Mark Labberton:
Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment magazine and Fuller Seminary. I’m Mark Labberton, welcome to Conversing. I’m delighted for the opportunity to meet and talk today to Elizabeth Bruenig. Liz Bruenig is a writer who has seen early achievement, Liz being a finalist for the Pulitzer just as she was beginning her early career. She has written for and been a writer for the Washington Post, the New York Times, and now is a staff writer for The Atlantic.
Her heart and her mind, her imagination, her faith converge in her writing in ways that I find compelling and her articles help me to see the world more clearly and to pay attention more deeply and to think and ponder its meaning even more fully. It’s important for me to note for all of you who are listening that today’s conversation will include discussion about capital punishment and also about some particular violence. Welcome, Liz. I’m so glad to have you as a guest on Conversing today.
Elizabeth Bruenig:
Thank you so much for having me on.
Mark Labberton:
You serve as a staff writer for The Atlantic, and we’re going to be talking about that. You’ve had a career in other publications as well, but I’d like to start a bit more about just your formation as a person and as a person of Christian faith and as a person who’s involved in journalism. So just give us a little bit of your narrative so that people who are not familiar with you could get a little bit of a picture.
Elizabeth Bruenig:
Sure. I was born in Arlington, Texas, which is a suburb of Dallas or Fort Worth. It’s right in the middle. Was suburban, had a middle-class family, which we had everything that we needed and wanted. I was very blessed in that regard. My parents were, are Methodists, United Methodists, and I went to church. I did vacation Bible school. I did music camp with the little kids, and I was a Sunday school shepherd where I helped out with the really small kids. So I had a Christian background from my childhood. I was baptized as a child. It was interesting, Methodists do infant baptism, but my parents had sort of an Anabaptist take-
Mark Labberton:
Interesting.
Elizabeth Bruenig:
Where they wanted me to be the one to kind of initiate it. And so I did ask as a child, fair enough, people have their personal theologies. Around the end of high school, I think it was the height of the new atheist movement and the idea of atheism at the time was associated closely with the political disapproval of the conservative movement. And so I already had my issues with conservative politics and that just bled into me having this temporary dalliance with atheism. But even when I was identifying myself as an atheist, I still prayed, so it didn’t stick at all.
And by the time I went to college, I wanted to study Christianity and religion, so I studied Christianity. Actually, I took a class with a rabbi who was a very smart guy, and for one of our assignments, we read something from the Talmud or the Midrash, and I asked him after class why Christianity didn’t have a textual accompaniment tradition like that. And he said, “”I was under the impression that you do, what is the magisterium of the Catholic Church?” Which I knew nothing about, nothing, was so far from my experience.
I had just sort of inherited your sola scriptura type beliefs. So I started reading. I went in the basement of my library where all of the theological texts were and started reading St. Augustine and really just completely fell in love with him as a person, as a Christian. I identified with him so much. He has such a searching mind. It’s really easy to get to know him. And what is it Socrates and Diotima say? I wanted to possess the good and beautiful forever. I wanted that to be in some part mine, St. Augustine and his tradition. And so I converted to Catholicism while I was getting my divinity degree at Cambridge.
Mark Labberton:
Got it. Wow. It’s an amazing thing that that route was yours because, well, I didn’t discover Augustine until later. I had my own conversion to Christianity as a college student and was really surprised having come out of an unchurched background or less churched background that I was now enraptured by a personality. In this case, for me, it really was the discovery of Jesus in a way that I would never have imagined.
My dad had saved certain neck veins for the discussion of religion because he wanted to be sure I avoided it at all costs and the heart of his critique was really that what Christians and religious people tend to do is to take great things and make them small, and then to discover that Jesus was really himself the antidote to that. But then discovering Augustine, for example, a few years later was really a further extension of that kind of questing mind and searching personality was very and is very attractive. I try to reread the Confessions annually actually because it’s such a formative book.
Elizabeth Bruenig:
Yeah, I think about lines from Confessions all the time.
Mark Labberton:
Yes, yes. I’m curious, you take this step of faith, how did it begin to change your religious practise or your Christianity in how it manifested itself in your life, different routines in a certain way?
