Mark Labberton: Welcome to Conversing. Today’s episode is a special opportunity for a conversation with several people who were active participants in a pretty extraordinary gathering recently at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. It was called the Understory Festival. It was a gathering of about a thousand or more people who came together to spend a couple of days experiencing and seeing and feeling and thinking about the meaning of what it is to be human. There’s a link in the notes that will tell you much more. I’d like now to just briefly introduce each of the participants in this conversation.
First is Anne Snyder, who is the editor-in-chief of Comment, a magazine of public theology for the common good, that is becoming a vibrant ecosystem of conversation and community. Next is Ray Pennings. Ray is the executive vice president and co-founder of Cardus, a leading Canadian think tank and the publisher of Comment Magazine. Elizabeth Oldfield, who has spent five years interviewing public figures about their deepest values on her podcast called The Sacred. Shadi Hamid. Shadi is a columnist and member of the editorial board of The Washington Post. He’s also a research professor of Islamic studies at Fuller Theological Seminary, and together with Matthew Kaemingk, hosts a podcast called Zealots at the Gate.
Each of the five people in this conversation are hosts of podcasts sponsored by Comment Magazine. We’re so grateful for the partnership that we have together in this work. These people and I had a conversation together just after the festival ended in Washington, D.C., reflecting on the values and commitments and experiences of those three remarkable days, and the deep underpinnings that are part of the vision behind Comment and the Comment Manifesto. Join us now for this rich conversation.
We have had such a privileged experience over these last few days to be part of something in Washington, D.C. at the National Cathedral, which has been under the title The Understory Festival. Two really, really wonderful and rich words. And part of this is really the charism that God, I think, gave you — and combined with the sponsoring organization, the full-on partner of Cardus, who supports and undergirds and is absolutely part of the Comment family.
So I’d love it if you could just give us a sense of what the calling was for this festival, and then we’re going to have a chance to talk a bit about what our experiences and our insights from this have been.
Anne Snyder: Thank you. Thank you, Mark. There are like a million portals into the answer to this, so it’s hard to pick just one. But I think at a basic level, I have long felt and experienced in our part of the world that there is so much hope that is bubbling up — bottom up, often in local places, but also a fragrance of thinking and leadership that is somehow so diffuse and uncoordinated and hidden. And everyone has talked in this country, in the U.S., the last number of years, you know, local hope, national despair. It’s a very common thing. I felt that for a long time. I think I just was starting to get very frustrated that it felt like the only cohering narratives and cohering currents were what I would view as quite disordered forces that were at the most basic level drawing out all of our reactivity and all of our not-so-great angels — or our demons. And so I wondered, is there a way to cohere and make visible this hidden constellation of common good actors that are actually quite diverse within themselves, including very much across religion and not religion? But could we do so in a way that somehow rooted it in a plumb line that had some intellectual rigour and philosophical history, but that also had beauty?
So I’m referring right now to a gathering, the Understory Festival, but The Understory as a concept actually came from a conversation with Elizabeth. I’m realizing this right now. I don’t know if you’ve been thinking about this this whole time. Sorry, I hadn’t acknowledged it, but I think it was a few years ago. And you mentioned this book — I can’t remember what we were talking about — but Lore Ferguson Wilbert called The Understory. She said, have you read The Understory? And I just immediately loved the word. So there was something about that that was an initial spark, that the more I just sat with it, it came together with a sense of, I think this could be a name that doesn’t have baggage, that is sufficiently enigmatic, that is from nature in a time when we’re all very aware of what’s happening to our planet, that somehow can evoke something that people resonate with and they can’t entirely explain why, but they have intrigue.
Mark Labberton: That’s a great way of capturing it. I do think what drew me right from the start was this sense that it was an invitation to acknowledge what was already present, which was hard to reach, hard to gather — as you said, hard to figure out how do you take the ineffable and the eternal and the granular and actually bring it together in a way that is verdant and productive and generative and reflective, really, of what’s happening.
I love the fact that that theme was not just a theme, but actually the reality of how the whole conference and gathering festival itself was put together. And it shaped, I think, a lot of people’s imaginations. I kept wondering, why are so many people — there were about a thousand people — why are a thousand people gathering for this particular thing? And I do think it was partly one of the questions that you asked toward the beginning about what is it that’s being birthed, or wanting to be birthed, in this era. But the other part of it was also, what is the thirst or hunger that is actually the thing that is drawing people into this space? And I’m just curious, as each of us, through our own particular lenses, think about that, what some of that understory of our own experience might be — what we brought to this time.
Ray, I’d like to give you an opportunity as the person who leads Cardus, and in such a significant time — Cardus’ work in Canada and far beyond is really so significant. And I would say very much an expression, an embodiment of what this spirit has been about. So tell us a bit about your perspective on that.
Ray Pennings: Thank you very much, Mark. Cardus is a think tank in Canada, and to some extent, we do the work that traditional think tanks do. We’re a bunch of policy geeks who provide advice to governments and industry associations on political issues. But right from the very beginning, when my colleague Michael Van Pelt and I co-founded Cardus in 2000, we were very conscious that many think tanks and many policy prescriptions very quickly run out of gas. You start with a brilliant idea, you beat it to death for a couple of years, and then you become — and we were quite resolved in building a new think tank that was explicitly faith-based, because we felt there was something deep in the roots — just to go back to the understory — we thought there was something deep in the roots that wasn’t being talked about. And we’re in Canada, where talking about faith is a little more difficult than it is in the U.S., although quite different in character as well.
So one of the things that we did very early on is start a magazine. And the audience of the magazine was us. We created a magazine for ourselves. I appreciate all the kind words about us being generous and all the rest. We were pretty selfish, actually. It’s good to admit that. But what we wanted to do is we needed to understand what’s happening in the culture. And the magazine, the festival, everything — so I came here very much with a listening ear. What could I learn about what’s going on? To what extent were all of these local activities authentic? Were they unique? Was there something they could learn from each other? Did they need to be brought into conversation with each other?
The other thing that I would highlight is, you know, our own philosophy — we come out of the Dutch Reformed neo-Calvinist tradition, which places a strong emphasis on civil society. It’s not identical to, but in American terms it’d be very similar to a Tocquevillian perspective on things. So our own default assumption is not to look at politics as the leader. Politics is downstream from culture. So it really takes a read of the culture to understand what’s going on. I came here very much with a listening ear, putting on my think tank hat as opposed to my Comment publisher hat. What is it that we need to learn about what’s happening?
