Ep. 435 Ben Norquist & Brian Miller - The Places We Live Are Telling Stories. Which Ones Are Getting Told?

In this episode, Ben Norquist and Brian Miller make the case that American Christians have become a placeless, rootless people and that we are shaped by inherited land stories. That our land is exceptional. That property is something to wall off. That the ground exists to be taken and turned into wealth. We dig into where these stories came from, how they affect our faith, and why it matters that Scripture opens with God calling place good. We talk about how to read the place you actually live, whose stories get monuments and whose get erased, and what better land stories, ones shaped more like Jesus, might look like.

Dr. Ben Norquist is a writer, researcher, and communications strategist whose work explores how Christian understandings of land shape mora/l imagination and public life. He serves with the Bethlehem Institute for Peace & Justice, engaging American Christians on questions of theology, justice, and the realities in Palestine. He is co-author of Every Somewhere Sacred: Rescuing a Theology of Place in the American Imagination (InterVarsity Press, 2026).

Brian Miller (PhD, University of Notre Dame) is professor of sociology at Wheaton College and regularly teaches about and publishes on Christian residential and cultural patterns. His books include Sanctifying Suburbia: How the Suburbs Becamethe Promised Land for American Evangelicals and Building Faith: A Sociology of Religious Structures, coauthored with Robert Brenneman.

Ben & Brian's Book:

Every Somewhere Sacred

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Transcript

Unknown: 0:00

If we're followers of Jesus, the Prince of Peace, we want to find and grasp better land stories that are more like Jesus and that help us live more like Jesus towards our neighbors and

Joshua Johnson: 0:29

Hello, and welcome to the Shifting Culture podcast, in which we have conversations about the culture we create and the impact we could make. We long to see the body of Christ look like Jesus. I'm your host, Joshua Johnson. You know, I grew up in Puyallup, Washington. It's a town named for the people who lived there long before any settler arrived. The name means the valley of generous people, and in the place that I grew up, there are two different land stories: the stories of the people who were there, the Native Americans, and the people who settled the pioneers. My mom grew up on Pioneer Avenue. Who gets to tell these stories, and which story emerges to the forefront? That's kind of what this conversation is about. Land stories, the accounts we inherit about the places we live, who they belong to, what they're for, how we came to be here. My guests, Ben Norquist and Brian Miller, argue in their book, Every Somewhere Sacred, that American Christians have absorbed a particular set of ideas, that our land is exceptional, that property is something to wall off, that the frontier is there to be taken, the ground there to be turned into wealth, so we don't really ask whether any of these stories are true or whether they're good, and whether there are better stories that we could be telling, and this really matters to our faith and to the way that we follow Jesus, because scripture opens with God calling place good three full days of creation before a single creature is made. Land runs through the whole story, from Eden all the way to new earth, new creation. But somewhere we shrank the gospel down to God and people. We left the earth, the ground, the place out of it. Well, we're going to put a pack, and in this conversation, we're going to talk about why we've become a rootless people, how to read the place we actually live, whose stories get monuments, and whose get erased, and what better land stories one shaped more like Jesus might look like. So, join us as we discover the places we inhabit, how to read them, how to live in them, and how to tell better land stories. Here is my conversation with Ben Norquist and Brian Miller. Ben, Brian, welcome to Shifting Culture. Excited to have you both on.

Unknown: 3:02

Thank you so much. Thanks for having us.

Joshua Johnson: 3:05

Yeah, I'm really excited to dive into every somewhere sacred your new book. We're going to be talking about a theology of place, what place looks like, how it matters, why we've lost our sense of place as American Christians. One of the things you do talk about, you say that American Christians are placeless people that we have kind of lost our ability to see or inhabit the places that we occupy, that means that we're rootless. Why do you think that placelessness is actually happening. What is at the heart of placelessness in American Christianity?

