Wholeness in Fractures: Jonathan Foster Discusses Love, Grief, and Theopoetics

Psalm 126, verses 4 through 6 in the New American Standard Bible. Restore our fortunes, Lord, as the streams in the south, those who sow in tears shall harvest with joyful shouting. One who goes here and there, weeping, carrying his bag of seed, shall indeed come again with a shout of joy, bringing his sheaves with him.

This psalm is said to be a psalm of thanksgiving after the people of Israel kind of returned from captivity. This is in context to kind of remembering their sorrows in the midst of rejoicing, seen for their new freedom. They sing the verses above. Jonathan Foster.

What do you think the church today could learn about valuing and appreciating sadness? Like what they're doing here? Yeah. When I think of sadness, I think of, like, this weight, this thing that. A cloak, something heavy, and that the weight of that thing causes me and maybe all of us to go in a particular direction. Because when you have a weight on you, you know, your options are just a little bit more limited. You don't move as freely with the weight. And this is.

That's troubling in one sense, but another sense, it's kind of freeing and. Or it may just keep you focused. Like, that weight kind of keeps you down and focused and going in a particular direction and maybe causes you to be more aware of where you're at and where you're going and more deliberate.

And so, as you read that, I was just thinking about, you know, I do think it's important for faith communities to remember and to be present to the sadness and to the weight of, you know, the gravitas of the thing that's happened or the event or whatever they've been through. And in a sense, it kind of keeps them grounded, that gravity and ground. I'm. I'm just thinking in those kinds of terms and probably really important. Jesus said, what do you say? Blessed are those who mourn. So I think.

I think we're. I think we're on the right track there. Yeah. Oh, man. Good stuff. Good stuff. I been getting more into Daoism and being a little bit more open about it, and that's what you bring up is kind of reminiscent of that. It just kind of the sadness and the joy both being a good thing. You know, a lot of times I think of the joy of the Lord. That means we shouldn't be sad as Christians, and. Right. Verses like this remind me that that's not the case. That's right. Hey, everybody.

Welcome to the Whole Church Podcast, possibly your favorite church unity podcast. I am here. I am Joshua Noel. I'm in the middle of moving and a lot of other stuff, so I might seem discombobulated and you might be like, oh, why is this guy here again? Well, I'm here because you need someone to hype up. Hype up.

Our guest today, the most holy Jonathan Foster, author of Indigo the Color of Grief, as well as, like, he had a lot more credentials than I knew, like, husband, father, and he has a doctorate in mnematic theology. And I believe you also teach open and relational theology with some of the. The ORT stuff or are just involved with the ORT stuff in general. Always have a hard time.

I hear ort, and I'm like, that stands for open and relational theology, but it sounds like Ord, and I know it's associated with Dr. Ord, and I'm like, man, that's a. It's a nice branding move by Tom, actually. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This good, good word sounds and one who appreciates word sounds. We already have the most holy, but now we're here with the mostest holy, the one for whom both the words most in holy were invented. The greatest co host of all time, TJ Tiberius 1 Blackwell. How's it going?

Welcome to your show. Thanks. Yeah, yeah. Oh, and we're here today to talk about. I already mentioned Jonathan Foster in his book Indigo the Color of Grief. We're here to talk about that book. I usually don't like doing episodes where I'm like, hey, I could just point you guys to like, Rethinking Faith because Josh Patterson is a better podcast host and listen to that episode, but this is like a selfish one. I so desperately wanted to talk to the author because this book impacted me and.

Yeah, so we're making this happen not because we think we could do a better job than Josh Patterson. Listen to that podcast. You should. But this is more selfishly because I wanted to talk to Jonathan, so that's why we're here. And while you're here, you should also check out the Onazam Ministries podcast website. The link is below for shows that we are affiliated with and. And if you're already listening, if you're listening on YouTube, hit like, hit subscribe. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, with all that in mind, guys, I. I don't know if. If Jonathan knows the Most Holy knows, but I. I have a favorite form of unity. And we like to start every show off with a sacrament of. Of silliness where we ask a silly question and TJ and I answer it first. I really thought this was going to be next week's silly question, just to be transparent with everybody. I thought I had more time to think about this, because I'm not sure what the answer is. This is a difficult question.

What is the best animated afterlife? You know, Mount Olympic from Hercules Heaven and Disenchanted, which fantastic series. You know, I think Robot Hell and Futurama deserves a shout out. I don't know the real answer. I'm gonna go to the one that I most want to visit, and it's purely based on color scheme. And I know that's a dumb reason to pick something, but I'm picking it anyway. Coco's afterlife. Fantastic. It just. Aesthetically, it's so appealing.

I mean, the idea of, like, being forever dead is terrifying, but colors are cool, so I could take a little bit of risk to enjoy the color palette there, I think. Tj, what about you? What's the. What's the best animated afterlife? I was just gonna go with All Dogs Go to Heaven because it's pretty much just heaven and there's a lot of dogs there. That does sound like a better heaven. All of them, actually. But is it. Is it the, like, the. The guy in charge of hell in that. That movie also a dog?

There was an angel once. Oh, okay. He can't go to. Checks out. That's not from, like, deep Christian lore for our All Dogs Go to Heaven franchise theological movie. Yeah. Yeah. All right, Jonathan, what's the best animated afterlife? Man, those are a couple of good options you gave. So as you're asking, I'm thinking the first thing that came to mind. I don't think it's the best animated afterlife, but it's the first one that came to mind is soul. And partly because I almost said that, too.

Yeah. Partly because the music's so good. It's a. It's an eclectic. Probably Mash. I haven't seen it in a couple years, but it's a mashup, probably of some different mythological, religious kind of tones. But do you know a short I just thought of. And this is a. Takes the discussion a little bit more serious, but there's a short on. I don't know which one it is. I think it might be Netflix called if I don't see you, I'll just know I love you, or something like that.

And it's 10 or 15 minutes long. It's animated, and it's about parents losing their kid. And so I resonated with that. But if anyone listening is grieving, going through something, I highly recommend that. So it's not technically about like a heaven, but it is after the loss of a child. And so I guess in a sense it is after life. But that's a thought. Yeah, yeah. I did also think about soul. Soul is great.

