Making Peace with the Proximate: Vocation, Faithfulness, and the Questions That Shape a Life | Steve Garber

What does it mean to give yourself fully to something — a marriage, a calling, a city, a cause — and still make peace with the fact that you won't get everything you hoped for? In this episode of The Upwards Podcast, host John Terrill sits down with professor, author, and longtime friend Steve Garber for a wide-ranging conversation about vocation, faithfulness in a particular place over time, and the trap of dualism.

Drawing on literature, theology, biography, and lived experience, Steve invites listeners into the central question of his new book, Hints of Hope: Essays on Making Peace with the Proximate - Is it worth doing something that matters, even when you don’t get everything you hoped for?

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN
00:00 — Introduction: Steve Garber and the questions that have shaped his life and writing

03:26 — Steve’s father, plant pathology, and the question of germination: how a scientist’s work became a metaphor for vocation

07:52 — Dropping out of college, living in communes, and what those years taught Steve about the nature of learning

11:40 — “Common grace for the common good”: why a theology of common grace matters for how we work in the world

16:40 — “Vocation is integral, not incidental”: what it means to live seamlessly, without dualism

17:59 — Can you know the world and still love it? Making peace with the proximate: the essay that became a life philosophy

21:31 — Who is this book written for? How Steve’s audience has grown from university students to the whole world

28:39 — Telos and praxis: the fundamental question of the book — is it worth doing something that matters if you don’t get everything you hoped for?

33:19 — Already but not yet: Tolkien, Frodo, and what the last pages of The Return of the King taught Steve in his 60s that he missed at 20

36:36 — The Clapham Community, Wendell Berry, and why commitment to a people and a place matters

41:26 — NT Wright on joy and sorrow woven into the fabric of a life

44:45 — The perennial question: What does it mean to be human in 2026?

49:23 — What Steve may write next: pedagogy and learning “over the shoulder and through the heart”

ABOUT STEVE GARBER

Steven Garber was professor of marketplace theology and leadership at Regent College, Vancouver, and the principal of The Washington Institute for Faith, Vocation & Culture. A consultant to foundations, corporations, and schools, he is a teacher of many people in many places. His books include Visions of Vocation and The Fabric of Faithfulness, and he is a contributor to the books Faith Goes to Work: Reflections from the Marketplace and Get Up Off Your Knees: Preaching the U2 Catalogue.

BOOKS REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE

• Hints of Hope: Essays on Making Peace with the Proximate by Steve Garber (Paraclete Press, 2026)
• The Fabric of Faithfulness: Weaving Together Belief and Behavior by Steve Garber (IVP, 1996; revised ed. 2007)
• Visions of Vocation: Common Grace for the Common Good by Steve Garber (IVP, 2014)
• The Lord of the Rings (The Return of the King) by J.R.R. Tolkien (George Allen & Unwin, 1955)
• The Moviegoer by Walker Percy (Knopf, 1961)
• Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book by Walker Percy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983)
• The Homeless Mind: Modernization and Consciousness by Peter L. Berger, Brigitte Berger, and Hansfried Kellner (Random House, 1973)

CONNECT WITH US
Subscribe to The UpWords Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts and visit slbf.org/studio to learn more about our work at the intersection of faith, the academy, and the marketplace.

This episode was created by the SLBF STUDIO at Upper House.

Produced by Daniel Johnson and Dave Conour

Edited by Dave Conour

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Tragically, the church is plagued by dualism. We have a very hard time thinking more currently about a life of faith and hope and love, what it means, what it ought to mean for the way you live in the world. Whether we're Catholics, Protestants, or Orthodox, it's rare, I would say, to see fine people who have been conscious of that and push back against that.

SPEAKER_00 0:26

Welcome to the Upwards Podcast, where we explore the intersection of Christian faith in the Academy, the Church, and the marketplace. Today, host John Terrell is joined by longtime friend Steve Garber, author of the recent book Hints of Hope: Essays on Making Peace with the Proximate. In this conversation, Steve explores some of the enduring questions that have shaped his life and writing. What does an imagination for a faithful and proximate life look like? Can you know the world and still love it? How do we make peace with the proximate in a world that groans? Rooted in stories, literature, theology, and lived experience, Steve invites us into a deeper understanding of vocation, one that is honest, wise, embodied, and grounded in hope. Let's listen in.

SPEAKER_02 1:15

Well, this is um a great delight to welcome a longtime friend, uh Stephen Garber, to the podcast. Um we're gonna have a lot of ideas and things we talk about. We'll post a lot of these in the show notes. Um, so if you're listening or watching today, we'll try to grab the most important resources uh for you. I want to commend, and I've got markings all over this new book, uh, Hints of Hope, uh, essays on making peace with the Proximate. This is just a beautiful book. Uh Steve, I don't know. Is this your fifth or sixth book at this point, fourth or fifth book?

SPEAKER_01 1:51

Yes, it is.

SPEAKER_02 1:52

Okay. I'm I'm I'm in the ballpark of of numbers. I know you you your books um you don't you don't uh you don't publish a book every year. These germinate with you for for a long time. And I appreciate about that about you because um you know you're a uh a a student of the world and of of stories, and um and you've got a lot of them bundled in this book. So thank you for the gift of this book.

SPEAKER_01 2:17

You're very welcome, John. It's uh you know by now because I've told you this so many times over the years, but I have always seen you to be a remarkably, wonderfully kindred spirit to me from your days before Seattle and Seattle, and now I'm beating Madison. And you know, I meet people along the way like you do, and many people around the world. But sometimes you meet somebody you think he's the same world I do. So thank you, John.

