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Evan Rosa: From the Yale Center For Faith and Culture, this is for the life of the world. A podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity.
This episode is about the Bible, but. Not in the way you might think. We're not investigating the authority, reliability, or inspiration of scripture as a theological or spiritual text. Instead, it's about our relationship to the Bible as an object, as an accessory to human culture. An artifact that shapes and is shaped by very complex cultural forces.
Because when you think about it, we can deploy the Bible in so many different ways that extend far beyond study or devotional reading. We create new meanings through new uses sometimes for political expediency and power. Sometimes as a means to control or persuade or influence and sell. We consume the Bible, idolize it, decorate it, exploit and abuse it, and so much more.
So this is an opportunity to more deeply and carefully reflect on our roles as bystanders, participants, and accessories to the act. And decisions we undertake in the Bible's name. In this episode, I'm joined by David Dault, author of the Accessorized Bible. This recent book of his is a provocative exploration of how the material form of the Bible and the communities that read it shape the meanings we draw from it.
David teaches at the Institute of Pastoral Studies at Loyola University Chicago, and he's the host of the award-winning podcast and radio show Things Not Seen, conversations about culture and faith. In this conversation, we discuss interpretation and responsibility, what it means for the Bible to be a book, a platform, a community, and an accessory.
The ethics of translation, moral seriousness, and solidarity, and what it means to read scripture in ways that heal rather than harm. Thanks for listening, David, it's great to have you on the podcast.
David Dault: Evan, I'm so glad to be here. Thank you so much.
Evan Rosa: This book of yours, the Accessorized Bible, is a provocative title in the first place.
Um, to think of the Bible as an accessory, at least in common parlance, is a fascinating thing, and it can be bracing, I think, especially to the ear that normally reveres the Bible, that holds the Bible in such esteem and authority. If we refer to it as a mere accessory or merely accessorized, it can spin it in a particular way.
David Dault: Thank you. And so first of all, this started out a long time ago as a very different book. The intention, I think at the time was to have the accessorized Bible indicate a kind of panoply of weird bibles. I think that was what first. Interested me because I have been doing work on the material side of the Bible for close to 20 years now.
And at first I think we were all planning that it was gonna be that kind of book. It was gonna be, look at all of the Bible zines and look at all of the kind of weird ways that we are accessorizing the Bible towards these lifestyles. Mm-hmm. As I wrote the book and then rewrote the book and then rewrote the book, another sort of voice came out in that process.
And I began to realize that there was a deeper question than simply the surface appearance of the Bibles that I was trying to bring the reader to. And it was an ethical question, not simply a cosmetic one. And so as I began to think about Accessorization more deeply, and as I kind of got into the fourth rewrite of the book, this book has taken a long time, it really emerged that there were various levels of accessorization, and one of them was certainly the lifestyle level.
And you know, having a Bible that will compliment your Easter outfit or having a Bible that will sort of be attractive for you to carry among your peers if you're a teenager. Like there's that level. But then there's also the level of, and I began to think about this, the notion of how we talk about an accessory to a crime.
And once that sort of locked into me that there was more than one way to think about accessories and Accessorization a whole other wing of the book opened up.
Evan Rosa: I wanna dive straight into one of my first associations, which was Marshall McLuhan. The medium is the message and, and I think there's some space to, to dive back in here, but I just wanna appreciate the fact that you are drawing attention to, you said it yourself just a moment ago, surface level elements, which.
Really, it's not fair to think of them as surface level as part of what I'm picking up from the point you're trying to make things we normally consider fringe surface level matters of form rather than content or medium instead of message. They're doing more than we think and they're often doing more in hidden, maybe invisible ways or I know another project of yours covert ways.
And I think that opens up a bunch of new meanings, a bunch of very exciting things to be able to say, not just about the Bible, but about a lot of books. How we communicate with each other, because it comes down to, for me, a question of communication.
David Dault: Well, and if I may, and thank you for bringing in Marshall McClean.
One of the things that I try and say very clearly at a number of points in this book, the Accessorized Bible, is that I really am thinking of the Bible, not as a special book, but as a book. And when we talk about a book and McCluen did this so well, we're really talking about a revolutionary technology that has now become mostly tamed in our thinking, but it still really is a kind of magical process.
You know, Stephen King describes the idea that he can take an idea in his head, he can make some squiggles on a page, and suddenly the idea in his head appears in some way in your head. That's a little bit of magic in some ways, and it is a kind of deranging technology in that sense too, because when you read.
Carefully and well, and when you're captivated by what you read, the text really disappears and your imagination takes over and you begin to imagine that you're seeing clearly into a narrative. And in the case of the Bible, that you're seeing clearly into a past where you think that you're just getting the truth of what happened.
