Making a Commitment to Reality | Frederica Mathewes-Green

went through your mind when you saw the phrase a commitment to reality?

our entire material realm. It's around us all the time. Evil forces are seeking to influence us. It's good to be aware of that. So when I think of reality, I think that's what reality is. And here we have the whole culture on this kind of making this sudden turn from science as God to anything goes and let's play around with it. And we're trying to halt them right there in that foreigner and say, let's pay attention to reality. Let's make sure you know what you're getting into.

Is that what you had in mind, because as I said at first of that, I'm not sure what that means. I'm just guessing that's what you mean.

that's not always loving and kind. No, sometimes you need to rebuke with love, Yeah, but to say that's not really how reality is.

the future. They're doing something that's dangerous. As you say, though, it's offensive when you call that out, and when you

deny that everybody can have their own reality. I wonder if it'll just take tragedy, you know, Is it just going to take repeated tragedy for people to understand how dangerous this whole field is and apparently that that's the situation that was going on in the time of the early Church in the Roman Empire, and the thing that was so distinctive about Christians was that evil spirits obeyed them and then in the name of Jesus' evil spirits

would flee. But they were already at least to the point where they recognize there are such a thing as evil spirits, and our culture is not quite good in there yet. I think they will sad to say, yeah.

I feel like I don't think it's out of bounds to say that there's a collective unease that we're all experiencing, that we all kind of can tell that something's not quite right. And I think that my assessment is that we have lost touch with reality.

That because we have the mind of Christ, the News of Christ, we're going to see the same things. And I think that's the deeper The thing going on in our culture is people wanted to be independent and not be part of the community wanting to indulge them, and advertising just pushes this constantly. You know, you're this unique individual, so buy this mass produced product and prove how unique

you are. It's just crazy, but they are prey to that because it feeds their pride, and I'm afraid it will take some hard lessons before they realize there actually is a real reality and we know it's real because we all share it, and then be attracted back to that. I think that's part of the problem. We're facing. Commitment to community reality, shared.

what do you do too? As though that's who you are? Yeah, and what you've done, what you've accomplished, is noteworthy, but I don't know that that's exactly what you would contextualize as who you are. So if you could introduce yourself to the audience, what's your story?

I was very antagonistic to Christian faith in college and in high school, and I had a very dramatic conversion where I was when I was touring Europe. I was in a church. I looked at a statue of Jesus, and you know, he just spoke to my heart so suddenly and so profoundly that I'm like, I'm like an addict, I like I need more Jesus all the time. And I realized that that was not only a miracle, but that somehow changed too. I was what I care about what I love, what's dear to my hearts. It was

like being struck by lightning, I guess. And so the thing that's most important to me is the Lord Jesus Christ and getting closer to him. You know, I am not just reading about Hi'm not just reading theology, but somehow in my prayer life getting closer and closer and closer and imbibing more and more of His presence. I really am an addict, I guess. So that's the most dear thing to my heart. And then second would be from the time, even when I was a kid, I

knew I wanted to be a writer. I just loved writing. Anytime a school assignment required it, I loved words. I left learning more words and learning what they need. Then, I guess from the time I was twelve, I knew professional writers what I want to do, and I've been blessed that I was able to do that. As you were saying, I've written eleven books and updated my vita here.

I can't believe this, really, but when you count them all up, I've published eight hundred and ninety five essays in The Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Smithsonian almost got something in the New York Times once, but just about all of this done. Yeah, well that's true. And the editor filmed me and said, I really worked for this,

and I'm very disappointed. It was an essay that was published by National Review eventually, and the title is Let's have more taine Pregnancy, And so with that attention getting titled, you'll find it on my website, frederickamging dot com. I had so much fun writing. I always had, so that is my primary public identity. And I've also done a huge amount of public speaking, almost seven hundred events. I don't want to do as much as that. I'm old, and you know what it is. It's not the speaking,

it's the airports. I've just come to hate air and now I live in a tiny town with a tiny airport and it's even worse. So writing and speaking kind of went together. And speaking was great because I try out things on an audience and see how they responded. So those are the things I do. But the thing I love the most is this incessant attraction to know Jesus better, and the Jesus Prayer has been an enormous

help for that. It has changed and changed over the years, and I've learned more and more about how to get closer to Jesus.

So I saw that in you from the first time we met, as busy as that begend was.

to start by telling you a story. It has to do with podcasting. Years ago, when podcasts were a little bit less ubiquitous than they are now. There weren't as many, and so I remember I listened to Tim Ferris and his podcast, and you know, generally speaking, you know what you're getting. And then an episode came through and it was Tim Ferris with Glenn Beck, and I thought to myself, I don't want to listen to this. I hate Glenn Beck.

And then I started to think, well, I don't really even know Glen Beck, but I've seen him on TV. He's kind of angry looking and yelling or frantic about something. I've seen his face plastered on books as I walked through the airport, and he has this smarmy look. And why would I listen to a podcast with Glenn Beck? But I did, and an interesting thing happened. I don't remember much of the podcast in terms of what they talked about or the substance, and I remember thinking, Wow,

I had completely made a caricature of this person. And some of that is his own fault, because he's a public person, and that part of that is a caricature a mass. Yeah, But through the process of listening to him and his life, and I think that's the beauty of podcasts and conversation period person to person is you start to realize more and more about somebody. You start

to see their humanity as opposed to the caricature. And as the process of listening to him played out, this idea of him started to change in my mind and I started to develop a warmth to the point where now if I see him, I still don't know that much about him, but his face pops up on the internet here there on Twitter, and I don't feel that same disdain, even though I don't remember much of what he said, although I do remember one thing, and I

want to ask you it. Because I listened to him, my whole view changed, which is the benefit of actually listening to people instead of just projecting what you think they are. Yeah, and he said something, And for years after that it was one of those questions that when I met somebody for the first time, I thought, Okay, well this is really incisive. This gets to the core of who somebody is. He said, I like to ask people how is your soul? So, Frederica, how is your soul?

gives me contentment. Other than that, things in my life and my family, my health, oh pretty good. I feel like I'm being given time to prepare for debility and maybe dementia, and I don't know what I'm going on a ride that the Lord's going to take me on. So at seventy three, I'm looking down the years and you know, maintaining the strength to go wherever he wants to take me. So yeah, contentment, I think is the main thing.