Mark Labberton: Right, right. I think it’s significant and suggestive of the things that both of you have shared that it really was called a festival — because a conference is much more about just one part of the brain and organizing and producing and having outcomes and measurements and all of that. It’s a very broken form of learning — if by “learning” we mean the fullness of body, spirit, mind, heart, soul. A festival is a celebration. It’s an experience. It’s a reality. And part of it is the event that has now happened called the festival. But really, the deeper meaning of festival — understory festival — is really that that’s actually what’s happening in real time and space in all kinds of manifestations, registered or not registered, public or private.
And I’m just curious, Elizabeth, how would you enter into this festival? And what is it that came together in various themes and soundings that have been meaningful?
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yes, I ended it with great joy, and I would not have got on a plane to a conference. I think the thing that’s really struck me is how — and it’s in the principles of Comment magazine — the honouring of different ways of knowing. And, you know, I used to run Theos, which is kind of part of a similar family of think tanks, faith-based think tanks in the UK. And, you know, Shadi works in D.C. and does a lot of policy work. Lots of us have been formed by this theory of change around: if you just have the best ideas, if you just have the strongest arguments, if you just have the best data and evidence, then the world will change. That’s what we do. It’s not just that people know from experience that that doesn’t actually work, but our deepening understanding of who we are as humans — our understanding of neurobiology — is really beginning to challenge the primacy of those ways of knowing. Not undermine them, not say we don’t value them, but to broaden our sense of how humans come to remain reality-rooted, right? How do we actually see? How do we actually understand? And then how do we actually build something beautiful? And it has to involve these imaginative, intuitive, creative, relational ways of knowing for us to be able to be fully human.
I believe that’s how we were created to be, right? It’s part of the image of God in us. But I have never — I go to the theatre a lot, I go to concerts, I go to poetry readings, and then I go and see people give lectures and have debates, right? And to have had all of that in one space was such an interesting experience for me — to have them not be, like, well, this is the real thing, and the stuff happening around the edges is like the aesthetics of sprinkles to make the medicine go down. The way that beauty and art and embodiment, the feasting and the moving and the artists working in all the little cathedral nooks, allowed the ideas, I think, to land in a different way. Allowed us to imagine more, to open to possibility again, to get out of those tram tracks of thinking that we get into when we’ve thought about things the same way for such a long time. And the kind of beauty and breadth of all of those things being in one place — honestly, I have never felt more at home in a place, because like all of me is allowed here.
Mark Labberton: Right, right. I think that was the grandeur of the invitation, right? For a lot of people coming together — it felt like an enigmatic experience. I’m so excited and enthusiastic about being able to come, and I have no idea what to think. I think few of us have gone to gatherings where that was as high a degree of value and experience, and I think we all came away understanding a why in a way you could not have laid it out in the way that a classic, quote, conference would have been. And it was an invitation into something, into a lived experience, which is part of what the theme of the understory is all about.
Shadi, what was it for you? Elizabeth talked about various seedlings and influences that struck her. I’m curious how you interacted with what happened these days.
Shadi Hamid: Yeah, well, first of all, I really didn’t know what to expect. I haven’t really been to many Christian festivals or conferences. This is not my world. I should say that I’m not Christian, just so people are aware. I’m Muslim. I co-host a Comment podcast with an evangelical theologian called Zealots at the Gate, but I’m the Muslim voice in that. So I came in as a participant, but also as an observer, kind of looking at things a little bit from the outside.
I’ll just say that, as a Muslim, I don’t agree with Christianity’s truth claims, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t appreciate the beauty of Christianity. I think Christianity has so much to offer to society and specifically American democracy at this moment. And what was wonderful for me is all my favourite Christians were here. So it was really a coming together of just a remarkable group of people. And that was really powerful to me — to see that there are people who are looking forward, who are hopeful, who believe that America and other countries can actually become better, that it is not a dead end.
I think so many of us, especially as Americans, there’s just such a negativity bias in the media and in our own minds of just how we look at the world. So to be reminded of beauty, to be reminded of experiences with people we care about here at the festival — and I think there’s a real, as other people have said, there is a real yearning and hunger for a different way of looking at the world. So many of us are struggling with this moment in American politics. Some of us are sad, depressed, people don’t know what their path is. There’s a real sense of despair, and the sense that just things aren’t quite right. And to be reminded that things can be made right — or maybe not right, but more right than they were before — is really inspirational. And I want to be reminded of that. I need to be reminded of that.
I think about politics a lot as part of my job, but to be reminded that change happens primarily or even mostly through culture and through religion and through spiritual practices, that we don’t have to be obsessed every single day and every single moment with the political news of the day — that there is a kind of deeper story. And we have to go to religion. We have to go to faith and we have to go to our spiritual practices in order to kind of change the country.
Mark Labberton: Right, right. That — yeah, culture is the path.
Shadi Hamid: Yes, yes.
Mark Labberton: Well, I do think the culture theme was very prominent. And part of the reason why I think the attendance and the eagerness of people who weren’t able to come but who have been following it over the days has been really this invitation into the wide cultural space, rather than entering it through the lens only of faith — though that was central to the practices of what occurred, and yet it didn’t require that as the first point of entry. And if faith and religion was your entry point, that was a completely appropriate thing. If it was also just culture, or culture primarily, then that was also a rich invitation, which creates a platform that’s much bigger than religiosity as the core — with no aspersions whatsoever, per se, about religion or institutional religion even — but just on the fact that those forms and structures do often create both pathways and hindrances. And I think the openness of the invitation of the Understory, and then the experience of the festival that leads you into the reality of the understory — which is really the human experience, the experience of being human with all of the granularity and particularity and earthiness of what our embodied lives are actually about.
Ray Pennings: Yes? If I could just jump in on that, picking up on what you just said and what Elizabeth said earlier about winning arguments. I think — the reality is that as human beings, we are lovers more than we are thinkers. There is a sense in which — and I think that’s a very Christian concept, loving God above all — and part of the pathologies that we face in the world are because of idolatries of loving the wrong things in the wrong way. And I think one of the benefits of this sort of approach that was there is that it invited the other parts of our brain, the other parts of our experience in terms of loves.
