think often it’s good to understand mission narrowly, crossing boundaries for the sake of the love of God and the love of other people. We had categories for discipleship, many things that we I think have thought through relatively well, but we had not.

hoax them up to what most people spend most of their days doing, which is actually culture. mean, most jobs are making or sustaining some aspect of human culture, not evangelism, not discipleship per se, not mission narrowly understood. And I had spent 10 years working with college students and college and education generally is preparation for cultural contribution. And in a way, if I lacked

vocabulary for that. I lacked a vocabulary to equip them for the main thing that they were actually doing with their days in the library, in the lab, you know, on the field. You know, so it took me 15 years, but the culture making basically starts with a definition of culture that I didn’t make up, but that I can remember. Unlike many definitions of culture, which sociologists provide that I didn’t make up either, but I can’t remember them because they’re long and they have multiple

syllable words. Ken Myers, Ken Myers is this wonderful journalist, had a definition I could actually remember that I actually think captures it. And that is culture is what we make of the world in both senses. Culture is the actual material that human beings make. It always is material, actually. And it’s the meaning we make. It’s always full of meaning. There’s actually no material thing, pretty much, that human beings make that isn’t laden with meaning.

And there’s no meaningful activity human beings engage in that doesn’t end up with some material component or effect in the world. Even this podcast, it’s mostly meaning, right? Because it’s mostly conversation, language. And we sort of think of that as pure meaning. But in fact, we’re doing it through speech. We’re doing it through sound. We are encoding the motion of material airwaves back and forth. And you and I, as we speak, then

listeners as they listen are actually engaged in a physical activity, not just a meaning activity. yeah, and then the other big idea. So I just kind of opened up Ken’s amazing, fruitful definition, and then just made the case, this is actually something Christians should always have cared about. We have cared about it in kind of the wrong ways. We’ve been very good at complaining about culture. We’ve actually been very good at consuming culture and being conformed to culture by consuming it.

But we haven’t been very good at cultivating it and creating it. Cultivating meaning taking care of what’s already there and creating meaning adding something significant to the world with our lives, our collective lives. So that was the idea. Does that match what you took away?

Amy Julia (06:57)
Yes, and it’s so interesting because I didn’t remember that the, and I assume this is in the book the Ken Myers definition and I will just say for listeners will add a link to the show notes to Ken Myers he has his own kind of app called the Mars Hill audio journal that Peter my husband.

Andy (07:15)
Best

podcast in the world before there were podcasts.

Amy Julia (07:18)
Exactly. We used to get the tapes. So that’s probably one of the reasons why your book resonated so much for me is that I was already kind of tracking with Ken Myers. I think that for me, the idea of first of all, having a positive contribution to make that idea of both cultivating and creating. secondly, I mean, I remember you talking about like making an omelet is a cultural

Right? Like that sense of the materiality, but also the materiality of this podcast or this realm of ideas, which is I tend to swim. But it just gives me a much broader view of, again, what it means to engage constructively, positively, with hope and purpose in the world. And that was incredibly encouraging to me. I think as just at that point, a young writer, you know, for me, my

first book, was not traditionally published, also came out in 2008, which we talked about long, long ago. And so yeah, as someone who was trying to bring things into the world that might form and shape people through stories, was really, really helpful. And that kind of brings me to my next question, which has to do with language and culture. And I will back up a minute because

I’ve thought a lot, think because I was an English major, I write books, of course I think about the ways language shapes culture, the ways culture shapes language. Recently, I have come back to thinking again about specific words. And as most listeners of this podcast know, I have a daughter with Down syndrome. And a couple months ago, someone sent me an essay in Rolling Stone about the rise of what we tend to call the R word, a slur that is used.

to refer to people with intellectual disabilities. And then more recently, someone sent me a study that showed that Elon Musk had used that word on X, and then there was an exponential rise in other people also using that word on X, which was just this kind of dramatic visual of one person in a position of cultural power shaping the way other people respond. And so I’ve just been wanting to…

think with you, like talk with you a little bit about that relationship between language and culture. How, again, how language shapes culture, but also how culture can kind of shape language, like how those things are related to each other. And what it might look like to be on the, the creation side of that, on the kind of not being the word police.

but also like bringing something that is like good and true and beautiful into the world when it comes to language. think, yeah, I guess that’s, I don’t want to be someone who says you’re not allowed to use those words because they’re bad. But I also want to say, here’s what happens when we speak in this way or in this way. And I want to be speaking in a way that brings, you know, shapes culture for in a positive way. So I’m just wanted to hear you talk about that a little bit.

Andy (10:34)
Wow, wow. Well, a bunch of things come to mind. The first is actually a quote that I won’t probably reproduce perfectly because I’m going by memory. That would seem to have very little to do with this because it’s about a super material reality, which is eating. But from Wendell Berry, who is this obviously amazing, important writer and kind of prophetic figure of our time.