Elizabeth Bruenig:
Well, I started going to mass even before I could receive the Eucharist, and so that was a change. Church services in Protestant churches are often pretty free form. And my Methodist church growing up, there was some ritual, but it was all symbolic. There was a sense that all you really needed to do was observe and think about it. And so it created for me a distance from what was being said because my role was just to think about it basically. And you can think about something fairly quickly. It doesn’t necessarily stick with you, but in mass things aren’t symbolic. They’re really happening. A miracle is taking place.
And so all of the praise and worship around that is elemental. It’s contemporary. It’s happening right now. I appreciated that very much. I didn’t go to the adult initiation, the classes, I didn’t do that. I met with the Monsignor of the Cambridge Catholic Center every Sunday, and we mainly talked about Augustine, who I was studying at the time. And that started to be a Sunday morning routine for me, and then mass, which was a big change. I mean when I started receiving the Eucharist, I was a little bit crazed about it. You can actually bring the bread of life into your body and it is the body of Christ. This is a crazy thing to hear, and it’s hard to get out of your head.
Mark Labberton:
Yes, do you know the writer Sara Miles?
Elizabeth Bruenig:
I don’t.
Mark Labberton:
She’s an Episcopal priest who grew up in a very anti-Christian home and had been a journalist in Latin America during some of the most turbulent days. She had this experience in an Episcopal church in San Francisco where she came in unexpectedly and without any conviction or inquiry, just curious about some of the features of the building that she had seen. And she found that not long after that, she was literally dancing her way with the congregation to a high altar, which everyone stood around like a mosh pit.
And then the bread and wine were consecrated and passed around and in that lower church context than the Roman Catholic one, but nevertheless, with a strong sense of the real presence of the body and blood of Christ. She said, “All I know is that suddenly I was standing there and God was in my mouth.” And she said it changed everything, she didn’t even believe that there was a God let alone that God could be in her mouth. And it was in the context of that, that she had this experience that is this embodied experience of God being in and with her in a very profound way.
Elizabeth Bruenig:
Yeah, that resonates very strongly. I believe actually Methodists do have the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. I think that is part of Methodist theology-
Mark Labberton:
I think that’s right.
Elizabeth Bruenig:
But it was never taught to me that way as this is literally a miracle. I mean, it was King’s Hawaiian bread and grape juice. These are familiar, to say the least. And the sense that I received is this is symbolic, we do it in remembrance of the Last Supper, doing something in remembrance, you do it, you remember, and then you move on. My experience of the Eucharist was just vastly different than that.
Mark Labberton:
Yes. How did this encounter with Augustine, with Catholicism, with the Eucharist, how did it affect your intellectual life and your perceptions of the world?
Elizabeth Bruenig:
Well, for a hot minute, Christianity was all I wanted to think and read about. I finished my masters at Cambridge, and then I went to get my PhD at Brown, and all I could do was read about Christianity, think about Christianity. And I had kind of a radical turn while I was at Brown where I was, this isn’t for me. I don’t need to be studying and getting degrees. I need to just be living my life radically as a Christian, giving myself in love to people that God has put close to me.
And that made me interested in journalism, which is kind of an extra judicial way of trying to help people who are in difficult and bad situations. And I also wanted to be a wife and a mother, and I was married already, but my husband and I were living in different cities. So I dropped my PhD and I went and started living with my husband, and we had a baby. And I’ve never regretted it. Someday, maybe might go back, but it was the right decision for me.
Mark Labberton:
So it was a turning from simply thinking about the faith to thinking through the faith in the living world that you were a part of with people in need, with circumstances that you could actually respond to. Is that a fair way of putting it?
Elizabeth Bruenig:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I felt like I could keep reading about Christianity so I didn’t have to lose my connection with the intellectual world of theology and Christian history, but I could also be living in the world in a way that allows me to emulate Jesus Christ and try to serve people.
Mark Labberton:
You are a magnificent writer, and the beauty of your writing is really quite something to enjoy. In a little bit have you read a portion of one of your articles, but one of the things that’s striking about it is that you’ve spent quite a lot of time in a very acute way simply paying attention to the people that you’re writing about. And I sometimes think that Christian faith is about paying attention to the world in God’s name. And certainly that’s what I see you doing, and it’s a beautiful thing. There’s a courage in your voice. There’s a factual reality, a kind of unflinching willingness to keep looking even when some of the things that you’ve been looking at are particularly painful and agonizing to consider, let alone gaze upon.
