Andrew Root, PhD (Princeton Theological Seminary) is the Carrie Olson Baalson Professor of Youth and Family Ministry at Luther Seminary. He is most recently the author of three-volume Ministry in a Secular Age series (The Congregation in a Secular Age, The Pastor in a Secular Age, and Faith Formation in a Secular Age), and The End of Youth Ministry.  He has also authored Christopraxis: A Practical Theology of the Cross (Fortress, 2014) and Bonhoeffer as Youth Worker (Baker, 2014).  Root puts together theology and storytelling to explore how ministry leads us into encounter with divine action.  His book  The Relational Pastor (IVP, 2013), as well as a four-book series with Zondervan, called A Theological Journey Through Youth Ministry (titles include Taking Theology to Youth Ministry, Taking the Cross to Youth Ministry, Unpacking Scripture in Youth Ministry, and Unlocking Mission and Eschatology in Youth Ministry) break new ground in this direction.  In 2012  his book The Theological Turn in Youth Ministry (with Kenda Creasy Dean, IVP, 2011) was Christianity Today Book of Merit.  He has written a number of other books on ministry and theology such as The Children of Divorce: The Loss of Family as the Loss of Being (Baker Academic, 2010), The Promise of Despair (Abingdon, 2010), Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry: From a Strategy of Influence to a Theology of Incarnation (IVP, 2007) and Relationships Unfiltered (Zondervan/YS, 2009).  Andy has worked in congregations, parachurch ministries, and social service programs. He lives in St. Paul with his wife Kara, two children, Owen and Maisy, and their dog. When not reading, writing, or teaching, Andy spends far too much time watching TV and movies.


Dayle Rounds (00:00):
How can congregations keep pace with the speed of life today? Andy Root is Carrie Olson, Baalson professor of youth and family ministry at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota, and a Princeton seminary alum. In this episode, Andy returns to talk with us about his third book in the series engaging the work of Charles Taylor. In the congregation in a secular age, keeping sacred time against the speed of modern life. Andy offers a new paradigm for understanding the congregation and contemporary ministry, articulates why congregations feel pressured by rapid changes in modern life, and encourages an approach that calls congregations to re-imagine, what change is, how to live into this future, and to help them move from relevance to resonance.
New Speaker (00:48):
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Dayle Rounds (00:51):
You're listening to The Distillery at Princeton Theological Seminary.
Dayle Rounds (00:55):
Andy, thank you. It's great to be able to talk to you again about one of your books and particularly this one, which is the third in a series of three, and we've had the opportunity to talk about the first two. This is another one where you engage the work of Charles Taylor, in his, his published work, A Secular Age. Would you give our listeners just a brief sketch of your series and for those who are not familiar with it, the essential claims made by Taylor that are key, for, for the three books. And then particularly for this one that we're talking about today about congregations.
Andy Root (01:31):
Yeah. I mean, it's interesting to try to, you know, be in dialogue with this big, this big brick of a book called The Secular Age by Taylor. So it's taken me three books that just kind of, analyze it and be inspired by it and, yeah, then go from there. So yeah, I mean the, the, the series starts with faith formation in a secular age, and I don't know why it starts there to be completely honest. Like it just, it just kinda started there. I'm not a systematic theologian, so I didn't have a grand system in my mind. I think it was more, I don't know, problems kind of facing the church as we, as we thought about decline, as we thought about, how we pass on faith, particularly to younger people, but really across just, the, the church doing its thing.
Andy Root (02:18):
That was in the forefront of my mind and the project it's kind of developed from there. So there's no real, like methodological reason on why faith formation comes first. But I mean, one of the main elements I pick up from Taylor and that is just the way we are so deeply embedded in an age of authenticity. And so what does it mean to kind of pass on faith in a, in an age where in many ways, in some very good ways and some very challenging ways we live in a time where we believe every human being has a right to define for themselves what it means to be human and that - and there's an ethic out of that that says everyone, no one should tell anyone else how they should live their life. Well, that's, there's a lot of good things around where we respect people's experience and things like that.
Andy Root (03:01):
There's also some real challenges on how you take people deeply into a tradition, how you form them in a way to follow someone who isn't them, how, you know, the core of discipleship is actually following someone else and, and giving your life over to Jesus Christ, as opposed to finding the uniqueness within yourself. Those aren't completely mutually exclusive, but they're, it's a, it's a challenge. So we started, I started there in, you know, Taylor, the thing that's so interesting about him. And I think for me, he's, he's impacted the way I, I think, theologically with his larger philosophical system. And I think we'll probably get into that as we talk about book three, but, it's really his description of our moment that is so interesting to me. And, you know, all the way back when Dayle, I first met you when I was, you know, during the last Cicada season, when I was, I was a student at Princeton Seminary, the question that was really always driving me from the moment I stepped on that campus.
Andy Root (03:58):
And even earlier was thinking about how is it that we concretely encounter the living presence of God? And, I wouldn't have had the language then to say that, but how is it that the modern world and particularly late modernity makes that really difficult? And that's really what Taylor is trying to articulate. He's trying to say, yeah, we can talk about secular and we throw it around. And it's confused in, yeah, it's not just that people are less, less religious. That's not really the issue. The issue is that there's an overall kind of movement within our Western societies that makes this a, the sense of transcendence or of a living personal God who speaks to us that becomes harder for people to hold onto. Or even when they do hold onto it, there's, there's currents that kind of, undercut it and can wash that away.