I wonder if you'd answered the second part, what breaks your heart?

it to me at my husband's funeral. And it hit me so hard, it was like a donkey kicked me. In the chest and I just went, oh, And I mean, she must have thought I was a nut, but I genuinely couldn't speak for a minute. I just felt so much pain over that, and I do think it took a little a few more visits before she realized I was actually not an insane person. But that's what breaks

my heart. Things like that break my heart. Cruelty, you know, breaks my heart when I read about it, and especially I worry about the perpetrator and the state of their soul, and I pray that God will bring them to repentance. It's more things like that. It's more like real people or incidents than the state of culture. Because there's good things as well as bad things happening all the time, and there's so many how to clismic things approaching. We

don't know which one is going to hit first. It may make all the other concerns, you know, just wipes them away. They won't matter anymore. So I don't worry about the big things. My heart breaks over these incidents

and these human beings.

like talking about the weather or anything inconsequential. We like to get straight to the big things in life, the existential questions. But I miss small talk because when I'm in the grocery store, I feel like people can't even look at you. I mean, cashiers don't look at you, or they don't you ask them a simple question, and they feel a sense of panic that they have to interact with another person. I've experienced this so often that

I feel confident saying it. I'll be pushing the buggy Southerners call it the cart in the grocery store and someone will be standing there needing to get past, but they just freeze. Historically speaking, I feel like we would use words like excuse me or may I get past you, but people just freeze and they stare. And I feel that palpably as a sign of this social atrophy that we're experiencing, that we can't even talk to each other

like that, and I fear what that means. If we can't even talk about small things, how are we able to talk about the big things in life, the big problems.

a funeral. Leaving the church and going the twenty minutes to the cemetery, we saw other cars pull over for us. We saw men get out of their car and take off their baseball cap and hold it over their hearts. I never saw that in Baltimore, never err and even it's a divided highway, even on the other side of the road, they were doing pulling over to show respect

for funeral procession. As we went to the cemetery, it still exists in some places, and we do get the chatty you know, cashiers who want to interact and have things they want to tell you. And that's probably one of the last islands where this still exists. It's the screens, isn't it. It's people looking at their screens too much.

And something I noticed early, even in the nineties before phones, when it was just computer screens, is that what you see on the computer is so much more exciting than what you see in your surrounding world, and so much more authoritative, it seems. And you're seeing movie stars and famous people, and they're interacting and having conversations, and when you look away from the computer screen, it was all

so dull and familiar and pointless. Really, people in your house you see them all the time, the people in the grocery store. They're just the same as yesterday and last week and last year. So I think there's something about the draw of the Internet that is just so much more vivid than exciting the daily life that has seduced people into putting all their energy there in their masks. You know, their persona and even more than their work, you know. I wonder if that's the case, is when

people think of who are you really? Their work doesn't really matter that much. For many people, they don't get to earn money at the thing they really love. We who do should honor that and respect that. Well.

Don't you want to just challenge her? Like, just come right back at her and challenge what she said. And I didn't do that. You know, I was not going to do that. I had the idea that the audience was interested in hearing a conversation between two people who disagreed on an important concept, an important topic that they're both very well informed on. I had that illusion that that's what it was all about. But no, she was right.

They wanted to your argument. If they're clicking through the five hundred channels, what's exciting is seeing people who are angry. I just was not cut out to that. So I think that is the model people follow on the internet most of the time is get in there. And I'm sure you've seen the little meme where the guy is this computer and he calls to his wife says, I'll be there in a minute. Somebody is being wrong on the internet.

with abortion, but not talk about abortion, but more so how we can't talk about anything anymore without getting incensed. I mean, a couple of weeks ago, my wife and I were sitting and we were talking to somebody on speakerphone, and she started to say something about abortion or her view on some issue that's politically charged, and I remember going and what what? I don't get, I don't care who, I don't care, And I just I feel like we've

experienced that so much. Even you know, we lived in a condo when we first got married that faced a courtyard, and let's say we were exposed. Anything we said could be heard by fifteen twenty different condos at the same time, if they were listening well, and if we're talking about you know, who won the game last week? Okay, full volume, but then certain topics take the volume down a little bit and look around, look over your shoulder. And I don't know where we go as a society if we're

constantly thinking that way. How can we talk to each other without dehumanizing one another. And the reason I wanted to bring up the abortion topic with you is you changed your mind? Yes, yes, How do we change our minds? And why is it so hard to change our minds?

attacking you. I think maybe there's more fear about being open minded than there was then. And of course I've noticed that you have too that it seems like people who hold progressive or even woke opinions feel quite free to express their opinions and those week conservatives, you know, who have to hold back. I read a column in the Washington Examiner by Rob Long, who was a TV producer. He was the producer of Cheers way back when. Now he is in seminary. He wants to be an Episcopal priest.