Yeah. Also, I'm the main reason I didn't do it because I know how hard cheating this would be. But the Good Place uses a lot of CGI when you go to the afterlife there. I mean, that's kind of animated. Oh, yeah. But if it did, that's a good place for your. That's where you should go for your afterlife. Theology or philosophy or both. It's a good show. Yeah, yeah. So one thing we found that helps in Gender Christian unity is to hear one another's story.

Jonathan Foster, could you briefly share with us your faith journey and maybe tell us some about the faith community you find yourself in now? Sure, absolutely. Well, my faith journey, like, I can't even remember a time when my life was not connected somehow with some Christian influenced kind of faith. I grew up in a pastor's home. Both granddads were pastors. You know, the whole mimetic emphasis and influence was very strong in our household.

And two words that come to mind growing up were love and legalism. So there was a lot of legalism, but thankfully there was a lot of love.

And later in my life, that love kind of served to Trojan Horse the legalism, kind of broke it from the inside out, which I'm really thankful for because a lot of the stuff I was, you know, the church was telling me the way I was supposed to lead as a pastor or the way I was supposed to think as a theologian wasn't really lining up with probably my best thoughts about love.

And so at some point along the journey there, I decided I needed to go with my best thoughts about love rather than necessarily what the tradition says. So the faith journey, yeah, just kind of evolved. I've been a church planter. I was asked to leave a denomination over matters LGBTQ because I had changed my posture officially on that. And, yeah, we'll talk a little bit in the book. We lost a daughter in 2015. We didn't lose her necessarily. I mean, she died.

And that really shaped and influenced. I mean, there is no corner of my life that's not been touched by grief and loss. And at the same time, there is no corner of my life that's not been touched by beauty and life. And they're all kind of entangled and wrapped up together. And then, yeah, finished up a dissertation with my good friend, Dr. Thomas J. Ordinary, who is the one who coined open relational theology, and I've been working with him a lot the last few years.

And so the last part of your question, what's your faith community now? So my faith community has changed quite a bit. I don't really have a local church when we're in town here in Kansas City. We live outside of Kansas City and lathe of Kansas, sometimes we go to my friend Tim Suttle's church, Redemption. But other than that, the last couple years have been really interesting. Haven't really had a Sunday. It's been kind of a nice sabbatical.

I don't know if that'll continue forever, but it's been good for now, and it's kind of a nice, weird, awkward season. With respect to the faith community part. Yeah, right. I. Yeah, I want to ask you one thing about something you said, but just with the faith community, like, we even reworded that question a little bit because of how interesting that's become for some of us.

You know, I feel like, especially in our inner circle here with TJ and I, you know, I work most Sundays, so, like, I attend a Lutheran church when I can. I'm an online member of a Lutheran church. You know, I kind of made that switch a couple years ago, and I feel at home there. The sacraments, the high liturgical stuff, and the beliefs, I'm, like, close enough to. I'm like, I feel good.

But, like, when I really think of, like, when I use the term community, you know, I have really specific people in mind, and I don't really have a name for that. You know, it's like, you mostly people I podcast with, you know, tj, Christian, Ashley, Brandon Knight. Ryan does even, you know, I don't podcast with him as much. I listen to him every week on Skipping Church and his Thor podcast.

And we text, and it's like my community is more like the people who are closest to me that I can talk about faith stuff with. Like, I wouldn't go up to a random person on a Sunday and start talking to him about, like, hey, man, I'm not sure I feel this God thing this week, but I do know if I'm having one of those weeks, I absolutely would text Ryan, you know, like, without a doubt. Like, I'm like, Ryan, I just, I'm not feeling God this week.

And we'd have a meaningful, good conversation that, I don't know, I could have at church. So, yeah, complicated question. It is. Did you want to respond to that part before I Asked my other question. Well, I would just agree with you. There's been a lot. There's been so much change over the last several years.

I think probably it feels like in my life, I'm obviously a little bit older than you guys, but the change really started to speed up on the advent of heavy social media use and then picked up even more speed with Trump's first presidency and the polarization and now just the poly crisis, what some theologians and thinkers are calling the day and age we live in with this convergence of all these different crises. Yeah, it's pretty wild and kind of undomesticated.

So lots of us, because of that, and our views have shifted, our theological circles have shifted and, and I have lots of friends. I thought we were close, but turns out not so much. And so you got to kind of find your family, your community wherever you can. So I'm doing the same thing you guys are doing, just trying to find it online with other thinkers and writers and podcasters and in person as much as I can. Yeah, sometimes it's just about sanity because, you know, we mentioned Tom Ordolot.

I've disagreed with him a good bit on podcasts, but it's like one of the few people that I'm like, I feel connected with, you know, Whereas like people I do agree with, I'm also a lot of times I'm like, yeah, I don't, I don't connect with you. Interesting. Real quick, before I let TJ have his show back, you mentioned changing your views on LGBTQ stuff and being asked to leave a church because of that officially.

You just explained a little bit on like where you, your, your views were and where they are now and how did the church go about that? Were they like, you bad leave or was it a little bit more nuanced than that? Yeah, so I came from a pretty, I came from the Church of the Nazarenes, pretty evangelical, ish, standard kind of Bible believing church. You know, their idea all along.

And they're Wesleyan, so in theory they're supposed to be a little bit more open, but the way it's just played out over the last decade in particular, it's not been that way at all. And so it's not so much that I was ever anti gay, it's just as my thoughts really shifted about all kinds of things, it just necessarily wound up coloring my ideas of, oh, wait, what do I think about the queer community and what does the Bible say?

And turns out, as you guys probably know, there's four, maybe six depending on how you count them, passages out of 31,000 verses in the whole sacred text that even specifically deal with it. And when you look at what Jesus says about the eunuch, he's pretty gracious. So, yeah, I started changing my posture. I started preaching different, thinking different. Plus, I was meeting lots of young people and older people too, but mostly young people who were dealing with that kind of stuff.

And so eventually, long story short, the denomination stepped in and despite the fact that I was a third generation Nazarene pastor in good standing, was asked to surrender my credentials. And so that was a watershed moment for us. And as I say, sometimes, well, I mean, I really didn't have any choice, but at some point I had to acquiesce. So it was the hardest easy acquiesce of my life. And we moved on from there.