SPEAKER_02 2:41

Thank you. Yeah, I uh it's the I so much enjoy my times with you. I wish we lived uh around the corner. I could imagine uh lots of regular coffees, or I know you drink tea, coffee and teas that we would enjoy together. One of the things that I enjoyed about your new book is you get into a little bit more of your journey with your growing up years. And I know you do this as you tell stories and as you've written in the past, but you've had a fascinating life journey. Um and I wonder for the benefit of our listeners and viewers, if you'd be willing to talk a little bit about your work in the world over the years. Um, and you can take it uh as detailed as you want to, but I'd love to hear, you know, how you characterize your work and um and and some of the places your work has taken you.

SPEAKER_01 3:25

A minute or two, you use the word germinate. All of a sudden I thought that's a good word, John Terrell, germinate, because in many ways, uh I mean that's autobiographical for all of us in our own unique, distinctive ways, but for me, it has a particular meaning. You're we're talking from you in Madison, Wisconsin, and you're across the street from the University of Wisconsin, and you know it's a major public university in America. But because it is a land grant university, it also has an agricultural dimension, which may be a surprise to people who don't know much about UW. But um I grew up in that world, John, in uh University of California Davis world. My father was a a scientist there for the his career, and he was a a plant pathologist by training. And uh his PhD work was on germination, to use a good word here. And the particular question was how do you help a farmer move from a healthy seed being planted in soil to come up as a healthy seedling a couple of weeks later to grow into the next five or six months a healthy plant that could be harvested and the fruit will come off and be useful to the world. So his question was that when he was in his twenties after World War II, he went off to study and study and work and work, and you know, when I was aware as a little boy, my father was a plant pathologist for the University of California. It wasn't really till I got to be more eighteen, nineteen, twenty, I began to think, well, what is it you do, Dad? What is the exact work you do? And I began to ask a lot of questions. So the book actually begins with that story of my father, but I I was intrigued by that, and I would say in some ways when I was a teenager, I read biographies and more biographies as a boy. I was intrigued by and fascinated by biographies, and I was, I think, grew up assuming that boys do what their fathers did until I realized in my software year of high school, I didn't like botany that much, you know. And it was a surprise to me because I thought I would be my dad somehow, and I couldn't be, because I didn't really find those questions the questions that really intrigued me as much as they did him. It probably was another ten, fifteen years I began to realize my dad's questions weren't my questions, but my questions were about German age in a different way, John. In some ways it really is probably sort of the line, the vocational thread that runs through my life, because I began to be interested in the question of what is a vocation and how does it grow into a vocation that can be lived into for the rest of life. So everything I've done from my years of being a professor, those are questions even in the public square, teaching politics in Capitol Hill for many, many, many years. Um, I was interested not only in the public policy dimensions of our study, which I was, we taught that, but I was interested more deeply in the questions of the polis and of political location. And how do you be somebody who somehow avoids the Lord Bismarck Realpolitik criticism or observation of the mid-1800s, writing about German politics, he said, if you want to respect sausage or law, then don't watch either being made. And you can't be in Washington, D.C. very long without realizing there's a lot of sausage making here, and it may get seemed to be too ugly and too smelly for you, and you just go back to some place where you came from and think, well, it's too messy. I wanted my 20, 21-year-olds who were so full of eagerness for the world, to begin to have a deeper sense of calling to care about the world. And I realized, in fact, that that in those years I began to teach that toward that direction with that idea in my mind, and my own schedule of studies were really about that question too. Then I would say every book I've written has been a further up, further into that same question, John. Out of the questions, which I would say have become the very important quandaries that I need to eventually think, I need to think this one through.

SPEAKER_02 7:08

One of the things I appreciate about you, and I think it's a fresh word for a lot of students, um, is it's okay to uh step into a different context to learn for a season. I know you interrupted uh your college years, right? To to go ask maybe the same questions, but in a different context. Could you share a little bit about that? I think that that takes, for me at least, it takes some of the pressure off that um we don't have to have kind of this straight line from point A to point B in how we think about our vocational journey. It will sometimes be circuitous or it will feel circuitous, but it's not necessarily so. I wonder if you could speak to that time in your life. Maybe there have been a couple times where you've you know taken a step aside to ask maybe the same questions or different questions in a new context.

SPEAKER_01 7:52

Aaron Ross Powell So again, I grew up in a university family. You know, there was a certain, you know, I don't think ever requirement, but certain assumption that we too, me, my three brothers, we too would go off to the university in our own growing up years. And I did that. But I was also coming of age in what we called, you know, in those years the counterculture. If you can imagine the 50s, the sixties, the seventies, we're a tumultuous time in America. Now we were sort of rethinking through who we were and how we were going to live in America, and clearly the next generation coming of age in the sixties. You know, you could pick a name here, but just think about why it was and why it still is. Bob Dylan was such a a spokesman as a songwriter for a particular moment in history. The move from the Beatles from being I Wanna Hold Your Hand to songs of angst and alienation. And I mean, they were in some ways artistic, artful windows into what was taking place in America. I was aware of that because I was growing up in those years. And at a certain point, I mean, nobody I really knew very well. My brothers didn't do this, but I did this. I did drop out uh after a couple of years of college, and it wasn't because there was uh academic pressure on it, thankfully I wasn't failing my courses. I had a growing sense, even as a twenty-year-old, that there were questions I had. I didn't think the college or university years were a place to ask them and answer them very well. And I wanted a better reason to be a student than simply to pass the next examination. That didn't seem to me to be a big enough reason to keep being a student at the time. So, you know, I did spend a couple of years in communes of all places. Um I know that's kind of an odd idea to hear today, but you know, in those years it was well, there were communes almost everywhere, especially in more university situated communities. I lived in the Bay Area for that first year, lived in Palo Alto, which is where Stanford is located. I hitchhiked every week across the Bay, Bay Bridge to Berkeley, where somebody's sort of the heyday or the center of countercultural protest and movement. And I would say, John, I mean, just to cut to come not to prolong the story longer, that I, after a couple of years away, I began to think, I think I've learned something about learning in these years away. Principally what I learned, I suppose, was that the learning most of all had to do with whether I wanted to learn and what I was willing to learn. I realized that I couldn't say, well, the professor didn't the course didn't, didn't, you know, but that in some ways if I was purposeful enough and thoughtful enough, I could in some ways go into any course the university offered and ask questions within the context of the curricular requirements that some ways deepened my own desires and insights about things I wanted to learn. Now not playing a game with the professors, but in some ways I realized that the whole of learning was open to me, and it principally had to do with what kind of questions I was willing to ask and be able to be creative and persistent and you know and work at them and think about them. And in some ways, I, you know, I I redeemed, I suppose, a small use of that word, like university years by those years away from school.