Andy Root (04:46):
And, and they have to deal with kind of doubts or the realization in very pluralistic societies that their neighbor across the streets, you know, never goes to church really has no, religious affiliation at all, but yet feels spiritual. And then when you watch them raise their kids, you think, oh my gosh, they're way better parent than I am. And, you know, I'm, I'm a pastor or I'm a Bishop or whatever. And, you know, that does thrust you into some kind of level of, of doubt or what Taylor would call cross pressure. So that just feels like a big, a big challenge we face. And I feel like he describes that so well. And then, so in book two, it's really trying to, to place those realities. Where the place where I think they're most acutely on the lap of someone is the pastor, that the pastor has to deal with that reality.
Andy Root (05:33):
And not just even externally, like within your people and within the culture your people are living in, but within yourself. Like, you know, you have to deal with the kind of the cross pressure of here you are standing at the communion table saying, you know, this is the real presence of, you know, depending on your traditions, I suppose, on how much you, how much, how much you push those, theological commitments, but in many ways for most of us, like this is a holy act that this is the real presence of Jesus Christ in one way or another. And yet, you know, we're very different than medieval people who were, you know, tempted to smuggle the host out of church and use it on, you know, their dying crops or their sick pig. You know, like, I don't know, pastor who's ever been tempted to take the host from communion and, you know, put it, put it on their car to make, because it's not running well, you know, or, or put a little wine in the gas tank to get home from church because they're cause they're out of gas.
Andy Root (06:27):
Like we, we don't, we don't think that way. And I think often as, as pastors and leaders of - inside of Christian ministries in congregational life, it's, it's the challenge is, geez, do I really believe this? Or how, how do I make sense of this? And I think sometimes oddly people in our congregations are willing to confess, experiences with transcendent realities or hearing God speak or praying and, and feeling like God led them to do something, particularly in mainlinr communities, often more than the pastor is like the pastor. She's kind of like, wow, I, I don't want to be, I don't want to be too weird here about this. And so it's just interesting how that secular age imposes on us. And I think it raises a lot of other challenges for the pastor, but then it just made a lot of sense to end this, this trilogy, which I still kind of laugh calling it a trilogy because it should be like, you know, I dunno it should be cooler than it is, or it should be a movie or something.
Andy Root (07:23):
So I always feel a little bit of you know, imposter syndrome, when we call it, the trilogy. But, it just made sense to go to the congregation and think about the congregation here. And I originally thought, and I originally pitched it that I would write like a full fledged ecclesiology. And you know, so it'd be like the church in a secular age and thinking about what's the church and that's started to feel a little bit too broad. And, so the book is pretty, it's, it's, it's at times unwieldy probably. I mean, there's a lot going on and a lot of theory, but I was trying to kind of focus just on the local congregation and what kind of late modernity does to the local congregation. And, yeah, the challenges we confront there, especially inside of just anxieties about the climb and things like that.
Andy Root (08:17):
And then I took, in the midst of that, the first two books are, so Charles Taylor focused in this one still is really Charles Taylor focused. But, you know, there's always a big question of like, what's next. And for me, one of the, the pursuits was like, okay, who else is dealing? Who else is building off of Taylor in a significant way? And that's how I came across this really, I think very interesting thinker named Hartmut Rosa, who's really, well-known on the continent of Europe, a really well known across it, but very well known obviously in the German speaking countries, is becoming, I think more well-known here in the states. But I just find his, his, his work really interesting. And he wrote his dissertation on Taylor and is doing his own thing, but is a kind of inside of those, that same kind of thought world. And so this book, we came a pretty significant conversation with, with Rosa and kind of Taylor becomes more so he's there, he's more supporting actor than, than, than lead actor where Rosa kind of takes, takes the lead here.
Dayle Rounds (09:17):
Yeah, that's right. We'll, we'll get to Rosa a little bit more in, in a couple minutes, but I want to dial back to, in this volume you spend a lot of time, a lot of real estate in the book talking about time, right? So, and our relationship to it, and you begin the book with a discussion of a depressed congregation, which is how this pastor describes it and how people are to, use you phrase as too fatigued to be the church. Would you talk about the connection that you're making in, in, in this work between time, speed, this sense of fatigue or depression as it relates to congregations?
Andy Root (09:59):
Yeah, I mean, it was a really interesting,` you know, the, the stories that are in this book and that set this book are all true, but have been, you know, it'd be like if it was a movie, it would not be this, this is a true story as much as this is based on a true story. So these are all conversations that have been shifted, but vividly remember talking to a pastor in a state that I've put it, that the pastor is not in. So, but in, in a, in a, in a flyover state where the pastor was in all for all outward appearances was in an incredibly successful congregation. You know, there was, it was a, it was a big middle America church that had just done a capital campaign or was in the middle of it. But I had finished the building project.
Andy Root (10:44):
There were, you know, posters of programs and trips everywhere in the narthex you, walk to the pastor's office and there were you walk by, I don't know, half dozen, eight, nine offices with, with multiple staff in there. I mean, it was, it, it was a very impressive church. And yet this pastor of the deep sense that, they couldn't keep up, that they, that they just couldn't keep up with all this, in his words, over, you know, a sandwich to me where that he really thinks that his congregation was depressed. Like he just couldn't get them engaged beyond showing up on Sunday morning. And even those numbers were kind of inconsistently dissipating in some ways or downtrending, but for the most part fine. But when it came to any kind of sense of engagement, he just felt like they weren't. And yet when you would talk to them individually, they, there was, they wanted to be.