I’m not particularly aesthetically gifted, and philosophically I’m very committed to the arts. That said, there was a good amount of art and music there in which I wondered more about what I was supposed to understand than actually experiencing the understanding at times. There were other pieces that were much more in the genres I was familiar with, and I suspect that was true for almost every guest — such a variety. This wasn’t just one type of genre that neatly fits a model. This was quite a wide experience. When I didn’t understand it, part of it was, okay, what makes the person who understands and really appreciates it — and usually they were sitting right around you — so I got to people-watching, and watched the other people respond. Okay, I don’t quite get what you’re getting excited about, but boy, you’re getting excited. And that was a pretty good thing.
Elizabeth Oldfield: And that’s what feels unusual, right? The way our information environment — and just our, when we do experience culture, we’re so sorted, right? We’re so sorted by these hyper-specific niche tastes that we’re really only usually with people who like the same things as us. And so to be next to, like, I’m weeping at the thing the other person’s rolling their eyes at, but we are still sharing an experience. And those moments of embodied collective ritual where it can hold it, right? It can hold the different tastes. It can hold the different preferences without that becoming a reason to move away from each other. It felt like the cathedral could — yeah, that there was a really big net — and in the bits that I wasn’t vibing with, I was — you’re exactly right — I was watching the people loving it. And that is powerfully, profoundly, theologically rich somehow.
Mark Labberton: Right. Well, I do think — sorry.
Elizabeth Oldfield: No, I just — I’m moved by that observation. Yeah, absolutely.
Mark Labberton: I do think the spirit of theological understanding — that we who are Christians, and people of other Abrahamic faiths for example, worship a God who is capacious in being and mind and spirit and attitude and approach — and that allows for the eclecticism, or just the diversity, or whatever the vibrant variety — as David, the president of Fuller, calls it — this incredible eclecticism to arise in a way that in some circumstances is really fenced out, like: we do not want eclecticism; we are one brand with one type, with one voice, with one message, with one formula. And I think the attraction in part to this call to the deeper understory is a call to an acknowledgement of that richness — of all of that variation and the tastings that will be exactly as you said, Elizabeth, where some are rolling their eyes and some are breaking into tears because of the impact.
I found myself very tearful a number of times throughout the gathering — and it was partly because I was triggered by the hope that had been behind the whole vision. It was partly triggered by beauty. It was partly triggered by people who were here and expressing their gifts in ways that are not frequent enough in my life. So I felt it was an invitation into a wider and deeper space. And that’s just a very profound thing and not an easily achieved thing. I think it was part of God’s abundant blessing.
Anne Snyder: Do you mind if I — I’m talking too much, but the word that’s been coming to me this whole festival is and. Yes. And I was thinking about it as Christian Wiman was reading poetry, but also elsewhere — the spaces that can hold beauty and brutality and look them both in the face. Right?
And the tragedy of the times and the promise of the times, and the wounds and the wonder, and the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere, and men and women, right? You know, left and right. Like the binaries that we so fall into — and it’s a very uncomfortable place to balance. We really do think it’s an either/or situation. And, you know, the last night — to have the beauty of the music and then to be talking about the Holocaust, to be talking about Viktor Frankl — for it to be so dark and so heavy and then so beautiful, the sense of the fullness of life, actually, the fullness of the human experience held in one place — is what kept making me weep. The relief of, oh, we get to be honest about both. We don’t have to deny one part of this.
Mark Labberton: Right, right. I’ve often thought of Romans chapter 8 as a chapter in Paul’s writings that contains this image of groaning beauty. And that is exactly the same sort of theme. How does all of that groaning that’s laid out in Paul’s argument in chapter 8 of Romans get held together with this deep, profound hope that is never outside the love of God?
I’ve always — funny, I don’t know, sometime in my early 20s, someone just asked me, what’s your definition of beauty? And I always said it was groaning. I actually have never understood it as fulfilment, ever. And maybe that’s also aesthetic taste. I always prefer a minor key to a major — well, there are exceptions, it depends on the genre and the beat and everything. But colour palettes, word and language and rhythm.
And I don’t know if that’s theologic. I don’t know what Dane Ortlund would say about that, or Mako — people who really think and embody beauty in their work as artists. But I just want to pick up on — I just want to note: when you said groaning — for me that’s redundant.
Ray Pennings: Is that part of the appeal, though, of the festival? I wonder whether or not — which I mean as a good thing. I come from, you know, one of the major policy files we’re dealing with at Cardus is Canada’s adoption of euthanasia. We’ve gone from nothing to it being record and being front page and all of the rest. And, you know, on the one hand it’s a policy question with lots of details, but underneath it is a refusal to accept that the death and dying process is a beautiful thing. And I was sharing with someone here at the festival — you know, the testimony of Ben Sasse right now in these days — you know, from afar I’ve admired his work and his life in his various roles, but frankly he is teaching us more about how to die well than he ever taught us in terms of how to live well along the way.
And I’m wondering whether or not we are perhaps at a longing point, even in our culture, in our society, in which we don’t know how to deal with suffering. We’ve been told it’s all about autonomy and accomplishment and fulfilment, as opposed to the beauty of groaning. My wife and I have lost all four parents, have been around deathbeds — the most beautiful, sacred moments, but they were deathbeds. The Burundian woman who had arranged 73 funerals — the essence of that story was the beauty of a woman having brutality all around her, in dead bodies, burying those bodies, giving dignity and giving rise to something that was sown in the midst of all of that.
Mark Labberton: One of the things that I think is so present in this event — which is really an invitation always beyond the event; it’s not about the event as a dead end or a cul-de-sac of some kind; it’s really a doorway into an acknowledgment of all of these things that may be present in our world, in our personal lives, on the global stage and national stage, local stage — I’m just curious, how did that opportunity, that sort of capacious invitation, strike you? And where did you find yourself being maybe even surprisingly awakened or ready to receive an invitation to go further or deeper, or in a direction that you wouldn’t have come anticipating?
Shadi Hamid: Well, maybe just to add to what Ray just mentioned — I think that there’s a real sense that the secular way of approaching things has failed. We’ve been told that more secularism will lead to a rational, reasonable politics, that our lives will improve, that progress will happen. But I think that the broader society has reached a dead end where there’s a real sense that that wasn’t enough and we need a new paradigm to guide us. And I don’t know if there’ll be a religious awakening in the U.S. — that might be overstated — but I do think there is a yearning for worshipping something beyond ourselves, for not being so me-centred and shifting to an other-centred approach to life. That, I think, is really what’s bubbling up in the culture on both left and right.