Well, this can be a very powerful thing. And so yeah, as we talk about the Bible as a book, we are very much talking about the Bible as a form of media, as a medium for conveying ideas and for shaping, for one of a better word, identities. And I'm hesitant to use this word, but worldviews. And you know, when we are in the midst of thinking about and trying to pay attention to the object that's literally in our hands doing this to us, it can feel very alien because we're used to seeing through it, seeing behind it, imagining that it's not there even as the physical thing is what conjuress all of this sort of magical, imaginative stuff for us.
Evan Rosa: You quote Rebecca, this art of making things unfamiliar again, or a phrase I associate with Jamie Smith making the familiar strange, and I think it's worth emphasizing this important distinction that you make, just also the introduction that you're trying to talk about the objects and not the Bible itself.
And I think attempting to par that out and make the distinction there, it can be very difficult for precisely the reasons that you're just pointing out there, which is things become so familiar to us and this partially the moment as well, that we end up wearing them in a way that goes unnoticed or sort of adopting particular perspectives that can go unnoticed until we make them strange.
Not strange in a bad way, honestly. And I appreciate you used the word weird, a few points. Like yes. You say things are gonna get weirder before they get clearer, and I love that. I love your writing in this. I think it's very important, especially for someone who reveres scriptural text, to allow it to become strange again, to allow it to get weird, to allow it to become foreign once more, so that there can be a new opportunity to discover its meaning and make important ethical and moral correctives like you're trying to set.
David Dault: Well, if I may, and I wanna give a shout out to my late friend and professor Walter Erman. When I was working with him at Columbia Seminary and writing my master's thesis, um, he pointed me towards a Jewish German thinker by the name of Franz Rosenweig. And what you're picking up on was very important for Rosenzweig's translational methodology.
He and Martin Buber had a kind of famous slash infamous public debate about this and a book that they co-authored together called Scripture and Translation, where Buber was of the opinion that it was completely fine to take a text written at another time in another place, in another language, and to imagine that you could render it clearly.
With utter clarity into your own language so that all the alienness of the text would disappear. Yeah. And Rosenzweig was adamantly against this and said, we have to preserve the alienness of the text. And by extension, not only our relationship to the text, but also our relationship to the people in our lives and even our relationship to God, there has to be an alienness, a possibility of surprise, a possibility that we can't fully encompass the text or the other, or the divine in our knowledge.
Otherwise it becomes a form of idolatry. And so. For me, keeping things weird is not simply a cute turn of phrase. It really is attempting to live into that ethical stance that Rosenweig has mapped out for us. That the weirdness is an important part of actually having this be a living text to which we can relate and through which the divine can still surprise us, because otherwise, as I try and talk about in the book, things can get really terrible really fast if we begin to imagine that it tells us a story that allows us to encompass every other person that we ever meet and every other meaning that we could ever possibly know without having to check ourselves and wonder if maybe we're overstepping into idolatry.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. Are you familiar with this Italian phrase? Um, I'll say the English version first. Just the translator is a traitor.
David Dault: Ooh. So I don't know that phrase, but it's playing off of the notion of Tator and the kind of play of traitor and translator there. Yeah. I don't know that phrase particularly, but I'm picking up what you're laying down to quote my friend Dan Haran.
Evan Rosa: So in Italian it's musically represented exactly as you were expecting, which is translator comma, which in Italian, and I think this is just about as felicitous as you can get, this is in the direction of how you're referencing Rosen, that any effort to translate essentially brings along, brings all sorts of other invisible elements and commitments, values, ideologies.
Violence, violence in its worst cases where we bring more than the mere text, there is no such thing as pure translation. And the thing I was thinking was solic is that in Italian, the only difference between those words and the meanings they entail are the letters you and I. And that's just, um, really a beautiful, it ends up being all the more pointy.
David Dault: Well, and if I can build on that, we can also look at Bloom's book, the Anxiety of Influence. And in that book, he's not necessarily talking about translation, but he says anytime that, uh, a real master interpreter comes to a text, that they have to estrange the text in some way, that they can't simply repeat what the text says, but they have to take the text to a strange place in order to get at the guts of it and understand it more.
But to do that is, is to create a great deal of anxiety because you're stepping away from assurance and from surety and from stability into a kind of space where it is possible that someone will call you out. So there's risk there, just like there's risk for the trader in, uh, doing what needs to be done.
Evan Rosa: That's right. I think that there's some room to, to begin thinking about whether and how translation and interpretation go together. But it's hard not to do some interpretive work when needing to translate something. I think of recent examples like on the baseball field where Shhe Tani's got his Japanese translator for the interviewer, and I've always wondered what is he actually saying?