Andy Root (11:38):
And, and so his words were that from his own experience was that he just felt like there was a depression. Like it just, it, that there was a will to do more, but there just didn't feel like there was time, but it wasn't even just busy-ness though. I think busy-ness is a huge piece of it. But there was a, there was just a teetering on burnout. Now he would say, if you talk to, and I think, I think this is true. If you talk to a lot of individuals within the congregation, a lot of them weren't feeling like clinically depressed necessarily, but as a collective, that's how he, how he kind of named it. And, one of, you know, we were talking about Rosa reading him led me to this, this, Parisian scholar named Alain Ehrenberg, which does not, I'm probably pronouncing it terribly. And, you know, if I was in Paris, we would probably have to say it a different kind of way.
Andy Root (12:25):
And it does not sound like a Parisian name, but he's a really interesting sociologist. And he wrote this book that in English is called, the weariness of being, the weariness of - The Weariness Of The Self is what it's called. But the French translation is more interesting, which, if you translate it directly from French, it's the fatigue of being yourself, which is really haunting to me and his, in what he does in that book is try to trace a genealogy of depression and how depression for individuals in the west has become a pretty core, kind of mental illness struggle. And he wants to make an argument that these senses of kind of mental illness or mental struggle, or how we interpret those is really dependent on the way modernity imposes, certain goods upon us. You know, so, there, you know, we, we, in the book I talk about, you know, you go back to the late 19th century, early 20th century, the big issue is hysteria and really psychoanalysis and Freudian psychoanalysis is based off Freud doing rounds, particularly with Parisian women who are in clinics for going hysterical.
Andy Root (13:35):
And so all psychoanalysis is kind of built off that, and there was something that was going on in modernity that could lead people to kind of have these hysterical moments and not be able to kind of control themselves or kind of come out of their minds or go out of their minds. And you know, you can go back earlier in this kind of sense of madness is not being able to really be this rational agent you're supposed to be, but he says like post seventies, the big issue we confront is this sense of this looming depression that is, is before us. And so he kind of traces the genealogy of Prozac and how Prozac became such an essential thing, but he, what his argument actually is, is that what depression is he thinks is this fatigue of needing to be always keeping up with curating the self, that the responsibilities always, you kind of curating yourself and depression comes upon you, or you, you, you start to, you start to burn out and then you realize you can't keep up.
Andy Root (14:34):
And it's a much more complicated. And I think more sensitive argument than even, I think I'm, I'm making here, but it was, it was really interesting hearing, reading that book and then having the pastor say that. And so when I'm kind of exploring in this book is, is part of our issue, the fatigue of being church? That, that people just are too exhausted to actually be Church? They like the idea of it, but the church, especially in American Protestantism is on you curating it. And so we say to people in our churches, like we need to change. And I do think we're at a really interesting time in the history of at least, you know, North American Protestant Christianity, where people finally, I think, I don't know, Dayle, you may have a different opinion, but like people finally agree that things need to change, you know, like all levels of the church. Where if you were to go back during last Cicada season, or even back the one before that, not everyone would agree with that.
Andy Root (15:29):
You know, like you would have thrown change on the table and some people have been like, not what are we talking about? Do we really need to change? I don't know, this is overstated and other people would have been like, yeah. But now I think everyone around the table, seminary presidents, you know, bishops, you know, executive presbyters, local congregational leaders, you know, people leading organizations, foundations, and endowments. I think everyone now agrees we need change. And yet my experience has been, now that we have that moment almost no one has the energy to meet, to meet that, that, that this moment. You know, so, and I think we could see that as just unfortunate, like, oh, that's too bad. It's like getting flu, getting the flu when you have tickets to your favorite concert. You know, you wouldn't blame the concert for giving you the flu. It would just be bad luck. So is this just bad luck that here it is, we all agree we need to change and no one has energy for it? Or is it possible that the demand necessitated by the change actually is imposing this, this despondency?
Dayle Rounds (16:32):
Well that's the argument you make, right?
Andy Root (16:33):
That is exactly the argument that I make. That if we're not that we shouldn't see this as just unfortunate, but we should be very, we should be very careful. And Ehrenberg says that he thinks depression is actually, is actually an issue of change. That constant need to keep changing yourself and continue to change it and not fall behind the need to change that can lead to this deep sense of, of kind of malaise that can, that can come over.
Dayle Rounds (17:01):
You connect that also just with speed and the speed of change, right? So just this constant, it's not, it's not like things need to change and we have all the time in the world in which to do it.
Andy Root (17:15):
Right. And that's kind of the connection to, to Rosa's project is, yeah. Rosa wants to say what it means to be a late modern person. Is that things just keep speeding up.
New Speaker (17:25):
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Dayle Rounds (17:28):
So let's go to Rosa let's, let's, let's dive into that a little bit and, and, and see, you know, like how you discovered that and kind of talk a bit about the thread of that throughout.
Andy Root (17:38):
Yeah. Well, I mean, that's, that's a huge piece here because what Rosa thinks happens is - as we kind of back our way in to talking about him - is that once you change, and this is why I think it, it imposes and why this pastor in this fly over state is saying that he thinks this congregation has a kind of sense that depression. Is once you change now, you have to meet the bar of that change and to continue in the dynamic of change, you're gonna have to change more and then more, and then more so there's a kind of, there's a, what he calls a kind of dynamic stabilization. Like if you're going to stabilize that change, if that change, that change is going to be sustainable, it also means that everyone has to do the effort of keeping that going and not just at a baseline, but at a kind of sense of growth and anything.
Andy Root (18:22):
So Rose's point then is that what modernity is, is this continued acceleration of, of our lives in every dynamic of our, of our lives. And it just keeps speeding up. And so it speeds up technologically, but it does more than that, which is we always kind of feel like, oh, of course, yeah. I mean, of course things have been speeding up technologically. Like you watch a movie from a, you know, 2000, and you're just amazed at the technological differences that have happened at 20 years. And, you know, the last half of the 20th century has been this extraordinary, just advanced in technological acceleration. And usually, particularly with young pastors, that's kind of the pitch why the church needs to change, like, look at the technology's changed. The church can't fall behind, but I think it's really helpful that Rosa says it's not just technology and technology is the speeding up of communication and of production and of transportation.