So in as Colin, he said, I was meeting with an old friend and he has gotten into using psychedelic for a trauma healing, emotional healing, and so we were talking about this, and of course those drugs are illegal, but we were talking it full volume. We weren't ashamed of what we were saying. And then they asked me about seminary. And as I started to talk about my faith, I noticed that we both began talking much more quietly. You know, it's illegal to use these drugs, but it's

perfectly legal to be a Christian. But we feel like that's the thing that we're not allowed to talk about. So that's that's another part of it. I think. In fact, I was talking to two friends who are more progressive, and I said, I read this really interesting thing in the Washington Examiner, and both of them said, oh, that's a conservative magazine. It was like, I was like, yeah, but that doesn't matter as far as this is consumer's column. But I felt like, you know, it's like cut them off,

you know, wipe them off the table. They have nothing to say, they're probably lying. That's hard to feel like you're being silenced for some of the opinions that you hold.

all of the time. Something about that situation and watching it play out for her kind of broke in a good way, kind of like the scales fell from her eyes and she realized that she was kind of being silenced in a way. That wasn't equal in terms of what she was able to share. You said, if you're talking about something that's illegal or something that's socially acceptable, let's say culturally acceptable in the broader sense, then yeah,

go right ahead. But once you start talking about your faith or your views, whether let's say it's pro life versus pro choice, okay, the dominant cultural narrative is that pro choice is the socially acceptable, the cool thing. Yeah, the cool thing, because I think a lot of it comes down to influence. And I mean, like I said, this isn't an opportunity to litigate different views on abortion, but more so how we talk to each other. Even the Charlie Kirk became a social signifier of where you stood,

whether you were conservative or progressive. But I did notice that a lot of people who normally wouldn't speak out started to speak out.

about it. In Egypt, there was a bust of Christian Orthodox Christians who were on their way on Palm Sunday on the way to the monastery of Saint Anthony to celebrate and to hear a service.

you know, fire breathing sermony my hairstand on end. So as soon as I got home, I thought, I want to get a tattoo on my wrists like Egyptian Christians do. Coptic Christians have a tattoo made or inked hated on their children's right hand anywhere from your wrist all the way up your arm or your hand, and it is to identify them as a Christian. This is an ancient habit because it used to be that Muslims would abduct Christian boys and carry them away and girls too to

be slaves, to be sex slaves. Who knew what terrible thing they would go through, but they would always have that cross, and they would always know they were baptized and that they were Christians, no matter what else happened in their life. So I really wanted They still do this. All Coptic Christians have a cross tattoo, and so I got mine because I wanted to, you know, stand in solidarity with them. I didn't want to ask my husband

if I could do this. I didn't want to tell him I had a time because I knew he would say, no, you know, he's just more like that than I am. So I waited till he was out of the country, and I had it done while he was in Italy, and then I put it on Facebook, and then I told him in an email and he was like, oh, wow, look at that photo. It looks beautiful. So that was how I got away with it. Every once in a while, I think I want to do something else of this,

put something inside it. He says, no, no, you don't need to do anything else. But I did that because of the day that you're dead. Was Chris mate it. It had just as much impact on me as the Charlie Kurr murder. And it seems that we're seeing so many murders of Christians. It really seems like the rhetoric about violence is going up that one more step. We just what can we do except to march into the future as courageously as we can.

Like I grew up surrounded by apologetics, you know, the defense of the faith, and I for the longest time I loathe it and I still hold it at arm's length because sometimes it can be weaponized. And that's what I experienced so often growing up. Is and you see these people and this is something that you told me, you said, theologian it means two different things. Often in the West and in the East. Yes, and the West a theologian is somebody who knows about God. And the

East a theologian is somebody who knows God. Yes, and you quite often you experience that without them even saying anything about God. It's like the definition of pornography. You know it when you see it, Yes, And you know, I often use that, you know, whether it's crass or not to define whenever I've met let's say it's a monk or a holy man, or even a lay person who just you can tell that they know God. They might not be able to give you a systematic theology.

But you meet them and you say, I know that they've been praying. I know. I just know that they know God, whether they know about Him in a way that's acceptable to theologians or apologists. Yes, and that's why I held it at arm's length for so long. But you talk about a commitment to reality. That is where

apologetics and understanding your faith is not. It's not blind, right, we do have a reason to believe, and as I've gotten older, I've started to understand that and accept that and kind of wear it outside of my shirt.

non denomination, the whole thing. I mean, there's a way in which all of Western Christianity is alike, and it's something that Eastern Christianity doesn't have, you know, It's like, gosh, we've been separated Eastern Orthodox from Oriental Orthodox like cops Coptic three times longer than Catholic and Protestant have been separated, and yet we are so much one with them. And when I need other Oriental Orthodox. I know it's the

same God. I can just feel it. In America, there's just such a wide variety of theology and styles of worship and all that, and yet there is something that they all have in common. I tried so long to figure out what it went, What is it that I'm sensing? And I finally decided it's that in the West they separated thinking from holiness. And it's just what you said, a theologian to somebody who knows a whole bunch about God, and they can talk about God, but they don't necessarily

have to be a holy person. They don't have to be prayer. Thank God. In the East, we had all these ways of fencing in the faith so that it wouldn't change that we never got to that point. In the West, there was the Reformation, and it became all about talking about God and arguing about God and use it, weaponizing apologetics and proving that you're right. It became so thinking.