And I should also say a really cool thing about the festival is that it was, I mean, it was political in a sense because everything has political implications, but it wasn’t political in the sense that I couldn’t really tell whether someone was left of centre or right of centre. And it didn’t even really occur to me to think about that. I could put all that to the side and say, hey, we’re all sharing in a kind of cultural experience. We do have some commonalities. And I think most of us at the festival, we do believe that there is a role for religion in public life. And I can say this as a Muslim — I want there to be more Christianity, maybe a certain kind of Christianity, in public life, and that would be better for all of us. So it encourages me to see Christians following through on that. But that’s not a left or right thing.
Ray Pennings: Others? I’ll just jump in on that. The particular Cardus vision, if you will, comes from a particular view of — you know, all of life is religion. There is no such thing as neutral. So there isn’t a sense of, you know — and I, you’re not jumping on, you know, wanting more religion. Our argument is we all have religion all the time. We just don’t acknowledge it. And being much more explicit about our priors.
Mark Labberton: Can you, just for the audience, explain a little bit more what you mean by that? Just for those listening, so that’s not misinterpreted.
Ray Pennings: Yeah. Well, there is a sense in which, you know, you peel back the onion far enough and we all start with a core belief that — even if that belief is that reason is the ultimate determiner of all things, at the core of it, you may say, well, that’s reasonable; that’s a circular sort of thing. There is a belief statement that is at the beginning. Now, many people have non-transcendent beliefs, and there are those who have transcendent beliefs, but belief drives our behaviour in every aspect of life, and organisations as well — are there and are based around a certain set of assumptions and beliefs. In many ways they’re historically taken for granted. The founding of America was very much founded on a Christian vocabulary and a set of beliefs, even when they weren’t talked about, that established a sort of Western as opposed to an Eastern or a different set of assumptions. But we are all religious in the sense that we bring a core set of beliefs that we live out in every aspect of our life — also our public and organizational life.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Or we’d say: we’re all made to worship. It’s just a question of what we worship.
Shadi Hamid: But there’s something in the human spirit that desires something that is beyond.
Ray Pennings: Yes.
Shadi Hamid: And it’s just a question of how that makes itself apparent. And there was that Bob Dylan song — “Gotta Serve Somebody,” right? It’s just a question of how you make that choice.
And I think for secular or non-religious folks, it’s really important for them to come into the public sphere and acknowledge that they too are driven by powerful beliefs. As you said, there is no neutrality. But I think for a long time in American society there’s been, I think, liberal and secular elites who pretend that they’re neutral or aspire to be neutral, but they’re actually not. And the sooner we all realize that we’re driven by some kind of foundational belief, that means we can have a better dialogue with each other, because we’re not hiding what our beliefs are — we’re being very open about what drives us.
Mark Labberton: Right. I remember an interview years ago with Madeleine Albright, after she had finished her time as secretary of state, and she said her formation early on as a diplomat was all about avoiding religion and almost expunging it from any possibility that would come up in conversation — until, she said, she had a theophany where it became clear that, in fact, she couldn’t possibly do her job if she didn’t bring religion, and certainly overt values — spiritual and otherwise — into the direct conversation. Otherwise, it was like they were shadowboxing, having all these diplomatic exchanges, but they didn’t really tap into the understory of where people actually live out of, and what it is that’s actually shaping why we’re having the particular conversation that we may be having.
What would you say as a Brit, in particular, as somebody who sees this — not that you have any problems?
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yes. We’re fine.
I think it’s what Shadi said — the phrase that’s been running through my mind is moral ambition, and how hard that is to have, actually. And there are various secular discourses around moral ambition, the effective altruist movement and various others. It’s not that these questions aren’t being asked. But the difference, I think, between — I forgot the name of the very first woman who spoke. Anika? Anika, yeah. The power of her call, the power of saying, you know, our country has been moving towards justice and the mantle has been dropped, but it’s there to pick it up, right? And this is for all of us. That agency-building call — one, I think it’s more American than British; we also can do it, and it’s one of the things I really like about being here, is people are much more like, Tiffany embodies this, but much more likely to be like, yeah, why not? Let’s try. Rather than — someone’s tried that, don’t be ridiculous, we’ve got too much history of failure behind us in the UK.
But that call to yes, yes. And it’s again, it’s the and. It’s yes, the brokenness. Yes, the brutality. Yes, the pain. Yes, the division. And — yes to creativity and agency and innovation and possibility and hope. And I find it really difficult to be just with the hope people — that’s where I roll my eyes, right? The sort of toxic positivity people. And it’s really hard to be with the people who are just critiquing, right? Who just point to the problems of the world, who just see what’s wrong with the world. And to be in a space where we can actually honour both feels like, oh gosh, we might actually be able to move forward.
Anne Snyder: Yes, yes, yes. Can I speak about this from a creative process? I think one thing — and I might get a little emotional saying this — but one thing that was very beautiful for me to experience, having spent a year and a half making a billion decisions around every little fractal piece of quite a complex — I’ve used this word “four-dimensional” because it was entering into time and space, also ahead of the future and trying to discern the times and the vibe shifts — I mean, it’s just a billion elements. And then you get into the concrete space of it.
I think so much of this creation came out of pain of feeling torn between loves that do not get along. In my case, I can describe it in a few different ways. I’ll speak a little theologically and experientially. The Reinhold Niebuhr in me and the Henri Nouwen. The love of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Gandhis and those — and then totally convinced and convicted that we’re not in that era of a one leader anymore. And it has to be a we. Partly because of just how complex and globalised we’ve become as a society. It’s no longer binaries. I mean, there are still binaries, and I kind of tried to present them at the festival in terms of what things America does need to reckon with in a binary sense — of course, racially in particular. And that has spiritual roots and original sin issues and all that, civically.
I have always had a love-hate relationship with institutions. I’m so grateful to an organisation for whom this was like a big stretch, and who chose to trust me with something wild and raw. And, you know, I have so much affection for this Dutch Reformed publisher of Comment from Canada, who has such spiritual flourishing as a fruit of his roots and structure and way of seeing, and who said, yes, and America needs some help, and like, let’s just go for it, you know? And there’s like a wonderful, also like, naivety in that, that we both have — you know, it’s not just the two of us.