Unknown: 3:48

Yeah, I think that there are a lot of factors, and books have been written about this, and people are trying to figure out what's going on. Brian is a sociologist, and sociologists are asking these questions, you know, in systematic kinds of ways, in our book, we want to dive deeper and ask, what is it about our theologies and the stories that we tell theologically about land and place, and even about creation, you know, the categories that we like, biblical categories, creation itself, how do we, how do we understand those categories in ways that are resulting in decisions, outcomes in the world, and that kind of rootlessness. So, that's what the book is about. I would add that often, as Christians today, we think about minds, we think about hearts, we think about souls, but rarely do we reckon with the material realities of ourselves and the world around us. So, if creation was important to God, and was from the beginning, right, created actually even before humans, what is our relationship to that creation? What is our obligation? How can we live with creation to glorify God? Is an important question of place and land.

Joshua Johnson: 5:00

Is God calling place good and places good? Like, how is creation set up when it comes to place?

Unknown: 5:10

So we introduced this idea of land stories, and you know, we tell good land stories or bad land stories, and they result in the kinds of outcomes that you were asking about in your last question. The Bible tells land stories, and they're so much richer and deeper than the kinds of land stories that, as Americans, we have learned to tell about our land and about other places, and so in Genesis, when, when the creation account is being, is, is being laid out. Everyone's familiar with the cadence of, you know, God created x, and he, he saw it, and he said it was good, and God created y, and he saw it, and and he said that it was good, and we just notice and reflect on how the first three times that he, that God surveys what's unfolding, it is place that is being formed in days one, two, and three. So, before God fills this place that He's created, this universe, this earth with plants and animals and people, three times he's already proclaimed it good. So that's where we want to start. We all know how the account goes from there, and things fall apart and break. This place starts breaking, and our relationship to this place starts breaking. But what God created first, we see fundamentally his opinion of it is that it is good

Joshua Johnson: 6:45

if you're telling land stories. Where's the story headed? Because you just said, Ben, that we've, you know, we often think about the brokenness, and we broke it, and we'll talk about how we've broken it, and where we could actually see maybe foretaste of what is coming, the new parts, but like, so where is this the story headed for us as far as land and place goes, so we know to situate ourselves the beginning of creation, and then maybe you know the consummation and what is coming?

Unknown: 7:21

Yeah, what I'm consistently struck by in the final chapters of Scripture, but also it's a theme throughout the Bible, is that it's not just people who are restored with God, it's also land and creation, it's everything God has made is brought back to what it was intended to be in that opening story. To me, that's exciting, right? It's thinking about, as you just described, ways that we might see some of that now, or aim for some of that. That's not just it's coming in the future, it is, as Jesus suggests, it's happening now, and there are signs of it, and different ways we might think about it. But it's a central theme throughout scripture, right? It's not just beginning and end. Oh, yeah, there's this thing of land and place, yeah, it was put in place, and then we'll come back together. I'm thinking of the work of theologian Walter Brueggemann, who argues land is a central theme of scripture, and that's one thing that we just often miss, right? That's not our focus, our emphasis, and that's what we argue in the book, that's to our detriment,

Joshua Johnson: 8:21

since we're getting to that, and that's going to be new heavens, new earth. We now have to reckon right with the story that we're living now. I was struck by your move into, like, Genesis three through 11, going from Cain, building a city into, and then going through into Babel, so can you lay out Genesis three through 11 as something to help us see what is land grab or land mass as humans in the fall, what does it look like, how are we starting to reckon with