And yet, the dignity, the thoughtfulness, the human compassion, the willingness to be present to what you’re paying attention to, to who you’re paying attention to is really a striking feature. And to me, at least just as a footnote for you is to say all of that seems to me very much to be a manifestation of a person who has a Christian vision of the world and who seeks to reflect that reality and meaning of that world and the lives in particular that you’re focusing on in ways that are honest and true. And in that sense, honouring to their humanity.
Elizabeth Bruenig:
Thank you very much. That’s very kind. I’m very interested in people and people’s moral lives. Things like honour and shame, guilt, very complex emotions interest me a lot. And I think everyone has them all the time. People have these spiritual, ethical, moral struggles going on inside them, and so everybody is a little universe unto themselves, and that’s what really fascinates me about my work. That’s what I’m actually quite interested in.
But the other thing, journalism gives you a platform, the ability to talk to a lot of people gives you a kind of power. And so the question is how are you going to use it? And my hope, my intention in my career has been to use it to help people. So that’s the other thing I’m trying to do in my writing. I don’t know that I’m very often successful, but I’m trying.
Mark Labberton:
I think most writers wonder whether they’re being successful, even if they’re having opportunities or being published and so forth. Nevertheless, the actual influence is always a supposing question.
Elizabeth Bruenig:
Yeah, absolutely. You never know if people are listening to you or just turning the page.
Mark Labberton:
So take us a little bit into your life as a staff writer for The Atlantic, and then tell us how that gives you opportunity to see the world in a particular way. So how does one become a staff writer? What does it mean to be a staff writer among all the other designations of writers?
Elizabeth Bruenig:
I joined The Atlantic a couple of years ago. I came from the New York Times. Coming from the Times, and then the Washington Post before that, I had a newspaper background, but I had started to resent I suppose, the limitations of the newspaper opinion writing form. What I really wanted to be doing was magazine writing, was reported magazine writing, writing at length with opinions included, arguments made, but with narrative and with space for range of observations.
And so coming to The Atlantic, I was happy to get the opportunity to do that. Being a staff writer, I think we’re all, technically, all the writers at The Atlantic are called staff writers, but it just means as opposed to a freelance writer that you are salaried and have benefits, a bona fide employee, not a contractor. It also just means you’re part of this crew of people who have opportunities to do short essays and also long reported features. And I have enjoyed the benefits of both, and so I really love my job. I love The Atlantic. It’s been a great experience.
Mark Labberton:
Yes, yes. It’s a remarkable journal. David Bradley and a number other people that have shaped The Atlantic for different seasons and chapters of its life have certainly set a stage, which I can imagine as a writer is really both an honour and an opportunity that’s really exciting.
Tell us a little bit about how, given that you occupy this platform, that you have it, as you say, as a tool, as a gift, as an opportunity, as a use of power, and you look out on the world, not least the world that we are living in right now in the fall of 2024 in the United States of America, given both our local, national, and international affairs, just take us through how you try to sort, assemble, pay attention to that wide and teaming array of possible stories.
Elizabeth Bruenig:
It’s very serendipitous how stories come to you. One of the first big features that I wrote at the Washington Post was about a girl who was gang raped at my high school when I was a student there. And came up with the story just because I had thought about it for years and it seemed to be really unfair what had happened to this person. And I thought, well, all right, I have this capability to help someone now who do I help? And she immediately came to mind.
The other stuff has come about in similar ways where I just saw something in the news and have felt like I wanted to experience it, go report on it, that’s the case with the executions. And then other stories that I’m working on right now or have in the past, somebody just reached out out of the blue, and I mean, I welcome people to do that-
Mark Labberton:
I saw that on your website, yeah.
Elizabeth Bruenig:
I have found that to be a very successful way of garnering stories is just to listen to people.
Mark Labberton:
Right, right, right. And then once you lock in on a story, let’s take the story of the execution that you write about, talk about the process and then how that unfolded. I want to have you read in a moment, a portion of it and get into the actual content itself, but how did that process unfold?