SPEAKER_02 10:50

Oh, I love that. And it I just want to ask you so many questions about those years. It's not every day you meet somebody who lived in communes and and hitchhiked all over the country and everything else. But I'll I'll resist uh that temptation. You know, one of the things that um comes up, and I love this about your writing and spending time with you, is you there there are catchphrases that you have that that are just recurring. And um they're they're themes uh in your writing and thinking, and they really run across all of your work, uh, your storytelling, your writing, your speaking. And here are a couple that I wondered if you could just give me kind of a quick take on. Not so much a hot take, but you know, how would you uh how would you in a just a very short kind of way respond to these phrases? I think it'll help us to get into a little bit of a deeper conversation about the book that you've just written and published. Um, you use the phrase common grace for the common good. What does that mean to you, Steve?

SPEAKER_01 11:45

Well, because I do what I do, John, and we've been friends through all these years. I have met a lot of people in a lot of places and I've traveled a lot talking about these ideas to people all around the world. And that's been a gift to me, a great, great, great, great gift to me. The book reflects my interest in the rest of the world. Every chapter, some more went one more window into life in Europe or Africa or Asia or something people have gotten to know in those years. But what I've also seen, John, is that wherever you go, whether it's Africa or Asia or Europe or Latin America, that tragically, and I would use that word tragically carefully here, but tragically, the church is plagued by dualism. We have a very hard time thinking more hearingly about a life of faith and hope and love, what it means, what it ought to mean for the way you live in the world. Very, very difficult time doing that. Whether we're Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox, in different ways we all with our own ecclesial and theological traditions. And it's very, very rare, I would say, to see find people who are conscious of that and push back against that. I do and you do, and that's in some ways been what's drawn us together over the years. We've been people who've longed for that and have labored our our whole lives to see more coherence be present and visible and in the people of God of the world. So common grace for the common good, I think if unless we have a theology that can make sense of common grace and common good, what the relation is to each other, we stumble over dualism again and again. Common grace, of course, you know, is this idea that I don't think probably John, you asked when you bought the microphone or even your eyeglasses or the sweater you're wearing, well, does this person put SDG, you know, inscribe this on the microphone that we use here at the upper house? You didn't ask for like Bach, you know, is this to the glory of God alone, this microphone? It isn't we wouldn't be a bad thing, but you assume you're looking for a certain level of quality, a certain look and appeal and history and reviews, you know, it's just match what we want to be using in our setting here. It doesn't mean that Christians couldn't and shouldn't, you know, write SDG on the work of their lives. I don't believe that for a moment. I think that sometimes that makes a lot of sense.

SPEAKER_02 13:52

Do you use the initials uh SDG? I was curious, what is that are those your initials? I don't know your middle name.

SPEAKER_01 13:59

No, it's what it's what Johann Sebastian Bach wrote on the bottom of every piece of music that he composed. So the Deo Gloria. Ah, okay, perfect. So it's interesting. That's great. Because it's not only on the on the bottom of the St. Matthew's Passion, it's also on the violin concerto indeed. It was all to be to the glory of God. But we believe actually that every son of Adam, every daughter of Eve, made in the image of God, is able to actually offer work back to God, whether they do so consciously or not, and we say, well, that is common grace. Common grace is not saving grace. Most of life is common grace. My wife Meg's kisses to me don't save me from my sin. But they're not just secular kisses either. They can't be that. They're holy, holy unto the Lord. They're treasure and they're prize because they're holy unto the Lord. So common grace makes sense of that. Common good, well, I think unless we have a theology that can account for common good, we too fall again into the problem of dualism, into the plague of dualism, because we can't really see why the just to use the language that you and I have labored with for years, John, you can't understand why the work of a plumber, why the work of a farmer, why the work of an attorney, why the work of a kindergarten, why the why the work of work of, work of, work of, you know, why why it is that to build a building on the central corner in Madison, Wisconsin, like Mr. Brown did. I think probably he was known for years as somebody with a certain vision and conscience and a willingness to contribute to the life of Madison, Wisconsin. But I've been to that building a few times now, and I don't remember on the cornerstone you said, you know, this building is to the glory of God. I don't think that'd be a bad thing to do. But in some ways he was willing to say, I'm going to build the best building I can build to contribute to the life of this university community as I will, gloriously, wonderfully located where it is, a half mile or so from the Capitol, you know, across the street from the university, there's no better location in the whole of Madison, Wisconsin than where the opera house is located. It is for the common good of Madison. So the language of God through Jeremiah to the people of exile in Babylon, seek first the flourishing of your city. And clearly what Mr. Brown has done in my mind, you know, for Madison is through the work of his hands, even through the work of his mind and imagination and gift and history, he has said, Well, what can I do to contribute to the flourishing of Madison? That's what commonly good is about.