And there’s a line in an essay, I believe, called The Gift of Good Land, where he says, in order to live in the world, we must break its body and drink its blood. And we can either do that carelessly, heedlessly, thoughtlessly, and it’s a sacrilege, or we can do it thoughtfully, carefully, reverently, and it’s a sacrament. And that idea that there’s, in a sense, there’s damage

involved by living. mean, we eat plants, many of us eat animals, you know, and we disrupt the world in living in it. But we either do that without care or we do it with care and that makes all the difference. That’s what comes to mind when I think about maybe the deepest level of how language shapes culture is not what is denoted or connoted

It’s, is there care behind it? by care, I mean both kindness, but also attention. And all of us have you, without exception, have used language carelessly, thoughtlessly, heedlessly in ways that have done further damage in an already damaged world. And part of the reason that you are

you’re probably right to not want to end up just policing language is for one thing, what we see, and we see this specifically with these slurs, we call them, which are by the way, the last taboo because people use profanity in public all the time and no one cares. But there are a small number of words which all of us have heard and many of us at some point in our lives have said that we now don’t even repeat, except in very specific cultural contexts.

You know, there’s this idea that if we just stamp out that word, we’ll stamp out the damage. But in fact, what we see consistently is you have to keep shifting the target of which word is the damaging word. then interestingly, some of them kind of lose their power. In other words, I don’t think anyone will be unduly offended by my referring to the word Negro. We use it in public still, like…

the United Negro College Fund and so forth, even though it’s adjacent to another word that we rightly don’t use. But the history of that word is super interesting because it becomes a slur. And then the Black community actually claims the word Black in the late 1960s and says, no, don’t call us that other word, now call us this. Well, then Black becomes freighted with emotion and.

the deprive of dignity. so then people say, initially, it’s Afro-American and then African-American. So we keep moving the language to try to stay ahead of the co-opting of that to deny people of dignity. But you just have to keep changing the word. The damage is done not with an utterance, but with a carelessness. I don’t even think it’s intent always. That’s where Elon Musk’s example is interesting. He’s not.

setting out to damage, but he’s perpetuating damage by using that language. So that’s the first thought is, gosh, carefulness matters. And then I think the really hard thing is that it’s so much easier to damage things than to repair them. And it’s so much easier to create an environment of

hoarseness and destructiveness than it is to build beauty in the midst of that. There’s this kind of famous story of this cellist whose name escapes me now who went to play during the war when bombs were being dropped on Sarajevo and would play outside amidst the ruins of that beautiful, formerly beautiful city that had been completely devastated by war.

Amy Julia (14:55)
Yes.

Andy (15:18)
And, you know, it’s both a very moving and kind of inspiring story. It’s also like so unsatisfying because like what can one little cello player do in a crater? And, and when, when people are being careless around you and, and damage is being perpetuated. And by the way, this is part of, this is linked to profanity and, interestingly the, one way it’s shown up is,

People on the political left in America have begun swearing in public very consistently. So it started in 2016 when Donald Trump was elected. The political left was so agitated at a significant diminution of our public life, I would say, that they suddenly felt free to do something politicians had never done in American history, which is use the, not the slurs, but the…

Just basically the coarse ways of referring to the fact that we have bodies. Our bodies engage in sort of complex, uncomfortable, and in some ways wasteful activities, right? Excretion, as well as the potentially more fruitful generation of life. And all the profanities circle around this bodily, this fact that we have bodies, but refer to it in a very coarse way.

whether it’s the act of sexual generation or the act of excretion or whatever, right? And politicians have never felt free in public to use those words. And now it’s all over public political discourse from the left because the feeling was it’s sort of necessary to respond to a different kind of course. It’s interesting, Donald Trump, to my knowledge, never uses profanity in public, but he does use language damagingly in public. And so the other side is like, all right, we’re gonna

double down on that and use that language too. And it’s very understandable when you see language being corrupted and used to damage and used to convey contempt both in what’s said and what’s in the emotion with which it’s said. You’re very tempted to think we have to, we got to play the same game. And I think the courage to not play that game and continue to use words carefully when

everyone else is using them damagingly. I mean, that requires a level of faith. I think ultimately in God and the goodness and righteousness of God that is very hard to muster because you really feel like the cellist in the bomb crater.

Amy Julia (17:56)
Yeah, there’s so much I would like to say in response, but what I will say is this, I’m struck by just even in the history of what I’m calling the R word, I’ve done some of the looking at it and you’re exactly right. It was actually introduced in order to get rid of the slur idiot, which now we use without any sense of that being a slur, right? So it was meant to actually be an uplifting thing to say, no, we’re diagnosing this child with mental retardation.

that, know, got short. Now people might make, if they aren’t going to use that word, they might say, well, I see jokes about the short bus, which is often a bus that kids who have. Yes, exactly. You could take to school. there are other ways to do it. I it’s just, and that’s to your point that like, what we’re actually concerned about, I mean, it is the language because it represents this sense of a damage, damaging attitude or a careless one, either way.

Andy (18:37)
for special needs or whatever.