Unknown: 8:57

it? Yeah, yeah, so we're all kind of familiar with this, like formula that we talk used to talk about the, you know, so-called meta narrative of scripture, with creation, fall, redemption, and consummation, you know, there are different versions of that, but when that kind of meta narrative is being unpacked, often what's behind it is this, this focus about, like, you know, the through line here is about the relationship between God and, and God's people, God and people, and how it was, you know, set up originally and intended to be good, and for people to flourish in that relationship, and then the fall broke that relationship, and Jesus returns to restore that relationship, and then there's the eschaton in which we enjoy the benefits of that relationship together, and it's not that that's problematic in any way, it's just that it's limited, it's too small of a vision of of God's project. As we understand it, you know, if land is a major theme in scripture, if, if land and creation is actually a core pillar of the metanarrative, it leaves that out, and so when we look at at those, those chapters in Genesis, we're looking for land, and we're looking for patterns, and where the built world pops up, you know, the first, arguably some of the first built world is, is Kane going and building that city, you know, after he, he is expelled to the land of wandering, but if you take a step back, Kane, he's guilty of murder, he murders his brother, and where that first family has already been expelled from the garden, the consequence of that murder is is also expulsion. So there it's a place-based consequence. He has to leave where he is and go to a different place as a result of that, and he's afraid, he's afraid that that he will become a victim of the thing that he has just perpetrated against his brother, and God makes provision for that, and says, "I'm going to take care of you, but that's not enough for Cain. So Cain, when he goes to this land of wandering, builds a city, presumably with a wall around it. It's a defensive structure, so that he can protect himself, take his own care and safety into his own hands, and that pattern of building in the world of creating a place continues through multiple chapters and culminates with the Babel story, so really in the first chapters of the Bible building places, you know, it's a negative thing. I think we should take that seriously. We still live in that reality, even though Christ has returned and the kingdom is dawning and the spirit is with us, that we still live in a world that tries, that strives to take our own security into our own hands, and we build Babel as a result, and that's where we live right now.

Joshua Johnson: 12:06

We tell ourselves these land stories all the time. So, if you're taking us, we're in America right now, so if we talk about American land stories, Brian, what are some of these stories that that we're telling that to maybe be reminiscent of of building Babel or something of like taking our own own power. What are the stories that we tell as Americans of our land? We discuss four of these in chapter two, sort of thinking historically, where do these come from? How do they develop, but we discuss first this idea that the American land mass or property is exceptional, right? It's specially blessed by God, or there's been special provision made for it. We have this concept of private property, which is in the Bible, but the sense that property rights are really important

Unknown: 13:00

in the American narrative, right, you should not be able to violate those government and private property owners have sort of a wall between themselves, right, sort of defending yourself. We have this theme throughout American history of frontiers, exploring, taking, colonizing, moving into, and then using it for ourselves, as opposed to what it had previously been, and then finally generating wealth from land, right? That the purpose of land, or creation, is not for the goodness of itself, but that we can make something out of it, we can extract from it, we can commodify it.

Joshua Johnson: 13:37

How do we then say, okay, are these stories correct? Are they true? Are they good? And is it something that I should aspire to, or are there other stories that we need to be telling? How do we start to discern the stories that we're telling, and start to then start to learn what are the stories, and are these good stories, and stories we should be leaning into.

Unknown: 14:06

We pause on this question, what do we think about these stories, and, and how, how do we go about evaluating them? And in some ways, we arrive at a very evangelical answer. We should read the Bible again and see, like, do these match up? Try to kind of survey scripture broadly. What does it say? And not just in the Old Testament, you know, we can think about land as a clearer, maybe a clearer theme in the Old Testament than it is in the New, but we, we find it in the New as well, and coming out of that exploration of scripture, we draw out four land stories that we say we just call them better land stories, and they're not the only biblical land stories, they're just four that emerged for us as really important, and in some ways maybe important corrections. To the American land stories that we described, we need to wrestle with those. How we got those American land stories, and just arrive out of nowhere. They have consequences, they've had effects on individuals and groups of people, and we've structured the book so that we have some consistent themes in this history, chapters three four and five, but try to package the categories in some different ways to help people see some different angles on this, either thinking about colonial settler colonialism in chapter three, thinking about race, ethnicity, and social class in chapter four, thinking about types of space, cities and rural areas and suburbs and wild areas, which, if you read those three chapters, have some very similar themes, right? Those land stories are persistent, but with some of those different angles, we can, we can reflect, we can lament, we can say, oh yeah, those things didn't just come out of nowhere, they have a long history, gives us a little bit more impetus, I think, to get to those. Well, what does the Bible say about this, right? What is the.. what are those themes in scripture?