So I think, like, the desire to see if it was possible to bring soul and structure, left and right, some working class, elite — all those things that have been a part of the pain of trying to bridge in my own vocational discernment over the years, and worlds that I see great good in. It drives me nuts that a liberation theologian who actually spoke at the end today, who has also been working his whole life with undocumented immigrants with spinal cord injuries in Houston — that he would not be heard by, you know, a very conservative… he wouldn’t necessarily be heard by those who have a wonderful theology in their own right, but would be much more to the right, and would hear the language of liberation theologians as anathema. But actually the lives being lived, as I see them, are so similar. Love of neighbour. Walking with the suffering. Yes, you might have different ideas — should something be funded more by government or not? But all of that is so not existential. That’s just practical problem solving. We can have these debates. We’ve been having them for too long. They’re very boring, but they’re important. I think we all feel this way. You just have to be honest about it.
This is good, and this is good. And our world has somehow made them seem like enemies, and taught us they are enemies. And certainly in the fabric of the world, I think Christianity has helped give me this sense of: what if we could shift the frame? And I do not know how to do that didactically. There would be so many people who are gifted at doing that didactically and providing plausibility structures in a way that speaks to the more structural mind. But I did know that somehow a metaphor — when you don’t fully have the answer but you’re intuiting your way to something prismatic — maybe in such a chaotic dispersed state, maybe there’s something about an underused metaphor that could help open a doorway where we discover together, because we actually all resonate with something cracking above us. We all feel like victims of something. And yeah, I don’t know if that’s quite making sense, but it was really beautiful to experience, like — okay, maybe it is possible to combine these facets of life that, as Elizabeth was saying earlier, so segment us in ways of knowing.
Mark Labberton: Ways of knowing is kind of the secret sauce.
Anne Snyder: Right, it is ways of knowing. I don’t think — you expressed some helplessness in terms of how do we didactically carry it forward. I don’t think we need to have those answers either. To some extent, even from a Cardus perspective — you know, our belief is in civil society, it’s in partnership. There were a thousand people in the room, but I don’t remember — I think the last spreadsheet I saw, there were 269 organizations or something that had leadership attending here, right? You know, if we’re going to use the metaphors of horticulture along the way — we started that a few years ago with Breaking Ground and now we have the understory and everything else — the next one may logically be planting seeds or growing shoots. And we think of farmers and we think of nice neat rows. But it’s pretty windy outside today. Some of the seed is going to blow all over the place. And we’re not even going to really realize the fruit of it until somebody comes and picks it and brings it to our attention and says, this started at the understory.
I’m a Dutch Reformed guy. I believe in providence and how God’s sovereignty works, all of that. And I think to get at Anne’s point in terms of the differences of all of these — we make our identity a starting point, something other than our fellow humanity.
Ray Pennings: Yes. I think Luke Bretherton, in his speech, talked about this expressing itself in five different ways. Yes. And what struck me — and I don’t know; I didn’t listen carefully enough to remember if he meant these in this order — but I actually thought the order was important. He started with the need of the neighbour. So often our Christian love for our neighbour frankly sees someone else in need and you step in and help because of that need. And that’s a fundamental human response. Trip on the street and the total stranger is going to come and help me. They’re going to see me because I’m a fellow human being. Then he started, you know, so there is — he started with the need, then he sort of moved to institutions, then government, then aesthetics, and at the end he put the scholarly. So he has sort of five levels of engagement, suggesting we need them all. But I think the problem is we have in many ways inverted the order. As I was listening, I thought, how much is it that we invert the order? We don’t start with need. We start with conservative or liberal. We start with Dutch Reformed or Pentecostal or whatever. No — we should in many ways start with fundamental humanity.
God’s story has four chapters. It starts with creation and God created all men. I made mention in my own talk here — as a Canadian, I want to be very careful in terms of being in the United States; we don’t necessarily appreciate when other governments tell Canadians what to do, and I want to honour that in reverse. But, you know, your own Constitution: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” Number one, you didn’t discover it. It’s self-evident. You didn’t invent it. And secondly, all men. That doesn’t sound American to me. When we start with that premise, and then we create something building on that rather than one of those other categories — and in many ways, I think that starts with just observing my own suffering, going back to your point about beauty — my own suffering, my own need, my own loneliness. I’m created with a hole in my heart that can only be filled by God. You know, Augustine: “I have no rest until I find my rest in you.” And when I find that and I share that with others, well, all of a sudden that starts to give expression in my family, in my neighbourhood, in my business, in my politics.
Mark Labberton: Yes, yes, it does. I do think there was something of a call to arms that is a little bit more distinctive that people can kind of take with them, and that’s in this idea of Christian humanism. Thank you, Shadi. Maybe you want to say more about that in a moment, but that’s what I’ll be — I mean, I haven’t thought a lot about those two words put together, but now it’s sort of entrenched in my mind. And what that looks like in practice, I think, will be up to all of us who kind of leave the understory and go and do our own work and participate in our communities in the way that we will.
Shadi Hamid: But I think there is this idea that for humans to fully flourish, there has to be some kind of divine constraint or divine inspiration. And that goes to what you were saying, Ray — that the other part of the declaration is that our rights are endowed by our creator. They don’t come from governments, because if they do come from governments, governments can then take them away. But if they come from God, that means they have a deeper foundation, and that means those rights can be more secure.
So I think adding Christianity to humanism, or supplementing humanism in that way, is a very powerful idea. Because humanism on its own, I think, can be very me-centred. It sees humans as the ultimate source of creativity and progress. But we as members of the Abrahamic faiths say that the human isn’t central — ultimately, God is central. And then we derive something from that centrality that actually allows us to flourish more fully as human beings.
Mark Labberton: Preach it, my Muslim brother. Amazing. Thank you.