Amy Julia (18:55)
towards a group of people, but there’s also a sense in which the language is not the problem. And that’s where I also think that one of the things that I have been so grateful for over the course of my experience, especially as the mother of a daughter with an intellectual disability, is my friends who’ve said, hey, I used this word and I’m really sorry. I have, you know, sure, I wish they hadn’t used the word, but I care much more about that sense of I’m taking care.

with my language in this interpersonal way. And I think we need to make space for people to, if we’re in a posture of some words are good and some are bad and you can use them or not, and you are good or bad, if you use them or not, we can also get into this place of not being able to actually forgive and to have the relational repair that can happen even in those spaces. So that’s just some of what

what you were talking about, caught me thinking about that perfection in language is not what we’re looking for. But there is, I think to your point, just a degree of carefulness that comes out of care, not out of a desire to get it all right, but comes out of, as I think I wrote down, kindness and attention as your description of what it might mean to care. And I think here’s my other question though. So this is related.

I think to what we’re talking about when it comes to power, because I’m also curious about the ways in which status and power and language plays into a desire for status and for an exertion of power. And again, for listeners who have not read all your books, as I have, there are couple that are related to this topic, one called Strong and Weak.

which is actually an easier read, I would say, than the other one I’m gonna mention, is Playing God. They’re both very good, but Strong and Weak is short, it’s like pocket-sized, has a lot of, what are they called, two-by-two grids that are incredibly helpful about vulnerability and power. And in both cases, I just think about the ways we create human hierarchies based on status.

and the ways I increasingly when I read Jesus’s words and actions in the gospels, he seems to want to both interrupt and dismantle status hierarchies. And so I just wanted to kind of add power and status to this conversation in terms of like, where that desire comes from and why that does I think that I guess here’s what I’m getting at the desire I think for high status is a part of our

When we are in that posture, I think that’s part of when we do damage and are not careful with other people. hadn’t thought of that until you got me going there, but that’s what I’m wondering about.

Andy (21:56)
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Yes, I think status is the very heart of the matter when it comes to thinking, especially as Christians, about power, because I don’t think it’s correct to say that Jesus had no power or gave up power. There’s all kinds of indications in the Gospels, and people around him experienced him as a person of great power, though not power just like,

Augustus Caesar’s power, a different kind of power, but certainly had power. And what he did give up, and I think this is both, we see it in his own life and then we see it in the early Christian reflection on it as in Philippians 2, which is this probably him that predates Paul where Paul talks about, though he had equality with God, he didn’t count it as something to be grasped but emptied himself. And what did he not grasp and what did he empty himself? Not actually the power of being

as we Christians believe, the second person of the Trinity, he never stopped being that. He never stopped having access to the true power that comes through full communion with the Father and the bond of love of the Spirit. But what he did give up was equality, that is rank. And status is ranked power. Status always is connected with what’s your place in line compared to another person or place on the pyramid or however you wanna visualize it. And that’s what Jesus,

does not care about at all. And as you say, sometimes dirt deliberately disrupts. So when you sit down at a meal in the first century in Judea, and you’ve been walking on a dusty road, everybody’s feet are dirty, and it’s considered for various cultural reasons in a way that probably we don’t much relate to now, kind of inappropriate to sit there with dirty feet and have a meal. So partly because you’re all lying there and your feet are next to your neighbors. It’s not like they’re under the table, they’re next to your neighbor, right? So.

So usually there’s a servant. If there’s a servant, the servant comes around and washes people’s feet before the meal. But in some places there’s no servant. everyone, and this would have been all men generally. There’s interesting, there’s other stories actually about Jesus where that gets complicated too in a beautiful way. But just take the typical situation. You got a bunch of guys, they’re sitting down for a meal. And everyone does this calculation. Who is the lowest status person in the room?

And that person probably, definitely without being asked, generally without thinking, just knows, I should pick up the basin and do this. And this is, we all know how this works. We’ve all been in settings where you kind of know whose job it is to go to the kitchen to refill the chips. And in principle, anyone could do it, but in fact, it’s always somebody, right? And it’s not necessarily a low status thing to refill the chips, but there’s someone who without thinking about it knows this is my role in the situation.

And that’s cultural too, like in white, Western, middle-class American culture, that would usually be the mom of the house if it’s a family. But in many other cultures that you and I could go visit, it’s the youngest person, usually the youngest child who’s old enough to carry a bowl of chips. Well, no, it’s my job to go back to the kitchen because the younger serve the older and it’s not the woman of the house’s job. Anyway, the disciples all are trying to, of course, now they’re in this complicated thing where they all don’t really want to admit they’re like the lowest, right?

So there’s this sort of moment of uncertainty who’s going to pick up the bowl and Jesus, who is clearly the highest status person, picks up the bowl and the towel. And then of course teaches on it and says, and it’s interesting, he doesn’t say anything about giving up power. says, in fact, says, you know, I’m your Lord, I’m your master. A servant, you know, if I’m your master, do what you see the master doing. Like he doesn’t give up the role of master even. He just says, status doesn’t matter.