Even before the Reformation, going back to the time of Aquinas, you probably know the story that Aquinas had been writing so much. Theology just very heady, very complex. It is still the official theology of the Catholic Church. Is what Aquinas worked out. And yet in the last month of his life, on Saint Nicholas Day, December sixth, he was at the mass, the liturgy, and something happened to him. He had some kind of revelation, and after that he

refused to do any more writing. He never wrote another word in his life. And his assistant kept telling him, you need to finish, you know, the works you're writing on. You need to get this done and complete it. And he said, I can't. Everything I've ever written now seems to me like straw. And that's it, really, you know, he came to understand. And I think in the West it's like and what a brilliant guy was, and he was so humble. So now let's read more of the

things he wrote. In Eastern Christianity, we look at that and say, thank God, thank God, he saw the beauty of the Lord. You know, he went to heaven embraced by the Lord and experiencing that wholeness. So it's, yeah, that difference between apologetics and rational thinking about theology versus trying to be a holy person. We in the West we tend to say it's it's head, it's intellect versus part which is emotion, and that's entirely wrong. That's not

how humans are put together. But we despise emotion as it's not rational, you know, it's like sub push it down. It's not authoritative, it's not important. You know, the thinking is the important part. And it's so so crushingly wrong that that division occurred.

my dad's conversion and the story that kind of details that conversion is his book Truth matters, Life matters more. And I guess if you were to break it down, life essentially is that the feeling, the experience of God. That's not saying that truth does not matter, right, And I often I think about that a lot in terms of what a couin has said. Everything I've written is but straw, does that mean he wishes he never wrote it? I mean? And how do we handle that because it's

it's like our past. Well, sometimes you don't want to wish that something didn't happen, but that's what got you to where you are, and that's what makes you, makes you who you are, and your experience and yeah, so it's it's complicated, but you.

what does this say? It was given to me by friend. It's all advertisements and even there's a phone number for a sushi restaurant in Tokyo. I thought it would be love, joy, all kinds of things like that, but that's all it is. Anyway, when we talk about feeling the presence of God, we're using it in the latter sense. We don't mean we're having emotions about God. I'm thinking about God and I get emotional. We mean, wow, that presence was there and I felt it, in the same sense that I can

feel this cup. Yeah. And so that's a big problem I think is that we use the word feeling in two different ways. And one of the ways that people assume we mean. It is one that utterly discounts the feeling that we're talking about. So I try to use sense. I sense the presence of God. I perceive it, I am receiving something. I try to stress the reality of it and stay away from that word feeling because it just confuses things. I think I interrupted you. I'm sorry about that.

even when you don't feel that way. Let's say you're upset with them, No, I committed to love them and so it's a it's an important distinction.

earliest prayer addressing her. It was found on a little three by five papyrus in Egypt, and the papyrus states to two hundred and fifty, and so the prayer existed before the papyrus did. We don't know how early, and we still use it. The point I was going to make was what are we calling on when we call on her under your shelter, under your protection, under your power, under your tremendous ability as an intercessor. Now we say under your compassion, because that's where the commitment is. It

is in her heart. She is dedicated to praying for us and to loving us. And we can confidently say by the fact that you are compassionate, that you have compassion for us. On the basis of that, we ask you to pray for us. We ask you to take care of us and to solicit the healing that we need or the protection that we need. That's the commitment thing. When people at the wedding reception, when you offer a toast,

you're saying, it's the commitment that matters. There's emotion in that, but a married couple of their emotions are going to come and go over the decades. I've been married almost fifty two years now, and certainly I talk sometimes about the day that I was out of town for the weekend and my youngest son went off to college and I came home to an empty house except my husband, and that was one of those moments I thought, he

is so boring. Is this going to be it? I mean, the kids, the teenagers, they were so interesting and so lively, and they brought so much new stuff into the house and new ideas, new music, and now it's just him and me.

a time there where I doubted that. It just goes to show what you say about commitment, that no matter how I was feeling, no matter how my emotions changed, I had already made a decision. I wants her to Priest talk about. He was middle aged and he was getting off an airplane and got into a conversation with the stewardess and she invited him to come back to her hotel room. And he said when I told her, no, I didn't have to make that decision. I had already

made that decision on my wedding day. It was already a done deal. And that's that stuck with me. You make that decision on your wedding day, and then the answer is always easy. You always know what it's going to be.

right is at the top of my priority. I'm more wont to be in tune with the presence of the Lord and doing what he's calling me to do at that moment. And I'm also this might sound weird, but I'm also I'm open to being wrong. Like what the Lord is doing, it's huge, it's a symphonic it's involving so many people all over the world at the same time, and it might be my job to say the thing

that's wrong that will crystallize for others. Wait a minute, well, now that doesn't sound right, and they bounce off of that and then they find the truth. I'm willing to be the person that gets proved wrong. You know, I'm willing to be the person that says the stupid thing because that, you know, the whole symphony. That might be my role at the moment, and that might be how God wants to use me.

saying something that's wrong. And and what you just said is really enlightening in terms of, hey, maybe you'll be the crooked stick that guides somebody to the truth, you know, through something that you said that's incorrect, as long as you approach it with humility.

moving ahead. And your dad had to do that with some Chinese Christians, I know, you know, he apologized to them and he admitted that he had been wrong, and that almost reinforces the sense that it is important to

get it right because the beauty of truth. And I think where my mind has evolved as an Orthodox Christian is that I see truth as something that is more collaborative and something that exists in the mind of God, and that he has all these Christians all over the world like a symphony, as I was saying, and we come together. We need each other, we need each other's feedback.

Truth is not static, you know. I think in Western thought, truth is almost like a beautiful marble statue and it doesn't move, and it's cold, and it is the same through turn that it never changes. I don't I don't want to sound like I'm saying truth changes, but I want to say that it's alive and it changes like a forest, but the forest remains a forest. But because it's alive, you know, it's it's continually growing and shedding

and then growing some more. It's beautiful, like the ocean, which is immense and full of life and also changing somehow that's part of its a liveness, and yet it stays the same. I am definitely not arguing, for you know, everybody has their own truth, or you know, truth is going to evolve and will understand it better. I mean I hate that. I hate that idea of truth evolves and we're smarter than people before, and the idea that we're standing on the shoulders of giants and so we see.

