[You can listen to this episode of Another Life on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts.]

Transcript

Joy Marie Clarkson: Hello everyone and welcome back to Another Life, a podcast of Plough magazine. I’m your host, Joy Clarkson, and it is a delight to welcome you back. So this week we’re going to be talking about a somewhat uncheerful topic, which is the decline of the church in the West. Now in recent days, there’s been some optimism. There’s been talk a lot in the United Kingdom of the quiet revival, a sense that young people are coming back to the church, and there are some hopes of that. But on the broad view of things, according to most metrics, religiosity, both in affiliation with Christianity and also with church attendance, has declined significantly in the West. Now, “in the West” is important to say because there are regions in the world where Christianity is both thriving and growing.

But this question of what will happen to Christianity and many denominations and the next century is one that looms over many of our institutions when it comes to America and Europe specifically. Now, there are many different ways one could come at this topic. You could look at it from a sociological perspective. And we have a bit of that in some of our other episodes, talking with Easton Law about Christianity in China and whether it’s growing or – the different things that contribute to that. But today I have with me a theologian who’s going to talk about how we think about this, how we respond as Christians, and how we respond to it theologically. So it is my great delight to welcome to the show Professor Karen Kilby from Durham. Thank you for joining us today.

Karen Kilby: Joy, it’s an honor to be with you. Thanks for inviting me.

Joy Marie Clarkson: So before we dive into this somewhat dour topic, I would like to begin with a bit of a grounding question, which is where this conversation finds you in the world. I will start. Usually I say that I am in my chilly flat in East London because it is almost always chilly. At least it has been when I’ve been recording these episodes. But today you find me in the tropical warm location of Hong Kong. I’m here for some work and some family and I have been enjoying endless milk-teas and noodles and getting to see my newly born niece. So I am currently having this conversation from a flat in the Wan Chai district of Hong Kong. Where does this conversation find you, Karen?

Karen Kilby: I’m speaking from a house on the edge of Durham where I live and I’m alone in the house except for a couple of very quiet cats and two dogs who are not always so quiet so I’m hopeful that they will nap while we speak. The weather is grey but not as grey as it has been in the recent past.

Joy Marie Clarkson: That’s good to hear. I heard that almost as soon as we left for Hong Kong that the weather started to let up and there were a few sunny days.

Karen Kilby: Yes, we had about forty days of rain and people were talking about building an ark but it has become a bit nicer with a little bit of sun now.

Joy Marie Clarkson: Yes, and I always think that between about April and June are some of the nicest months in the United Kingdom. I don’t know if you agree.

Karen Kilby: Yes, the snowdrops have been magnificent this year and the crocuses and daffodils are coming. So we’re moving into a nice bit of spring for sure.

Joy Marie Clarkson: So let’s dive into this conversation about decline. Now, when we were brainstorming this issue, I contacted you fairly early on to see if you’d be interested in writing about this. And part of my reason for that is that you have had a wonderful career and you’ve written about many things. But one of the things that I appreciate is how you’re able to deal with difficult topics in a way that doesn’t either rush over their difficulty or try to dissolve them. And I think this is something that’s difficult to do when it comes to decline because, well, for one thing, it’s hard to judge it, right? It’s hard exactly numerically to judge how much the church is declining, so it’s hard to get our minds around. But it’s also just emotionally difficult to know how to think about this and theologically difficult when it comes to these habits that we develop to cope with things.

Karen Kilby: Yeah.

Joy Marie Clarkson: So I don’t know, so I wanted to ask you some questions, some of what you addressed in your essay, and I hope that the listeners will go and pick up a copy of Plough and listen to them. But let me just begin by asking this broad question. So we discussed the fact that in various ways, the church in the West is undergoing significant decline. And in your article, you specifically talk about two different approaches you’ve noticed that people tend to take. One is genealogical, a genealogical diagnosis, and the other is the Saul Goodman approach. So could you tell us a bit about what you mean by these two approaches?