And in fact, we’re going to turn it upside down. here’s the second thing I would add. These things get most perilous when there’s status, when there’s unclarity about status, or when there’s competition for status, or when people are insecure about their status. And I think what’s going on when people use damaging language to

assert dominance, something we can see figures in public life all over the spectrum doing with rampant abandon in our time. But also something all of us have done, whether we use bad words or not. In some moment, when we felt insecure, you use it to try to diminish the other person, to diminish their dignity, diminish their standing as someone who has something to say to the community.

something to offer and thereby move up a few points in line. And when Elon Musk uses that word, it’s absolutely what he’s reflexively doing. He’s not referring, as you point out in your wonderful essay on it, he’s not referring to an actual person who would be diagnosed with mental retardation. He’s referring to an opponent in a debate in such a way as to rule that person out entirely as having anything to contribute.

and thereby to elevate himself as someone who’s manifestly more intelligent than this idiot, which we now feel free to say. But probably we shouldn’t say, but I mean, not getting back into the policing thing, but like if we’re being careful, I should not find myself in public even using that word, let alone the latest slur that has the most emotional power punch behind it. So what Elon Musk is doing is trying to…

established dominance because he feels insecure. Now, there are societies and our own society with a lot of pathologies associated with this, but also some beneficial things. Once had a much clearer status hierarchy that it was known who was the prominent person in a given town or city. And it was often a family and it was often multi-generational. That family was just kind of at the top of the status hierarchy. And there was this idea of condescension.

which is an interesting word because it’s changed meanings pretty significantly for us. It now means to be kind of patronizing or almost belittling. Like you don’t want someone to condescend. But there was a time in the 19th century in English, American English, when condescension was a virtue of those who know they have high status, but they actually treat other people with more dignity than they would have to. And they don’t assert their own status as much as they could get away.

they, it’s like, I mean, a simple example you’ll still run into is you meet someone a little older or more senior than you and you want to call them Mr. So-and-so or Dr. So-and-so or Mrs. So-and-so. And she says, don’t call me Dr. Becker, call me Amy Julia. And she has the right to be called Dr. So-and-so, but she, it’s condescending in the best sense of saying, I’m, and the word literally means to move down to be with, right? To condescend is to move down to be with.

I’m going to be with you on a first name basis. In many European languages, when the person says, call me two instead of, you know, it’s just this, let’s treat one, even though we know the status is there, people only do that when they’re secure. When you’re insecure is where you assert dominance and try to establish who’s, and we are living in a time of incredible insecurity where people just don’t feel like they have enough power. And so you’ve got to like trot out the diminishing degrading rhetoric.

to establish that you and people like you count.

Amy Julia (29:43)
Thank you for all of that. I want to add one more factor to this conversation, which is the fact that the role that technology plays. let’s be clear that technology played a role in spreading language from the advent of the telegram with newspapers. Right? Yeah, go all the way back. We can go back thousands of years. And yet, you

Andy (30:05)
To writing, I would say.

Amy Julia (30:12)
as a platform means that language is spread immediately. I think Elon Musk himself tweets, I mean, hundreds of times a day. So you’re getting these very short blasts that are going out to millions of people instantaneously. And so it brings in just, again, this idea that you’ve written a lot about. So I’ll just mention again, for listeners, there’s a great book called The TechWise Family, which we every…

person in our family has been required to read.

So I do recommend it for every listener out there trying to figure out the role of technology in the household. But I am also recently, and maybe this was in the book, I don’t think so, but recently I’ve been reading you and hearing you write about the magic inherent within the current devices we have, which is hard to say that.

Anyway, I want you to start just by explaining what mean by magic and then we can kind of look at technology and specifically what you know our screens and phones into this conversation

Andy (31:24)
Okay,

Wow. Well, I have to digress on something. You can cut this if you want. But I think it is super interesting that Elon Musk has had this lifelong fascination with the word, the letter X. He bought the x.com domain name like when he was running PayPal. He wanted to call PayPal X, but for various reasons, it wasn’t called that.

So then he buys Twitter, right? Twitter is a word. The word Twitter is a word that birds do and so forth. It carries meaning. X is a symbol that stands for whatever meaning you want and doesn’t actually say very much at all by itself, although it can kind of indicate annihilation, like to X out, right? And when Elon Musk gets hold of it, he replaces a meaning-bearing name with a meaningless name or a…

a much less, yeah, much less meaning laden. And it’s interesting, he’s the father of 12 children by at least four mothers. When you look at the names of some of those kids, they are also kind of nihilistic, linguistically nihilistic. He chooses symbols, which he then has to redo, because the state actually won’t allow you to put that on a birth certificate, it turns out.

There is something very odd going on in this person who wants to actually get away from the kind of the texture of language and who’s attracted to the symbolic that is kind of untethered from history. In other words, yeah, it was called Twitter was founded, but we’re redoing it now. Like, you know, so untethered from history. Anyway, I just think there’s something going on there, frankly. And

All right, so I do think this is absolutely connected to magic, actually. I’ve not thought about this before you kind of put these things together. So my belief is that what we’re trying to do with technology is magic. So magic is the idea of having arbitrary, effortless, instant power over the world. Effortless is like, you don’t have to do much to get the power. You don’t have to exert yourself. If I can magically move a rock,

It means I don’t have to lift the rock with my muscles, right? Instant means I don’t have to be patient. I don’t have to wait. The results are instantaneous or nearly so. I just say the word and it happens. And arbitrary, it is purely about my will. There’s no inherent constraint on my will. There’s nothing holding me back. It’s whatever I want. And I want it because I want it and magic will let me get it.