And it's crazy and absurd, but I'm also really honored and grateful to be a part of that journey. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ironically, when I was asked to step down from, from leadership in a more conservative church, it wasn't even because of LGBTQ stuff. It was literally because I said, instead of saying, wait till you're married to have sex, I said that the level of commitment you choose for someone should also coincide with the level that you are physically interacting.

And there's a lot of biochemistry, science behind what happens in your brain when you are committed to someone or not. And marriage is kind of a made up thing that we did after the Bible, so. So you're. Even when I was conservative, none of that made sense. Yeah, you're a heretic, man. Complete heretic. I'm a bad person. That's what I said. I was one of the guys that said, get him out of there. Yeah, absolutely. That's what happened. Absolutely.

Yeah. Then later I started changing my mind on all kinds of stuff now that I wasn't, you know, shackled to them anyway. Well, that is interesting. That is what happens a lot once you kind of realize, oh, it's oh, I'm now for good or for bad, I can think outside the box. It kind of gives you freedom, freedom, like oxygen. And suddenly you're like breathing all this new. And you realize, oh, there's a lot of other really interesting stuff to explore here. So that's why it is kind of a blessing.

Well, yeah, I definitely, yeah, the church. Should get more people out. It's great. Yeah, probably, probably, probably help everybody. We love church unity. So you've touched on it a little bit, the subject of your book, which is grief.

And before we get specific about it. Would you like to tell us a little bit how you came up with the title Indigo, the Color of Grief and the inspiration behind it? Sure. Well, the inspiration is basically just the reason why I do most everything I've done for the last 10 years, which is to try to figure out what do I think about God and life and love and art and beauty and loss and fatherhood and daughters and. Our girl was killed. She was 20 years old.

She was killed in a car wreck on New Year's Day 2015. So, you know, there's pre New Year's Day 2015 and post New Year's Day 2015 for us. And everything that kind of flowed out of that, everything I've ever said and done since then in some way or another, has been influenced by that event. And so it's interesting.

I had to write a few other books and finish up some degrees and go through a lot of other stuff, say a lot of other words, before I felt compelled to write what I wrote in Indigo, the Color of Grief, which wound up being only. It's only 12,000 words, and it's a bit stream of consciousness.

It's not really technically, because I edited it quite a bit, but it's a bit kind of like the vibe as I'm sitting down and as best as I can, trying to disclose in a poetic way a little bit about her and me and God and again, grief and loss. And so, yeah, I was really honored to do that and really glad I got to do that. I'm not glad I lost my kid, but glad I got to be a part of that. And I think she would have been really honored and pleased with it. And so that was important to me.

But to answer your first question, the name Indigo, I've always just thought that that was an evocative name. When I started to think about the color indigo, you know, it's mysterious. Is it blue? Is it purple? Is it going from dark to light? From light to dark? Depends on how you look at it. And so I just. It kind of stuck in the back of my mind, as sometimes these things do, and I just never really kind of got away from it. And it also makes an appearance in the book, actually twice.

And so for people who are interested, they can look for it a little bit of an Easter egg hunt. They can find it there. But, yeah, I just think it's a word that it evokes a lot of depth and intrigue. And if grief is nothing, if not something that evokes a lot of depth and Intrigue. Yeah, it. It was big for. It stands out a lot to me because as a kid raised in South Carolina, you think that indigo as a plant and a color is going to be a lot more relevant than it ends up being when you're grown.

We spend a good 10 years learning about indigo farming. I didn't know that That's. That's what happens in the Southeast. You learn about that. Yeah, not extensively. Just in. Pretty much every history class you take until you get out of high school, they're gonna mention it. I did not know that. I. I didn't have that experience, but I was also in private school, so I cheated. You also didn't grow up in South Carolina? Yeah, also my.

I was homeschooled through high school, and all those were done through Florida, and I cheated for all of them because they gave me everything, including the quiz, just without the answers. Google was just starting to be a thing. Googled all the quiz answers, memorized them, took the test, didn't need to do the rest of the school. Now I have my college degree, so if they take my high school diploma away, I don't care that much. Look where it got you.

Yeah, you could cheat your way through high school. As long as you get your college diploma before anyone finds out, you're good. This is great. I'd be in a great podcast host today. Oh, man. So Jonathan wanted to kind of get to the point before we get to some of the other stuff, so. What? Weirdly enough, one of the first things that got me interested in your book. Josh Patterson, good friend of mine, good friend of the show.

I'm starting to talk to him about theopoetics, because at first I thought it was just theology through poetry. And I'm like, okay, that's interesting. And then he's like, no, it's like the theology of I don't know. And I'm like, okay, that gets really close to this Daoism, something I've been flirting with. Let me learn more about this. And, like, you know, big theme of Taoism is, like, emptying yourself. And I'm like, that sounds like that's what theopoetics are doing.

Just like, with, like, Christian language to it. And your books are one of the ones that came up. So I want to just kind of ask you, what are theopoetics, and how does that theological posture impact how you navigate the writing that you did in this book?

Yeah, I think you're getting at it. It's in one sense, for me, it's always been Just a combination of those two things. The theo for theology for God and the poetics, which is the art part. So it is, for me, an artful way to talk about who the divine might be. And necessarily then it deviates quite a bit from what Western, historical, traditional Christianity has been, because, unfortunately, it probably hasn't been real artful.

You know, it's just been kind of packaged and systematized in a formulaic ways. You know, you got your Romans road or your four laws or your tulips or your three steps to whatever, and some of those serve a particular purpose. I don't mean to be overly sarcastic towards those, but theopoetics for me just opens up a whole new way of thinking about it. And I think you're right. I think there's an element of it that we would like to say. I'm not really sure. I think of Jack Caputo.

He's really well known for using the word perhaps in front of a lot of his theological statements. When I first started reading him years ago, I really gravitated towards that. The humility of. Of not needing to die on certain dogmatic hills. And then it just leaves space to explore and to allow. I feel like it empowers the reader or the other person to kind of come up with some of their own ideas.