Karen Kilby: Sure, yes. I realized at some stage that all my career I’d been watching these approaches and hadn’t quite noticed it. But the first one is thinking, “where did we go wrong?” The church is in decline, that can’t be right. There must be a mistake somewhere. And then the theologians come along. So I’m spending a lot of my time, of course, with other theologians. And I read their work and they say it all went wrong maybe beginning of the nineteenth century with Friedrich Schleiermacher with his liberal turn or it all went wrong in the Enlightenment where we started being controlled by some ways of thinking that are not really . . . that are wrong, that are too dualistic, that are too reductionist and so on and we’ve lost our ability to think well. Or sometimes people keep pushing it back earlier, so maybe it really went wrong in the development of late medieval nominalism or in the thought of Duns Scotus. So different theologians have different genealogies, different stories they tell of the history of what’s happened to Western thought to get to this unfortunate place. Or on another side, people say it went wrong because we’ve been too stuck in the mud and we haven’t kept up enough. So not that we adapted too much, but that we haven’t adapted enough and we need to get with the times, pay more attention to the culture, be more flexible, represent the gospel better. And so whatever people’s diagnosis is, then they also have the cure. So as I just said, if you think it’s that we haven’t kept up enough, then the cure is to pay more attention and to translate better and to think afresh better.

And if you think that there’s been some mistake in the nineteenth or the seventeenth or the fourteenth century, then you go back to someone before that, often, and say, “look, they had it right. We just need to learn again to think like them.” And I don’t want to dismiss all this theology that I’ve read. There’s been a lot, you know, it’s interesting. It’s partly right, partly persuasive. But when you step back and think about it and think, is it really the case that the salvation of the church lies with the theologians and that if we make a mistake, you know, some error enters into a way of theological thinking? That’s why everything goes wrong. Or if we only get it right, we’ll reverse church decline? And I’ve realized it’s like we’re, theologians are trying to do this, trying to do intellectually this impossible task of pushing against something else. So that’s the genealogical approach, as you say. We see how we’ve gone wrong.

Then the other thing that I’ve also heard bubbling along, and it took me a long time to see these as the two approaches, is an approach that says it looks like loss, but it’s really gain. And I called this the Saul Goodman character, because I really like the TV program Better Call Saul. And in that, the character whose actual name is Jimmy McGill.

He has an early career as a small town confidence trickster and his line is that he’ll use when he’s pulling off one of his confidence tricks is, “it’s all good, It’s all good, man.” So when he goes wholesale into becoming a sort of criminal lawyer in the double sense of the word of working for criminals, he takes the name Saul Goodman. And so I think this approach says it looks like decline, looks like loss, but if you just have the right eyes of faith and if you’re theologically clever enough, you’ll see it’s all good, man, really, it’s fine. So the most common way in which I’ve seen that worked out is in terms of Constantinianism. So the Emperor Constantine famously converted to Christianity in the fourth century. And after that, the church’s political fortunes greatly improved and for many centuries we were close to power in the West. And so the argument goes this was actually a corruption. So now that we’re shrinking and losing power, we’re actually released from our captivity to Constantinianism, to this political capture of the church. So it’s good. It’s good that we’re shrinking. It’s good that we’re in decline. It’s good that we’re no longer what we were. It’s all good man.

Or there are other ways I hear it worked out. For instance, people reach for the language of kenosis. We’re a kenotic church, we’re self-emptying. So then rather than feeling bad that we’re in decline, we can identify ourselves with the perfect goodness of Christ who empties himself. And so it’s all good, man. It’s good to be kenotic. It’s good to be more humble. And again, there’s partial truth in this. Of course, some of what we’ve lost is stuff we never should have had. Some of it’s been a purgation or a purification that it’s good. It is a danger for the church to have too much political power for sure. But it just doesn’t match up to the reality you see to say, this is just a loss of what we never should have had. And I guess, for me, the most striking example of that is looking . . . so I’m a Catholic theologian . . . in the last ten or so years I’ve had a lot to do with groups of Catholic religious women, so, sisters, nuns. And I find it so moving the way they deal with their own decline. Not all of them, but many of them are shrinking, at least in the West, and some of them will completely end after centuries of existence. And they are such impressive people – often they represent something different that you don’t see otherwise. They have a distinct way of being. It’s not good that we’ll be losing them. Or you can think about other kinds of losses. There are really good things that happen in the church that are also being lost as it declines. And I don’t think it’s respectful to say, it’s all Constantinianism that’s going. It’s not truthful, and it’s a denial of a loss that we’re undergoing to try to frame it that way.