Well, I do think that the role of Christian humanism in the festival was very prominent. Obviously, in a way, it was the content theme throughout the whole time. And I think the experience of it, again, created windows and opportunities to move into spaces and to consider ideas and relationships especially — which are so frequently bounded — which this festival gave an opportunity for freedom. So if the outcome of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are in part meant to be guarantees of freedom and a legitimacy of freedom as a human experience, I think part of what drew people to this was that it felt as though the invitation — to an understanding of reality centred in God, centred in Jesus Christ, centred in the reality of other faiths in the same tradition, and of the experiences of what it means to be a person in the world in all of the places that we live and work and create and make and do all the things that we do — is really, again back to the word, capacious. It’s really a capacious invitation. But it’s a vibrant, healthy freedom — not an indulgent, narcissistic, individual-centric or object-centric, but a relational centrism, which was really a part of why it had to be an experience, not a schedule. It was coming to this experience, this communion together, which was being created from many different parts that would never otherwise have been together except for what has occurred in these days.
I know that each of us are hosts of podcasts that Comment sponsors, and we’re all extremely grateful for the partnership together. And I do wonder about what kind of voice or what kind of hearing you want your listeners to experience that ties in with some of the themes we’ve just been talking about at this conference. I think the instincts that we hold in common are these instincts that we’ve just been talking about. But ground that a bit more in the distinctive angle that your podcast may be. Elizabeth, why don’t you lead?
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah, I just think — a lot of these things are sensibility words or character words. The Sacred, which I host, is really about trying to model real, kind of curious conversations with people from a wild range of perspectives and philosophies and life experiences — ask them about their deep values, right? Not about their controversial ideas, but about what has formed them and their philosophy of life, essentially. And we’re trying to do that in a way that is fundamentally hospitable. And that’s something that’s been really deep in the festival — the setting of the table, the centrality of the table, right? The centrality of these ritual meals in our wisdom traditions are there for a reason. And the invitation of the other to come in and be a guest, not an enemy — for us to approach them with curiosity and openness because we are committed to their human dignity.
That’s a central thing that all humanism should share. And Christian humanism grounds it in the image of God in us, and in the incarnation, in God coming close as a human. If I believe that, then any human I meet — no matter how different from me, no matter how deeply I disagree with them — I’m called to love them. Whether I see them as a neighbour or an enemy, I’m still commanded to love them. And listening to them is one of the simplest and most powerful ways that we can demonstrate love to each other. So those postures of hospitality and openness to the other have been shot through the festival, and we hope that we can continue to model those on The Sacred.
Mark Labberton: Shadi, what would you say?
Shadi Hamid: Yeah, so in our podcast, Zealots at the Gate, what we try to do is model a kind of Muslim-Christian, or Muslim-Evangelical, conversation that can be uncomfortable at times — and we push each other. My co-host is Matthew Kaemingk, who is of the Calvinist tradition, but he’s also conservative. I’m more left of centre. We have obviously fundamental theological differences. I think he wants to convert me to Christianity, which is understandably evangelical, right? That’s what makes a good Christian.
Mark Labberton: Yeah, exactly.
Shadi Hamid: And that’s what he’s told me. And at first I was very uncomfortable. I’m like, you know, shouldn’t you be able to accept me as I am? But he’s like, Shadi, no — if you’re a dear friend of mine and I have something that I think is valuable, of course I want to be able to share it with you. And he was like, I’m almost offended that you don’t want to convert me to Islam. That would be the equivalent thing. That’s a longer story. Tune in.
But we’ve had fascinating conversations where we pushed each other on: do we as Muslims and Christians believe in the same God? And that was — I always assumed that we do believe in the same God. Matthew pushed me on that and shared some of his concerns with that framing. And we can do that and have those uncomfortable conversations, but stay dear friends. And that’s what we try to model in our own relationship. And we try to use our collaboration and our friendship to talk about those challenging issues — oftentimes with a political bent — because faith does have something to say about politics and public life, and finding what that intersection is is important. I think a lot of Americans in particular struggle to bring their religious selves into the public sphere. They’re oftentimes told not to bring so much of their religiosity when they’re debating politics, that everyone has to be reasonable and secular. But we think it’s very important to come to our public lives with strong conviction.
Mark Labberton: Right, right. I think in being the host of Conversing, one of the things that struck me — I have lived a privileged life in thousands of different ways, and one of them is the richness of knowing many, many people who are extremely different from one another and feeling an intense connectedness to them. So I kept thinking, how do I invite others into this kind of experience? I can’t make everyone a friend of everyone, but I can at least give people an opportunity to have a hearing, a tasting, when they may not have yet stepped across lines of difference — which I’ve, by God’s grace, been able to do in many ways, not yet able to do in all the ways that I would hope. And so the opportunity for these conversations has felt like, please come into this space with an eclectic gathering of people who are guests, who are doing thoughtful, significant work, many out of the motivation of Christian faith and the framing of their understanding of what it means to be a Christian in that space they particularly occupy — but also being aware that these have kind of overtones that carry across different episodes and that end up inadvertently bringing each other into conversation across lines that are not necessarily in the program, but are part of the residue of the conversation. And so I think it’s that creation of a kind of surprising conversation that all of our podcasts land in the ears and hearts and lives of people who find us, or we find them, in some wholly unexpected way.
I’m wondering, Ray, how are you feeling? How would you describe the contribution of your podcast?
Ray Pennings: Yeah, so the podcast that I’m going to host — the first edition is scheduled to land in September. It is with my colleague, Andrea Senya. And it really comes out of, frankly, the inspiration of your collective podcasts along the way and the fact that Cardus is establishing a family of podcasts. We felt it was a missing piece in terms of, number one, our Canadian identity as a think tank and a number of the issues that are there.
Andrea and I are not quite like Shadi and Matt, but she’s of a different generation than I am. She’s Roman Catholic; I’m Dutch Reformed. She’s an immigrant to this country from an Eastern country, arrived in her early teens. She experiences the country from quite a different lens, and yet she’s the Director of Policy at Cardus and I’m the co-founder. So we find ourselves collaborating, and frankly, we found ourselves at the water cooler having lots of interesting conversations that our colleagues seemed to enjoy listening to, and the suggestion was that maybe we should broaden the audience for that.