It's not that I don't have some strong convictions and some ideas, but I just am trying to be careful with how I impose that upon others because I think ultimately I really want to empower people and to esteem their agency. Meanwhile, I kind of like art. And art always has tension, has holes in it, at least. Good art and, well, good grief. Grief and loss and death, I mean, fit right into that category because those are, in some senses, those are the biggest existential holes.

So it kind of tends to work for all that. Yeah, yeah. I real quick. The one thing that I knew about indigo, I grew a butterfly garden outside my house here. So one of the big plants for cultivating the kind of ecology that's required for butterflies and stuff is you need some indigoes in there. So it was interesting when I encountered your book, I had already, like, just finished that. Well, not finished that part of my life, but, like, finished the hyper fixation part of that.

And then I saw your book through Josh, and I'm like, indigo? Yeah. That's a thing that I associate with the life of butterflies. Well, that kind of works. Kind of funny. Yeah, that could really work too, in terms of metamorphosis and moving on from caterpillar stage. So there's probably quite a few connections if we wanted to get creative with it. Oh yeah, yeah. And then I want to ask you real quick before TJ takes his show back again, he's going to beat me with a stick by the end of this.

It's fine. That's why we do this via camera. I can tell. No, but you were talking about the humility that comes with theopoetics. And since this is a church unity show, I just felt like this was a good opportunity to be like, do you think there might be less division in the church overall if we took more of that kind of stance? Obviously I still think there's room for some standard theology and like you mentioned having hard stances on some stuff.

But do you think that posture might help us find greater church unity? Oh, for sure. I think without a doubt some of our biggest problems wind up emerging out of our obsession with certainty and certitude and having to be right about things. And meanwhile, life is relational and therefore in flux all the time. Nothing really ever quite stays the same, counterintuitively, even love itself, because love is in relationship, so it's constantly changing and working its way in and out of stuff.

I will say that love itself, so what I think that, I think, and this is like a process influenced open, a relational take. But I think that love itself, the essence of love, never changes, but the experience of love necessarily changes because love is constantly trying to figure out how to be applicable and relevant for each person, each creature, each entity, all the way down to the microscopic world. So anyhow, that's something we can double click and talk about later if we want.

But I think humility is a really big deal. By the way, complete side note, we just came back this weekend from my, my youngest son's his senior football banquet after five and a half years. I mean he's red shirt played four years and then actually had a Covid year. So it's kind of been like six years. And so he won their kind of annual award for like dude who worked the hardest, best character, all that kind of stuff. Super proud of him.

And the coach, when he gave it to him, he cited the word humility multiple times. So now I'm telling you that I'm proud of my kid who's humble. So something is not quite right about. All that yin yang balance thing maybe. There you go, there you go. But even in that football context, here's what I was been thinking is, you know, it's such an overt physical, quasi violent, you know, Military sometimes, which I don't love that part of it. But testosterone driven in that setting.

It's just so fascinating how often humility in kind of a subversive way comes about to be. And he winds up being captain and leader of the team. So if that can happen with football, how much more so could that happen with the church? There's my answer. It's a good answer. Good stuff. So rather than asking a bunch of points questions about the book, we're going to give you five recurring themes or lines that we noticed to let you speak on the importance of each.

And of course, we're going to ask a couple questions about the formatting of the book, which is really interesting and makes it very engaging to read. So the first one that we noticed was love. All right, so you're just gonna talk. Yeah. You're gonna drop these words and I'm gonna give a comment. So how this works. Yep, pretty much. I like it. Yeah. Love, gosh, that's pretty much everything.

I imagine so many things to say, but I guess in the context of this book and the way I think often is, the thing that was so wild to me was our kid died. And I started to say immediately, if there's a time sequence that's quicker than immediate, that's what the word I need to go for. Like, it was like love was present in that whole thing. It wasn't afterwards when I was reflecting upon it. It wasn't as if love showed up afterwards and was surprised and.

Or that love showed up and was, like, incapable of helping. It was just this weird combination of grief, but also the presence of something really deep there. And that has never left. I mean, a lot of stuff is left. A lot of my thoughts about who God is and was left. And I became an atheist in a particular type of God. But I've never had the sense once that love is left in part because when you're a parent, yeah, like, my daughter was gone, but I never stopped loving her.

That peace was always present. So the love thing then necessarily winds up being something that I just started to excavate. And it turns out it has. I mean, I intuited that it was a very robust, important word, an idea, but I didn't really have language for it until after this happened. And Indigo is in one sense. Yeah. It's a theopoetic story about love. Yeah. All right, so where is God?

You mentioned a couple of times in relation to something else you saw, and I can never remember the author's name, but it's Striking. And it almost gives me the same feeling as you mentioned having in the book. Where I kind of want to put it down for a minute and come back later. But where is God? Is something you say a couple of times. Yeah, I think my comment is, yeah, where. Where is God? Where. Where is she? I think she's either everywhere or she's nowhere. Yeah, that's all I gotta say.

That's all you have to say. Beauty is another one that comes up a lot. Beauty became a really important theme. It's always been important to me. My background's in music. And I noticed years ago that stuff that I thought was the most artful, maybe beautiful. And I already kind of said this earlier with respect to holes and tension. But things that I liked to listen to and to dig into the most. Weren't just these normal, like just three chords, all major, happy whole notes.

But they were always full of minor and tension and inharmonic passing tones. And I began to superimpose all of that thinking into my theology. And realized the most beautiful stuff. Isn't necessarily the thing that you can say factually that's black and white, definitively true. First of all, there's very few of those things anyhow. Beauty really lives in the edges and around these really odd places. And it's more curved than straight. And it's more question than answer.

And I kind of think, like Al Whitehead says, beauty is really the trajectory of the world. It's not about morality, although morality plays a role somewhere in the discussion. But that beauty is always doing something. The other thing I'll say about beauty is I was shocked to discover over and over again that beauty is not like the opposite necessarily, of pain. But that somehow beauty and pain are all entangled. And they're two sides of the same coin that I name as love.