Joshua Johnson: 16:07

So, I mean, if we're looking to get back into our place, one of the things that you.. you need to do there is to your particular place, the place that you inhabit now. How do you read that? And so, if you're looking at those, those American land stories, like those are a few ways that you were reading those stories of where do they come from. So I think, especially when we're talking about America, America is so vast and so big, especially when it comes to land. I want to figure out how do we do this in our particular areas. So can you just like take your place where you guys live and work, and say, how do you start to read the land story of the lands around you?

Unknown: 16:53

I'm going to let our suburban sociologists address this, but I just want to preface by saying this is really, I think, kind of where this book had its start. Brian and I, we have some common interests. We were interested in place, kind of as an academic, you know, thing. We were out on a walk one day, it was snowing. We were in Wheaton, that's a very specific place, and just looking at the buildings and the churches and the train tracks and musing together about how this place came to be, and of course it wasn't planned fully formed in in the way that it is today, it evolved over time, you know, through many, many processes, many many generations of people, of builders of communities and many, many generations of the exercise of different kinds of power, so there's a kind of critical dimension to all of this that needs to be accounted for, and and it resulted in this, you know, we, we came away from that walk wondering, huh, I wonder if it would be good to develop tools for helping people read the places around them. Okay, Brian, how should people read the places around them? I'll just mention a few of the tools that we actually introduce at the beginning of the book, and then we try to put those into practice in the subsequent chapters with sort of stories or examples, and I like one of the examples that Ben opens that chapter with, of what do we do with the suburban shopping mall? Right here it is, this sort of very American late 20th century embodiment of a lot of these land stories, and a lot of what American society is about, and so we put it in these categories of we've got lenses we can take, we've got metaphors that help us see some similarities, and we've got what we call diagnostic questions. So, as an example of a lens, at least in the academic study of place, we often differentiate between what we might call an ecological or a critical approach. So, an ecological approach would stress, how are the pieces working together? Can we see this like an organism? How does this grow and thrive? How do other parts of it die not do so well? That tends to line up with what we call the Chicago School of Sociology, which became famous in the 1920s The Chicago is growing rapidly. How do we make sense of these new kinds of places? But a few decades later, a number of other scholars say that that lens is not sufficient. It doesn't describe well what's going on, and they start what becomes known as more of a critical approach of asking questions of who's behind this, what power is this serving, who's benefiting, who has the right to a particular place. So we use that throughout the book. We also think about in terms of metaphors. Places are sometimes hard to grasp, so can we use ideas like networks or copying and pasting ideas, or a facade where there's something real behind it, but you're presented with something out front, or a black box where. So you can't really, we don't know what's going on, right? We see the output, but we don't know how we got there. And then we propose there's a set of questions any of us could ask in any of our places. If I'm at that suburban shopping mall, or I'm in Wheaton, Illinois, or I'm in a city, or I'm in a small town, I can ask, what scale am I at, where I'm trying to understand this place, individual, smaller group, collective, societal. What is this place being used for? What is it about? Where is it aimed? How are institutions shaping this place? Often American Christians think in more individualistic terms, but thinking about the local groups and governments and bodies that are shaping this place. What power is being exercised here? Who has power, and how is it being used? And then, finally, who's this home for, right? Who's welcomed here, who's seen as a resident or someone who's welcome, and maybe who's not. And often those people aren't even there, right? It's a question of who's not present, or who could be present and who's not.

Joshua Johnson: 22:39

Can one of you just take in a particular place that you have, and then start to think through some of these, these questions to help me grasp what this looks like for my particular place, which is East Kansas City. How would you start to read your place in some of these things and metaphors and questions that you were asking.