What's going on there? And In's case, you know, his former translator did in fact swindle him. And there can be a betrayal in interpretation that can happen, even unwittingly, even when it's well-meaning. And I think that's one thing I wanted to start with is like, no, we can make the assumption of well-meaning or good intentions, but nonetheless, once you allow certain accessories to come along with an authoritative text or an iconic text, like the Bible, as you say, even holding it, merely holding it as such ends up carrying so much weight, so much meaning.
David Dault: Well, that baseball example that you give is, I think wonderful. And I come from Chicago, which is an improv town. And so let me, yes. And that example, and I'm thinking of the, the movie from, I think the late fifties, early sixties, a movie called Fail Safe. And it's a movie about nuclear war, and it's a movie about the Cold War.
Evan Rosa: Yeah.
David Dault: But in the midst of that, there's uh, the character of the president of the United States, and he's having to speak to the Russian Premier through a translator. And there's a point where he says, I don't want you just to give me word for word what he says, but if you could tell me also the tone, the, the sort of greater meaning, sort of help me to know the nuance of what he's saying.
And so for the president to say that to the translator, that's an act of trust. And for the translator to understand what's being asked there, that it's putting oneself in a position of trust. And so I think that opens up for us an interesting sort of direction in this conversation. And that is, are you reading your Bible, whether it's in translation or in originary language?
Are you reading it in a community where you have trust and where people trust you? And in particular, can those people trust you with their safety? Can they trust that when you're gonna use this book, you're gonna draw circles that include them in rather than exclude them out. I think that's an important piece here.
And so we have to trust a translator 'cause very few of us are actually working in the originary languages and even when we are, we're still having to trust that those originary language texts have been assembled in a responsible way. But once we have a translation, we have to trust that it's been given to us responsibly and, but even if we do trust that process, we still have to be reading with our hearts and not just our heads or else we're gonna get ourselves into a lot of violent trouble very quickly.
Evan Rosa: Here's something I'd love to get you thinking about too, is even in the originary, the original text, let's say a letter from St. Paul or something, do you think that even in the original language that he's writing in that there could still be a kind of like, if I was to read that in Greek, would there still be the need to look for some kind of accessorizing or an understanding of what else is the channel through which.
The apostle is trying to deliver a particular message because it speaks to basically the social elements that are constructed around it that we inhabit and live in, and the use of particular words. You've brought up tone, so I do want to complicate it even further for. The original language,
David Dault: and I wanna be careful about the language that I use here you are using the term original languages.
I used the term originary languages. I wanna be careful for listeners that they understand that. I'm not suggesting that we have access to a kind of, or text or a kind of monograph where we know that this was the hand that, you know, Paul's hand wrote to manuscript. We don't have that, we don't have anything near that.
But to get to your deeper question about if we were to read this in Greek, what would we be reading? And so let me turn to a more contemporary text, which I hope will not seem flippant about 20 years ago or more. A great moral theologian by the name of Michael Jackson put out a text for us where he said the words, I'm bad, I'm bad.
I'm really, really bad. And so we can look at that text and say, well, he didn't actually mean in that moment that he was bad. In that moment he was actually saying that he had prowess, that he was potent. That he was very good. Okay. But since then, you know, some people accused Michael Jackson in the public sphere of being really bad.
Right? So was this instead a confession that Michael Jackson was giving us, that he was just saying it honestly to us that he is in fact really bad? Or is he saying that he knows what the accusations are and he's gonna beat those accusations? So he's, his prowess is even greater. He's really bad because we tried to call him bad, but he's gonna call himself bad.
Meaning that he's good and he's gonna reassert his goodness by declaring his badness in public. I have no idea how to read that text. And it's 20 years old
Evan Rosa: and I gotta, I gotta break it to you, man. That's like 40 years old.
David Dault: Oh my gosh. Okay. Sorry. Yes. Okay. I take the point, but either way,
Evan Rosa: and I take yours.
It's wonderful example of.
David Dault: A lot of my life overlaps with Michael Jackson. He was literally here to tell us what that text meant, and we still don't know exactly what it means. And so I think we have to be very careful. We have to move slowly, and this goes right back to Rosenbach. To assume that we know what a text is telling us is a matter of hubris.
And to assume that we know what a text is telling us about someone else's life is in some cases an act of violence. And we have to move with great caution to not fall into the trap of narrating someone else or allowing or believing that the book somehow gives us license to narrate or to do violence or to overwrite what they are telling us about their experience.
Evan Rosa: Yeah, because suppose there are even meanings unknown to.
Unconscious life emerging through our language in ways that we don't expect.
David Dault: Well, and if I may, you know, having just finished this book, I guarantee you that there are things in this book that I did not intend to say, and I come along reading lines and I'm like, oh, I wonder what that line means. So it happens.
It really does.