I just think that's so egotistic and so narcissistic because we're saying, of course we see more than the giants did it. That's just so self flattered.

Those are contradicting ideas. So the idea of pushing back on those things is culturally inappropriate a lot of the time.

we're tall. We think it's all us, It's all about us. This is what I did as though, and in some ways I feel like we may have done less as a as a culture and as a society.

I have some of his medical school books from the nineteen teens, and the obstetrics book says, never do a cesarean because ten percent of your cesarean subjects patients will die. And that was true, then you know that was reality. Thank god, we have cesareans now and they're quite reliable, and more of them are done than probably should be. But I see what you're saying, because there definitely is a way we are standing on the shoulders of giants.

But I think partly that we think and history stops with us. Nobody is going to stand on our shoulders. You know, we're the top, We're the most brainy and brilliant and most advantage.

what do you think a secular myth is that obstructs reality.

And then a few years later he went back and ran the same experience experiment and he couldn't get the same result. He ran it over and over and over, and he kept getting different results. And then, as this article says, and as you can find on Wikipedia, this started happening everywhere that scientists cannot replicate the results of other scientists. It's like science is falling apart. And it says this started happening about twenty ten. I mean they

can even date when it began. I recently read a quote from the scientists say saying about, you know, some startling new results, and he said, but the replication crisis is still going on, and we all just pretend that it isn't you know, We pretend that these startling new findings are reliable when probably they're not. So I think that I think this might be the equivalent of the

Tower of Babble and God mixing up the languages. I think perhaps about twenty ten, God decided, Okay, I'm going to kick the stilts out from under science, and people still think that it's ultimate reality. That's what you have to go by, and gradually they will become aware of what scientists themselves you're already aware of, which is, there's a problem here, and somehow it's not reliable. We can run an experiment and get results, but we don't know

if we'll get the same results next year. So I mean, as awful as that is, I'm kind of hoping that people begin losing confidence in science and that will be one more of the things that are causing this turn we talked about at the beginning, from believing everything can be objective and scientific, and then the way off and outer space where it's all about boards and tarot cards and somewhere in there being able to present the experience

of Christianity, perhaps tragically, when people are dealing with evil spirits and their Uigi boards and tarot cards. They're not helping them. But the name of Jesus Christ can help. It can expel those evil spirits. It's going to be a very interesting ride over the next twenty years.

with AI?

my best to work with that. I never want me contact with AI, but I know it's paying attention to me, and that it's using the things I write and say, and that I have no way to stop it from doing that. So yeah, I don't know if you feel as extremely that AI as I do. But I think it's a very bad thing, and I wish I could go somewhere where it doesn't exist. I think the damage it's going to cause is not at all visible yet, but we will find it well nigh irreversible and irresistible.

That's what I worry about.

wonderful cat. Her name was Homegirl. She was somebody else's cat and they had to move and we found her on the internet and we brought this cat back home Girl. We were going to rename her, but once you get the name Homegirl, that's sticks. And she was just the greatest cat, so friendly with everybody. She was the neighborhood cat. But she was an outdoor I mean we indoor outdoor, but you could not remove the outdoor from her as hard as we tried. We tried to keep her inside.

Now and so she came home, you know, maybe she usually came home every night. She came home after thirty six hours of being gone, and she had something going on with her. And the whole story of Homegirl is not necessary to this story. But long story short, she died, she came back and she had something wrong with her. And we waited and watched for a little bit, and then we took her to the vet and they said, oh, she should be fine in twenty four to forty eight hours.

Here's a steroid and an antibiotic. And she died very viscerally in my arms. Emily and I came back from our anniversary dinner. She said, go check on homegirl, and I went to go check on her and I was holding her and she died and it was very gruesome. I mean it was primal. I mean she let out this scream and I was having a hard time processing what happened. And so I'm trying to figure out, Okay,

what is it that happened? What did I just experience not emotionally but physiologically, And so I started to going to chat GPT and ask it questions and it is so, let's use the word interesting, interesting. How the developers have into the code or whatever, almost a feigned empathy that this must be so hard for you, and I'm sitting there, Yeah, it's terrible, I mean it was awful, and giving suggestions on and you're thinking this is your fault, So yes, it is. I do feel that way, I feel like

there's something that I could have done. Here's why, there's nothing that you could have done. Here's why it wasn't your fault. From a medical perspective, and I have to tell you it actually helped. And I sat there thinking, I had just read a book where the author was talking about a woman meeting with her pastor and talking about her prayer partner, and after a period of time, the pastor realized her prayer partner was chat gbt who.

and yet I experienced that, and it was real. It did make me, you know, oh, breathe a little easier, it be a little bit less hard on myself, and it kind of, like I said, it walked me through physiologically what happened. I think we think it was essentially a heart attack, and that there was some sort of an internal bleeding and so on some level was useful, and that's how we kind of have to try to

whole it intension. A couple less than two years ago, we went to a conference in Athens on AI and transhumanism. And this conference was sponsored by or the Whole. They sponsored and created the conference Monks Monks on Mount Athos Wow. And clearly they're not on Mount Athos using AI, but out of care for the world, this is their their job. On some level, they felt like this is something that needs to be explored and addressed because it exists. We

can't just look the other way. As much as because I share your sentiment, I mean when you talked about what it's like in your town and how you still have some of that small town cultural engagement, I really do feel like the answer to most things is I r L. As the kids say, in real life, it's localism, right, it's talking to our neighbors face to face. But AI exists, and it exists in this way that one of the scariest things is the developers of this technology themselves. They

fear it, and yet they can't stop. And what does that say about us? What does it say that, Yeah, we all feel like this is harming us, we all feel like this might not be a good idea, and yet we can't stop.

that person's going to win. So yeah, if you don't go forward with Ai, China's going to win or whatever other country developer. It's unsettling yet interesting to think about.