Joy Marie Clarkson: I think that’s really helpful and one of the things you wrote about in the article is that both of these are sort of forms of denial, as you said, an unwillingness to grapple with the world as it is and this loss as it is. And I think that’s maybe less apparently so with the genealogical take because I think oftentimes, in the quite extreme, you often see this in young students who suddenly get into one period of theology where they think, oh, if we could only go back to, you know, the one I hear a lot in the theology-on-the-arts world is if we could only be enchanted again, like then, you know, then everything would be better. And, and as you said, there’s some aspects of that that might be true, right? We don’t need to be so circumspect that we can’t say that something did go wrong at one place or another, or that something valuable was lost in the movement towards modernity. But it’s also a denial of the fact that those movements and those changes that came along the way often came for a reason, right? It’s also a denial of the world that we live in, this getting a little bit away from decline in religion, but you know, that for the loss of enchantment, we also have such . . . I’m amazed; I had several friends have babies recently and one of my friends would have certainly died if she had had the baby even thirty years ago. so that’s a silly example, but the point is that even with that kind chronological [approach], it’s an unwillingness to not necessarily accept in the sense of approve, but just accept that these things are the way they are now for a reason.

Karen Kilby: I was going to say, you know, I do think we should study the theology of the past, the resource small movement. It’s great. It enriches theology. So we learn from it. It opens our eyes to possibilities we might miss if we didn’t see it. But that doesn’t mean that it contains the wholesale package, that if only we could just force people to only think like thinker so and so in the past.

And as you say, doesn’t do justice to some of the gifts of modernity or you know, some of the partial gifts from the Enlightenment and so on. Yeah, there’s a nostalgia. It’s in danger of being a nostalgia, where you just wish away the present and wish you could be in the past. But there is lots to learn from it. It’s trying to hold that in balance.

Joy Marie Clarkson: Yes, it is holding things in balance, as you say. So I guess one other thing I would just add in there too is that it’s also helpful when you are looking at the past and drawing from it to remember that there are actually these moments of real decline of the church in the past as well.

Don’t quote me on this because I think it might be technically incorrect. But I think in the nineteenth century, there was quite an intense decline of church attendance in Britain to the point where you did have panic that the church would end. And then you have these moments of revival. So it’s also helpful to remember that this is not a simple linear thing. And there are moments of decline and refreshment and that’s all part of it as well.

Karen Kilby: Yes. Also you could say the geography of the church shifts over time. So I found it quite striking when I was looking at the Council of Nicaea, which we’ve recently celebrated the seventeen hundredth anniversary of – this is the beginning, the first ecumenical council. It’s where the doctrine of the Trinity begins to be sorted out. If you look at what bishops were there, it was not a Eurocentric council. It was Asia Minor and the Middle East and so on. The church has its center in different places at different times. If we’re no longer the center, it doesn’t mean it’s the end of the church. means it’s different. It’s changing.

Joy Marie Clarkson: And that’s an interesting topic. In one of the conversations I had on the podcast prior to this was talking about the Christianity in China and that on a demographical level, but also on his own personal level of it becoming quite important to think about the theme of migration and scripture and also in faith and how for him a picture of a lot of people migrating and scripture that is . . . this past week in church, the reading was about Abraham going to a foreign land. As you say, that’s also in church history. And there’s also this sense that now maybe the center of Christianity is moving, but that’s always been a part of its story and its history. And in a way that keeps it from becoming a purely nationalistic thing or a purely communally oriented thing.