Andy Root (19:17):
So those things just keep speeding up. And he says, well, what that, what occurs when that happens is it also at the same time because communication and production and transportation are indelibly, social realities, you know, it starts to impact our social lives. So the very norms of our social lives start to really speed up quite quickly. And I think pastors on the ground feel this, like, especially over this last election season, you know, like there's, I think there are a lot of Protestant pastors feel this kind of fraughtness of people, even in their congregations at different acceleration paces in the changing norms of their, of their, of their congregational life. So you have some people who have kind of kept up with the accelerating pace of different ways of talking of different ways of thinking about these kinds of social issues and other people who are resisting it, or who have simply felt left behind by the change.
Andy Root (20:15):
And then maybe feel resentful about leaving, being left behind where the change and so are angry about it, but so that it leads to this deep kind of sense of just social norms changing as well and changing really quite quickly, which is why in the book I use the example of The Office and Steve Carrell being asked if he would reboot The Office. And he said he wouldn't, you know, and this, I think he was asked in like 2016 and the show was over and I dunno, there's you have mega fans listening to this like 2013 or something like that. So it was like a short three years and he was asked, would you, would you be part of a reboot? And I think Peacock is planning a reboot. So, but he said, no. And he, in this main reason, wasn't just that he was a big movie star now and didn't need the show.
Andy Root (20:58):
He said, I don't think Michael Scott's humor works in this cultural time. I just don't think, I don't think that I don't think you can get away with saying those jokes anymore. And that's really interesting and I think he may be right, and that may be a good thing, but it is a huge accelerated change in social norms between three years. You know, that what we were laughing at before, we now feel very uncomfortable, laughing at and Aziz, who was on Park and Rec, he has a little thing in his standup where he talks about that as well about thinking back to scripts from Park and Rec and thinking, you know, now, and he's doing a standup in like 2019, and he's looking back like now I wouldn't do some of those things. Like those things seem creepy now, but at the time I felt like they were fine.
Andy Root (21:43):
So you just see this kind of acceleration of, of social norms. And I think the pastor and the congregation becomes a place where sometimes those come to loggerheads of people just being at different paces of those. But then the third one is the one I think we feel most existentially. It's just that the pace of our lives continues to speed up. It just feels like we're busier and busier and busier. And there is a kind of weird, I mean, we all know this weird irony that supposedly Silicon valley in all its technological advances was supposed to be time-saving innovations. We're supposed to have more time now, you know, so the example Rosie uses that I develop in the book that I think is really most helpful to think about is email and that, you know, pre email, which, you know, most of people listening here, don't remember a world pre email, but pre email, if you had to do you had to write letters, I don't know if you had 10 correspondence you had to do a day.
Andy Root (22:37):
It probably took you an hour and a half, you know, to write those 10 letters and address them and get them in envelopes and get a stamp on them. When email comes along my gosh, 10 emails? You should be able to do 10 emails and 15 minutes, a half hour at tops. So there you go. You should have a full hour back of your life to just to actually exercise like you want to, spend more time cooking and eating right, reading, reading your kids' books. You should have so much time. You can finally read Dostoevsky, you've bought all the books, but never had time to read them. But now you can actually read, read all this stuff. You can read Russian literature, but of course it doesn't work that way. And anyone who has an email account, which is all of us, knows that we all live under the burden of, you know, a piano of a piano falling our head of just email after email, after email, because what happens is it's not that we're given more time what those kinds of innovations give us is more actions inside a unit of time.
Andy Root (23:35):
So of course, why we don't have more time is because you don't have 10 correspondence to do anymore. Email means that you now have 60 to do, and now it's pretty hard to do in an hour and a half. You actually need two hours. And now you have to somehow find another half hour to do, to do correspondence and get your emails down. And now your multitasking and you're at your son's swim meet also trying to respond to emails, which means you're really not at the swim meet, even though you're sitting there at the swim meet because you're trying to multitask and get these things done. So this just adds, and I do worry. I mean, I think, I think, you know, in some ways, and maybe we'll talk about this, but kind of, I'm pretty hard on innovation, with, within the book, because I just want us to be careful that innovation often has meant in this kind of logic, we don't exercise this kind of logic out of innovation.
Andy Root (24:30):
It has meant more actions inside of units of time. It means doing more with less, the really innovative person often does more with less. And, you know, in, in my world, for instance, it's just, you know, bishops love that. To do, to get pastors to do more with less. That sounds great. Yeah. And so to kind of glorify the person who can do more with less as innovative maybe there is some kind of genius in that, but there's also a sense of pushing a person closer towards burnout too. And, you know, it's, I don't want to over, over make these claims, but it's just no wonder that it feels like people who find a lot of fullness and another, in another way of saying that, like there, the sense of the good life is through being very busy are also really prone towards, senses of burnout that leads to some kind of debilitating depression.
Andy Root (25:22):
So, you know, we have a younger generation of people who are more linked into the advances of getting more actions and more reach out of time. And yet we also are seeing epidemics of anxiety and depression at the same time. So those things I don't think are disconnected. And you know, I don't, I don't want to go too far in connecting them either. I think there's, there's really complicated issues, but, that becomes part of the challenge. So this just becomes, this continued acceleration in these three ways. Rosa says, and, as a good kind of Frankfurt school, social theorist, he thinks what this does to us is something pretty diabolical. Is that it alienates us, that we end up going so fast that we feel disconnected from ourselves. We feel disconnected from the people in our lives, which you only have to watch someone who's continuing looking at their phone to, you know, be, make sure they're on the right, you know, Twitter conversations or seeing how many people are re tweeting them to see how disconnected they are from the people around them. But he actually thinks it goes so far that we feel disconnected from the world that we just feel like the world becomes quite a dull place. It doesn't speak to us anymore. We just feel, we just feel like we're not, we're above it. We're not in it. And, and those become pretty, I think depressive in many ways.