Also often arbitrary, and this is where the language connection comes in, you know, a lot of times it’s been thought that the way you get to do magic is through language, through spells. And these are words that don’t have, they’re not embedded in culture. They’re like secrets that the universe discloses to you. That if you say this apparently arbitrary sequence of sounds, like abracadabra, which is kind of our memory of this.

That doesn’t mean anything except it means something to the universe and you the magician have found out the secret meaning and when you say it, it happens. Now this word abacadabra traces itself back to the magical writings of the mid second millennium that is roughly say 1300 to 1600, maybe 1700. In the middle of the second millennium of the Christian era,

European men, think universally men, there is a history of magic among women, but it’s a different thing from what I’m describing. Start this quest to control the world through magic. And we call it alchemy. they borrow a bunch of ideas from the Arab, the Muslim world, including alchemia, the word. And they start, they look for this substance called the philosopher’s stone that will turn anything into gold.

and will give its possessor immortality. They look for the spells or the ways of accessing kind of the secret power. And they’re also, by the way, trying to create slaves, the homunculus, the little human being who I will make and will be able to control. And I actually think, so when we think about the alchemists, which in one way we don’t think about them,

very often at all. And another way we think about them all the time, because actually a bunch of these ideas still circulate. Mark Andreessen, who’s a very powerful venture capitalist, published this thing called the Techno Optimist Manifesto. And he said at one point in it, AI is our alchemy. We are teaching sand to think. That’s, think, a pretty direct quote from this essay. AI, artificial intelligence, is our new alchemy. In other words, this dream of alchemy.

Though we mostly think of it as, that didn’t work out. There is no philosopher’s stone. You can’t just get eternal life that way. You can’t actually, it seems harder to make people than they thought that we’re working on it. It went away as science, but it absolutely stuck around as a dream. And I think it’s when we actually did discover how the natural world worked, because the alchemists in the end had very mistaken ideas about the natural world. And so it was kind of a scientific dead end, but we figured

stuff out in the 18th and 19th centuries. And when we set about implementing that, operationalizing that in the world, what we set out to do was to do magic in almost all of the features I’ve talked about. So there’s a group of Silicon Valley people who are absolutely obsessed with immortal life, with the infinite extension of human life. Some of most powerful people in Silicon Valley are like pouring hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars into the quest for that.

turning everything into gold. That is exactly what technology does. And by that, I mean, it takes everything that used to be non-economic and tries to make it economic. your friends, I hope you still have friends, everyone who’s listening, but Facebook or now Metta, by the way, another change from an actual like embodied thing. The Facebook was this thing at Harvard College where every first year had a picture taken and you knew who your fellow students were, right? It was faces.

Facebook used to show you the faces of your friends as powerful you saw the faces often of people that you maybe went to school with you hadn’t seen in 10 years. That gets replaced by a word that means nothing except the next level up, which is meta or the next level behind. It doesn’t mean anything. my gosh, why is this actually something to Google too? It turns into alphabet. Like they’re all saying, they’re all saying we want to get away from our history. We want to get away from.

embodiment and the story of how we got here. And we’re going to a level of abstraction because we aim to control everything and in controlling everything to turn it all into financialized money economy. So your friends, this is where I was originally going, your friends become a commodity that Facebook sells back to you at the price of your attention to the ads and now to the algorithm. And it takes this thing that was completely non-economic.

You never thought of your friends as having any economic value per se. And now they still don’t have that much value to you, but in the aggregate to Facebook, that social graph is of tremendous economic value, right? Because it leverages attention and emotion. Anyway, sorry. If anyone is still with us, this is the dream behind technology. It’s to do magic. And it’s in the hands of magicians who

who fancy themselves as the people who are going to figure all this out and it’s going to unlock incredible abundance above all for them. But it’s a complete, I think it’s always been a total dead end. I think magic is not the way the world is meant to work. It can work for a little while because it’s deceptive in that way, but in the long run, it doesn’t work. And it has very, very diminishing returns, let’s put it that

Amy Julia (39:52)
I want to talk about that on two fronts. So the first is the relationship between the magic of phones and our particular technological age and the most vulnerable people among us. And the way I’ve been thinking about this is that our daughter Penny is my most socially and physically vulnerable child. That’s just true about someone who

has an intellectual disability and who has, you know, low muscle tone and all these other kinds of physical components of the way her body has been constituted. She is also the, of my three kids, the one who is the most likely to become addicted to things on her phone, most likely to be the victim of a scheme to send money or photos that she shouldn’t send. is the most likely to be cut off from the real human connection and personal formation. She might

Andy (40:34)
No

Amy Julia (40:46)
otherwise experience as a result of being just sucked back into this device that in some ways feels like it protects her from these really vulnerable social interactions, but it actually keeps her from them. So I’ve just been thinking about the role on the one hand of the magic of the phone is really alluring to her because of I think that sense of like, finally there’s someplace where I have some, yeah, effortless and instantaneous.

power. And yet, the flip side of that, I think it makes her more vulnerable in multiple different ways. And so I’ve been thinking about like, the ways that all of this is and you’ve already spoken to this a little bit, but I just wanted to kind of like hone in on it a little bit, but the ways in which it’s exploitative. And I think that’s probably true about many of us, but especially the most vulnerable.