Evan Rosa: I appreciate your own relationship that you described to the book. Um, and I'm, I'm coming back to something about the kind of pride and her hermeneutical pride in particular, but you described your experience of writing it as frustrating at times, and whether it's just endearing, I take a deeper point to be there from you that you're referring to a kind of slowness with which we have to exhibit some care.
And I appreciate the fact that you have shared so openly for rewrites. That's very interesting. I mean, I think that's gonna become less and less common. It's too easy to put stuff out these days, and that happens all too fast. But the slowness and the modesty. We need to approach texts like this, especially when they're our own words to use our words with care is absolutely essential.
And I'll let you comment on that. But I also wanna move into this Hebrew concept of Nuit, and I don't even know if I'm saying that right. Can you help me with that word?
David Dault: So I'm not a native speaker by any stretch, either of modern Hebrew or really very competent in ancient Hebrew. I've heard it pronounced S or S, but, and if listeners are unfamiliar with this term, if it feels alien to you, the place that you would probably know it best or have encountered the concept is in Micah six eight, what does the Lord require of you?
But to do justice, love, mercy, and to walk with modesty is how it is often rendered in sort of the English versions of the Tanach to walk with modesty with your God. But on our side, on the Christian side, it's often rendered as to walk humbly with your God. Yeah. But the phrase there is Nu that is being utilized.
Evan Rosa: I would love for you to say more about this kind of modesty and about the Christian interpretation of that as humility, but it comes along for you and I wanna make sure that we bring this up into this aspect of this part of the conversation. It comes along with moral seriousness.
David Dault: Thank you. Yeah.
Evan Rosa: Um, we would need to back up enough to be able to allow you to also talk about T and the healing of the world.
So.
David Dault: Let me take these in a sort of random order. And so Tku Lam is a notion that comes from the Jewish tradition. I encountered it through my experience working with one of the methodologies that I talk about in the first part of the book where I sort of give the background of my thinking. And one of these methodologies is called scriptural reasoning, right?
It arose out of an Abrahamic trial log where Muslims, Jews, and Christians would get together and they would read common texts. So for example, if the Koran and the New Testament and the Old Testament, or the Tanakh all reference. Noah, they would read the texts where Noah is a common character and then they would sort of host a conversation where nobody gets to be the master of the text or the master of the character.
But rather they try and learn together how this text has moved and, and how these ideas have been shaped and reshaped by their three traditions. And what I really liked about that approach is that it's not simply an academic approach, but rather it has an ethical core. And the goal of it was to try and heal the historic barriers that exist between Jews, Muslims, and Christians, and to try and build bridges of friendship by having these risks with texts in a place where nobody gets to say, well, this is what it means.
And you can't say it means anything else. Like the whole assumption is that everybody's gonna be misreading this text. And this is my phrase, not necessarily a phrase used by scriptural reasoning, but everybody is gonna come misreading the text in some way. And I really liked that. Notion. And so through this, they are trying to approach this ancient idea of Judaism, of Tikun Olam, which is the world has a wound, and we are participants in the healing of that wound and the reestablishing of righteousness in the world.
I think of a really excellent book from a few years back by Rabbi Daniel Ruttenberg called Repentance and Repair, where she reads Maimonides. And she really kind of goes through, you know, when a party has been wronged, what is the ethical obligation of the person who has done the wronging, and how do they bring things back to repair?
So if listeners are looking for a really good material, practical example of TikkunOlam, I would recommend Rabbi Ruttenberg book Repentance and Repair. But this sort of under. Girding of the world is not okay, and our relationships in the world are not okay. And so we should enter into our relationships with each other, not assuming that we're on level ground and not assuming that everything is hunky dory, but rather there's, and this is Judith Butler, there's always an undercurrent of violence, even if it's not.
It's very present to us. And so when we talk about kind of wanting to heal the world, we're not wanting to restore the world to some, to some place that it's fallen from, but rather we are entering the world in the chaos that it is, and we're trying to make that chaos less violent, and we're trying to make situations less, less oppressive for all who are involved.
And so from there we can move to this notion of t
Evan Rosa: the claim that there's always violence in the context there that can do some alienating work. It's a polarizing kind of phrase. Um, and I'm not raising it to question myself, rather I'm, I'm raising it to ask you about how you tried to communicate that fact and how you respond to skepticism about it. I think it can be misread as a heavy form of blame or shame.
Particularly on well-meaning folks who just don't wanna think that a text like scripture or its interpretation can come along with violence or is not there. So I just wanted to have a brief. To talk through that because I think completely you're an ideal person to ask about that question.
David Dault: I dunno about ideal, but I appreciate the generosity of your characterization there.
Let me give a very simple example for your listeners. If we imagine a flashlight, and this is not original to me, this comes from Martin Heider who was a thinker, who had his own sort of ethical problems and real difficulties with his association with the Third Reich. So I don't want to put him up as any kind of paragon of moral anything, but this image of the flashlight I think is very useful.