Dayle Rounds (26:42):
Yeah. And that's what we don't want congregations to feel disconnected from the world and their communities. Right? So if we're falling into that with, at the congregational level, but you're using innovation to try to get them to be connected, then we're just, are we just exhausting everybody?
Andy Root (27:04):
Yeah. That becomes that, that, that's the, that's the, the, the warning maybe I think that this is signaling? It's not to say there wouldn't be a way to think about innovation and there might be some kind of to put it kind of in philosophical, theological language. There may be some dialectic that innovation has to go through. You know, it has to be put to death to be resurrected in some way that it has to have some kind of theological movement where it becomes, which I think all things in many ways, at least in the traditions that I kind of rest in, all things have to go kind of through death to life, they all kind of move through a baptismal sense of being drowned and brought back to life. And, and I do worry that we haven't thought enough about how innovation has to go through that, so that some of these, some of these kind of corrupting forms from kind of late capitalism and in hyper late capitalism, that just is like, hurry up so you can get more.
Andy Root (27:56):
And this is a competitive game, and this is a, this is a place where you can express your most singular unique self. And this is a fight between selves to be who has more, more value or who has who's more interesting or who has more reach. Yeah, I think we have to worry about that. We have, we have to worry about how we take that to a deeper theological perspective, so we can kind of do that innovation. The biggest problem with all this speed-up is what connects us back to Taylor is that it, it flattens the world. And, you know, if we become alienated from connections and I guess this is making this larger theological argument, that's connected with the kind of full breadth of my project, that if we really meet God in connections and in relationships, and yet this acceleration severs those. Well, it's no wonder then that late modern people have no idea or continue to doubt that they could hear the voice of a living, speaking God, or encounter a personal God who speaks to them or be pulled into something transcendent.
Andy Root (29:00):
And yet they long for that. And so I do think one of the reasons innovation, and kind of Silicon Valley creativity draws people in initially is it does have a kind of allure of the spiritual to it. I mean, there's nothing more interesting than watching a biopic of someone who creates, you know, the great, a great invention or something, you know, like we love the story of the great inventor and, you know, when Steve Jobs died, how many biopics did we get of Steve Jobs? And we, we admire that and there's a kind of pseudo if not direct spirituality to it. But how much is this that spirituality disconnected from a kind of, kind of deifying of the self and the self's own uniqueness. And, does it end up putting us on a kind of accelerating path that eventually burns us out and, and crushes our humanity, in the midst of it?
Dayle Rounds (29:52):
Another thread throughout the book that intrigued me is your discussion of the good life. So you talk a little bit more about that, about what it is? How our understanding of a good life has maybe changed? How the acceleration impacts it. And then also you, toward the end, you weave around to this concept of resonance and what that might have to do with your understanding of the good life.
Andy Root (30:20):
Yeah. So, you know, I don't know, Dayle, I keep on talking about the last Cicada season just because I know you're in the middle of it and it just, now I'm thinking like my gosh, it just like frames my, my life it's been, yeah.
Dayle Rounds (30:33):
I know, yeah the Cicadas are chirping inside. I'm a little worried, you can hear it through my microphone but-
Andy Root (30:36):
and it's been 17 years and I was on campus at the
Dayle Rounds (30:41):
It's a marker of time. It's a matter of time, you know?
Andy Root (30:46):
Yes. Interestingly, it can't be accelerated, you know, so it's a marker of time that kind of natural marker of time, but it's different than kind of, it comes back every 17 years and you, you can't speed it up. And that's, and that's how it works. But yeah, back back in that first Cicada season or last Cicada season when I was there, I, would've never thought of talking about the good life like that was in my theological kind of imagination in this kind of Lutheran sensibility that I grew up in. And then now I teach in a seminary at as well as this kind of Bartian reality that I was in and reading Bonhoeffer, like the good life would not have been, I would have looked sideways at it. But kind of reading my way back into it, through Taylor particularly find it really helpful.
Andy Root (31:32):
And, what, what Taylor thinks as, as a larger philosophical argument, even more than his descriptive argument about what it means to live in a secular age is even back to his time writing in the fifties and sixties is he really thinks that all forms of human action have some kind of sense of the good connected to them. That for us, even to have an identity for us to be able to answer the question, who am I, whether directly or just tacitly that we have to have some kind of sense, some kind of directionality even, towards the good, and sometimes we don't explicitly know what, or can't lay it out, but we have that. We have a sense of what would make our life full is what he often says. What gives us a kind of sense of full life. And he thinks that that is inherently connected to narrative, that you need a story that, that kind of directs you towards the good.
Andy Root (32:21):
So when you find yourself in an identity crisis, what often happens is you find the stories that you would tell yourself about what made your life good. You find all of a sudden they don't work or that you've been deceived by them. And so sometimes you can find someone who betrays you and you thought you thought, what made life good was your relationship with this person. And they've betrayed you and said, well, I've been, I've been cheating on you for three years. And when that revelation comes up, the person who encounters that revelation, who didn't even do the moral violation, feels like they'll say things like, I don't know who I am. Oh my gosh, I, who am I anymore? You know, so we call this an identity crisis. And what actually happens is you, the stories you have that directed and kind of framed what made your life full, all of a sudden feel like they're not real or they weren't working anymore.