SPEAKER_02 16:21

Well, I've got I had six other or five other um phrases that you use. And um I I think you've addressed a lot of these, but I want to I want to name these for our listeners and our readers, and there are many, many more, but I think you've addressed some of these in your first response. I'm gonna let you circle back, but let me let me read a couple more. Um something that stuck with me that I will often say in my own kind of way, or sometimes just quote you directly: vocation is integral, not incidental. I love that phrase. You talk about seeing seamlessly. You talk about the fabric of faithfulness. Um, you ask the question over and over again, what will we do with what we know? That's a question that has been recurring through all of your teaching and writing. And a similar question or related question is, can you know the world and still love it? And I guess that leads me to the last of these phrases, which is a lead-in to the book, making peace with the proximate. You've always been realistic about human endeavors, but but never uh losing imagination and a sense of God's agency. So you're you're someone who dreams big because you know that God is uh is on the throne, God is uh stewarding the world, God created the world. But you're also realistic about the the incremental steps that we often can and should take uh to be about peacemaking or repair in the world. I wonder if you could speak to this idea of making peace with the proximate.

SPEAKER_01 17:59

It's a good question, John, and it does grow out of in its own way. The other questions you, other phrases you've you know offered here. I think about the earlier book Visions of Vocation, which had at its heart, can you know the world and still love the world? Which to me seemed to be the most difficult question of all. All the questions we could ask and try to answer in this life, that seemed to be the hardest. Because more the more we know, typically the harder it is to love. Whether it's in a relationship intimately with a person, uh whether it's a 20-year-old with roommates in a glorious new apartment, and then two months later you think, She does that! He's always that way. You know, I didn't know that when we started this offering whether it's you know taking up, you know, the life of being a professor at the University of Wisconsin, and you realize, well, what a glorious thing it is to be invited by UW to be a professor of. And then of course, a year or two later you realize, but there's so much bureaucracy. I had this idea in my mind that I have to do this and this and this too. That's not what I wanted this to be like. I did not want it to be like this, really. I would say, John, that is the most difficult question of all. Which in some ways grew me into over time the next, you know, this next one, making peace with the proximate. About 15 years ago, I was invited by the editor of Comment Magazine, who was a who was a South African, he'd been part of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, been the translator in the courtroom for some years, but had to re say out loud the most terrible, horrific words that none of us ever want to say out loud anywhere, about crimes against other human beings that were terrible and awful and tragic. He got worn out eventually by that and moved to Canada, became editor of this magazine in its earliest days, and asked me one day, You've been watching Washington, DC a long time, Steve. Is there a vocation in the political world? And I thought about it for the I remember thinking about it all summer, really, because it seemed like it was a such a weighty question. I finally offered him an essay I called Making Peace with Proximate Justice. It was essentially to say back to him, if you're gonna stay in a messy place, do a work in a messy world, like the messiness of the sausage making of Washington, DC, you're gonna have to be willing to make peace with doing something more honest and true and right, but you won't get everything done. It's still a now not yet world to draw on the theological wisdom that we have ours for two thousand years now. We don't live on this side of the restoration or renewal or the consummation of all things. We don't yet live in that world that Tolkien so poetically and beautifully describes as someday, someday, all sad things will become untrue. We long for that, we work for that, pray for that, we pray your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven, and yet we have to make peace with even still the creation still groans. So what do we do with that, that reality, the creation still groans, and we do too, because we long for things to be right and well in every part of life. So for me, making peace with the proximate is in some ways another step into, or in the language of Lewis, further up and further into these long questions began to germinate within me when I was a you know much younger person, thinking, well, my father's work in the germinating of seeds in the soil of California and the world, that wasn't me after all. But 15 years later, I realized that the question of germination was my question. That it was more what does a healthy vocation look like? And how do we understand that in a way that can be deepened rather than discarded over the years of life?

SPEAKER_02 21:30

Aaron Ross Powell Have all of your books been written to the same imagined or uh the same audience, or has it changed? You talked a little bit about dualism, our our perennial struggle with dualism in the church. Um I imagine there are some who are maybe a bit too idealistic about change. Uh there's also a a group that would be cynical about any good in the world. Uh who's What's this book written for, and you know, has the audience changed over time?

SPEAKER_01 22:04

When I wrote the first book, John, you know, I wrote it particularly for university professors and students. That's what I was thinking about. And by the surprising graces of God, it had remarkable reading. It's had almost 30 printings now over the years and a couple different editions to it. And, you know, I was surprised, so glad by that, too, just to find people all over the world who were reading it, and it was being republished to other nations of the world. And maybe, you know, the name Charlie Peacock, who's a musician and producer in Nashville, and sort of become a remarkable, sort of iconic figure in the Nashville music world. But I got this email out of the early world of emails years ago from him saying, I've been reading your book, and can we ever talk about it? And I thought, well, I didn't know you'd be reading my book, but you're here you are. And anyway, I thought, you know, I'm going to be going to Tennessee to speak next month. Maybe I could stop by Nashville. I had never been to Tennessee in my life, so I thought, well, I'm being asked to speak in Memphis. Nashville can't be that far from Memphis, so I had no idea it was like five or six hours away. But anyway, I stopped for lunch in Nashville with Charlie and his wife Andy, and just found myself entering into what's become a very dear and important relationship in my life. But in that conversation that day over lunchtime, which lasted several hours, he said, you know, I know that the subtitle of the book sort of puts us in the world of the university, but you just need to know that here I am, I'm way beyond the university years. This is a book for me too, Steve. I think you ought to rethink even the subtitle. Maybe you go back into the book and write it purposely for everybody. Because this is a book for everybody. You know, and I did that in a year within a year or two. I go to the publisher and we decided to redo it, re-edition, you know, a different cover and a reset re redone subtitle. And I went back in every paragraph and page, kind of thought, well, I want this to be relevant for 20-year-olds and those who teach them. But I began to realize the fact that the questions were questions for everybody. I think as I grew up from my twenties to my 30s into my 40s, I began to realize that I had a deepening sense of desire to write for the whole world. So I've been surprised to find, you know, walking into meetings or giving lectures in Singapore, I did years too ago, thinking, well, okay, here's Singapore. I have a guy walk up to me and said, you know, when you wrote about this, I thought, that's my life too. I thought, well, thanks for God.