Unknown: 23:02

I'll start with there's both broad patterns that apply to particular places, as well as sort of individual histories and decisions made in places. I'm thinking of East Kansas City, right? Some of those broad pattern patterns you're describing of redlining, right, that's involving the federal government and banks and mortgage institutions in the early 1900s but then the way that plays out in a particular neighborhood or part of a community is people there responding to that and making decisions, so if people are thinking, the example I would use with my students often is, after you graduate, where are you going to live, right? And in the American context, we often think, well, that's a free choice, right? I could make a choice about where I go and where I want to be, but I think we stress in the book, this is shaped by all of these sorts of forces. Who do you feel welcome with? What do you desire? What kind of economic resources do you have? How do people perceive you? Do you feel you can contribute to a place or a setting? Do you want to know that place? Right, I mean, that's often just a basic question of am I here temporarily or do I have something that I can learn or contribute in this community. One of the, one of the factors that going through this process in the study highlighted for me is how much maybe in America, especially probably in other parts of the world too. Some of those choices are shaped through hype and desire, you know. A lot of the settlement of the United States was, you know, part of it was economic interests develop, like generating drumming up interest in Europe to come and telling stories, land stories, right? Same today, I see, you know, generations of young people, I recognize this in myself, who have ideas about places in the country, you know, those who feel free or interested in going away from home, wherever that is, want to go to just a few places, they want to go to New York, LA, if they're politically minded, they want to go to DC, and they have, they're holding these really powerful land stories in their minds, and those land stories even contribute to the development of the places that that you live, and if the other side of that land story is, here's a desirable place to live, the other side is, and this is not a desirable place to live, and and so there's that layer that I think is is carving out the contours of the places that we that we experience.

Joshua Johnson: 25:39

Good, I'll give you just an example of where I grew up. I grew up in a town in Washington state called Puyallup, named after the Native American tribe that actually inhabited the land. It means the valley of generous people, that's one story we get to sell, but also then we have my mom grew up on Pioneer Avenue, so we have the Pioneer settlers that came in right down the street was Meeker Mansion. So Ezra Meeker was a guy who blazed the Oregon Trail and was actually a prominent figure there, and so we have this this land story of these people that have come and settled. How do even names who we are, the stories we tell, like something like that, and that story. How do we then reckon with what is this land for? Whose is it? And what, what do we do with this land now that we are all find ourselves here, because now in. An amalgamation of different stories tied to a particular place. Now, what? What? How do we start to then figure out what is good today in this place that we live?

Unknown: 26:54

So, you're describing a place, your hometown, that that is reminding me of a story that we tell in, in the book about a Riford Road area, just down the road from where we live, where there was a Potawatomi village for, for probably hundreds of years, there were, there was a native trail that the road that that this area is built around is laid over right directly over the top of, so the space has been used as a, as a thoroughfare for people, probably for 1000s of years, but right now today it just looks like a normal everyday road. People who live here would, wouldn't think twice about it, and yet they're passing these spaces and places that for other people who are not fully at home here, who are not present, have very, very different land stories to tell about that, those woods there, and about that stream, the ways that the physical environment does acknowledge land stories along this road, they acknowledge the settlement land stories, so you know we talk about in the United States history, the way that we think of history starts when the, when the settlers arrived, and the native history, the indigenous history is an afterthought, or half of a page at the beginning of the history of the local history book, and along this road there's a monument on one side of the road to the first cabin to be erected in this community, but we know through research that and indigenous testimony that the Potawatomi village was on the just adjust adjacent to that cabin on the other side of the road. There is no sign about that village, and it leads us to reflect on a question that becomes really important to us, which is Whose land stories get told, and it prompts, I think, a moral opportunity, at minimum obligation, perhaps we can think about it to acknowledge and start recovering the diversity of land stories, because people, land means is richly meaningful to different people, and when, when those land stories are lost or pushed out, there's there's a moral dimension to that that we need to reckon with. So, what do we do with competing land stories? Then, Brian, one of the things we would encourage readers to do is some of that is just wrestling with that tension, right, living in that tension and resisting that urge to go to the easy or common land store. We can just overlay. Oh, yeah, here's the one we are used to. And then the next step, after what Ben was just describing, is thinking about how do we live those out in ways that bless creation and all the people involved, so that the outcome is not just one-sided or only one group feels heard or represented, but how might we live those together as Christians in Christian communities, but also with others around us in ways that is affirming, it's a life-giving and not taking away from people in their experiences.