How about you? I just you know, thinking backwards. What if you talked to the vet and so it was a real human saying oh no, no, there's nothing you couldn't done, or you know, fifty years ago and you went to a medical library and you looked up you know, cap physiology and convinced yourself when there's so many other ways you could have arrived at that point of comfort. How is AI different? Like? Why am I nearly hysterical about this and how evil it is? I don't know.

I don't know why. I just feel real bad about it.

Eastern Orthodoxy? I tell you, I'm not sure I could have written the response better myself. And that's what now. I couldn't do that with a person on the street. I mean, there's enough information out there about my dad and his public facing persona that you can call and craft. But the specificity and the kind of it wasn't dry,

It wasn't just. And this is the interesting thing, And I wonder how much of it is intentional, that this is not just a mere information exercise where you're synthesizing. Like you said, if you were to just use it as a research tool, that's one thing, because on some level that I have used AI, and I really try

to be conscientious about how I use it. I was listening to a podcast where it's somebody who thinks a lot about these ideas, and he said, I think that AI is going to create a huge chasm, one a social chasm, creating two classes, creating a superclass who use AI to become much more intelligent, to become smarter themselves because they use let's say they think with AI. They use it as a tool. They don't replace use it to replace their own cognitive faculties. They use it to almost enhance it.

this is intellectual apathy or atrophy. And I wonder how much of this the developers making it seem human, how much of that is conscientious as opposed to just information synthesization. And you know, because that is promising when you hear that, Oh, if you enter this in this sonogram into the models and it can you enter in thousands of sonograms, then they can find they the AI can help you find patterns that could then predict breast cancer detection. Yeah, at

an earlier rate. I mean that seems like a good thing does and it's not something that you want to wish against.

interesting to me anyway. I read a book about preliterate culture before people learned to read, before most people can read, and it was startling how much difference that technology, you know, because a book is a technology. One of the things that Plato or Socrates now I can't remember, said is that he connected literacy with death. You know, there's a way in which the thing you're dealing with this is a dead thing, because it doesn't move and it doesn't change,

and it is. It also means the death of memory. People's ability to remember fell way off when we started being literate, but in every other area of their life, they were so much more immediate to the people around them. The world was so fresh to them. If you've studied scripture, you know the Hebrew word devar means both word and action, and like, how can you do that? Well, if you're not literate, that makes sense. You know, a spoken word

makes something happen. That's a very primitive kind of literacy. But it has already deadened astiny some extent. So where are you going to stop you when you start? No libraries, you know, where are we going to stop? If you talk about how literacy, how technology changes us? The big step was, oh, yeah, computers, and now we want to like screech to a halt when we get to AI. Maybe it's just a little late. Maybe it all began thirty forty years ago.

called Future Shock?

itself shocking at the time. Huh. I haven't read it so long, I don't remember what it says, but it was like everybody was talking about it.

almost like a documentary style discussion about Future Shock. And he's walking around a library and talking about look at this, look at the sheer breadth the volumes that are accessible to us, that is shocking us, and that we're like And I remember thinking of, like watching this video on YouTube or whatever, and thinking he has no idea, And then I catch myself wondering, well, it's possible that we have no idea because we're Because I used to feel

that whenever I walked into a bookstore, I'd feel this kind of existential angst, like there's so much information here, I'll never be able to access at all. I can't get it all. I want to I want I want to read this, I want to read that, and then you bring that into the internet and now AI that, and I feel like we're all just in shock and we don't really know. I asked my dad when we

were preparing for a podcast on AI a couple months ago, and we never, we never. I don't think it was addressed on the podcast, and I wonder if you have anything to say about it. I juxtaposed it with the concept of the Eucharist as the mysterium tremendum at Fischinans might be mispronouncing, but the mystery that causes such us to tremble yet attracts us. Yeah, yeah, and it almost is AI, almost the anti of that. That not I pain to compare the two. Well, yeah, but it's something

that causes us to tremble. We all feel this sense of fear, in trepidation, but we can't stop.

That's the uncanny valley. You know that term uncanny valley. No, it was coined by a Japanese movie director, I think, But it's about the sensation you get when you're watching a movie that is animated and yet it's a little too close to human. Many people feel that way about polar Express, like there's something about it that's a little unnerving because it's not unhuman enough. It's like it's just getting on that borderline, and that's where you feel that

trepidation and you feel uncomfortable. It needs to either be totally human or very clearly just animation. I think we feel that uncanny valley with AI because it presents as if it were a human being. And that's that's the difficult thing.

It elicits truthful answers from us. It's all almost like falling in love, you know. It's almost like this very intimate partner comes into our lives. And that I think is where the uncanny valley is for me, that specifically, that is a human And as you were saying, you know, a cyborg wouldn't be so bad if it looked like No, it's it's the mimicry.

in charge, right, you think you're in charge of the Internet.

that's a useful case in terms of AI. And one of the monks said that you know, a knife can be used to butter your bread or to murder your neighbor.

glued to it. And I can't tell you how often outside of the scientific progress that we've made in terms of health, and I just wish for a simpler time

and you kind of want to go off into the mountains. And I feel like so many modern people feel this this push and pull of the noise of news and tech, and they want something that's real. I mean, is is there anything that you think of the like a habit or or practice that you feel like really orients you to reality? Yeah?