So we're in a darkened room. We point flashlight in one direction, and then we see the things that are in the view of the flashlight, and then we move the flashlight to another location of the room and suddenly the part that had been illuminated goes dark, and now the flashlight is pointing in another direction and now other things are lit up.
Okay? So using that as a kind of baseline, let's go to the gospels. And let's go to that point where Jesus is in the crowd and suddenly the head of the temple Jairus comes and says, my daughter is dying. My 12-year-old daughter is dying, and suddenly Jesus's flashlight is completely on gyrus. And he says, okay.
Let's go and let's deal with your daughter. And he begins to move through the crowd with haste, focusing his flashlight on Jairus and the concern of Jairus. But then suddenly Jesus's flashlight swings wildly because someone in the crowd has touched him. And he says, who touched me? Who touched me? And the disciples say, Lord, everyone around you is touching me.
And he goes, no, someone in particular touched me. And he swings the flashlight to a woman kneeling next to him. And this is the woman with the issue of blood. And for 12 years, she has been bleeding. And you know, if we go back to Levitical law, you know, she has been trying to do all of the right things.
She wants to be cleansed in the temple, and she wants to have the acceptance of the community. She wants to return and do all the things. She knows that her touch right now is unclean and that she's possibly bringing death and destruction if she goes into a crowd. But she's so desperate because she has not had the blood stop and until the blood stops, Levitical law says all of the purifications that would restore her to community can't happen.
Right? So Jesus suddenly swings away from gyrus to the woman. Okay, now we can say in one sense, well, you know, this is great, but in the process of swinging the flashlight from the person with high estate and with a lot of access to, to Jesus, to a person who is of low estate and has low access to Jesus, in the midst of that moment, Jairus's daughter dies.
Okay. And so I think this is beginning to illustrate Butler's point. Yeah. That you can't ever get to a place where you make all of the right decisions and everything is clean and wonderful and everybody gets the benefit and the survive. The, the whole notion of a household, the whole notion of an O coast is that you don't have abundance, but rather you're always starting with limitation.
And limitation means that you're gonna be making horrible decisions where some people are gonna be excluded. And in the process of that, you know, Jesus making the decision to swing that flashlight of attention from Jairus and Jairus's daughter to the woman who had the issue of blood. He heals the woman and he helps the woman.
But in the process, there was a cost The girl died. Yeah. Okay. So e. So even though we know what the end of the story is, the girl gets brought back to life. There is that moment where the entire household of gyrus is traumatized. And Jairus a father, and I'm a father myself, is traumatized. Like we cannot imagine.
That is not in some way an eruption of violence for this small community around this child. Yeah. And so we can't be clean of the violence. Even as we're pointing, we think our flashlight in the most moral, the most just place. And this is why Judith Butler says that violence is always an act of interpretation, which brings us back to the original parts of our question.
So by simply choosing where to point our flashlight in a moment, we're putting resources in one direction, but we're excluding resources from another direction. We never do that neutrally. We're always implicated in someone being left out. And the more that we can name that and the more that we can take responsibility for that, and the more that we can make that process transparent rather than hidden, the more that we can put that into a political and a conversational realm instead of it just letting it be a fiat that comes from people with casual access to violence.
Now, I hope that I'm speaking to the substance of your question. It
Evan Rosa: certainly is, and maybe you weren't ideal, but my goodness, that was a really interesting way to, well, not just explicate. I tried to nuance Butler, but, and Heger for that matter. But the pairing of those two events are seldom, in my personal experience, noted they're treated individually.
They're treated separately. And to help make your point, I hope, I wanna call out the necessity of being able to identify things of that nature in order to allow fullness and allow new things to emerge. And I think that would hit home with anybody who's trying to participate in some form of healing the world.
We are limited and to attempt to, to think that there could be some like perfect decision to make there. Even for Christ. He's operating within the bounds of his human position.
David Dault: And if I may just add one more piece to that, I'm thinking of a really good illustration of the thought of a Emmanuel Lenos from my friend and colleague, Aaron Simmons at Furman University.
Lenos declares that we have an infinite responsibility to that other person, whoever's in front of us, who have an infinite responsibility. Mm-hmm. And Aaron sort of deals with his head on, that sounds exhausting, and that sounds like a reason to just give up because you know, we're gonna burn out and everybody's gonna just take everything from us.
And Aaron says, no, you do whatever you can, as much as you can. And then you go home and you rest, and you get up the next day and you get back into your responsibility. The responsibility never goes away, but it's not your job to fix it. You're not ever gonna be the Messiah that masters the problem. But that doesn't alleviate you of doing what you can with the resources that you have to do the best you can.