And you really, to have one, you wind up having the other. I don't mean that in a prescriptive, deterministic way. I mean that in a more artful, qualitative way. That's kind of the way it works. And so beauty's always got this. Like, if you're going for beauty, it's probably because you've been through some stuff. And that's about all you have left. You don't have certainty, so you want to go for beauty. And that's become a really important theme in my life and certainly in the book.

It's an important theme. Yeah, I kind of feel the same. There's beauty in everything. It's easy to see if you open Your eyes. And it's hard to notice. Fractions is another one which has its own part. Please talk about that. Yeah, thanks for asking. Well, thanks for asking all these questions. I think 4/5 is the name of one of the little chapters, and that's the fraction. You know, I started thinking of our family of five, which would have been my partner and I and our daughter and our two boys.

You know, the five of us, we were whole, and then our daughter's gone, and now we're four fifths.

Forever four fifths. And the fraction piece became extremely important because. Yeah, when you stop and think about it, like, everything is changing all the time in small ways and in big ways. And turns out we're like, really fractions because stuff changes so much.

And then I started thinking about who God might be or what oneness might be and unity might be, and started thinking that for me, unity and oneness in God isn't necessarily like this whole, perfect, complete, static end, but rather is this ever evolving, changing beauty and loss, entropy and creativity, you know, panic and pain and potential and promise, all just, like, wrapped up, bundled together in growth and death and resurrection over and over again.

And evolution is a big piece of that, too. So the fraction thing kind of started to turn on its head, like, oh, there's something really beautiful about this fraction. And we're so obsessed with going for wholeness. That is winning, achieving, dominating, getting the girl, getting the position or getting the guy, whatever the case might be, getting the power. There's something really subversive and poetic about the fraction piece.

And given that we are forever 4/5 in our family, although the boys are now adding girls, and I have a granddaughter now, which is pretty awesome. So, you know, you're adding more to that. But our immediate family is forever 4/5. It's really become kind of poignant and interesting to me. Yeah, we're actually gonna make the subtitles gonna be whole church podcast and then subtitle is a whole of fractions. Something like that. I don't know. I like it. We're working on it. I like it.

Yeah. Whole church podcast. Living in the fractionality. So one thing you do like to say a lot is. Sounds about right. Sounds about right. It sounds about right. I like that a lot. It makes what can be a hard passage to get through, you know, emotionally feel a lot more grounded. So tell us about it. Yeah, a lot of people have commented on that.

So it seems to have hit a positive nerve for a lot of people, I think, you know, in one sense, What I'm trying to do is, like, I'm saying something that's interesting or intriguing to me, and then I'm pausing and I'm kind of letting that thought, that idea sink, and I'm listening to it again in my psyche and my heart, my mind. And then I'm saying to myself, oh, yeah, that sounds about right. Like, that fits that. Like the way it hits my body. You know, sound is vibration, it's energy.

And in some sense, we're all these pieces of energy. And I think there is a way to look at a life of love, certainly in the flavor of Christianity, which is the life that I'm attempting to live. But it's probably true in other religious traditions as well. But there is a way to see all this as, you know, we are all this energy, vibrations, and then love is a vibration itself.

And you live probably the most beautiful life when you tune yourself up to this energy of capital L, love that's infused in the middle of all of it. So when I. I didn't even really realize till later, but sounds about right is a way, also a way to tap into this vibratory way that we're all living. And if what I want to tell the listener is if something doesn't sound right, in a sense it's not hitting your body right, you have every right to question it and to approach it and re.

Approach it until you come up with something that does sound about right. And the last thing I'll say on this is that's probably, for me, about the best I'm ever going to get in terms of whole and healthy theology. I don't know if I'll ever get the definitive stamp of, oh, this is the system for all time and all things, but if I can get to places in my life, yeah, that sounds about right. That's probably a pretty healthy place to get to. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's.

Like I mentioned, I don't always agree with Dr. Ord, but one of the things he said on one of the many podcasts we had him on, he was talking about God and he was like, you know, a lot of people will criticize some of what he does and say, you're just kind of making up things about God. And he's like, you know, I won't even engage that argument a lot of times, because if I can make up a better God than your God, then is your God really God? And I'm like, well, you know, he's got a point.

If God is all good, shouldn't be able to make up a better version of him anyway. So. Well, I've learned with one of those. Things I held onto. Yeah, he's thought through quite a bit of this, so I don't think there are too many arguments that you could throw at him that he hasn't thought through at this point and at least doesn't have a reasonably intelligent answer to. Another approach to that would be also, in a sense, theology. We all make up our thoughts about God.

We might have inherited a lot of it from traditions in the past. And there's a whole bunch of people who want to say, well, because of that, then clearly it's been vetted over centuries. And that could be true, but it also could be true that a bunch of dysfunction has been sewn into those ideas and it's turned into an ideology that not enough people have questioned.

And so we need poets and prophets and preachers and priests and whatever other words, alliteration that start with a P that could work there to be empowered to question those things. So obviously at the end it is a mystery, but there's always stuff you're trying to figure out. Yeah, for sure. But, man, we mentioned earlier we want to get some of the format questions because that was some of the most interesting bits to me in the book.

And I listen to a lot of audiobooks, so I listened to the audiobook first, and then just the way some things resorted, I was like, I bet that that reads different on paper. Yeah. And I got a Kindle for Christmas and then I immediately downloaded it and I'm like, oh, this is quite different on paper. I actually think people should do both because I think the sounds about right line hits better on audiobook. But a lot of the other stuff is much better when you can visualize what's happening.

For example, early on, you talk about a lowercase theology whenever you wrote this book, mostly in all lowercases. How does that idea kind of play a part in your mind and in the formatting that. Yeah, like, how did you come up with lowercase theology? I guess. And I'm sure it's going to tie back to theopoetics, but. Yeah. Yeah. Well, first of all, the listener should note that Josh just said you should both buy the audio and the ebook at the same time. That would be an.

That'd be an author's dream for that to have happen. My wife actually, when she likes a book, most books she will both listen to and read at the same time. Because you write, it hits differently. When I first wrote this, I was definitely writing it with my voice in mind and just how I would sit down in kind of a controlled soft. Like, if you listen to the audio, I. It's not the melody of my. The timbre and the tone of my voice doesn't change a lot. It's just.