Andy (41:38)
Wow. Wow. Yeah, that’s interesting. You know, I was actually initially when you kind of laid out this topic, I was actually initially thinking about the ways that this layer of magic is actually inaccessible to people with profound or even, I mean, not uncommon disabilities. My mother is 85 with some cognitive issues,

though very capable in many ways. She’s not at the stage where she can’t carry on a conversation or doesn’t, she remembers lots of things. But one thing she cannot do is learn these interfaces of these digital devices. And this is very common among people who are older, who might’ve well been able to learn them at 65, but at 85 can’t. And now she’s cut off from all these things. I mean, even as simple, like, you know, how do you get something?

that you need in the mail. You have to do that through this really complicated digital interface. so there’s that directionality where it’s hard for them to access it. But then there’s also this way that people who have profound needs, and this is different from Penny’s situation, so we’ll come back to that. It also, they need a kind of attention that the digitally conformed

don’t know how to give. we who need to care for those with these particular kinds of needs have lost the ability to care, to pay attention and be kind in a way, insofar as we have gotten very dependent on this scaffold of the digital. of course, the great gift of people with certain kinds of disabilities is they

kind of force us to exit that world of magic and be back in a world where there is no magic to be done, but there’s an awful lot to learn about presence. I think I really appreciate though this other point, which is the way that, know, in a way all of us are, all of us have weakness, including

Amy Julia (43:36)
Right.

Andy (43:55)
psychological weakness, including the fact that our bodies really like to not move and do hard things. Our bodies and brains, actually. Whenever we ask your brain to do something really hard, it’s like, can’t we do something easier? And the digital world so wonderfully responds to my body’s desire to be inactive.

Because I think if you think about it evolutionarily, for most of you in history, you had to be active all the time just to acquire enough calories to get through the next day, right? You had to be out harvesting or whatever. And so any chance you got when you had a surplus of calories to rest, your body was like, please, let’s do that. But now we have a surplus of calories all the time and our bodies are like, I’d like to rest all the time. And the digital world is there for you, to answer your body’s call to be inactive, to be at rest, to be at leisure. And then your brain, same way.

your brain used to have to exert itself in various ways. And then we all know the true satisfaction of doing something really worthwhile with our minds. But your brain, I mean, so for me, I’m a musician and practicing the piano is this. Practicing the piano, my brain hates doing it because it requires it to learn and it’s repetitive and very focused. It requires really careful attention, very, very small things if you really wanna get better.

And your brain is like screaming for the exit. It’s like, can we just play this piece? Why do we have to work on it? Well, the digital absolutely taps into that. And when, as you are witnessing with your daughter, when the kind of systems to regulate that and push back on that thing that all of us have, isn’t as strong, just like, in a way like low muscle tone, there’s also a…

you know, there are different degrees of being able to get to a point where you just resist the invitation of the addictive. It’s actually, I mean, a lot of very typically abled people are completely drawn in by this stuff and as an eye, right? It’s just that we may have a few layers of being able to kind of re-regulate that your daughter may not have. But they’re playing on all the same weaknesses that

all of us share, by virtue of being human in a way.

Amy Julia (46:16)
Yeah, right. mean, and I do feel like Penny more often than not is a magnifying glass as opposed to some other other situation. And I think the other thing I wanted to bring up in this conversation about magic is the idea of control. So going back, I wrote an essay right around Christmas time this year about the distinction between magic and mystery. So just to flesh that out a little bit.

I was talking about how the magic of Christmas, that word is used a lot in December to refer to the stockings and the glittering lights and the Santa Claus and all these things that are under adult control. Like we actually can make this happen. But the mystery of Christmas is New World. Yes, exactly.

Andy (47:02)
Disney world, the magic.

The Imagineers are engineering every bit of magic. None of it’s going to happen unless the Imagineers keep the machinery going. Wow. Exactly. my God.

Amy Julia (47:15)
But then there’s a mystery of Christmas, which is a story of a baby who is also God. And that’s beyond our ability to comprehend, to control. is actually, what I was really thinking about this year was the fact that in that mystery, like the birth of God into the world is actually able to both suffering and wonder. But like there’s no place for suffering in the magic of

There’s no place for all the people in December who are like life is not okay like it whereas in the mystery I think that can still be very much held on to and so I’ve just been thinking again about that relationship between a desire to avoid suffering and to control life and magic as a Means to those ends that ultimately does not work at all, but it deceives us into thinking it might

Andy (48:08)
Wow, yes, yes, totally, totally. Well, and you said, you know, the real Christmas, we might say, can hold together suffering and wonder. I would actually say it is of the essence of the mystery that it includes suffering, that it includes limitation. you know, Simeon, when he meets the baby, Jesus says to Mary, a sword will pierce your soul. Like this is a little eight day old baby. And he’s like, and a sword is going to pierce your soul, too.