Elizabeth Bruenig:
Well, the first execution I ever witnessed, I witnessed for the New York Times. It was during Trump’s spree of federal executions. I think they executed something like 13 people in six months, really unprecedented. I wanted to report on that. I had read some coverage of it, and I thought, what’s happening here is really historic.
And I had the inclination already that capital punishment was wrong, and I just wanted to contribute to that discourse, I suppose. And so I applied to witness as a media witness. All states I think have some provisions for media witnesses, though they try pretty hard to clamp down on media access. I was one of those media witnesses.
Mark Labberton:
So once you’ve chosen this particular story and you’ve gotten access, do you have any access at all to the person who’s potentially being executed?
Elizabeth Bruenig:
So not in the case of Alfred Bourgeois and not in the case of David Neal Cox. Both of those, I learned about the cases and traveled to the execution very quickly. So there wasn’t much time to get to know the person being executed. But in the cases of James Barber, Kenny Smith, and Alan Miller, I have had the opportunity to speak with men who were about to die and to get to know them as people a bit.
Mark Labberton:
I’m Mark Labberton thanks for listening with me. When this article appears in the New York Times, it appears under the title, the Man I Saw Them Kill, and at the beginning you describe some of the details and mechanics and some of the arrangements and some of the background work that you had done about the case itself and about Mr. Bourgeois who was going to be executed or potentially executed.
You talk about the attorneys that were working with him, and eventually his execution occurs and you are present for it. And right toward the end, after this has taken place, and you’ve shared some of your own emotional process in the experience of witnessing this and being part of it in that way, you’ve shared toward the end your own reflections and conclusions about the experience. I wonder if you could just read those closing paragraphs and then we’ll have a chance to talk about it.
Elizabeth Bruenig:
Sure. The idea of execution promises catharsis. The reality of it delivers the opposite, a nauseating sense of shame and regret. Alfred Bourgeois was going to die behind bars one way or another, and the only meaning and hastening it as far as I could tell, was inflicting the terror and the torment of knowing that the end was coming early. I felt defiled by witnessing that particular bit of pageantry. All of that brutality, cloaked and sterile procedure.
So much time and effort goes into making execution seem like exercises of justice, not just power. Extreme measures are taken at each juncture to convince the public and perhaps the executioners themselves that the process is a fair, dispassionate, rational one. It isn’t. There was no sense in it, and I can’t make any out of it. Nothing was restored, nothing was gained. There isn’t any justice in it nor satisfaction nor reason. There was nothing, nothing there.
Mark Labberton:
Again, a tragic experience to witness and void as you’ve described. And I think one of the things that struck me when I read that is the convergence of a lot of qualities in you that I have come to admire very much. One is this sense of acute act of paying attention because there’s something about the way that you have written that that feels to me, spare, non-dramatized, plain and profound all at the same time. And empty in its profundity. Void instead of something is filled with the meaning of justice or whatever a person might attribute to it, or protection of society or any of those kinds of things.
So there’s the issue itself of execution, no execution, but then there’s the way that you personally experienced it. I’m curious, going back to the issues and reality of your own Christian faith, how in that moment does your faith, that particular story, and experience, the void again of an execution like this, how do those things converge behind the scenes, not just in the language, but also in how you come to that language in order to be able to say what you did?
Elizabeth Bruenig:
It’s a good question. I mean, I read a lot of essays. I think a key to writing is reading, and they’re entwined. And I find that reading great essays summons language in me. I find myself reading and agreeing or disagreeing and thinking of how I would put it if I were to agree or disagree or basically write a counter essay or a concurrence.
But either way, I end up putting a lot of language to thoughts, and I find that to be really helpful. Just reading good essays, stuff that one finds moving and profound, and then letting yourself be inspired by that. That’s a big part of my writing process. I think there’s this great book called On Beauty and Being Just by Elaine Scarry, and she points out that beauty inspires reproduction. When you become affected by beauty, you want to produce it in some sense yourself. You want to have the good and beautiful forever.