It's kind of a way I'm trying to control the out of control ness of what it means to be a grieving parent. And I think that that also plays over into the lowercase stuff. Like, I just didn't want to spend a bunch of extra time dealing with all the, you know, syntax and proper grammar stuff. And there's like, in a way, this stuff is so heavy and deep, it just. It doesn't really matter.

Like, you know, when you're in that kind of pain, nothing else really matters other than just trying to convey the story. So that's playing into it. I love the lowercase idea, which I keep. I need to double check that. You know, John Caputo might have already done that. I don't know. I know that when he read it, he absolutely resonated with that and loved that lowercase. You know, it's not. I mean, uppercase would be shouting. Lowercase is just.

It's just more soft and subtle and spoken and doesn't have to get in your face. And then, yeah, the formatting, then there's lots of white space, as it were, on the page that of course, you don't get when you listen to it. And the white space turned. I didn't really. I didn't really kind of realize I was almost done with it. That. Oh, gosh, yeah. That all that extra space kind of serves as a buffer for the reader to have space.

Like almost metaphorically, but also literally as you're reading it kind of formulate their own opinion and to allow these words to bounce around on the page. All of that stuff ended up being. I didn't set out to do that necessarily, but as it was happening, I was realizing, oh, all these things are ways that I'm trying to package, so to speak, this really painful thing. Because if you don't like it gave me a sense of being able to lowercase C control it. I don't know.

You can really control anything otherwise. It's just. It's so. It's just too much and. Yeah, so, yeah, something like that I think is happening. Yeah, it works. It reads really well. Thank you. We did also want to have you unpack the way you use the blank spaces as part of the art and theology you mention it in the book. So, you know, I think it's cool that you mentioned it just now. Yeah, well, the book starts out like I kept getting.

I kept revolving around this idea of absence. The idea that our daughter was literally present, and then, you know, a moment later, she was literally absent except in that absence. Something was still there. I'm not saying it very well. Obviously, that's why I wrote the book, so, you know, people would have to read it to maybe get a better sense. But. So the absence becomes a presence. You know, the nothing started to become a something. Like there was nothing there.

But that nothingness created its own kind of energy that wound up literally changing everything about my life. I mean, there's nothing my life hasn't been influenced by. By that nothing. So can you really call it a nothing? It's actually a something. Can you really call it absent? It's actually this. It's the most intense presence. It's this paradoxical way that I started to think deeper and deeper about who God might be. And I think that in a small way, all of that spills over into the.

To the margins and the space of the book. And to some people, maybe this is all sounding too grandiose, you know, like. But whatever, it doesn't matter. I'm a grieving dad. I'm going to grasp at whatever I can grasp at to try to make sense. And the formatting of all that and the way it wound up wound up being like a really. Like, there's this old. You guys are probably familiar with the Marshall McLuhan phrase, the medium is the message. The way a thing is delivered.

You know, the local news, the way it's packaged, the way the people look, the way they dress, the words, that. The slickness of it necessarily, or the. In certain cases where they're not trying to be as produced or whatever, all of that becomes the message in and of itself, for good or for bad. And so that's what's happening some with the art of the book. It's trying to convey all of that, which I think is kind of. It's kind of cool how that all wound up being.

Yeah, I forget where I read it or saw it. Somewhere I saw a line that was like, when something becomes nothing, it evolves to everything. And I don't know. That stuck with me. I wish I just knew where I got it from, because I like it. That is nice. And it's resonant with what I'm writing about. And by the way, I'm glad you brought that up also. I Reminds me that I was really thrilled. Is that the right word? I was really surprised.

And it was meaningful to then come across other thinkers who have thought in this way. I've already mentioned John Caputo, Peter Rawlins a little bit, and then a new friend of mine by the name of Rick Boothby, who's a psychoanalytic philosopher who teaches at Loyola Marymount and has written about. He lost his son. He's written about the void and Embracing the Void, and then deeper thinkers like Jacques Lacan and psychoanalytic people like that. Hegel and Freud to some degree.

So it was really interesting to be having these thoughts. And then once I started being more, well, read, realizing, oh, this is tapping into a stream of thinking that some other people have also leveraged, which, in one sense, I don't really care. My lived experience is my lived experience. In another sense, it was kind of validating to connect with those other people and to get kind of this shared commonality between us. That was fun.

Yeah. So you also do what a lot of modern poets do, and they'll use the size of the text to make emphasis and special punctuation like strikethroughs, which is just a line through a word. If you're not familiar with a strikethrough. But how do. How do you decide when to do that? And when do you, like, decide to use a strikethrough? Because it always seems very intentional. It's never a lot. You don't do it a whole lot. But when you do, it's usually one out of the five lines in a stanza.

Well, you have my editor, Julie, to thank for it not being more often. So the way it turned out, I think it's done. You know, we used it economically in my first. The first iteration or two. First go around or two. There was a lot more striking out. There was a lot more font change. And she was like, you know, look, this is cool. But after a while, it. You know, you're asking a lot of the reader to have to.

Because one thing I like, for example, what happens with the strikethrough, at least for me, when I read that in other people's work, I always go back and read, okay, what did they. What did they write? And so you're asking the reader to not do what they normally do. And usually that's. That's a recipe for disaster, because you want to try to keep things easy for the reader.

But in this case, thanks for pointing that out and for mentioning it because, yeah, it was kind of like I was trying to Convey this idea, which really, it's more than idea. It is really what has happened over the last 10 years. I was thinking this way, thinking I was going down this path, and I would say things or preach things or do things based on this line of thinking.

But then afterwards, you know, maybe in my next season of my life, I'd basically be living differently or speaking differently. So in a sense, like, in a real world sense, I was striking through what I had done before. So that's kind of what's happening here. I'm like explaining and I say it out loud and it doesn't sound right, and so I go back and strike through it and say it again. Yeah, I really enjoyed that whole process.

And like I said, the artistic part of me went crazy for a while, but thankfully we dialed it in a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. Which there's merit in, you know, pros and cons. Economical. Yeah. You know, but it is, it is really. It's one of those things that when you're reading poetry, it's nice to notice. Do you know what would be called tj? Potentiality.