SPEAKER_00 24:23

If you're enjoying this conversation with Steve Garber, we encourage you to check out his new book, Hints of Hope, Essays on Making Peace with the Proximate. Throughout this episode, you've heard Steve describe the lifelong questions that animate his work questions of calling, coherence, joy, and sorrow, and what it means to live faithfully in a world that is both beautiful and broken. You can find Hints of Hope wherever you buy books, and as always, we'll include key resources mentioned today in the show notes. Now, back to the conversation.

SPEAKER_02 24:58

When you write a book like the book you've written, or maybe this applies to all the books you've written, what what are your hopes for the book? And how have they changed over time? I mean, I I think you're referring to maybe your first book was Fabric of Faithfulness. Is that the one you're and that was uh how many years ago? 30 years ago?

SPEAKER_01 25:16

Years ago, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 25:17

30 years ago. So, you know, it's a it's a different world, uh, and yet uh it it's not a different world. The same questions um persist. Uh maybe they're asked in a little different way. What are your hopes for uh hints of hope?

SPEAKER_01 25:32

Well, to drama and my friend Charlie again, um maybe 10, 15 years ago, he invited me and then a good friend of both of ours, a poet from Britain from Steve Turner, to come speech for a few days to a gat gathering, probably 50 young musicians who'd cut to Charlie said, Help me become famous, Mr. Peacock. That's what he was doing as a producer. He was the the music and you you know the bands that have been come under his two leads who he's produced, and they have become globally renowned for the giftedness and the skillfulness and the artistry, the music. That's what Charlie's done for years. But we were standing for a few days with these fifty, you know, sixteen-year-olds or so, eighteen-year-olds, and who were aspiring and ambitious for a future. And it was the first time I put a question out into a room which I've now put out all over the world. Can you learn to sing songs shaped by the truest truths of the universe in language the whole world can understand? Typically, I would say, maybe more often than not, because we're so prone to dualism, we imagine there's sacred music and there's secular music. What are you going to do? Will you do CCM music that will take you to Nashville, contemporary Christian music, or will you actually, you know, lose your faith, lose your identity, and do music for everybody, right? Seculars. It's been in some ways tragic, you know, dis disposition and dualism that plagues the church everywhere in America, you know, first of all, and then all over the world. And uh I have wanted to write and to speak, John, in a way that takes these truest truths of the universe and communicate them to sing songs that everyone can understand wherever they are. So that's really animates me. It animated me for years now. And in the writing of this book, you know, this title, subtitle, don't require a Christian to think, wow, that's a book for Christians to read, isn't it? It wouldn't be a negative or a morally bad thing to do, but I wanted a title that would be a title everyone could say, ha, I wonder what that's about. What would it be look like to be here? What am I trying again? And when I he first read the manuscript, as well as my former publisher, they both said, you know, Steve, you write in a way that you speak. You ask questions, and you invite people to come with you into the questions you're asking. You don't fly your flag on the first page. It's clear what you believe when we begin to read you. That's clear. It isn't you hide that. But you don't require the reader to buy into all that you believe on the first page. You're inviting him into a deeper, serious question that you will wrestle with in the pages of the book, but that's who you are. And I would say, in some ways, to have your friends be mirrors upon you helps us to understand, do you have a pimple on your nose, or do you get your tie on wrong that day, or whatever it's going to be. And uh I would say that to have good, trusted friends say, Well, you know, you write this way, Steve. You have a question, don't you? And I I know that for years I've thought about the books, John, as being questions that matter enough to me to keep wrestling with him for a time if I need to write about them. But even to have my trusted counselors and advisors say, That's how you write, Steve. That's the kind of book you write.

SPEAKER_02 28:38

Steve, what would you say is there are a lot of questions you ask and hints of hope, but what would you say is the fundamental question that you ask in this book?

SPEAKER_01 28:48

Is it worth doing something that matters if you don't get everything when your best shot's been given? Given yourself with everything you can imagine to something you think, yes, this is important. A marriage. You think, well, I made promises, you know, that beautiful night in July ten years ago. I had no idea, though, in two weeks it'd be harder than that first night of promises made. I began to realize, ugh, it's harder to be that kind of a man than I wanted it to be. You know, or six years later you think, she is that way, isn't she? You know, what do I can do about that? And to realize that for me, could you make peace with something that's honest and beautiful and true, even if it isn't perfect?

SPEAKER_02 29:32

Aaron Ross Powell So you you you you explore these ideas of telos and practice. I wonder if you could unpack those as they relate to this fundamental question.

SPEAKER_01 29:42

In the second chapter of the book, which I identified as the question of my life, it was drawing upon that question, John, though with those words. Because in some ways, looking back on the years of my life, that has been a deep driving question I've pursued day and night for a long time. Do you have a telos which is sufficient to meaningfully orient your practice over the course of your life? Now, John, I've said this and you're hearing, I'm sure, but I've said this all over the place. Those words are magic words, so you can use other words. You may not want to ever use them again after today, but they're words that we all understand in our own ways. Tell us is a work up word about what? Where are you going? What's your life about? You know, what's this all about anyway? Whether we answer that thoughtfully and self-consciously, or whether we just intuitively, by gut, you know, say, well, my life's about me. What else could it be? Well, that's a tellos answer, of course. My life is about me. It could be class struggle, could be pick any kind of, I mean, the worlds and the worldviews that live around us all day long. It could be by the sad, sort of resignated resignation that the poets of the Old New Testament picked up. It could be simply eat, drink be mayor for tomorrow you die. That's it. In both Old New Testaments, those words were heard in the cultures of the day and were quoted by the writers of the Bible. And we have, of course, I live in Albemarle County in Virginia now, where the University of Virginia is located in Charlottesville. The biggest landowner in Albemarle County is Dave Matthews, the musician. He made a fortune singing about what? Eat, drink, be marriage for tomorrow you die. And so in some ways it's fascinating that two, three thousand years later, you'd have the poet laureate of Albemarle County of Charlottesville, Virginia, you know, be the wealthiest landowner in the whole of the area, and made a career out of, made a fortune out of singing songs with that same plaintive, you know, what is the point? Well, the point is to eat, to drink, be merry for tomorrow you die. So I would say that telos is about that, for those of us of faith or even Protestant faith, we have a telos written into the first question of the Westminster Catechism. What is man's chief end? The telos question, of course. And it's fascinating to me that hundreds of years ago, these Westminster divines, as we call them, made a telos question the first question in the whole catechism. That doesn't surprise me, because that's true. We make that is the first question for all of us. Praxis, of course, is the question, what are you going to do with what you think matters most? Does your life look like that? Does what the way you live day by day actually look like what you say matters most to you or not? So that's really this business of more seamless or more coherent life, is do you bring your worldview and your way of life together? Honestly, thoughtfully, intentionally, purposefully, prayerfully. Is that how you live your life? And of course what we think of by the word hypocrite, as harsh of a word as it is for all of us, is so we think, well, I know you say this, but shees, don't you know how this looks to the rest of us? Aren't you bothered by saying this matters? And obviously, you don't care a rip about that. For those of us of honest hope in God and trust in the work of God in life, we long for something more seamless.