Andy Root (33:09):
So his sense, which I really do agree with is we all really have this implicit, sometimes explicit kind of sense of what makes life good or full. And those can be contested and often are contested, where, you know, like the neighbor across the street seems to be living a good life in, in a very different way. And, and they, they can, they can change and they can be misdirected in times too. But I think one of the ways that we've tended to define what it means to live a good life, particularly kind of middle-class upwardly mobile, congregational life even is that we've tended to see it as, busy-ness - busy-ness as fullness. Like your life is full when you're busy. So when we meet, when we meet somebody or we see somebody we haven't seen for a while, or see a colleague after a pandemic, and you say, Hey, how you doing?
Andy Root (34:05):
Our response a lot of the time is things are good, but it's busy. Things are really busy right now, or how's your family? Things are good, but it's busy. And that signals a couple of things. I mean, it does signal that things feel stretched and new things, things do feel busy and you are kind of signaling that if things get any busier, it could push you into a depressive state or it could lead you into burnout. But you're also communicating when you say that it's busy, that you are near, or you are being directed towards a form of the good life. That you are in demand, that you have a lot going on, that you have reach, that people are interested in you, that you are getting emails. And unfortunately you have to respond to all those, but people are emailing you and asking your opinion or inviting you out to wine, or whatever, a social distance walk or something that you, your life is busy.
Andy Root (34:56):
And that means it's also has a sense of fullness. So I do think we haven't been critical enough or thought about how we even think about how we define a good, a good congregation in this kind of moral sense of what it means to be good. And I, and I do think ,this is a little bit of an overstatement, but I think if we talked about it more, we could, we could justify it. Is that the way we've tended to think the good congregation as a congregation that can get busy people connected to it. And one of the only ways to get busy people connected is to be busy yourself. So, unfortunately in a weird kind of way, because again, this is a deep, moral sense, maybe test, that maybe implicit of people trying to direct themselves towards the sense of fullness that they think will reward them with a sense of living well. That people tend to, if they feel like they're getting their sense of meaning out of being busy, like that's their sense of fullness.
Andy Root (35:57):
They will look for a church that's busy. I mean, it's an odd kind of thing. Cause you'd think super busy people would want to go to like meditative small churches and just sit in the sanctuary and like reflect on an icon. And, you know, it's been an hour doing that, but they don't, they tend to go to big churches with a ton of programs and then they can't go for six months cause their kids in AAU basketball. And then they find out that the youth pastor has decided that they're not going to meet as a, as a youth group for six months because people are too busy and those parents would never even be able to get their kid to the youth group write the most angry email. Even though they can never get their kids to that program, they don't want that program to be disbanded even for six months because they feel like, well, we go to this church cause it has these things going on and we're busy people and we want to be affiliated and connected to a busy church.
Andy Root (36:48):
So I think that, that it plays in, but it has this kind of connection with what they view as, as fullness this busy-ness. And, and I get it and this is a way we kind of interact with our community. And I think one of the ways we kind of contextualize ministry in a positive way is to be aware of people's kind of senses of fullness. But it also is potentially really dangerous too, because you now, when you make the good congregation, the busy congregation, you are moving it closer to that the, that law fatigue detra eglise where we become too fatigued to be church. And so, yeah, I think busy-ness becomes that, that sense of fullness for late modern people, at least middle-class late modern people.
New Speaker (37:32):
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Dayle Rounds (37:35):
We haven't, we haven't talked too much about resonance yet, have we? Can we do that toward the end, you, you introduce that concept and that how modernity speeds us up to a rate that leads to alienation, which you were just talking about a little bit, but you lift this up as maybe a way to combat alienation? Is that too strong, a way to describe it?
Andy Root (37:58):
Yeah, that's really fair. So, you know, like the trajectory of Rosa's work, which this book really is following more of his early, early work, where he's talking about acceleration and how acceleration kind of gets imposed within us and how every part of our lives accelerate. And so he, he presented that stuff in his early books and in Germany and, and became quite famous. Like I said, quite well known in the German speaking world. So it was like on our equivalent to Sunday morning political, you know, round table discussions. And, it was in newspapers everywhere. It became known as the slowdown guru, you know, that's what they started calling him. Because he was warning, like we can't accelerate too fast. And there has a whole movement culturally of slowing down, you know, there's slow food and there's slow, slow parenting. And I don't know, slow everything. And even, even people, you know, making, I think really important cases for kind of slow church and things like that. But Rosa wanted, and I really, I completely follow him on this and think he's really right.
Andy Root (38:57):
Especially as we put it into the connection of the church is that it's not enough. Like slow down the acceleration is so, so all encompassing and does something, he wouldn't quite say this way, but I would kind of echoing Jim Loder or something like it does something to our spirit. Acceleration does something to the human spirit and becomes a kind of spiritual crisis that simply slowing down won't solve the issue. That, that there has to be something else in place of that. So the second half of his work that's been, I think really brilliant, is he wrote this book called, Resonance where he thinks the other to this alienation of acceleration is actually resonance. So what we need is not just a slow down, but we need a whole nother form of action and a form of action that doesn't accelerate us so that our connections get cut off because we're going too fast, but there are forms of action that we have, that we have to have, or we wouldn't be, you know, the kind of beings we are though.