Yeah. Sorry to interrupt you, but what would be cool is now that we're talking about it, you should write a whole book and freaking strike through the whole thing until the last page. And then the last page just be like some, you know, interesting thought. And that's the book. Yeah. That's basically the way. That's the way we live. You know, you. You go down this path for a while and then you realize it's, ah, that's. It's something else. So that's fascinating.

That's probably how I would write my memoir. I like it. I like it. I dig it. And then annotate it every couple of years and strike through that page too. Exactly. And update it. Re upload it to Amazon. Yeah, I like it. Yeah. So you do explain. There have been many times in your life where church folk offered platitudes that aren't or weren't helpful when you just needed somebody who could be there without answers to listen.

How do you think the church could do a better job of teaching people to be present with one another without the answers? There's probably a bunch of different ways to answer that, but the first thing I thought of when you asked is the best way to be with others without rushing to offer answers is to figure out how to be with yourself without rushing to offer answers and to try to complete everything and tie up the bow. I think I say this in Indigo somewhere.

What I realized at some Point was the intensity of my problems were really stirring up the intensity of other people's problems sometimes. And also sometimes it was stirring up love and goodness and grace. So it wasn't always bad. But in the times where it was bad, I pretty quickly, I'm good at this now, unfortunately, because I've had so much experience with it.

You know, I cultivated the ability to recognize, oh, this thing that I'm saying, and the way this person is acting, it's not really about me and what I'm saying, it's really about what's going on with them.

And so the best way for the church to be able to sit with others is to sit with themselves and to let their own agitation, you know, let the fraction ness of their own lives not only be a reality, but realize that God, this is what I think now, that God is with them in all their fraction ness. In fact, that's the only way God is with us because we're never really whole and complete.

And you don't get God into this God shaped hole inside your heart necessarily, because if it's like that, that turns the whole thing into a vending machine. And then God's like this materialistic product that you stick in there after you put the coin in and pull the slot. So I think just this ability, learning how to sit with yourself would allow you to be able to sit with others. Yeah, I agree.

So is there something in Indigo that we might have missed or think the listeners could benefit from you expanding on concerning the book? Whether it's theopoetics or something else we discussed today. Are we missing it? No. You guys did great. It's always meaningful to have conversations about your work with folks. And with respect to this book in particular, every conversation I have, it is really surprising to see how different people bring up different things.

And so there's a whole bunch of other stuff that probably if the listeners read it, they're going to think of because it hits at different levels for different people in different stages of life and different walks that they're on. But you guys did well. You brought up some really good stuff and I appreciate the opportunity to talk about it. Thank you. So where should our listeners go to get your book? Follow your podcast, learn more about your work. Is it just Amazon?

We're going to the Jonathan Foster? Is that what it is? I mean, you could do all the above. Yeah, I mean, the easiest thing. Jonathan Fosteronline.com I have a substack that I write just about every week. I usually, not always, but I'LL often write about mimetic theory and. Or open relational theology and. Or grief and loss. So if the listeners are interested in that kind of stuff, there's a study diet of that.

But yeah, I've got other books on Amazon and the Barnes and Nobles and the Apples and all those places and would love, love to connect with folks if they wanted to reach out. And I do think everyone listening should probably read it. It's really short. You get through in a couple hours. And it's extremely worth it. We'll have a sweepstakes. I'll buy one person a copy of the book to read, or if you just DM us, I'll probably send you one. I really do think it's worth it. That's nice.

Hey, I'd be happy to send someone a copy too, so we could do two. Well, do three, because I don't want to be stingy. Yeah. All right. Sounds good. Oh, man. No, I really do. I love this book and I can't recommend it enough to people. It's one of those. I don't know how to explain this. A lot of times if you're in circles that read a lot, some books just get brought up a lot. And you're like, eh, I'm not sure that's for me.

And eventually you just hear it enough times, you're like, well, I guess I'll pick it up. And then like, man, why did I. Unless in the first time that book got mentioned. This is one of those. This is one of those where you're gonna hear it a million times. Eventually you're gonna get it and you're gonna be like, man, why didn't we just listen to Josh and TJ the first time on Whole Church and not your chance. Just listen the first time. Get the book. Yeah, that's nice. Thank you.

But one thing we do like to do before we do our, like, ending stuff, we. We ask every guest and we talked a lot about humility today. But there's something practical that anybody could do right now that if they're listening, they could stop and go do something tangible that would help better engender Christian unity. What's something that you think might help if people went and did it? I think just listening to all of the episodes of your podcast, you know, would make all of them just.

Yeah, bingeless. I agree. Yeah. Better human beings. Maybe in addition to that. Gosh, what? One thing, the first thing that came to mind for me has. It's just been the importance of getting out in nature and Taking walks. And that's always been an important thing, to hike, to get in the mountains as much as I can, to be in the forest. I didn't really realize to the last few years how neurologically and biologically it literally does really healthy things for us.

So, you know, when you're in the forest alone, it's really the only time I'm ever truly away from all the idiots. Except for the voices of my own head. I guess I'm never really away from those. I was gonna say, every time I'm alone, I'm still stuck with at least one idiot. Yeah, exactly. That's an old Lily Tomlin line. She said, the problem is, everywhere I go, there I am, so. But that's the first thing that comes to mind. The forest for me and the mountains and getting out.

Talk about open spaces and negative space and buffers and margins. That's just been a necessary way for me to stay grounded and to stay connected to love. Yeah. So what changes? What do we see happen if we're staying grounded and getting out there and listening to you with the entirety of the whole church podcast? Yeah. We all lose a lot of time, that's for sure. Yeah. I mean, you and I don't. We already heard them all. I don't think I have heard them all. Oh, that's true.

There's been at least a couple you didn't make it to. You got work to do. I got work to do. Well, you said lose a lot of time. That's an interesting phrase. Like, it was just a passing comment, but that's really what. That's what. That's all we're doing, really. We're all. Just. From the moment you're conceived, you're losing time. You're wasting time. You're spending time. Time is the currency. That's it. So how you spend that is how you spend your life. So what's happening?