Karen Kilby: Yeah, I sometimes think that it’s easy to default to the idea that if we do everything right, then the Holy Spirit will ensure that the church in our particular area keeps growing. And I’m not sure that that’s what the gospel promises.

Joy Marie Clarkson: Well, I’m going to ask you my fourth question now, actually, because I think that that is something that a lot of this belies is this anxiety that if we don’t try hard enough or do the right things or have the right strategy, that that the church will just die. But there is this sense in most understandings of what the church is, that it’s not something that is sustained purely by human effort, or even primarily by human effort. It’s this work of the Holy Spirit. And it strikes me that a part of the difficulty of accepting church decline is something like a lack of faith. And by that I don’t mean, you know, that being sad about church decline is a lack of faith, but that on some level, if you buy into what we think the church is, there doesn’t need to be anxiety that decline or disappearance will actually mean the end of the church. I was curious how you think about how does the virtue of hope coexist with acceptance and grief over decline of church in some places.

Karen Kilby: I do think, you know, I could feel it in myself before I started to think hard about this, an assumption that if the church is declining, does that prove that faith is untrue? Does it prove that, you know, if people won’t accept the gospel message, then maybe they know better than us and it’s wrong? Or then the promise, you know, “I will be with you” from Christ to the church, is falsified?

So, I think if you don’t stop and think about it and you’re so much in your own local context, it’s easy to make that sort of mistake. And being reminded, as you say, that we don’t think it’s primarily an algorithm. I do my right thing for Christianity. It continues and grows in my local spaces. We shouldn’t expect it to be the sort of thing that a business can strategize about and be sure that it happened. It doesn’t mean we don’t need to think about what we’re called to do and that we don’t need to make efforts, but we need not think there’s some gospel guarantee of what the return on our efforts will be in any particular place, any particular time.

I suppose I have been very shaped by spending quite a bit of time talking to one particular group of religious sisters, the Sisters of La Retraite, whom I talked to, the ones in England and Ireland particularly. And I saw them gradually beginning to talk about the end, that they wouldn’t continue collectively.

I admired the fact that they didn’t seem to call into question their faith or the faith that what they’d been doing, you know, that they had been responding to their call or that their lives . . . that it didn’t mean undercutting the meaning of their lives . . . it was sad. They were reckoning with, you know, when you went into the congregation, you assume that when you were an old sister, there would be lots of new life around. That was the way you experienced it then. So there’s a change from what you expected. It’s hard.

There’s a sense that the particular gifts they have to offer the church are still needed, but they’re not going to be around, so it’s hard. There was just this quiet, there was missing any sense of panic or reproach or shock from it all. They’re able to take it quietly. So I think there’s a hope – that is I don’t need to see the exact thing that’s happening in my life to trust in the Holy Spirit. That’s one way of thinking about hope. And then I guess in what I see, I mean, I’m lucky enough to be in contact with a lot of young people through my work and to meet a lot of dynamic young Christians who have a very deep and integrated faith. They might be smaller in number, but when you encounter them, it’s hard not to be hopeful, I suppose. I also recently was very struck by a video we were shown or a presentation I was shown, as I’m on the board of CAFOD, which is a Catholic development agency in England and Wales. So it does international development and it also does education in the local schools. And the Pope had declared a Jubilee in 2025. Jubilee’s associated with, you know, new hope and restarting and debt forgiveness. so CAFOD with others is beginning to work hard on a debt forgiveness campaign, but it also did an immense amount with schools. And, you know, at a time when the society is fracturing, you have all these schools putting up banners in their local areas saying, “working together for a better world,” so quite a lot of quite serious reflection going on in – Catholic schools in England are state schools – so, you know, ordinary kids, so I found that, you know, I’m not saying I know that something will come from that, but that was another concrete source of hope for me.