And I feel that way about reading great works of literature. You read it and I want to do something that’s beautiful as well. It’s sort of strange to think about beauty and horrible circumstances together, but I try probably clumsily at times to bring beauty to a thing that’s really horrible, and just in the prose writing I mean. But in terms of covering executions, there is just a void there. The main character always dies, and there’s so many things that are inaccessible about it, and yeah, there’s just a darkness centre of it all, I think.
Mark Labberton:
Did that conviction about executions come from your faith or would you call it more of a social conviction that you’ve just personally resisted? I certainly know as you do that all the evidence that’s been shown over and over again of how ineffective it is at stemming crime or changing people’s decision making about crime or anything like that. It seems more that it’s just an exercise for the sake of the state to be the state in some sort of way rather than to actually execute justice. But where did your conviction about execution like this come from?
Elizabeth Bruenig:
I had a religious conviction going into the first execution that I was at, that executions were wrong. And it wasn’t really based on anything that I could point to. I just had the very simple notion that killing people is wrong and that it’s wrong in all cases, even if the person is a very bad person. So as I worked on the issue more and covered more executions and met some people who were slated to be executed, etc, say my theological views deepened and became more refined.
And if I had to give a capsule theological argument against capital punishment, it would be that there are two executions in the New Testament. The first one is one that Jesus halts, that is the attempted stoning of woman who was caught in adultery. He puts an end to this, and he says, essentially, you are not qualified to make this kind of judgment because you all are guilty of sins yourselves, which I find to be a very compelling Christian argument.
And then the second execution in the New Testament is the execution of Jesus. It’s the execution of an innocent person, which also happens under any death penalty regime. But more than that, it’s just very obviously the destruction of good by evil. And it’s an incredible take on what the Romans were doing. It’s a profoundly anti-capital punishment take. God could have worked the story of salvation in any particular way and in the way it was worked out was through the misuse of the state’s power to execute. So my view became more refined in that sense.
Mark Labberton:
I think it’s such a existential thing to, I think anyone who’s ever been ready and willing to think about capital punishment is struck by the fact that there is something so foreign and fundamentally abusive about it. And even though I think, I don’t know if you would share this view, but I certainly believe that people should be restrained and kept out of public when they have committed crimes, which are crimes that have been legitimately proven, and also in order that they not be given opportunity for those to occur in any other context. But that always doesn’t always work, of course, within prisons themselves being violent, but also certainly in keeping people out of some circumstances that they might repeat.
But even so, the idea of ending a person’s life in this way partly because who are we and what do we actually really know and do we really have a clear picture, even when some of those things seem aligned, it still feels like it’s a subhuman act. And I think that is very much informed for me too by my Christian faith and a sense of the uniqueness of human identity and value. On the other hand, I know that from talking with friends I’ve debated this with, they would point to the horror really that has often been caused by criminals who are on death row. How do you weigh that side of the story as well as the side of the story of the execution itself?
Elizabeth Bruenig:
I don’t think you need to understate the horror of losing a relative or a friend to violence. I think you, in fact, as an advocate against capital punishment, have even more of a duty to recognize the seriousness and the heinousness of these crimes. The crimes people are executed for are not always the most diabolical crimes you can imagine. If someone is executed because they committed a murder in the process of a robbery, that’s a fairly common case.
And you can say to yourself, well, it was a murder and it was horrible, but there were no aggravating factors, essentially, it could have been worse. We recognize this in law. That’s why there are aggravators and mitigators that are required to actually sign death sentences, or the jury is required to consider aggravating factors versus mitigating factors in handing down a death sentence. But then there are crimes that are just diabolical and surpass understanding. These are crimes that are sexually motivated or involve sex. There are crimes that have to do with torture, intentional infliction of emotional, psychological, physical distress. Murders that were exceptionally cruel.
David Neal Cox, for example, shot his ex-wife, and molested her daughter while she lie there bleeding. Just the most horrible stuff you can imagine. And those cases, it’s important to recognize that they’re diabolical. Someone who’s opposed to capital punishment, especially on Christian grounds, has even more of a stake in saying, this is evil. It’s pure evil. I’m not disputing that. That’s been my approach anyway, and the argument that I make against the death penalty doesn’t at all require a person to downplay or dismiss the horror of a crime. And it’s also worth mentioning my sister-in-law was murdered, so I’ve seen the havoc that this wreaks on a family up close.