Andy Root (39:57):
They get kind of thinned out, unfortunately, but we do have these deep connections. We do have these kind of kind of actions and kind of kind of engagements in our lives that connect us deeply, where we feel again, there's a live wire connecting us with the world. And particularly like when we engage in an artistic activity, or see a movie that we love or have a long conversation with a friend, like we, in those moments, we can become tired. Like I needed, you know, we've been talking for three hours, I need to go to bed, but you often don't feel alienated. You feel connected and you feel drawn into something really full. And you often don't even know time. You look at your watch and are like, oh my gosh, we've been talking for three hours and I'm tired. I should go to bed, but you don't feel like something was, something was carved out of you and taken out of it.
Andy Root (40:49):
You feel, you feel full with this kind of deep connection. So he, he really in his beautiful ways tries to articulate this, this idea of resonance. So resonance, isn't just a kind of spiritual thing. It's a form of action that there are forms of actions we can take that really connect us deeply with the world that stand in opposition to this acceleration where time doesn't become, hollowed out. And this is kinda my argument throughout this, like the sacredness of time becomes pulled out of it and modernity, so it can continue to be sped up really starting with the industrial revolution. But beyond that, so we can just continue speeding up. It has no sacredness whatsoever, but yet we do have these moments, like when you sit with your grandchild and eat an ice cream cone, or when you just have a walk with somebody you love on, on vacation, or you do sit in a moment of silence, or take on certain mystical practices, that all of a sudden time becomes full of something.
Andy Root (41:47):
And what he really wants to argue, which is connected with the trajectory of my work these last 15 years, is that it becomes full with these deep forms of relationship. These, what I, what I call following Bonhoeffer like these deep senses of place sharing these relationships, where we're just with and for each other, for the purpose of being with and for each other, not to accelerate off to something else, not to try to make, ourselves into or, or achieve some kind of goodness, but in the relationship itself is this kind of sense of goodness. So I'm trying to take a turn here at the last half of the book. I think it is true. Like some people have said, my gosh, first 200 pages of this book. I was so depressed. And,
Dayle Rounds (42:31):
I know, that's how I felt.
Andy Root (42:31):
Yeah, I do keep that. You're not going to miss the point that acceleration is a problem, whether you agree with me or not, that's for you to de- but I think I've given you a 360, kind of sense of why it's a problem, but so the solution is kind of resonance and I have another book coming out that will even get more into that, that, that ecclesiology that I didn't get to, I will get to you in my next project where resonance will become kind of more, more central, where here it is the answer to a really big problem that I, that I've laid out. But I do think that maybe the good congregation isn't the busy congregation, but the congregation that finds a way to create environments that allows for actions of resonance. And, in this forthcoming book, we'll try to even more theologically articulate how, how resonance and, and, and the act of God, kind of connect in some ways
Dayle Rounds (43:22):
And you brought up Bonhoeffer. So I feel like I should talk about Bonhoeffer when we, whenever we talk with you. So you do bring him up toward the end of the book with this, with the notion of his phrase, carrying the child. Can you go into that a little bit?
Andy Root (43:39):
Yeah. So this is, the original kind of brainchild of, of this project. Like I told you was supposed to be a full ecclesiology and it didn't become that. It was because of that phrase, like insect torum commino - so much good scholarship has been done on that, that book. And yet almost no one really centers Bonhoeffer's statement of his really practical form of the church for him. What a faithful community, what a faithful gominda, as he would say as a faithful kind of church community, not necessarily an institution, but a community of people together. It's most practical form that reflects its faithfulness is that children are at the center of it and that children are being carried. And, almost, you know, God bless, Bonhoeffer scholars everywhere. But very few people focus on that and, you know, get caught in kind of philosophical ideas that need to be really articulated, and larger theological ideas.
Andy Root (44:33):
But this is his real practical sense of that. And I've just been always so intrigued by that. And what would it mean to have a kind of whole ecclesiology where caring children becomes the central piece? And so I returned to that here, and it doesn't become as full blown maybe as, as it should be, or as I originally thought it could be. And I had a whole thought of like doing a kind of Mariology with thinking of Mary as the one who carries, carries the Christ child. And there's a long footnote where I talk about how I wish I could have gone that direction, but you, none of you would've read a 600 page book and, who knows if I could have pulled it off anyhow, but there is something really beautiful about Bonhoeffer's sense that, we, when we know, and I guess to put this in kind of Rosa language is that the deep temptation is to have our congregations be accelerating, to keep up and to be busy, to attract busy people.
Andy Root (45:25):
And when that happens and when those are the kind of forms of church, usually children always get pushed off into potentiality. They either get literally taken out of the congregation or we need a children's ministry. We need to think about children because they are what we will potentially need there. It all is based on the kind of potentiality, or we need them as a kind of a felt, need marketing ploy to get young, fast, busy people to come. You know, like if you have a good children's ministry, then you're gonna have young professionals who want to come to your church with kids. But Bonhoeffer thinks something really differently. He thinks that, that first of all, we, that that's a bad image of the church. But if the church is really a community, then children are there at the center, but why children are so important is because children fundamentally represent to us.
Andy Root (46:15):
That's true about our own humanity that we have our own humanity through. He doesn't quite, he doesn't say this, but to give him Rosa's language, we have it through actions of resonance, of relationships, of connection. A child is fundamentally bound to others. That a child has to be carried by another. It's like Winnicott the great object relations psychologist said, "there's no such thing as a child, there's only a child and a caregiver, a child, and a mother." He says like, there it's that dynamic of a relationship. And Bonhoeffer's getting at that, in that relationship often of a child and a caregiver, when it's at its most beautiful, isn't accelerated, I mean, there's temptations for acceleration. Like how many, how many baby times should we go to? And should we start music lessons here? So our child - you know, there's, there's, there's, there's the temptations of the acceleration for development, but at its most core and its most beautiful, there's just something about being in each other's presence.