I mean, there's a ton of different things going on. There's different ways to answer that. Again, neurologically, biologically, in a sensory way. There are things that are happening. Oxygen is happening, you know, blood flowing. Literally, your. You know, your cells are dying and new ones are being formed. You're like, actually, you're a new person by the time you're done. Well, over the course of any few minutes, you might be a new person, depending on if we're talking at the cellular level.

So all those things are happening.

For me, it's what I think of a lot, especially in the context of grief. There's been so Much loss in my life that when I'm in confined spaces, I am slightly claustrophobic to begin with, but then also somewhere it crosses the line from a physical thing to a psycho spiritual thing. And I think so often in terms of, like, I can't fix the stuff that's happened in the past, I think probably the best I can do is carry it. Well, my problem is when.

When I'm crowded in with a bunch of people, I don't feel like I have room to carry it. So I know for me, when I get out into the wilderness, it's like, oh, I just breathe, like, oh, now there's room to carry all this pain and all this stuff. And it has been absolutely an indispensable element for my healing. Not that I'm completely healed because I'm always and forever afraid, but on the journey, and it's a. It's a really important piece for me.

Yeah. So the last thing we do before our outro is we share a God moment, where that can be just a moment where you saw God, whether it's a mode of worship, a blessing, a challenge, whatever that may be. And I always make Josh go first to give everyone else enough time to think about our God moment, because he tends to have at least several that he would like to say at any given moment. So, Josh, do you have a goddamn for us this week? Yeah, still in the midst of moving, so all that's stressful.

And just to make things a little bit more stressful, our youngest kitten thought it would be fun to run away. So it snuck out and ran away. And we spent about a full day looking for this kitten. And we find it, like, really late at night. It was literally a full day. It was in the forest, hiding under some things and scared, and we got it home. And of course, you know, I had a lot of those thoughts of, like, oh, hey, we. We have five pets now, so we left the four to find the one.

So, you know, some part of that was, like, interesting, you know, kind of some. Some interesting Jesus parallel thoughts. But mostly I think the thing that stuck out was how all the stress of moving and all of the other stuff that, like, is going on in life, you know, the schooling that I'm dealing with and stuff at work, and all that just kind of goes away. You know, it's like.

Like everything became about finding this little kitten and just how, I don't know, the relationships we build, whether it be with other humans or creation or, you know, whatever, how important those relationships can be and how that's able to drown out everything else is. I don't know, something that's sitting with me in a way that I consider a God moment, though I couldn't classify it as a blessing or challenge or anything specific. Yeah, no, doesn't have to be.

I would count that as a blessing though. So my God moment, it's definitely a blessing. Revelation of knowledge. But for me, I am entering like a period of my life and really it's like a family thing where my. The cousins that are getting married are getting a lot closer to my age. So it's really, it's just now starting to hit me cuz like one of my little cousins got married a couple of years ago and at the time I didn't really think anything of it. And now one of my. My last older cousin.

They know first cousin is getting married soon and now it decides to be like, hey, life happens. Everyone's living their own lives in different ways. And it's humbling, I guess, to see everyone progress in different ways, you know, °no ° married, unmarried, different ages. It doesn't really affect who we are. At the end of the day, we're all still a family. I really thought you were about to announce that this fall is going to. Our show is going to turn into the whole church dating show.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. TJ's getting married next, guys. No, it's actually tomorrow. We're going to be live for streaming. My wedding. No, yeah, yeah. The first fan that shows up, that's it. I thought it was gonna be an engagement announcement. Yeah, that would have been fun. No, it's actually me and Aaron Simmons are gonna go. He's gonna wingman for me. We're just gonna go to the mall and over here and he's gonna. Yeah, we're gonna figure it out. Kierkegaard with Aaron. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Taking him right out of his comfort zone. We are going very public. Bar hopping with Kierkegaard. Bar hopping with Kierkegaard. So I can't imagine carrying that book around in a bar. Oh, man. But Jonathan, do you have a God moment for us? Well, most recently, what's at the top of my mind is we have a granddaughter. She's 11 months old. And so talk about coming full circle, circle of life.

And it's a blast to be around her and to watch her grow up and to kind of relive this stuff in a grandparent kind of way. So, I mean, I just don't think I could get any better than that. So I'm gonna Go with Eleanor, my granddaughter. It always feels like I'm in the presence of the divine when we're together. In fact, that's where I'm going after we get done with you guys. I'm gonna go have dinner with her. It's gonna be a good time. Yeah. Let's not hold you up then.

So if you like the show, please consider sharing with a friend or an enemy or cousin. Especially a cousin. Especially your cousins. And then check out the whole church merch. It's good stuff. If you are interested in supporting us or friends of the show in other ways, reach out. We can help you. Help us. Yeah. Also be sure to check out all the other shows on the Onaz Isle Podcast Network. There is a link down below so you can see shows like Systematic Ecology.

TJ and I are both part of that, talking about fandoms and faith stuff. And check out Kung Fu Pizza Party if you just want to hear about kung fu movies. It's a fun time with Brandon Knight. Or let's go with let nothing move you, Christian Ashley. That'll be my third one for the network. You guys can check out Just a purely Bible podcast. Yeah. Yeah. Weird, right? We hope you enjoyed the show.

Coming up, we're going to be interviewing Kate Blewett about her involvement with the Porters Gate Collective, which is a music group that creates modern hymns that could be used in various church traditions, from Catholic to Pentecostal, everything in between. We're going to be interviewing Pastor Matt Thrifey. I'm not sure how to pronounce his name. It's Thrifty. I forgot the teeth. It's Thrifty all the way. Okay. I just assumed that was. What an odd last name. That's fun, though.

An abundance of spirit, as he is the author of Follow Genuine Discipleship in the Modern Age. After that, we're going to be taking a week off before starting our new series, which is the whole church job fair. We are not hiring you, but we are going to be interviewing lay people from various Christian traditions about their day jobs and whether the people, theological stuff we discuss in debate between pastors and students and scholars actually make a difference in their lives.

And finally, at the end of season one, Francis Chan will be on the show. Yeah, he doesn't know, though, so just a small hiccup in the plan. Yep, he's on. And not from DreamWorks. Yeah, and we'll never probably be aware because we put zero effort into that. It's just a bit. Yeah, mostly. I mean, yeah.