I would just highlight — it is interesting, I know Canada is not necessarily on the front of mind for most Americans, but I think there are some interesting questions we’re facing in Canada as well. Number one, we were formed very much as an explicit pluralism. Canada in 1867 was in many ways a peace treaty between French Catholics and English Protestants who weren’t particularly getting along. Read the previous hundred or so years — or actually go all the way back to the Battle of the Plains of Abraham. So that is a story of conflict, frankly, from 1763 to 1867. I don’t mean any offence to our gracious hosts in the United States, but I am heading back to Canada tonight, so I’ll dare say that — but frankly, it was American expansionism and the threats of annexation in Canada in the 1860s that caused Canadians at that time to look and basically say, well, the French Catholics and English Protestants sort of hate each other and keep fighting, but we’d rather live together in some sort of arrangement than become American at the time. So there is an element of anti-Americanism that’s actually built into that.
On the same side, we have become the strongest trading relationship and the strongest undefended border in the world. And whatever the challenges of recent years may be, geography has made us neighbours and we will forever be neighbours, and the vibes — the cultural, the political vibes — cross the borders. Now, Canada’s facing — we’re going to have a, you know, our province of Alberta is going to have a separation referendum on October the 19th. Quebec is going to elect a government where, if the current polls hold true, it’s going to be another separatist government. We may have another separation debate. So we have great internal challenges, and they’re our fault — they’re not your fault in any stretch of the imagination. But there are questions of a European mindset to some extent — French laïcité, French notions of secularism — how that all intersects. I think there are a lot of things that not just Canadian listeners but American listeners will find of interest.
And we have — similar to you, Mark — I’m blessed. I’ve been the co-founder of a think tank that now has some prominence in Canada. We have lots of connections along the way in terms of guests, and we have lots of resources in Cardus. I started a weekly newsletter during the pandemic that has grown to several thousand with a fairly elite readership. And so in many ways, we’re seeking to just extend those Cardus insights to the next level with this podcast.
Mark Labberton: Very exciting. And let’s give you the final word on the podcast and how you see your own.
Anne Snyder: Yeah, so the podcast that I lead or host is called The Whole Person Revolution, and it has been on a bit of hiatus while trying to birth this festival — but I hope to come back to it this late summer and September and relaunch in a sense. It has always been animated — it was begun over COVID, in the context of this other project Comment started called Breaking Ground — and it has a little — picking up on what Elizabeth said and what Iva said previously — it’s been animated by: how do you talk to doers on the ground about the soul of their organisations?
It’s not a thousand percent institutional. I had the most incredible interview with Elizabeth a couple years ago about kind of, like, apocalypse. And so what has historically been the case is Comment does themes every quarter. Those are discerned — it’s like a discerning of the times, trying to get the timing right. Is this the time to focus on friendship? Is this the time to focus on declensionist theories? Is this the time to focus on control and lack of control? Our themes are like pre-political — like more climate than weather. And so that, for me at least, has been an organizing frame for a season that has — this may change in the future — but historically it’s been like a season of eight episodes, with this stained glass window that we have tried to create in prose and in art in the magazine.
And then because my heart — I learned bottom up, that’s just how I’m wired — my heart is always with the practitioners out there. So it’s like we have this cerebral thing going on in the pages, and then — but I just, to me, it’s not valuable. It’s wonderful if academics and intellectuals read us, but I just get so much joy when it feels like the power of naming and power of moral imagination actually impact and fuel those people, and can play a cohering function, a community-building function, for those who are, you know, standing up to ICE in Minneapolis in January. And vocabulary still matters, as much as language feels a little brittle these days. So I think part of the podcast is the chance to feature the people and the voices that are embodying something of what we’re celebrating and exploring, or feeling consternation about, in our pages — both to expand the audience so we are reaching both thinkers and doers, and so that there can be some synthesis between the realm of imagination and those actually living it. Because I tend to think we’re in a time when the practice is way ahead of the theory, when it comes to the good. So the podcast is just a nice colloquial form to tease out voices who would never feel comfortable writing an essay.
Mark Labberton: So I do think that we all feel a responsibility going from this experience to manifest it in its fruitfulness and in its ongoing questions and uncertainties. I’m just wondering, where do you feel a call to give attention, nurture, support, encourage in your own particular context?
I have a particular interest in both community and the sense of neighbourhoods and neighbouring, but also living in community, living up close with other people as a kind of key social and spiritual technology for our times. And I have people in my household that would love us to be being more ambitious and more innovative about the call to make that possible for others. And so I’m going away with a little bit more energy to step up on that.
Ray Pennings: Nice. I’m a think tank guy, but I understand that politics, as I mentioned earlier, is downstream from culture. My own role at this particular stage of Cardus’s life is that I’m very much responsible for formation and thinking about how do we pass on an institution to a next generation of leaders in a way that holds on to our roots but also adapts to the environment in which it’s going to be. It’s not — I think, you know, if a founder thinks that you can somehow control what it’s going to be thirty years from now and anticipate it, that’s a big mistake. Sorry, some days it’s a challenge controlling it while you are still in the position.
That said, when I think of formation and apply it to the metaphor that we’ve been using in terms of growth and all of the rest — every plant has its own shape, its own flavour, its own scent, its own way of growing. But there is a certain amount of pruning. There is a certain amount of steering you can put on it. And in many ways at Cardus — whether that’s through Comment terms or providing resources to other leaders — we’re a wholesaler, not a retailer. We’re not trying to influence the masses. We are trying to be a tool, a resource for leaders in the many organizations at all levels.
Just interpreting the times — you know, really, what do we have? We have three things: we collect data and provide information; we can create a vocabulary and narrative within which you can find yourself; and we can create platforms and convening spaces. One of the things that Cardus does for every one of our events — we do about fifty or so events a year — and has been on steroids here over the last few days — is what we call the “unlikely room.” Our aspiration for every Cardus event is that there you will meet a person that you’ve never been in the same room with before, and create that opportunity for engagement. So we see ourselves as a convener of platforms to bring other people together to produce things that we may never know about, but in God’s grace and providence will grow.
Shadi Hamid: It’s a great vision. I don’t know exactly what it will look like going back out into the world. I’ll be a little bit sad, I think, for the rest of the day — sorry — after seeing so many great friends, some of whom I hadn’t seen in a long time. But I think that I’m re-energized and I’m reminded. As a writer, I think I spend a lot of time alone. I ultimately end up being a little bit too me-centred and too isolated. So just to be reminded that I’m part of a larger community with my Christian brothers and sisters — to me that’s just something I need at least a couple times a year, and I think I’ve got a very good dose of it at the Understory. So I’m grateful for that.
Mark Labberton: Right, right. Thanks for coming, Shadi, and trusting us.