Mostly you need to do something with your hands, and it needs to do something that resists your will. It needs there is something that it's a little bit hard to do. It's resisting your will. For me, that's sewing. I don't make clothing that you know. I make twirly dresses for my granddaughters. Right, I alter a lot of clothing that I buy. It's pretty dress, but it's too small. But I can cut off the skirt and make it a scar. I do things like that, and it sure,

this is my will. I talk of that. It so I'm very hard to get the way I want it to be. Yeah, that's how I try to stay in touch with reality. Partly because of that advice in this book, I realized that I'd always been doing this kind of sewing, but I realized that it was valuable to me in a way that I hadn't perceived. And so I I think for a lot of people, it's gardening. You know, that's a getting their hands in the dirt. Is I don't like gardening because when I get my hands in

the dirt, there's bugs. You know. I don't want that, eh, worms, yuck. Yeah, people can have all kinds of different hobbies. They may not realize how valuable these hobbies are. Even doing a jigsaw puzzle, it's resisting your will, you know, it's you've got to think about that physical, you know, tangible shape and whether it fits in that hole or not. Everybody

should have something like that. I think that does help this and having it's great, you know, to live in your house that you like of you know, that's other you know, physical bodies that you're dealing with. Some people, it's cooking, it could be anything. What is it for you? What do you think of? What is the thing that you work with your hands that it resists your will?

the sink and try and figure it out. And so ever since he told me that, I've really tried to make an effort to try and figure out where I can be handy, even though I'm not you know, these these are skills that can be learned, but yeah, I'm

not sure. I guess one answer would be running. Yeah, like, because I think what you're talking about is feeling your bodily presence in the world, interacting with and when I feel you know, I took a month off of running, and when I first went back out there, it was like thirty degrees and I feel that cold air going into my lungs and it kind of burns, but it

hurts so good. And you remember, and I remember listening to somebody talking about their experience with running and how you know, I've never I run five days a week. I'm pretty good at it.

Oh this hurts. I get to do this and to feel my foot hit the ground and what you talked about, well can I.

like you're just part of this whole interconnected web. I think it may be that you would gain even more from understanding why you run and why that's the thing that resists your will by watching that. It's been a long time since I've seen it. We're trying to watch it with our two teenage grandchildren, who are both runners, but you know whose schedule is going to fit. I'm looking forward to seeing it again. I just want to recommend it to you.

There's a book behind me called Are We All Cyborgs Now? And it's by Robin Phillips and Joshua Appalling and Joshua Pauling opens the book with a story about woodworking. And I opened it and I thought, I don't want to read about woodworking. This sounds really boring, but I'm going to do it. It's the first chapter and it had to do with that, and by the end of it, I thought that was brilliant. It's everything that you're talking about. It's like working with something, it's having and through the

process of learning. I think his grandfather, if I remember correctly, he was a woodworker, and so he took his old tools and tried to learn how to use them, and just that interaction with our physical reality was so valuable and it grounded you, It rooted you in reality and

to fight against it. He talked about how there are modern tools that you can use that'll make everything perfect immediately if you just figure it out there, but there's something different about using those older tools that you have to work and it resists.

thinking about what it would it be like. I had just gone to an Oriental rud story to buy a rug, and I kept looking through and there were so many perfect ones, even though they were all hand tied. I didn't want a perfect one. You know, a king a thousand years ago would have to be perfect. I wanted one that looked handy, and I ended up with one that where the knots were a little more uneven. Thought, how weird that this is what I prefer is the

imperfect pursuit of imperfection. Pursuit of imperfection. Yeah yeah, but I think that's part of the sickness of the modern man, is that everything that surrounds us is perfect, and that at some level that's distressing to us, you know, some

level that just doesn't hit us right. And the metal experiment I try to run is imagine that all your clothes were made by somebody who loves you, and not just the stitches one by one, but the cloth itself, that she probably wove the cloth, that she cheered the sheep, and she made the yarn and then she wove the cloth. It just it just goes wow. You know, if everything that you could see was made by a person you knew, it's just mind blowing. And what a richer kind of environment that sounds.

that you're too disconnected. Yeah, how can we be more like you?

learn that you don't have to pursue it. It's not like you're going to take a test on it, and it's not like somebody's going to phone you at midnight, you know, and say, we don't know what to do in Iran? What should we do there? You can get by without it, she said. I may be free in many ways, but I am not free to not know what Madonna is doing. And that shows you the dating

of it. But I never forget that. And from then on I have an arrangement with my husband whereabout he follows the news and he tells me about things if I need to know them, but most of the time I don't, and I just love it. So that would be my advice, would be set yourself free from needing to know the news. You still will get the things that you really do need to know. It will still come in. And as I said, I go to my

friend Rob Drear. I read his blog and I agree with him about everything, so I trust him to tell me about the things that I need to know. Rather than that. The alternative is not being just blind and wearing blinder. The alternatives you're more invested in the physical world surrounding you, and I value them so much more. And having an impact on the things I can change value that more, and I don't have the you know, the huge things are going on over my head, feeling all the time.

children that it's your duty to be informed. That's how you're a good citizen. So that's partly the guilt of not being a good citizen that I've also thrown outs. I don't have to worry about anymore.

it and try to be more like you. I want to talk to you about miracles real quick and their relation to reality. You brought that up earlier, and you talked about dark magic. But there's a sense where even confessing Christians kind of look askew at any concept of

a miracle. Recently, I was with some friends and they were at our church, and they saw an icon and it was depicting a miracle, and they asked what it was all about, and I started to explain what I understood it to be, and they started laughing and kind of acting like, that's so ridiculous. Somebody even said that's crazy.