Joshua Johnson: 30:23

I want to go through some of the land source and the things that you, you highlight, as in, what are the good ones? What are the ones we want to reframe, and one you talk about as gift, and land is as gift. What shifts and changes in our places if we start to see land as gift as opposed to something we control and own, one of

Unknown: 30:48

the tendencies you can see in suburban settings, in particular, is people are particularly worried about property values, so anything that might arrive, or people who might be near them, who they see as threats to my land, my house, my property is a commodity. It's an investment I need it to appreciate. If land and all of that is a gift, it's given to us by God to bless others, not to hoard, not to keep, not just to bless a maybe select group of people that I select, but to give for the enrichment of the people around me, the community around me. Just as a quick example, one of the stories we share at the end is I've been following a local case of a company in our area who builds drug treatment and rehab facilities, they wanted to build one in. About a mile from my house, and now they move down to another community, but they're often met with reactions of this is not something we want in our community, right? This is not the best use of our land, it's not contributing economically. Residents have been very clear, this is a threat. The kinds of people who come to these facilities are not people we would want in our community, but the bigger question is, where then would you locate this if we have a need in the community, and these are often our neighbors, people who need drug treatment. It's a problem across the United States, particularly in wealthier communities where people have resources. Those are our neighbors. Where might this be? Where could Christians be in leading some of that conversation of no, it's not just about my property values. This is about the good of the community. This is about providing opportunities for people to get help, to be treated, to contribute to that common good, as opposed to know that gift - I'm going to keep it for myself, as opposed to blessing others. A lot of times, there's. there is, unfortunately, a racism element, you know, that that is involved in these kinds of scenarios too, where people are evaluating an organization or a family, you know, any newcomer to a community. It certainly is engaged in a lot of American discourses about immigration as well. Who belongs here, however, here is defined, and I think the land as gift theme, it actually can be misused and misappropriated, like we can think about as a gift for us, not for you, and that also is, you know, deeply problematic, but if you think about it as a gift for all, then actually it, it should prevent us from making that move from an from responding to a newcomer that we, that we don't understand, or that's different, or you know, in some way, if in the back of our mind we hear God saying this land is a gift for them, who are you to say no?

Joshua Johnson: 34:50

I think it goes hand in hand, then with another one you talk about as kin, and how something like indigenous theology is can really help us think through what does it look like for us to say we're actually in this family of creation that we are from the dirt and that creation is actually an important piece that we're tied to. How does that help?

Unknown: 35:16

Just the basic idea with this land story is that we are more like the rest of creation in that we are created than we are like God. Yes, we have this doctrine of the, you know, the image of God in people, so there's a kind of special creation dimension, but, but on the other side, we often make mistakes by kind of distancing ourselves from our createdness, that's like the Babel story, in, you know, we are, we will be like God, and it's, it's such a deeply human and like root of of the brokenness of the world to to to have that impulse and to live it out, so we, we want to anchor ourselves as well with this story, to our affinity, our likeness, our kinship with all of creation, we are part of that created family, and that's why we use that kinship language, and actually we learned to use that kinship language from deeply wise indigenous American theologians that we've been reading as well, part of, part of, you know, our going back to scripture to ask, what does scripture say, is we needed to kind of distance ourselves from just like a single tradition, hermeneutical tradition of reading scripture through these lenses, doing that would really just produce the same stories that that Western Christians have have derived from scripture, and so we wanted to walk alongside indigenous American theologians in reading scripture for land stories and Palestinian Christian theologians, you know, in looking for these land stories in scripture, and so we were reading by the Bible alongside these men, theological mentors, really, and that kinship language is something that we learned from American indigenous theologians, and then we actually were reminded, too, after the fact that CS Lewis thinks in some of these similar kinds of categories too, in Chronicles of Narnia, we get some sense of that that affinity there too. The

Joshua Johnson: 37:33

Bible was written through a people that were indigenous, they were indigenous to lands, they. Had this particular affinity towards the land and creation, the created order. What does the creation look like? How do we stand there? They were an indigenous nomadic people that you know the Bible is written through, and I think that helps as well. Say no, this is actually good, that we need to learn sociologically speaking. Brian, how does the land miss that we tell, especially in America, how has that distorted American Christianity? And actually, then the melding of the I am particularly American, believing in these land myths that we have. How does that affect the Christian faith, especially in America?