Amy Julia (48:38)
Yeah, and Herod’s gonna come wipe out the other insects in town as a result of this birth. I mean, it’s just horrible.

Andy (48:46)
And so here’s another interesting, just riff on that. There’s this odd thing that John says right around the very, very famous John 3.16 in that same conversation, if I’m not misremembering this with Nicodemus, Jesus says, no, no, no, maybe it’s in the prologue. Sorry. I think it’s in John 1 where John talks about those who were born.

And by this he means reborn in the way that Jesus talks about with Nicodemus. Those who are born not by the flesh, and maybe he says another term by blood, but then he has this weird thing, it is very gendered in Greek, nor by the will of a man. That is those who are born not by the will of a man, but by God, basically, the of God. Now, the interesting thing about John is he’s said nothing about the virgin birth in his own gospel.

John over and over says nothing about things he clearly knows a lot about, like he never talks about the Lord’s Supper, except he clearly is thinking about it all the time. There’s all these things. And I think this is another example where he knows that Jesus was born without the will of a man, without a man deciding it’s time to conceive a child and kind of taking the initiative, you might say, to put it perhaps not as strongly as sometimes happens when men decide they want that.

And John is saying this happened not through this kind of exertion of intention by a human being or desire for control. It happens instead through this young woman. We probably would look at her and think of her as a girl, but young woman at time who says, let it be to me according to your word to the angel. She’s not controlling it. She’s not making it happen. No one’s making it happen.

I’m not even sure it’s right to, I’m not even sure it’s the right category of language to say God is making it. I’m not sure God makes things happen almost. I think that’s not quite how it works. But she says, let it be, right? And it’s this openness to grace and to suffering that will come with it. So, sorry, that was a digression.

Amy Julia (51:02)
think

it’s related. I’m thinking about the relationship, just you mentioned you’re not sure God makes things happen. And I think the idea, like the phrase, God is in control has always kind of rubbed me the wrong way because I’m like, but the thing is, the only way God does things is through love. And love by its nature is uncontrolling. And so, like, there’s some sort of contradiction, which does not, I don’t think, get away from the idea that God is sovereign.

But I think that’s the word I’m gonna go back to rather than control. And yet there’s such a human instinct to try to get things under control. And yet there is this kind of surrender to love at its best when we are engaged with the mystery of it all rather than trying to control it through magic.

Andy (51:59)
And think about how, I mean, I completely agree. I am completely on board with the rejection of God is in control language. I understand why people say it and I don’t, just like other language, language, I don’t police it. If somebody says that I…

And yet it’s the wrong category. Because God did not create the world, the cosmos that God created is not a machine. Control is a property of machines. And by the way, magic is the belief that the world is a secret machine, that if you learn the right spells or have the right substances, your potion or whatever, you can make the machine do your thing. But the world God created is not a machine. It has an element of vulnerability built in. It has an element of unpredictability built in.

This is true at the, we now have for hundred years now, we have a scientific way of talking about this, which is the quantum layer of reality, which cannot be characterized in terms of mechanical properties. mean, we talk about quantum mechanics, but it’s not mechanics like the way a machine works. The world God made isn’t like that. So God can’t control the world he made because he didn’t want a machine. And he certainly doesn’t want people to be machines. If we’re going to index all of our understanding of God,

off the life and ministry and death and resurrection of Jesus. There are all these indications in it that God, in order to fully intervene in the world, which is what the incarnation is, does not need to be in control, starting with being a baby. A baby isn’t even in control of, in this case, his own bodily functions initially. And it needs years of depending on other people. But then even as an adult, Jesus, so…

First all, he’s constrained by, he doesn’t have a magician’s ability to just come and go before the resurrection. Now, interestingly, it’s not like it’s out of question. Philip, know, the disciple or apostle, whatever we want to call him, in Acts actually is translocated from one place to another as an ordinary human being. Like he meets the Ethiopian eunuch out in the desert and then suddenly he’s gone and he’s somewhere else. So it’s not like God can’t move things around in that way if God chooses. But in Jesus, he doesn’t.

the 33 year old Jesus when he goes to the cross has always just been in one place. He hasn’t just sort of apparated back and forth. There’s one time when he’s transfigured for a brief moment and the disciples kind of see, oh, anything’s possible for this person. But to be in the redemptive role he has come to play, he doesn’t access any magic. And even the miracles, there’s this weird thing in Mark in particular,

Amy Julia (54:19)
around. Yeah.

Andy (54:41)
that says he couldn’t do miracles there because they didn’t believe. He’s like embedded deeply enough in this relational context where people’s willingness to trust him somehow affects what he can do. And if that’s like God’s ultimate intervention, I think that suggests that even if God could be in control, God is not interested in being in control because it will ruin what makes the world the life-giving reality that it is. And it will ruin relationships because you can’t.