Joy Marie Clarkson: I think that’s . . . I feel very similarly. It’s interesting being in London, which of course is this very multi-religious, and also, ironically, fairly secular city. But it’s quite shocking to see the amount of adults, like people in their twenties and sometimes forties who are coming to church for the first time, seemingly drawn by the Holy Spirit and that’s it or something. And I think even that I went to our church’s confirmation service and you know, it’s a little church in London and there were fourteen people being confirmed who were all adults. And that may not seem like a lot, but it is a lot, that’s basically more than one tenth of the congregation, like in numbers, and of people who weren’t from a Christian background or from that denomination. And so there are these moments of hope and I think this sense that there’s still a growing spiritual hunger and that we can see places where there is growth and hope and life.

I have one other question for you, and if you don’t answer this, then I can cut out this question. But it relates to this. In your article, you have the beginning where you set out these two approaches. They’re both forms of denial. Then you think about how the sisters have this grief over the loss of their community that’s also rooted in hope.

Because of this trust that just because something that is valuable and worthwhile ends doesn’t mean that the Holy Spirit has abandoned the church and you set that as a way for us to think about decline, that there can be a real grief as you would grieve over a death and that death is in a way, loss, but that there’s also this virtue of hope. But I think another question is, so if we accept that some things are going to end and it’s going to be true loss, we have to grieve it. But also that we have still some trust and some hope that things will grow. You may not remember saying this at all, and I’m probably remembering it poorly, but I remember being at a talk you gave at a conference in Oxford a few years ago, and you were talking about the synods. And I think it was the Synod on Synodality, I don’t remember, but it was that quite meta thing. And I remember you talking about how you look back at some of the councils of thinking about how they went and that some of them were quite contentious and quite difficult and there were arguments and you know have these myths of people literally, is it Saint Nicholas? I think it was Saint Nicholas or Saint Athanasius who punches someone supposedly, which is probably mythological, but the sense that like this council that’s supposedly led by the Holy Spirit and brings us these doctrines which are so important to the church was quite a contentious and messy and that we have this confidence that somehow the Holy Spirit actually is working through that. And I think, I wonder if there’s something of that spirit that we can bring to thinking about the decline or the refreshment of the church in the present day.

Karen Kilby: Yeah, no, thank you. That’s a nice . . . I hadn’t quite put those two things together, but I think that that is nice. Though I was reflecting, so the Catholic Church over the last few years, under the final few years of Pope Francis, was making this big effort to sort of have a grassroots attending to the Holy Spirit, bring everybody in, have conversations with everyone and gradually come together. So the Synod on Synodality. And then people would get a little cynical about, would they really be listened to and would there be factions in the church that would try to use it for different things? And as I say, I actually found it a source of hope to think just how terribly difficult the early councils were, and particularly in the fourth century from Nicaea to Constantinople. It’s over fifty years to resolve the issues that they tried to resolve at the Council of Nicaea and all kinds of struggles and all kinds of politics. So if the Holy Spirit’s working in the life of the church, it must have been working . . . the Spirit must have been working in the fourth century. And so we have to trust that the Spirit can work in things that don’t look quite right to us, in the midst of mess and imperfection and conflict, but presumably also of loss and failure.

Joy Marie Clarkson: Yeah, and I find that quite hopeful. And maybe on the more proactive end too, when you see churches that are trying to respond to declining church, whether that’s having a young people’s service that’s very whatever, or having more contemplative core of integrated life. Perhaps even in the wrestling over those things and things that might sometimes look calculating or maybe there is some sense that the Holy Spirit is still working and we can still trust that in all of these awkward and strange things there is still some hope. You’ve touched on this a little bit; I’d love it if you have any other ones. I’d love to hear what are the corners of the church that bring you hope?

Karen Kilby: Of course. Yeah. I touched on, you know, the work that I see CAFOD doing in my country with school kids and with others. Yeah, people in their . . . so it is interesting, I’ve also just suddenly looked at the congregation that I am in, the parish that I’m in, and thought, it doesn’t look quite as old as it used to. So I’m still pondering that one. But even apart from the possibility that, you know, young families are coming back or people are finding their way online to Christianity possibly. But also when I look at the people who are not clergy but who are Catholic laity that I meet doing different roles in the church, I just meet so many people in their twenties and thirties who are, and again, I feel very privileged to be encountering these people and I don’t think I would have in the past or in other roles. I wouldn’t have seen that so much, but there are little points of people with a deeply integrated faith who are, they’re more articulate about their faith than I am, they’re more integrated in it than I am, they’re more that they’re able to, so I think that in a way when you see real quality of faith and mission and evangelization, even if it’s not everywhere, that is a sense of hope. It gives me hope, I suppose, when I could just come across people whose faith and practice of their faith I really admire.