Unknown: 38:32

A great question, and one I've thought about a lot, based on my own personal experiences, but as well with a number of books in the last few decades, who have raised these kinds of questions, I wonder, this would be my own take on this, is that a lot of the time our default as Christians in the United States has been to default to the American land myths and not think too much about land and place, right? My sense is, when I talk to people about describing, oh, you're studying suburbs, you're thinking about places. People generally like the idea of places, but this idea that you would commit to studying, to knowing, to contributing to, is a further step, right? That is not in our often in our Christian, particular white Christian experience. I can't recall as a kid hearing many stories about land or place, right? There were stories about biblical land and places, but that was sort of so far removed or abstracted from our current realities, it was hard to see connections, and there were rarely questions raised or talked about about our current setting, and then there were also there was conversation about a future heaven and place as well, but again relatively little engagement with our current place. One way I like to think about it, I now live in Wheaton, Illinois, which is maybe an unusually religious place, it's got Wheaton College, dozens of religious organizations, 40 plus churches, and the way I often think about this is, is there something actually different about how Wheaton as a community works, because there's all these Christians here, or there's just happens to be a bunch of Christians here? Does it shape what day-to-day life looks like in our community? And my answer again, this is largely based on my own experiences. I don't know that it does, right? I don't know that people coming to Wheaton or moving would say no, there's something uniquely Christian about that place, the way they treat each other, the way they think about land, the way they approach some of these thorny, controversial issues that Americans face. It's uniquely Christian, as opposed to, well, they're suburbanites, and suburbanites in these kinds of communities, yeah, they kind of sound like that, but they happen to go to church, right, or they happen to be involved in Christian organizations.

Joshua Johnson: 40:53

You do wrestle in the book, Ben, a little bit, Christian Zionism. So, how does, like, American land miss in the way that we see land actually inform the way that we see something like what is happening with Israel and Palestine.

Unknown: 41:10

Yeah, yeah. Thanks for asking that. I think that we kind of learn a way of relating to land from multiple different sources, and so you know, America, for American Christians, the way that we've been socialized to think about what's happening in Israel and Palestine actually contributes to how we relate to our own places and vice versa. I think it's a two-way street, and part of, part of the issue, I think you know, with it goes back to fundamental relationships to land that really are forged in the United States as a place that that exists because of the displacement of one people of actually many different peoples and the replacement with Europeans, there's like, you know, that the academic term for this is settler colonialism, but it, you know, that term means something, and it, it correlates to the, to the very complex, but rich and clear, if you look at it, history of how the United States came to be, how it became possible as a country in this day and age to to exist, part of it was it necessitated those things happening, and so you know we have this kind of original sin at the root of the history of the United States and our relationship to to land. End, and we recognize that something similar is happening in, in the, in the modern day Middle East with people who are being displaced by other people, and we talk about, gosh, to talk about contested land stories. No, this is the history of this land. No, this is the history of this land, and it really highlights how, when you add in, when you add power plus land stories, land stories became become an arena where that struggle takes place, not just in the physical world, but in the discourses about that land, in whose land story gets to prevail here,

Joshua Johnson: 43:27

I think all of this is going to be helpful for people to just to lift a veil to figure out where am I, what, what are the stories that have been told about about our lands, where we come from, what the purpose is for it, and then how do we like tell better land stories, and our purpose here, and how do we engage with with land? What is your hope for people who read every somewhere sacred?