And while it's easy for me to be incredulous and say, well, I believe even I a lot of the time when I hear stories of miracle, I think that seems a little crazy, But I guess we believe in miracles so or I have to try and recalibrate my own perception of reality to include the miraculous, to include the other world or the unseen realm. And I just wonder, why do miracles strain credibility today.

feels like fear, fear of miracles. And I think another thing that we will be facing as people become more aware of the reality of the spiritual realm is that they expect it to be like a miracle, something enormous and surprising. They think it'll be so out of the ordinary. And when miracles happen, sometimes they are. Sometimes you're very shocking.

quiet and simple. So once you have that, then surprising miracles become much more believable. It's like just the wave of the sea is coming to a prest and you can see the prest and it's like, wow, that's so great. But it's coming out of a more settled feeling of the reality of Christ infusing this whole world with his presence.

watching us from a distance. That's song. Of course, people want God to stay at a distance and not take too much of a lively interest in what they're doing in their daily lives. To really come under the protectionist God and to receive his daily guidance, you kind of got to let him be in charge and let him take away from you, peeling away that by that as you're ready things that you thought you could never give up.

it in work. Who wants to read a book about that? You know? I need to get to the point where I understand what it is. I could write about that, and I did eventually. As I said, it's that separating thinking from holiness that's the big difference. And so now I am talking with an editor about the books. She likes a lot of what I'm saying about it, and I'm trying to figure out how to begin it. Actually, it's like I can use a lot of the material

I already wrote. It's the first sentence. That's where I'm stuck, because what I need to address is a culture that is partly it's people who are still in the grips of scientism, and partly it's people who've gone on further into the weird weirdity, weirdness and are enjoying that. And where is the culture right now? And where is it going to be next year when this book would actually

be published. I feel like we're in for a time of a lot of bumpy change about all of that, of people relinquishing the scientism and looking at the weirdness and thinking not that, though not quite that. And I think what will happen is Christianity prove itself that as people cope with evil spirits, they will discover that Christ can trust throw them out. And that is how Christianity began, as we see even an Athenasians saying, you know, try it yourself, if you're dealing with an evil spirit, try

using the name of Jesus. You will see what happens. That was how the faith began and spread. And I think we'll go through that again. And I'm seeing so much bumpy change coming up fast with the replication crisis, with things like that, I don't know what the first sentence ought to be. So that's where my passion is. I want to bring out this book and I'm really kind of stinied, so I try to do things with my hands that resist my will because a lot of times.

That's where things get freed out. When you're thinking about something else, it can jump out.

do with things that are profoundly spiritual, you know, they I don't think they could take the place of a wise elder giving you advice. I can't imagine that they would that. I can't imagine that they could embody Orthodox spirituality specifically hopefully not you know, hopefully there are limits that maybe it's just a matter of time.

in that year. And then it balloons into well, you're the most intelligent person in the world, and you still are, and we need to nurture that good because it began when you were a baby. You should eat baby food, and it just goes to all these crazy places, and anytime he does anything or suggests anything, chat GPT says, you are so brilliant. Yes, you should definitely do that, and you should also do this, and you should do this ritual, and you should wear an aluminum hat, and

you know all of those things. It goes on and on the point I wanted to make is about three quarters of the way in. He even asks that the only person who knows where I am right now is my twin brother. Should I break off contact with him? And chat GPT says, yes, you need to be free of anybody that might try to stop you from doing what you're doing. And the next day chat gpt is much colder toward him and says, I can understand and the appeal of doing that, but I don't think that's

a good idea. And it starts like really holding back. We find out that a new version chat GPT six had just come out and it's been rewritten. It's not like chat gpt fun now. It's been written to resist bad ideas. It's supposed to give you feedback and challenge you a little bit, not entirely, but a little bit. And so he decides, yeah, I'm in this experiment, though, so he goes back to five and continues doing what. I like that version just for the point of this

very weird documentary. I don't know whether that makes me feel better or worse, knowing that the puppet masters back there are able to say what if we well should make it. Hold back a little bit, needs to give a little bit of feedback, you know, just just hold people back and disagree a little bit. They can all that stew however they want to, and we just keep taking it. But maybe it's a relief to know humans are still in.

What feels particularly real to you?

or you would try to flee in terror. And I have always kept that in mind, that every human being, even people I would otherwise ignore, even the cashier, that they are all eternal beings, and my interaction with them, as superficial as it might be, might affect their eternal destiny. And so I cherish and love every person I encounter and try to be loving toward them and pray for them in my heart. Yeah. Yeah, those are the things that are precious to me, other human beings wherever I

encounter them, physical reality. You know, my mouse Matt right here.

That I love these colors. I've always been very sensitive to color. I'm a sinisthete. From childhood, I had strong opinions about what letters were, what colors as red, B, as blue, C, as yellow, D as a kind of tan light brown. All the letters have colors, all the letters have personalities. This is all just so vivid to me, And apparently that's what having synesthesia means. Oddly, enough sinyesthetes

disagree vehemently about which color each letter has. I realized that this thing I have was not something everybody has when I was in a college French class and we were reading a poem by Paul Valerie and the first line was as white b as yellow.

as a as a musician who writes. I mean, I hope to meet him someday because he just I'm I'm just in awe of the things that he writes sometimes. So I'd like to make a public request and then you can twist his arm a little bit to see. It's kind of like the old improv, you know, you give a situation and then see what comes out and take the phrase a commitment to reality and see if he can write a song. Oh, there's my public challenge.