Love and control, as you said, are just, they’re opposites almost. So yeah, we have to, yeah.

Amy Julia (55:19)
I’m feeling like I want to, I feel like if I could just pause and think for like 20 minutes, I’d come back and I’d ask some question that pulls all the threads together of this conversation. It’s so close in my mind. I’m not sure I’m going to get there, but I’m, what I’m thinking about in trying is actually bringing it back to the idea of culture making, which I think you just did in some ways, like that God is not simply making the world or humans into a machine.

but actually entrusting the world, like actually saying, you are made in my image and I come, I am among you. I come to send and suffer with you, live with you and also invite you to participate in this work of love, not of control that I am like continuing to bring into this creation. And so I’m thinking about…

Yeah, I guess I want to end by talking a little bit about our role in it all, whether that is kind of, you know, playing the violin in the rubble or saying I’m sorry, or, or perhaps something more even constructive, like making things. I’m also thinking about the idea, you know, this podcast is called reimagining the good life, you mentioned the imagineers, there’s also a place for the imagination for actually

But it’s interesting because that word magic is kind of in there, right? Like the imagination is different than magic, but they’re related. Like how do we use our imaginations in a way that opens us up to the mystery of life, that brings love into the world, and that does not insist on a magical future? I’m going to end it with that, with that question for you.

Andy (57:01)
Well, I don’t think that’s a question. I think that’s a commission. That is what we are to do. And we each have to figure out how to do it. For you and me, to the extent that part of our work is using words, it’s to go on using words carefully when everyone around you is using them like bombs. And to feel like it’s not enough will be part of the vocation. At least I feel this way. I feel this way.

very acutely right now. I think probably the biggest thing that’s changed between 2008 when I published Culture Making and today is I’m still hopeful. I think by the grace of God, I’ve retained hopefulness through my whole life. But almost 20 years later, I’m a lot less optimistic. And I see a lot less room for multiple reasons. We could have a whole other podcast about this. But I just see, I see the…

the space in which one can create worthwhile things as greatly diminished in our world in certain ways, and the hope that we can have that they’ll last or that they’ll be noticed or that they’ll matter. All of those, I’m less positive than I was two decades ago, but it’s still what we have to do. you know, it’s…

Every month I make a very long drive because my mom lives very near my sister but not near us. It’s good that she’s near my sister but she needs both kids to be in her life. And so every month I drive a long way and I sit in her small room with a life that once was so expansive but now is pretty small because of her limitations at this stage of life and just try to be with her.

And it produces nothing. I’m not in control of anything that matters most. And it’s probably the most important thing I do in most months is to be there. And I think in every dimension of our lives, we have to figure out what’s the thing that is just pure care and how do I do that? And that isn’t just, it isn’t.

It is the people, but it’s also your work. Maybe no one will notice that you care, but you care. And so you do that thing well and faithfully, even if it’s not like in your incentive structure, your bonus cap table or whatever. We keep doing those things. Because to do those things that way,

kind of force requires, maybe is the best word, requires you to pray and teaches you to pray. And thus it kind of invites you into relationship with God, which is really what all of it is meant to do in the long run.

Amy Julia (1:00:11)
Thank you. Thank you for all these thoughts. I hope that listeners will take from this what to me, the kind of simplest version of all that we’ve just said is to actually show up with care, you know, with kindness and paying attention. But there’s so much I think that can be derived from that and where each of us can think about

what that means in our everyday lives and it’s gonna be different, whether it’s attending, like paying attention with kindness to an elderly parent or in my case, more likely a  teenage child or a neighbor or even ourselves to actually be willing to take care and pay attention to ourselves as beings who have limits and needs and yet also great capacities to

yeah, participate in that relationship of love and the work of love in the world. So thank you for going in all these different directions with me today and for being here.

Andy (1:01:17)
Thank you so much Amy Julia.

Amy Julia (1:01:19)
I’m

Thanks as always for listening to this episode of Reimagining the Good Life. Again, I will invite you to subscribe to my newsletter, amyjuliabecker.com backslash subscribe. And I’m so glad you’re here. I hope you’ll continue listening. We are looking forward to Autism Awareness Month in April. I’ve got a conversation coming with Adrienne Wood about the new book that she and two others have written called Autism Out Loud.

Looking ahead to talking with Miroslav Volf, who’s a theologian with a new book coming out called The Cost of Ambition. I love his title so much, as well as the content of the book, of course. And we’ve got some other great guests lined up for the spring in addition to those. So please do continue to follow along. You can also send questions or suggestions my way. My email is amyjuliabeckerwriter at gmail.com.

And it is tremendously helpful if you share this conversation with other people or leave a rating or review. That helps the algorithm decide to tell more people that this podcast exists. So please help spread the word. I want to thank Jake Hansen for editing the podcast, Amber Beery, my social media coordinator, for doing everything else to make sure it happens. And in conclusion, I hope this conversation helps all of us to challenge assumptions.

claim belovedness and envision a world of belonging where everyone matters. Let’s reimagine the good life together.