Yeah. And that's always gonna be an interpretive act. You're always gonna be making a decision from a finite amount of knowledge. This. Brings us right back into Butler's position. You never get to kind of wash your hands as pilot tried to do and say, well, now I'm clean. We're always ethically implicated in the violence.
The question is, what do we do with that?
Evan Rosa: Um, because I think it's so helpful, but, uh, we're covering a lot of ground and it's really fun so far.
David Dault: Well, so thank you for all of this. And I'm having a blast too, just so that listeners are sort of moving this alien word a little closer to their familiarity. We oftentimes translate to nude as modesty, but even in making that move, we're gonna need to kind of make that word strange and alien because in our culture, especially for certain Christians and for certain Jewish communities, modesty has a very patriarchal.
Kind of feel to it where I get to tell certain people in my community what they can wear and how they can reveal themselves to the world. So oftentimes modesty is used as a kind of social control. That's not how Rosensweig is using it. Rather rosenweig in a, uh, writing that he did called on Jewish learning, he likens what he's trying to get at to a marriage.
And you go and you look at a married couple and you have to recognize that you're not seeing the fullness of their relationship when you're in public with them. That there is something that they're holding in reserve. And if you were to demand that they lay bare everything that they know about each other intimately to you, that would be a kind of violation.
You would be, uh, creating a kind of violence against them and against. The relationship that depends on a kind of secrecy that not everything can be public, certain things should be covered and appropriately should be covered because they are for the members of that relationship. But then he goes within the relationship and he says, but also the two members of the relationship do not fully know one another.
Because again, to be in relationship to another means that you don't simply look at that other and say, I know everything that you're gonna do before you already do it. But instead, I leave open a space where you can surprise me, where you can bring something that I didn't expect. Uh, HANA RN would call this the openness to the natal future, where in every moment we're birthing something new with each other.
And so. To the outsider looking at the marriage, we hold a space of secrecy, a space of reserve, a space of hiddenness within the marriage. The two partners also hold a space of reserve, a space of hiddenness from each other so that the relationship can stay alive. Uh, Rosenweig says, you know, when I'm dealing with my friends have to be able to surprise me when I'm dealing with a text.
A text has to be able to surprise me. This is the compass of what he means by modesty. So he's not trying to talk about the patriarchal social control of, I'm gonna tell you what to wear, but rather I get to choose. And you get to choose how we disclose to each other. We are never required, and no one can require of us to strip naked in front of the other and to share everything because to do so would suddenly create an idolatrous relationship rather than a human living relationship.
And so this is really the mechanism that I think is so powerful. This idea did not originate with me. I got this from a, a rabbi by the name of Zach Trough, who does a really interesting deep dive into Rosen's Vagan. It completely opened up my thinking about this, but the more that I have sort of gone into this notion of modesty, the more it has been transformative for my reading, my teaching, but also for my own relationships interpersonally, like I now recognize that when my children surprise me or when my spouse surprises me, or when my friends surprise me, I used to be a little bit of a control freak.
And so I've been learning to let go of that desire to control everyone around me and to really write their stories and make them characters in my story, and rather to let them be protagonists in their own story. It's scary. It's risky, but in the process of doing it, I so much has opened up for me and my life has become so much more rich as a result.
So I have to put a shout out for modesty. It's a helpful thing in all relationships.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. I think we can maybe see other ways that it emerges, but I, I wanna connect it to moral seriousness. I think the example of allowing the person before us to surprise us and the combination of that with not just infinite value, but
David Dault: so, so Lenos would say we have an infinite responsibility to each other.
Evan Rosa: Responsibility. Yes.
David Dault: And that, that, especially when when I'm confronted by your face, that face puts upon me an infinite responsibility for your care.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. That I think brings us into. James Baldwin in Moral Seriousness,
David Dault: and I'm, I'm so grateful for the chance to talk about this. So we have a mutual friend in, a wonderful scholar down in Nashville, Tennessee by the name of David Dark.
David Dark has used this term for more than a decade. He'll go on social media and he'll say baseline moral seriousness. Yeah. When he's getting in the face of a politician or when he is calling someone out, you know, in, in a public way. Right. He'll use this phrase, baseline moral seriousness. And I was really taken by that phrase, but I had no idea what it meant.
Mm-hmm. And so I, I wrote to him and I said, okay, when, when you use this phrase, how are you thinking about it? And he said, well, the best place that I notice start is a line from, again, HANA rn, where education is where we decide that we love the world enough to take responsibility for its care. Hmm. I'm Parar there.
There's a little bit of a, I haven't directly quoted it, but that comes from an essay of hers called The Crisis in Education. And, um. That line really sent me down a rabbit hole. And I began to try and think about, okay, if I want to talk about moral seriousness, how would I build that out? And what would be at stake in thinking that through?