Mark Labberton:
She was at the heart of that story that you pursued when you were beginning. Is that right?
Elizabeth Bruenig:
Yeah, yeah.
Mark Labberton:
That must have been a very gruesome, tragic thing, so thank you for sharing that fact again. When I think about your writing, one of the things that I appreciate about the kind of writing that you do that is both on the one hand, journalistic and investigative and reporting, and then also processed in your own being, processed in your own social reflection, processed in your own moral and or religious framework. It makes for a very powerful combination. And it’s part of why essay writing is so important and why the kind of essay writing that you’re doing is so critically important.
How during these, let’s call it the last 10 years, how has that business been affected by the turmoil, the misinformation, the brutality of so many kinds of social rhetoric? How has all of that affected your ability to write such articles, and how does it change the way you approach stories, if it does?
Elizabeth Bruenig:
It’s polarized politics that’s full of recriminations and vitriolic rhetoric. I find that to be really unfortunate because I find it very hard to introduce beauty into that situation. Everything becomes reprocessed as a product of one political expression or another. Pieces of culture are either left-wing or right-wing. There’s essays and movies and TV shows and online streaming products for people who are conservative, and then there are different ones for people who are liberal.
And so introducing something that is not really limited by or interested in the categories of American political expression, things that aim to be a little higher or more permanent than that, have a difficult time finding a place. And I find it annoying to have one’s work categorized as a specifically left or right work when one feels like it’s coming from a different direction altogether. And so that makes things difficult.
Mark Labberton:
I have been struck for many years about the text in Romans 8 where the chapter really begins, honestly, after making all kinds of declarations about the fact that there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Then Paul, the realist Paul, the pastor Paul, the person who sees the world in a very thick and complicated way, goes on for a number verses to expand on how the world is also full of groaning. And in the end, it’s full of what I think is groaning beauty.
It’s this tension between the groaning of creation, the groaning of God, Father, Son and Spirit. It’s the groaning of Jesus. It’s the groaning of Paul himself. And yet it ends in this way, at the end of Romans 8, is this set of verses of the resolution that will one day come in all of this. How does the already and not yet of God’s redemptive plan in the world that you’re writing about come together? Is it what you’re describing about introducing beauty? Is there beauty any other place than in groaning?
Elizabeth Bruenig:
That’s a good question. I mean, on Earth, post-lapsarian Earth, all of creation groans under the weight of sin. That includes human beings, that includes nature, etc. And so in everything that still bears beauty, human beings and the natural world, still has that inherent holiness in it. Even if it’s dimmed somewhat or frustrated by sinfulness, essentially, the beauty is still there. The holiness of creation, the goodness of it is so strong that it can’t be, I don’t think entirely blotted out by sin. I just don’t think that humans have the power to rob of beauty that which was made beautiful.
Mark Labberton:
Do you find in this season, again that you do certain things that help cultivate and maintain your attentiveness to beauty?
Elizabeth Bruenig:
Yes, I’m actually just very distracted by beauty and find myself thinking about it all the time. I read books about it. Obviously, I love that book by Elaine Scarry, staying reading, especially doing what I want to do anyway, which is read essays. Looking for the true and the beautiful in artwork, I think is maybe one of the most expedient ways to find it. And I spend my time in museums connecting with artwork, but it’s also possible to just find beauty and visual culture in pop culture, low culture. There’s beauty there to be had. And I am always pleased when I am able to spot it.
Mark Labberton:
Yes, yes. Well, it is really a gift. And I agree with you that museum going is great. It’s one of the reasons why for me, certain writers are people who capture that particularly. What writers would you say stimulate beauty in your imagination or attention?
Elizabeth Bruenig:
I’ve been reading Eula Biss quite a bit lately. I just reread On Immunity, and I think she’s just incredible. I think she has a very nuanced appreciation of beauty and pain, and I think her prose is glitters to me. I think it’s fantastic, not too melodramatic, restrained and elegant despite what she’s writing about, health, which is one of the most scariest and most wrenching topics because it applies to everyone, and it’s so out of our control.