Then there’s the sense of life in other parts of the world. And even the diaspora from African countries or from the Philippines can also infuse new life into the churches. There are things that we can learn from those amongst us who are carrying a slightly different shaped faith from other parts of the world. They’re also a source of hope.

Joy Marie Clarkson: I’ve been thinking about that even this week being in Hong Kong and we went this week to a church and just seeing faith practiced in a different context and people who are brought there for different reasons and just talking with people who seem to, again, come to faith out of, not out of nothing, obviously, I believe the Holy Spirit’s drawing them, and see whole families come to faith in different places. It’s quite encouraging and inspiring. There’s a quote by Abraham Heschel where he talks about how each one of us has encountered in our lives someone whose life has been transformed by the love of God. And that there’s something about just encountering people for whom that is true in a deep way that is genuinely encouraging.

Karen Kilby: Yeah. And I think it’s more about . . . I don’t want to undermine my whole message and say, “it’s all good, man,” but it’s very moving about the quality of particular people that give us hope or that strengthen our faith, I suppose, rather than exact numbers. I mean, there still are losses from closing parishes and losing things and so on, but there’s new shoots in the midst of it all, I think.

Joy Marie Clarkson: And I think that’s where you’re thinking about decline and loss in terms of death is helpful because every death is in some serious way a tragedy. You know, there is this Christian sense that death was not meant to be the end. And every death is a loss. But every death doesn’t also call into question our entire faith.

So perhaps there’s something in that with thinking about the Church and that it is true loss and true grief and has to be accounted for and reckoned with. And it doesn’t need to call into question the fact that the Holy Spirit may still be moving in the world.

Karen Kilby: Yeah, exactly. I find it quite helpful to think because there is such a tendency to think “what are we doing wrong” if we’re shrinking? Or to think what can we do? Or, you know, how could God be letting us shrink if we’re still needed? But we don’t. But we know with individual deaths that it doesn’t always work out perfectly that you finish all your life projects and you fulfill all your potentials and only then do you die. We know that sometimes people die in the midst of really valuable work or really valuable contributions or, and as you say, it’s always a loss. We needn’t, I guess on the one hand, I think there’s a problem of denial. On the other hand, I think there’s a problem of taking too much responsibility as though we must be doing something wrong if the church is declining.

And one person I found really helpful on this was, I was reading a book that Karl Rahner, Catholic Jesuit theologian wrote in the 1970s, early 1970s, I think. There was a synod of the German church and it was his contribution to thinking in preparation for that. And he just very calmly said, of course, the church is at the beginning of a long, slow sociological decline.

It’s going to become less important. It’s going to become less standard. People aren’t going to feel the need to do even the minimum, to pretend to be Christians. He even said, you know, maybe at some point there’ll be some crisis that triggers off a more rapid decline. And then we need to think about how to be church in this. So it feels very prescient that he saw what was coming, but he didn’t say, “and this is what we need to do to stop it.” It’s just that these are big sociological forces at work and then we need to think, what is our mission in the midst of this? What should we do? Rather than panic, that this is the end. So he didn’t quite talk about mourning, but this calm acceptance that sometimes these things happen, and then you have to think about how to go on, I found really quite striking.

Joy Marie Clarkson: Another connection you make is the difference between “it’s all good man” and “all shall be well,” which of course you take from the beloved Julian. And I wonder if that difference in tense is also helpful in thinking about these things.