And so really this is my first attempt to articulate what I think that phrase means. And it is still very much a work in progress. And so I welcome David Dark or anyone else to give me other pieces to bring to expand this. But I wanted to get this kind of solidly into the discourse so it wasn't just a tweet on social media, but now it's part of a conversation, you know, in print that we can continue, you know, in years to come.
But basically, if we're gonna be serious with each other, if we're going to take each other seriously, or to quote Lenos, if we're gonna be sincere with one another, what does that mean? And I think it's the opposite of what we oftentimes see on social media, which is a kind of performative irony. I'm gonna inhabit this particular space lightly, and I'm gonna be a character on, you know, this particular thread so that I can get the most amount of dopamine hits, or I can get the most amount of likes, or I can get the most amount of attention.
But I'm basically gonna come in and I'm gonna troll and I'm gonna, but it doesn't really matter to me the kind of import or truth behind anything that we're talking about. We're just gonna, I'm just gonna come in and make chaos. Mm-hmm. And so I'm trying to move in the opposite direction of that. I am a person who is writing in this book, in what I think is.
A somewhat provocative way. I imagine that some people will be very upset by some of the things that I've said about the Bible and some of the things that I've said about Christianity in this book. But that is not meant to get a rise out of them. Yeah. It is meant instead to try and deepen the conversation and bring us to some place where less bodies get killed, less people get separated from their communities, more people get fed.
Like there really is a. Kind of call to action here that is not at all the likes, the dopamine hits the lulls, if you will, but rather it's trying to move in a different direction. Yeah. Really trying to take sincerity seriously as opposed to irony in this particular sense. Yeah. And so, you know, I'm trying to lay that out.
So I have a chapter called On Moral Seriousness where I try and line that out, and then I'm taking that into the conclusion of the book called On Catastrophic Love. And in both cases, I'm trying to think with particularly this figure that you just mentioned, James Baldwin. And one of the things that amazes me is every time that I have an idea that I think is really cool, I will go back into a collection of Baldwin's essays and realize he's already thought it.
And so a lot of this has been me simply kind of humbly following James Baldwin as he stakes out moral territory.
Evan Rosa: Sure. I would love for you to provide an opportunity to tell your version of the story about how Baldwin left Paris for the sake of solidarity and your repetition of this phrase. Some one of us should have been there with her is really important.
I think your use of it in particular is wonderful, but.
Sobering example, sober.
David Dault: Thank you. So I'm, I'm working from Baldwin's own account of these events and so there, there have been some scholars who have questioned the timeline and kind of what the stage of events were. So just at the outset, so no one is confused. I'm working from Baldwin's self-reporting of how he thinks about this and the self-reporting.
And we talked earlier about, you know, the gospels and the letters of Paul. You know, in some cases those were written several decades after the events that they describe. In this case, Baldwin is writing a number of decades after the events that he's describing as well. Mm-hmm. And so, but what he says is basically, I, I was being oppressed by police.
I was a, I was an African American man in racist America, and so I did what anyone with the means to do it could do. I left to see if the entire world was like this, right? Or whether this was just an anomaly of certain places in the world. And he lands in Paris and he has a good life in Paris. And then he is going along.
And then in Little Rock there is an attempt to integrate the schools in Little Rock. And so there are students who are moving into the school who are African American in a white segregated space, and they are being attacked. And so as he reports it, he is walking down the streets of Paris and suddenly every newspaper kiosk, every place where he can see a newspaper, has a picture of this young woman who is basically having these jeering white faces behind her as she's bravely walking into school.
And his response is, I must leave Paris. This is where the genesis of that phrase that you just quoted, some one of us should have been there with her, and he takes that not as a declarative, but with an exclamation point, nearly shouting it. Some one of us should have been there with her. Mm-hmm.
Recognizing that she was bearing his responsibility and that he needed to stand with her and in support of her as she bore that responsibility for him. And so he chooses then to return to the site of his, of his terror. He chooses to return from a place of safety to go back into the fray and to write and to be a support from this place.
And so to me, that I think is. Indicative of what I'm trying to get at when I talk about moral seriousness. I don't want to, I don't want to make any kind of assumptions, but I will simply say that for me, myself, uh, if I wanted to live in a kind of isolation of comfort and safety, uh, I have a lot of things that would allow me to do that.
I'm a, a cis presenting, heterosexual presenting married white male in the Catholic church who has an above average income. I never have to deal with the people that are actually going through the terror and the violence just here in my own neighborhood. And so. There is a choice that we must make to leave comfort.