Mark Labberton:
I recently had a chance to interview Marilynne Robinson, and for me, she’s a writer that also stimulates my imagination for beauty, partly through her prose, but also by just watching what she’s watching. And how she’s watching and seeing things, it’s been very imaginatively stimulating and beautiful to me. And there are plenty of writers who do this historically, but you are I think one of those people who is doing that.
So I do want to say again, for those who haven’t yet discovered your writing or who haven’t read enough of it perhaps, that I hope people will take advantage of finding you wherever they can. And particularly in these days, it’s The Atlantic. Let me turn a little bit more to the current moment that we’re in as we approach the election this fall. I’m curious how you attempt, if you do, to see the role of beauty in what feels like such a set of broken pieces.
Elizabeth Bruenig:
Yeah, hard to find a lot of beauty in American politics. Everything is so practical on a deep level. It just has to do with the flow of money. When I think about this election, I think Pope Francis said recently, you have to choose the lesser of two evils, and he didn’t really elabourate on what he believes the lesser of two evils to be in this situation. So he just left it up to individual conscience.
The Democratic Party doesn’t produce policies that I’m fond of. With the exception of Bernie, who was a temporary movement, those policies, I could really get behind, those universal egalitarian policies, but that’s not on offer in American politics. Probably won’t be again for a long while. So then the question is, well, who is proximate to that? I’m disappointed that neither candidate has taken a strong stance on ending the genocide in Palestine. That’s extremely disturbing to me.
I would love to see a candidate take a strong position there, including an arms embargo. But I understand it’s not a position you find in American politics, although it’s a position you find quite frequently across Europe, for example, countries of comparable development. So in that case, you have to, again, kind of look at them, what’s proximate to that even if the difference between arms embargo and a ceasefire is much greater between the Democratic Party policy and the Republican Party policy, they’re closer together than the policy I would like and the policy that’s on offer. So those are the things that are on my mind going into this election.
Mark Labberton:
Do you find yourself carrying any particular fears? Obviously, fear is one of the most infectious emotions of our day, so I’m just curious how you see.
Elizabeth Bruenig:
Yeah, I am admittedly afraid of four more years of Donald Trump. And I’ve been loathed to get on this ideological bent that portrays Trump as far and away worse than other Republican candidates or presidents of the past. I’ve resisted that, but I think when what’s up for debate is the rule of law, then I’m going to go with a candidate, who whatever other faults is actually in favour of the rule of law. I think that’s very important.
I don’t want any kind of despotism, not even soft despotism. Yeah, I mean, those are my off the cuff views. I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about this election precisely because I’m uninterested in both candidates, essentially, but those are the thoughts that come to mind.
Mark Labberton:
Do you have in mind an article that you could tell us about without perhaps disclosing things you don’t want to say that you’re working on that is an expression of something that you’re particularly convicted about, hopeful toward, challenged by?
Elizabeth Bruenig:
Yes, I’m working on a piece right now that I’m very excited about that has to do with assisted suicide or medical assistance and dying. Death is obviously a subject of some interest to me, and one lens of looking at it is the lens of capital punishment, but another is this medical assistance and dying. And so I’m very interested to kind of find my way into this new territory and see what I can make of it.
Mark Labberton:
And in that, will you bring any overtly theological perspectives to bear or is mostly, is it written in a somewhat more neutral way?
Elizabeth Bruenig:
Yeah, I don’t think I can write without bringing in theology because it’s so much a part of what I consider to be true, and so to give readers an honest view into what I’m thinking I have to provide the theological issues that I’m thinking through.
Mark Labberton:
Yeah, yeah, when might we be looking for that?
Elizabeth Bruenig:
Oh, who knows at this point, I’m working on some other projects in the meantime-
Mark Labberton:
Got it, yeah.
Elizabeth Bruenig:
But maybe sometime next year.
Mark Labberton:
Yeah, good. Liz, thank you so much for this conversation. I really am grateful for the attentiveness of your eye and your ear, and your mind and your heart. You’re a gift, and I’m grateful that you’re doing the writing that you’re doing, and grateful for this conversation today. So thank you.
Elizabeth Bruenig:
Thank you so much.