Shadi Hamid: Yeah, totally.
Mark Labberton: I think for me — I think it’s partly that I’ve always felt like I was a discoverer. I like going to places, being in settings I don’t know, being with unfamiliar people whose worlds are vastly different than my own. All that is a very drawing influence. And I think part of what this has stimulated is understanding certain pockets of local opportunity for discovery that I haven’t yet pursued — that I’ve thought of several times over the course of these days, thinking that’s a person, or that’s a place, or that’s an institution that’s nearby where I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I don’t see that clearly. And I want to hear the voices. I want to understand what that reality is, which is undoubtedly different from the realities that I’m thinking of, or very different from the realities that I live. And I need and want to understand that. And then I want that to be shared.
So I think part of that is in mind. But it’s also — how could I do a better job of connecting these people? Again, there’s a kind of connection that happens through the podcast, but there’s plenty of opportunity for small gatherings and events that don’t involve cathedrals and other such things, to experience in a localised setting — and I feel motivated to want to do more. And Anne?
Anne Snyder: Well, I have two things that come to mind, and they’re vocation-specific to this thing that I get to steward — Comment Magazine, this podcast network, and different media we find ourselves growing into.
It was really special — and I always knew this could be true — to have a form of legibility, a form that was not the written word only. There was written word, of course, behind speeches, and we had calligraphy — there’s a lot of written word. But insofar as this really was a 3D space that has historic, symbolic, et cetera, that is in a paradoxical relationship with the understory — I talked about this overstory versus understory — it was so satisfying for me. And it was part of the mischief and the delight that kept me going in planning the program, that this 3D form allows for a wider array of people who have such wisdom to offer, from the street, from musical tradition, from oration, from rhetoric. I have just longed for a much more global, cultural experience of Comment that is Comment‘s heart, but the written word tends to attract, frankly, people who look like me. And it’s just — I mean, there’s a deep history to this, Western kind of the written word — and the written word is amazing, you know, the word made flesh, you know. But I think this has often felt like we’ve been blocked from accessing, from showing our heart of welcome to all these very important voices and perspectives in our pages. And it felt just like the key got unlocked through a different medium. Now I feel like, A, I feel like we have such a richer pipeline of writers that now know us and are all in and want us — so there’s that, and I’m excited about seeing that right away.
And then the second thing is — I cannot think about, in terms of an event, I can’t think about that for a while, of another one of these, or anything like that. But if there is going to be some continuation in a formally institutionally sponsored sense that involves planning and programming and curation, etc., I just think there’s so much uncovered richness in all the different traditions — cultural and theological, and also non-theological, political traditions.
Where I just feel like we — Tomáš Halík, who opened the night for us in a recorded video from Prague, he didn’t say it in the address he gave to us, but I’ve heard him say he thinks of all the binaries in our time, all the divides — the real one that he thinks is the most troubling, or at least the most true, is that we are somehow divided between the surface and the depths. And especially living in Washington, like Shadi does, which is full of brilliant people, too many PhDs, full of people who can get really textured and nuanced in their lane — but I, especially with religious traditions, there is a heritage underneath such a wide world. Like, think of a global world of people and communities that have deep, articulate, liturgical, rhythmic, aesthetic projects — theological, aesthetic, civic, political — and virtue formation, character formation projects that look different in different cultural emphases, that are almost infinite in how far back they go. And I think both the richness of them as traditions and the sort of length of history — I’m just excited to explore that.
I was very intentional to choose the most celebrated Black preacher in America today to end our time. However, I talked to some beautiful Eastern Orthodox folks that, in a future time, I would love to see a little bit more of the Eastern Orthodox Catholic traditions brought in. Or, you know, who would Shadi recommend from some of his worlds? And I think those who can be articulate about the hamidiyyas and all these different embodied practices — we have this thing at Cardus where I feel like we think, or we try to embody, this thing that’s so unpopular when we talk about pluralism, which is: it is actually possible to have deep roots and wide open arms. And Elizabeth’s whole life embodies this, and I think it’s at the heart of her vocation — saying yes to both, yes and. I just am excited to showcase that you can be very hospitable and porous, and in fact the deeper your roots go, the wider your canopy can be.
And I think just getting into the texture of that — at least for me, the nerdy part of me gets really excited to just sort of show what’s underneath the ground. Because we’re really focused on these — I’m just really tired of the five big debates that, you know, the root system is so much bigger. It’s just been a little bit buried under a lot of moss.
Mark Labberton: So I think one of the things that anybody who might be listening to this podcast is going to feel is how much they might have wished to be here. And we’re not trying to create a FOMO moment of intense fear that you really missed out on something. You did, by the way. But since you have — or if you did — we just want to invite you to the landscape of our podcast, but really also obviously into Comment Magazine. And even out of this experience at the Understory Festival, there will be assets and production that will come forth and be posted in ways that you can find and taste and see for yourself some of what it is that we’ve experienced here.
But I just want to say that there are many associations that all of us have. And one of the associations that makes this one so special in particular is really the singular person — that’s one part of it, without individualism — the authenticity of a singular human life. That is one of the most astonishing miracles in the world to me as a person. And I think all of us have a taste for wanting to live and dwell and reflect on that stunning reality. And then we live in community. Of course we must — healthy, unhealthy, vibrant, not so vibrant, localised. And everything that we’ve been talking about is not at the meta level. It’s really at the most granular level that it actually lives and has its being — hence understory. It’s really in that organic exchange.
And I think even the joy of being able to be in one another’s presence, when we live in different places and we have never been a group of five sitting together in a room doing anything together — but in this moment, the taste of that reality, which is really part of what we’re trying to stimulate and encourage both in the podcasts that we do, in the writings of Comment, and in the festival, but also in what we’re really inviting a much wider group of people to enter into and be conscious of entering into, and even leading in local settings that anybody is in. And to share it in the miracle of human existence in a world that is as fraught as the one that we have, that is as groaning as the world that we live in, and is also full of the hope of a God who shares and embodies and holds all of that in God’s own being, and with hope and love and assurance that we are seen and heard and known.
Thank you very much for being part of this conversation today. We’re all exhausted, but we’re also — and you get special exhausting credits. And we want to invite everyone into rest, but also into the work and ongoing fervour and labour of Christian humanism and of the understory that we all contribute to and receive from. Thank you.