Unknown: 44:00

I guess maybe on a couple of levels. I hope that people really like on one level just are stimulated to think more about the places that they live, about what, what does God have in mind, you know, when, when God created us as embodied people who are in place, like fundamentally, you know, as a physical creature, we are, we are always in a place, in a location of some kind. Why, why, why did God make it that way? You know, there's there are actually rich and fascinating and enriching things to learn by asking and then following some of those questions, so that that level of kind of divine curiosity about creation. I hope people walk away that way. I hope people walk away to thinking again about the inherited land stories that they've been handed. They're empty in a lot of ways, they're they're morally bankrupt in some ways, and they're just deeply problematic. They create harm for people. If we're followers of Jesus, the Prince of Peace, we want to find and grasp better land stories that are more like Jesus and that help us live more like Jesus towards our neighbors, that would be the deeper outcome that we're hoping for. Yes, I like where we ended up in the subtitle of the book with that word, imagination, and you might use some different words, you might think of vision, but being able to have that imagination, that sense of what is God up to in the world, right? It doesn't depend to some degree on us, right. We're asked to participate. God is given the capabilities of participating in His work, and yet God has plans for creation, which includes us, and to recover that, to think deeply about that, to wrestle with it, right. Even we say we have four themes for reading these biblical land stories, those aren't the only ones possible, but to get a handle on it, to have some sense of this is what it could be like, maybe it's like kin, maybe it's like sacrament, maybe it's like home, that would then inspire us to live in these particular places, but also have that fuller picture of what God has been up to from the beginning and will continue to do through the end.

Joshua Johnson: 46:25

That's great. Well, a couple questions I like to ask at the end. If you go back to your 21 year old self, what advice would you give?

Unknown: 46:32

Great question. That's roughly half my life, so half a lifetime ago. No, a lot of the writing in this book reflects the sort of kind of study and reflection I wish I had been doing before that, right? The sense that there are Christians wrestling with these ideas and stories. There are resources available to us, but these aren't new questions in the Christian tradition or in the biblical story, so to know that these often we think these are new, these are exciting. No, there's a lot to draw on, and I was not aware of that at 21 years old, partly that's on me, right? Not knowing, not being curious enough, but also I look back at my upbringing and think there are a lot of things that just we didn't talk about right, some omissions, some things that could have contributed to this fuller sense of what is God up to in the world, not just in my individual life, but this broader picture. Anything you've been reading or watching lately, you could recommend? I just finished watching the four seasons that are out of the bear, which is. A television show set in Chicago, a very placed show, right? A family restaurant and very close family relationships. I've enjoyed that quite a bit, and it's funny to see on the Chicago side, and my family's from the Chicago area, you know, people are very excited. Here's a show set in our city, but I'm always intrigued by how shows and stories make a place, right? How do you do that with editing and shots, and you know, like, what? What truly makes a Chicago restaurant any different than a Kansas City restaurant, for example, or Nashville, or Miami? So, I've enjoyed thinking along with that, and thinking along with the characters. How do you live out your vocation in this kind of setting, where you've got family, but also you're maybe you feel like you have your own pursuits.

Joshua Johnson: 48:26

What is particularly a Chicago story?

Unknown: 48:31

Since I think about places all the time, I am struck throughout my research of Chicago happened to have an advantageous location, right, that I think is fairly unique in the American setting, where it's on water, it ends up becoming this transportation center. At the time of its founding, it's in kind of like the northwest corner of the country. This area was originally the Northwest Ordinance from 1783 but it ends up being this central location where I think Chicago has that image of a story of like this is the center of the country, Kansas City, other Midwestern cities, St. Louis might have some claims to that as well, but I think Chicago sees itself that way, right? Like, there's the coasts, and we kind of know what the coasts are, and a lot of Americans, for better or worse, think the coasts are different, and people on the coast maybe think the middle is different as well, but I think Chicago thinks like this is where the middle of the country, right, and some key key ways, and tries to work that out. There are good things to that, there's bad things to that as well.

Joshua Johnson: 49:33

Yeah, Brian Ben, thank you for this conversation. It was fantastic to dive into Every Somewhere Sacred, this theology of place, what it looks like to read our places. How we can figure out how to inhabit and the places that we occupy. How do we figure out how do we what land stories that are we're going to follow? How do they actually the land stories that we do follow? How does that actually distort or enhance the way that we view God and our place in the story and our Christian faith. Really enjoyed talking to you. So, thank you so much for this conversation. Thank

Unknown: 50:10

you. Thanks for having us. Bye.