Karen Kilby: Yeah, because “it’s all good man” is close to Christian faith, which is that our faith is in God and that all should be well and every tear will be wiped away. Christianity is a fundamentally positive vision. So I set myself the question in the article, well, why am I denying? How can I deny it and hold it at the same time? And I do think it’s a matter of that Christian faith doesn’t require us to say that we can see why everything, right now, is good. It does require us to hold on to the fact that in some way, that perhaps we can’t imagine, all shall be well. And there’s faith for that. But we don’t have either the vision of the end of all things or a God’s-eye vision of what’s going on now to pretend that we know how it’s good or whether it’s good. And we need to be truthful to the reality we see that some losses are not good, they’re sad, they’re real losses.

Joy Marie Clarkson: I find that really helpful. I guess one of things I like about Julian in general in her writing is that, and I think it’s something else you’ve said also in your work, but she circles around things that she finds difficult, but she doesn’t resolve them, but she trusts in God’s love. And I think that’s maybe a good model for this as well, which is circling around that there is true loss and also there seems to be hope and I trust the Holy Spirit. And that’s something we can project into the future and rest in God’s hands that we don’t have to resolve it. And again, what we think about or what we believe about it doesn’t determine necessarily the outcome.

Karen Kilby: Yeah, that’s a really nice way to put it, that we live in the midst of it, we have to move between a sense of loss and a sense of hope, and we don’t have to have a formula to explain it all, but we have to be true to both those things. A moment, that was quite key for me when I was a student, I remember we were discussing in the chaplaincy, like the attacks on faith that we would get from our atheist friends. This chaplain priest slightly near the end of his time because he’d been there a long time and he was a little bit tired of hearing people saying the same thing again and again, he just said, “God doesn’t need you to defend him.” And it was like such a relief to me to think God’s existence doesn’t depend on me having the right answer to my atheist friend. And there’s something similar that, you know, we do need to be faithful witnesses. We do need to live out the mission of the church, but the Holy Spirit doesn’t need us to make the church. There’s another sense, you know, that fundamentally it’s not all on our shoulders.

Joy Marie Clarkson: I love that. And I think I had a similar realization at some point in my university years as well, that I could not and did not need to have all the perfect answers. Not just out of an emotional need not to, because if God really existed, then God will show, reveal God’s self. And seems to have continued doing so throughout the centuries. And that that is something you can trust in and rely upon. And that that confidence shapes how you live your life. And the level of panic you experience or not. Not to say I don’t sometimes experience panic, but . . . so, as we’re drawing close to the end of this episode, there is a question that I like to ask all of our guests. And you can answer however you like, whether this is profound, theological, or playful. But the question is, what is one thing, whether it is a person, a place, practice, a pet? For some reason, I always end up with P words when I ask this question. That reminds you that another life is possible.

Karen Kilby: So I guess to go back to the religious sisters that I spent time with, they remind me of that. The ones that I know best, the Congregation of La Retraite and a number of others, they don’t wear habits. It’s not super visible. They’re not living visibly another life, they’re just looking pretty ordinary and yet there these moments where they just respond differently and I think, they’re not part of the logic of neoliberalism, of the capitalist system, of the system of ambition that universities are structured around. I’m trying to think of how to illustrate this. I remember at the beginning of a project I was doing with a group of them, it was a little bit confusing exactly how it was going to go. I didn’t have the method entirely worked out. So I did my best to explain it. And they were funding the project, and I thought about how, if I was getting public funding, I would be asked for, you know, to spell out my methodology and to give targets what I was going to do by when and what the exact impact it would have. And so I apologized for not being able to say more exactly about how our work together was going to unfold.

And one of the sisters said, well, you plant a seed and you have to give it time and wait to see how it grows. And it’s just the difference between the planting imagery and the public funding bodies – to be responsible, all these forms of accountability. I just thought, it’s another life.

Joy Marie Clarkson: That’s quite concretely another life being possible. Thank you so much for joining us. And as I said, I hope people will go in and read your article, which is a crisp and gentle and really helpful way to think and to deal with this topic. But thank you so much for joining us today.

Karen Kilby: Thanks very much, Joy. It’s been a pleasure talking to you.