SPEAKER_02 32:55

You have a quote in the book. Um you describe life as stretched, taught between what is and what someday will be. You know, I think it speaks that that text I think speaks to this uh already but not yet tension uh that we live our lives in. Um I wonder if you could speak a bit more to the tension of already but not yet.

SPEAKER_01 33:19

Well, because you have read this book once or twice now, John, you know that I'm quite taken by Tolkien and his stories. In the first chapter I've written about my reading The Lord of the Rings in my early twenties initially, reading them again in my sixties years later, and how different the books were to me, even though I was so taken, John, by the stories of Tolkien as a twenty-year-old that the rest of my life I've been a hobbit. I've been a hobbit ever since then, really by identification, by passwords, by my wife's wife's helping to start a school called Rhythm School in Washington, D.C. I mean, we have been hobbits for a long time since then. When we used to have a telephone that sat in the kitchen, the answering was, you know, the house of the seven hobbits. We have been hobbits for a long time in our family. But I always thought that the last hundred pages of the third book, The Return of the King, were sort of boring. Thinking, oh well, you're a master storyteller, Tolkien. I get that, and you are masterful of all masters who write stories. But why this hundred pages after Mount Doom, walking back to the Shire, and it's not really hasn't the climax come and gone now, Tolkien? I was always sort of like embarrassed to say I don't like the last part of the book at all. In my sixties, Don, I read it very differently. And I thought, huh, I never I never saw that. I didn't understand that. I didn't hear Gandalf say to Frodo that not all wounds in this life are going to be healed, Mr. Frodo. I didn't hear that conversation between Frodo and Gandalf and Sam, where the question is, you mean someday, someday all sad things would become untrue? I didn't hear that, you know, as a twenty year old. I didn't think about the world like that then. I do now, John, you know, because I've watched that and lived with that, you know, and those words in some ways came alive to me in a very different way. Now they were all going to getting on a ship and going off into a future we don't quite know about, other than the promise that someday, someday, someday, someday, Mr. Fruno, all sad things will become untrue. So the now but the not yet, John, for me is somehow feeling stretched taught. That's the best image I can think about. Between one sense we think, yes, I believe in that. And yet, and yet, I have to make sense somehow in a life of faith and hope and love today, realizing that not all sad things are yet untrue. I will live with them, I will see them, I will experience them, my friends and my neighbors will too. Friends I I have who are dear to me will get sick and they will die, and may happen to me to next week. Injustice around politically, economically, we groan and we groan and we groan and we groan some more about things we think, oh Jesus, it's so wrong, it's so wrong. Please, O Lord, hear me as I crowd against the wrong of history. Please, I pray. And yet we still awake and in the day you do, I do, thinking, well, it so makes sense to somehow offer a place where UWS students and faculty could come to do what? To think more carefully and clearly and critically about the nature of vocation for those whose life and work is within the University of Wisconsin.

SPEAKER_02 36:36

One of the things that I I think comes through in your writing is um is this deep commitment to place. I mean, you're a person who travels and has been in many, many countries, uh cities, uh near and far, uh, and spend a lot of time uh on planes, but you you're very committed to uh place, uh embodied community in a particular place. I uh Wendelberry is someone who you write about often. Um how does being committed to a place help us with the tension of the already, but not yet?

SPEAKER_01 37:14

Of all the beliefs I have that are important to me, the deepest belief I have is that we live in the covenantal cosmos of God. Now there's a lot to unpack and all that, but covenant, however it's seen, whether it's the you know, the creation covenant or the Noahic covenant or the Abrahamic covenant or walk your way all the way through scripture to the covenant incarnate in Christ. Covenant always has to do with both responsibilities and relationships. I would also throw another R word into that mix, but there isn't time to explore all this. Revelation two, that those three are all twined together in the nature of covenant. God has spoken, he's spoken to us because there's a relationship that he chooses to have with us, and there's always a responsibility set forth within the context of that relationship. So for me, that is that reality is woven through the whole cosmos, whether we have eyes to see it or not. God's made the world a certain way. Do you understand that? Do you see it? Do you hear it? Do you believe in that? Do you work, live that way, or do you not? You know, the great question of Jesus was, you have eyes to see or not? Do you have eyes to see, in fact, that the covenantal cosmos of God? What is the terrible, weighty, you know, burdensome end of the parable of the prodigal son? Good Samaritan, the good Samaritan, of course, the story of somebody experts in the law, who didn't understand what the law required of them. They didn't know what a neighbor was. They didn't see themselves as in relationship to, therefore responsible for their neighbor. That was the problem, that was the point of the story. So for me, John, when I think about covenant, a covenantal cosmos of reality, it gives meaning to people and place, historically embodied and incarnate. My wife and I have lived by this cradle of the Clappham community for all the years of our life together. It is not a commandment of God, I never would say that. But there's a lot of wisdom in these words of these serious people of faith 250 years ago in London, the Clapham community. We know Wilberforce's name best of all, but there were a whole community of people who were bankers and educators and artists and storytellers and pastors who chose to live in a neighborhood called Clapham. Today would be what we say is it's Wimbledon, and just in the, you know, almost not very not very far from from the dams in the Westminster, but it was two miles away or so. But they chose this to live by this cradle to choose a neighbor before you choose a house. Why does that matter? Well, I would say that it in my mind, if you're going to keep at and deepen in, you know, a sense of vocation over time and through the years of life, you need others to come alongside you. You need to be somehow in relationship with, because you are responsible together, even though your work may be different day by day. For Clapham they were, again, bankers, politicians, you know, pastors and all. There were different kinds of work they did, but the deeper sense of vocation they shared together. And I would just say that unless we understand ourselves in relationship to people and place, there will be a certain sense of homelessness. Do you draw upon a Peter Berger image, the homeless mind, or do you draw upon a Walker Percy image, we become lost in the cosmos without a sense of rootedness, belonging to, in fact, both people and place in time and in space.