Andy Root (47:14):
And that relationship is full of a deep kind of connection where you can, where you feel spoken to in many ways or you feel connected to something deeper and where there's a kind of sacredness that lands inside of time and time becomes full of something sacred and connected. But it also is. It's done deeply through this kind of dialectic for Bonhoeffer where we, the child has - the child is a resonant creature to give him, Rosa's language because to give Rosa Bonhoeffer's language because it's fundamentally dialectic, they're dialectical beings. A child, even an infant is both spirit and will, is both open and closed. These things, these, these dynamics that play out, you know, that infant has its own will I need to eat, I need someone to hold me, but also can't be without being inside of a relationship. And when, when that's acknowledged and when that shared in, it feels a deep connection of something of something sacred.
Andy Root (48:14):
And so there's just also a deep kind of Christological element here of you know, the fullness of the second person of the Trinity, can't be disconnected from being a being that was carried by his mother. You know, so Mary becomes, I think this picture of, of maybe what it means to be church in this kind of resonant way. So that's kind of - Bonhoeffer, doesn't quite go with the Mary element here. He's too, too much of a early 20th century, Lutheran, but there is, there is something I think in that dynamic, that's, that's important. And so I use a little bit of a - or quite a bit actually of, a Greek Orthodox theologian named, Yannaras, who, who touches on some of this stuff as well and the importance of person. And he has this really important book, I think called Person and Arrows, where he tries to talk about what this kind of this passionate love is is about.
Andy Root (49:10):
But it has to be found within this kind of sense of personhood too, which I think, gives us a way of even thinking about what change might look like within a church instead of it being about this acceleration to do more, that it has to be embedded in this deep sense of person sharing in each other's lives. And that could be slower, but more so it's, it moves us into something. Well, it moves us into deep connections that feel, or that we can testify to being sacred or full. In full, I would want to say I'm full of divine action full of God's being, full of participation and, and God's life. It has a deeper kind of spiritually mystical element while it's completely concrete and lived also.
New Speaker (49:54):
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Dayle Rounds (49:57):
Last question is, I mean, at this point, I'm sure you're hearing from people, I've had some conversations with pastors or folks who've read the book, how are those conversations going? How are people engaging with this? Are they all walking away depressed because they read the first two, two sections of the book and don't get to the third? Or are they leaning in into this, into the last section of the book where, where there's some tools for figuring it out?
Andy Root (50:24):
Yeah, it's, it's, it's interesting because yeah, it's, I call you not, you know, to be wary of becoming a depressed church by going too fast. And then my diagnosis could just make you depressed in the other in another way as well. So, yeah, I think my, the, the pushback is been, or the interactions have been that this, that this does describe something. I think one of the beauties of Taylor and I hope what I've offered in a way that's congratulate with his work in, and hopefully in a little bit of a unique way is to try to articulate what people already sense and feel, but haven't had the words for maybe. And so I think some of the feedback has been, yeah, this really names that. And I think where it's maybe been most helpful for people right now is thinking about coming out of this pandemic because the book was obviously composed before the pandemic then, you know, released in the middle of the pandemic, which is, you know, every author's nightmare that some huge historical event happens after your book is already in production.
Andy Root (51:33):
But I think, you know, so there, there, I think there could be an, their initial pushback, like, well, wait a minute, you talk about acceleration acceleration, but from, you know, March, 2020 until pretty much February, 2021, there was no acceleration. We were all at home. So I guess that didn't work out, but I don't think that's really true. I think we felt deep forms of anxiety and feeling overwhelmed as we detox from some of that acceleration. And yet I think we also felt lost in the world. You know, like in the Twin Cities, particularly, violence has gone skyrocketed and, and just, there's just been incredible ways that when people have not been able to continue at the accelerated pace, they accelerate in other ways or they, they lose or kind of get pushed into, to, you know some destructive things. But the other element of this, and as we sit right now here at the end of May, is that there's just going to be a huge temptation, I think.
Andy Root (52:34):
And we saw this with the Spanish flu, a huge temptation to make up for lost time. And I think pastors and congregations are going to feel that. Like, okay, our young people did not get to go on a mission trip last summer. So let's do two this year or, you know, we gotta do, we, we need our youth group to meet twice a week or, or whatever, or, you know, people are gonna think, I gotta, I gotta preach my best, my best sermons now. You know, I really have to make sure that those, those are, those are out there top match, or we need more programming to get people more involved. And so I think we, we need to be really careful of that, the careful, the temptation to try to make up for lost time. And I think where the book has been helpful is reminding people, that this isn't just a little issue or this isn't just a needed tweak, but there is a whole way we have to kind of rethink, rethink what we do and really at its most base, what makes a congregation good.
Andy Root (53:32):
What does a good congregation? What does it mean for us to be living well together? And I think it has a lot more to do with our connections to one another and our confession of our connection to God then how, how far our reach is. And how, how fast we're accelerating to win resources to make sure we survive. And that's a worry, but I think ultimately what we desire most is to be connected to one another, which is something we became so deeply viscerally aware of through this pandemic too, is that the, that the we're lonely and that we need others in a significant way.
Dayle Rounds (54:13):
Thanks, Andy.
Andy Root (54:14):
Thanks, Dayle.
Dayle Rounds (54:17):
Been listening to the distillery interviews are conducted by me, Dale rounds and me Sue Sharma Austin Conner,
Speaker 4 (54:24):
And I'm Sherry hosting Peterman. And I am in charge of production.
Dayle Rounds (54:29):
Like what you're hearing subscribe at apple podcasts, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast app. The distillery is a production of Princeton. Theological seminary is office of continuing education. You can find out more@thedistillerydotptsen.edu. Thanks for watching.