SPEAKER_02 40:46

Um, because we are um embracing the life of others in ways that are going to bring joy, but they're also gonna bring wounds and to live in a way that makes peace with the proximate, to give our lives away in the in the ways that you're suggesting. You know, we're going to encounter wounds. I wonder if you could offer a word of hope uh out of your own life about woundedness and how the wounds have, maybe not at the time, been appreciated, but how you have seen them over time to make you into a different kind of person who is on a truer path of vocation.

SPEAKER_01 41:25

I would say that given what I've done with my life of traveling into a lot of different rooms all over the world, I've come to the conclusion some years ago that whatever room I walk into, wherever it is, I'm sure that everybody in the room bears a sorrow. Everybody in the room has a grief that they bear. Everyone in the room has a disappointment which is theirs today. We probably won't talk about it today in the way that if you and I could talking face to face personally for a cup of tea or coffee there in Madison, we may not make it go that to that place together because we probably won't know each other very well. But I do want to make sure that in what I can do in terms of preparation for thinking about who I'm speaking to, they have no doubt that when I'm done, that I too live in the same world they do. I don't think it has to be modeling in terms of like we sort of play all my feelings and emotions and terrors and wounds out on the table that you know all you know for the whole time we're together. But I do want to make it matters to me that I not come across as somebody who has a happy, happy, happy, happy life, and that somehow the wounds of the world haven't been mine too. So somehow, artfully, skillfully, I hope, you know, thoughtfully, I want to make sure that people who hear me understand that I live in the same world they do. And years ago, John, maybe you and I were at the same place. It was a university graduate student conference in Chicago twenty-five years ago or something like that, and N. T. Wright was giving Bible expositions then, and he and I had the first time we had a real conversation together one morning, and I had a question for him, and he was willing to talk about it seriously. But I remember coming across a book of his that was a book of Lent's and Meditations, which maybe it's a good thing to know about given the week we're in by now. But it was a book, and I was reading it over the next days of Lent, and these words jumped off the page to me, that the vocation of Jesus was to take into his heart the most remarkable joy and remarkable sorrow, and to weave them into the pattern of his days. As we take up the imitation of Christ in our lives, we too will find the most remarkable joy and remarkable sorrow. And we are called in imitation of Christ, take them up to weave them into the pattern of our days too. I know when I read the words, John, I thought, well, I'm not a Buddhist, I'm not going to be a Buddhist in this life. It isn't that I haven't read Buddhism, that I don't have a sympathy for worn out Western minds and hearts, people think, oh, the secularization, the secularity of the West, I'm I'm tired of it. Look at Buddhism. Isn't that more beautiful than more speaking to the soul of who I am? I am understanding of that in a certain way. But also Buddhism at the end of the day requires that we not distinguish between joy and sorrow, because the whole point, of course, is to be so enlightened that I see that in fact everything is the same. It's all one. A lot more can be said about that, John. But I knew intuitively in my gut that there was joy and sorrow in the world and in my life. And it made sense to me of what I was and what I believed. So I would just say, John, that I think the longer I live, the more I am attentive to both the reality of joy and the reality of sorrow. And I want somehow to live that way, to think that way, to write that way, to speak that way.

SPEAKER_02 44:45

Is there anything unique about the weeks and months and years we live in today? You know, as you reflect back, we've had a chance today to reflect back on the 60s and 70s and everything in between. But these are these are interesting times. And I I am curious if if there is a particular word you have for us today out of out of the lessons of this book about the times that we live in.

SPEAKER_01 45:17

She lives here in with Charleston. We had her her family over for dinner last week one evening, and which we tried to do in a rh rhythm with them regularly. And somehow, before the evening was over, she told about a paper she was writing in school, and that she gotten really good strong feedback from her teacher that yes, this was really well done. I said, What was it about? And well, for too long, you know, I said, Well, I'd love to read the paper. And so she sent to me that night, and the paper was these fourteen. What is a Christian view of human nature? What does it mean to be human? It was really a deep question, of course. And she answered in a way which the teacher was very surprised by and was impressed with her thoughtfulness in the three or four page paper that it was. But I responded to her, well, I think that you ought to think about this side of it too. And here's how C. S. Lewis wrote about this very same thing. I sent her a few paragraphs that he that he'd written. And uh before it was all over, John, I tried to say this as plainly as I could. She's thoughtful and she's intentional as a 14-year-old, but I said, I didn't want to overwhelm you with this, but my master's thesis was about what does it mean to be human. I dropped out of college years ago. You know, what did I end up doing when I went to a place called Labri, another commune I lived in in Europe the next second year? I want to know what does it mean to be human after all? Because I realized that first year in the Bay Area, every debate, discussion, lecture, address I heard in the Palo Alto's and Berkeleys of the World, whether it was in business, economics, politics, sexuality, the arts, whatever it was going to be, that the heart of every, every, every question was what do you believe to be true about what it means to be human? What is a human being after all? So I would say, John, I mean, without going into more detail about that, that I think that what it means to be human is the most perennial question, really, and we don't change fundamentally and finally. We can't. We're still sons of Adam and daughters of Eve. All of us are. That doesn't change. We are that. We live in 2026 now. I don't think that we were ever into what I would formally call a postmodern age. I call it a more postmodernizing moment for us. Postmodern in my mind says too much about the world that it can't be true. I still fly in and out of Douglas Airport, and that air traffic controllers cannot be postmodern, and we don't teach them to think that way, that all the numbers are up for grabs. John Gerrell's ideas and my ideas, and you know, how would you really know? And come on, get over your arrogance. We actually think that exactitude and precision matter sometimes in some places, you know, that our lives depend upon it. So we're not ever going to be in a postmodern age, I would argue. But I think we are kind of pushed between modernizing and postmodernizing moments, and things that are we who of us doesn't wake up in the morning and see one more serious essay by some serious person on what is AI after all? How's it going to change your life? That's not what my grandfather thought about. So that has meaning that we have to be conscious of and attentive to. And I get that part of it. And sometimes it wearies me because it's so much to think about what's it going to mean. But I also realize that the best question in that is so what how do we hold on to what it means to be human in the year 2026?

SPEAKER_02 48:36

Yeah, and Steve, I that's what I love about you, that um our our years the years change and the issues change, but um you've been probing the same questions over decades, the most important questions. And that's a real gift to the church. It's a gift to me, it's a gift to organizations around the world. And I just I thank you for the for the way you have tackled those really, really hard questions and um and have invited others in with that very same thing. Um I don't want to end before asking you what's what's next. Um Do you have another book you're working on? I know your schedule is busy, but I'd love to hear. I know our listeners and viewers would love to hear about what is next uh for you, some of the things you're working on.

SPEAKER_01 49:23

Well, I'm grateful, John, for the continuity of my life. As you just said, I have had some questions that I've kept at and kept at and kept at in my life. And they become richer and more complicated and, you know, deeper and more nuanced because they have to, because life goes on. But I would say that for this day and this week and this month, I'm so glad this book is done. It's hard work to write a book. It's hard work to oversee a study center, it's hard work to do a good work in the world. It takes a lot. You have to persist, you have to decide to do it again tomorrow, the next day, the next day. And writing a book is like that, of course. So I'm sure I'm mostly glad that the years of I would call a long labor of love have come to be, you know, finished in this. Um I will spend the next period of my life, I'm sure, following up on this book. And people wanting to I have emails every day from around the world, people saying, what about this? And I have a question for you. You know, I will be drawn into visits over the next weeks, from going to Memphis, Tennessee next week to going to Oxford in a few weeks to going to Vancouver, British Columbia in a few weeks. I mean, I will do these things over the next while of my life. And they will all be in response to people reading the book who want them to think more about it. If I have anything, John, I've not even said this to anybody out loud other than to you, John Terrell, but you would understand this more than almost anybody would. If I have any little quiet little place in my soul where I think, could you, would you ever try to write again? Which at this point I think, no, I won't, because it takes too much, it's too hard work. But there's one thing I feel like I still I'm still thinking about and wondering about. It is pedagogy and how what teaching and learning mean. My PhD was really in pedagogy. I was looking at this relation of belief to behavior, how that's formed in a human being's life. I have been quite drawn in, John, I think you know this because we've talked about this, by this image of that the truest, deepest learning always comes over the shoulder and through the heart. I love books and you do too, and we're drawn together because of the books we've read in many ways. You both love the same books and we have the same kind of libraries and just a conversation about a book today. I do love books and books and books and more books in my life. I I love books, actually. But I also realize that in Walker Percy's inimitable, you know, hard, hard cutting, you know, hard edge wisdom, you can get all lays to still flunk life. You can read all the books that are required of you and miss the point too. You know, in Luke ten, the story with Jesus and the expert in the law, he had mastered the law, the letter of the law, but he didn't know what a neighbor was. He'd missed the point of the law. So in some ways I'm interested, I know this is sort of deeper thread for me. I'm interested in what does it mean to teach in a way that somebody come to see what the point is after all. And I am persuaded that the deepest learning, the truest learning, always comes over the shoulder and through the heart. And whether I could could write, will write about that, I'm not sure, but I think about that.

SPEAKER_02 52:27

Wow. Over the shoulder and through the heart. It's a wonderful way to end this conversation, Steve. You have taught me that very lesson. So thank you for the gifts that that you offer the world. Thank you for this for your time today. It's been just a joy. And I will say, for those who are kind of on the fence on the book, um, buy the book. You're gonna love every page, and uh, you're gonna come away with so many book and movie recommendations. I I have I my Netflix cue it it grew exponentially as a result of reading this book. Some of the movies I had heard of, others I had not. And that's why I love being in conversation with you, Steve. I learn every time I'm with you. So we thank you. Thank you for the good work that you do and for your time with us this day.

SPEAKER_01 53:15

It's a great, great gift to see you again and to remind me, as you are reminded too, of the gift of the collegiality we have together from a long, long sense of kindredness between us. So thank you for you being here. Thank you, Steve.

SPEAKER_00 53:32

Thank you for joining us on today's episode of the Upwards Podcast. Our deep gratitude to Steve Garber for sharing his wisdom, stories, and the questions that continue to shape his life and work. If this conversation resonated with you, we encourage you to pick up hints of hope and explore the many films, books, and thinkers Steve mentions throughout its pages. To hear more conversations like this, subscribe to the Upwards Podcast in your favorite podcast app and visit slbf.org slash studio. Until next time, keep looking upward and living with purpose. Go in peace.