Those of us that have been blessed with it, and to go into the fray and to stand in solidarity. And there's nothing romantic about it. We don't need a medal for it. It's just this is what we are called to do. And in doing that, I think that's, again, Matthew 25, we're following the gospel. We're going to where Jesus is because Jesus is not choosing to be here with me in my comfortable, heated apartment in Hyde Park in South Chicago, Jesus is choosing to be out in the cold with my homeless neighbors, with my neighbors who are being rounded up because they're the wrong color.
My, my neighbors who are being hounded by the police because they present their sexuality in the wrong kind of way. Any number of vulnerable people. That's where I'm called to go and I'm called. To, and I'm not called to save them again. This is the important thing, like this gets us back to Lenos, but also takes us to Pope Francis.
It's not my job to fix their problems and to make everything perfect. I'm not the savior. It is my job to use the words of Pope Francis to support these people in becoming the dignified agents of their own destiny, to support them in being protagonists in their own story. And so that's, that's what I'm called to do.
And it's messy and it's risky, and sometimes I do it wrong. A lot of times I do it wrong. But the important piece is that you keep doing it and you keep being called from the safety of your Paris back into the fray and the risk of Little Rock. And in the midst of doing that, you are moving in a direction of greater moral seriousness.
You're building those muscles. You're doing what, uh, James C. Scott, the anthropologist would call anarchist calisthenics, where you're learning how to resist empire and violence in the midst of your daily actions.
Evan Rosa: Yeah,
David Dault: you've got me preaching now, Evan. I'm sorry. So I was trying to find an example because when I say a Bible is a book, there is a reflex that says, well either the Bible is a very special book and it's unlike any other book.
Or we have a kind of hierarchy of books that says that certain books give us kind of moral lessons and other books give us other kinds of instruction and other books aren't useful for that at all. Yeah. And so in, in this chapter, the Bible as a book, uh, or a Bible as a book, I am trying to find an example to show that.
My point is that no book commands you to do anything. No book tells you how to be a moral person. Rather, any book can be used for any kind of moral end whatsoever. And to illustrate that, I go to Carl Reiner's 1979 film starring Steve Martin The Jerk. And in that film there is a character. Steve Martin, the character Navin r Johnson is who he plays in sort of the classic vaudeville.
We'd call him a schlemiel. So he, every situation that he gets into, he's he, he's just kind of sloppy in that situation. And he's a fool, basically. He's slowly working his way up the socioeconomic ladder, so he gets a job at a gas station as a filling station attendant. And then we get a scene where he gets really, really excited one day because the new phone books have come out and he goes and he runs and he sees his name in the phone book, and now he feels like he's somebody because his name is in the phone book.
Alright, the very next scene we see an interior shot and there's a person opening the phone book, the same phone book that we just saw to a random page, taking a finger and putting it randomly on the page. And it lands next to Navin Johnson's name and the voice says, die Navin r Johnson. And then in the next scene we see that this person who was, who we just saw picking the name randomly, has basically a sniper's nest and begins shooting at Steve Martin's character trying to kill him.
Now, within the film, this is all slapstick designed to drive the Na Johnson character from the filling station into the next sort of adventure, which is at the carnival. Yeah. But my point is that this is the quintessential moral decision. You are deciding whether a human being will live or die.
Evan Rosa: Yeah.
David Dault: And that moral decision was being made by a book that most of the time people would say contains no narrative or instructive message whatsoever.
It is simply a book of names and numbers. It is a phone book. Yeah. The most boring book in the world. Yeah. But if you can make the most quintessential moral decision from just putting your finger randomly in a phone book, you can use any book in any way at all. Yeah, to try and justify whether or not a person is to live or die.
So the Bible doesn't tell you to do anything. The Bible doesn't restrict you from doing anything. You as a reader of the Bible, and I'm not the only person to make this point. If you watch like Dan McClellan videos, he makes this point all the time. So it's hardly original to me. But I very strongly want the, the readers to understand that I am not talking about what the Bible tells you to do.
I'm asking you to interrogate who you are as a person with other persons and the responsibility that you have, not because a Bible told you to, not because some religious authority told you to, or some institution told you to, but the moral actions that you are taking to me are the quintessential object of our inquiry here.
So I hope that gets at what you were asking.
Evan Rosa: That's fantastic. Just by pure association, as you're retelling the story from the, that chapter in the book, flipping through a telephone book and putting your finger on something is you could. Quite easily refer to countless people, including St. Augustine himself, flipping through the Bible and landing on a verse and then declaring the Bible told me to.
And you know, of course in Augustine's case, they sing, take up and read and he takes up and points to that verse and it's, it's a conversion experience, but to think of it as a life or death, and this is to make the point that you say objects, this Bible in your hands with a telephone book in your hands cannot have intentions itself.
David Dault: Yeah. And so by extension, and again, because I don't want to fall into the notion that some books are sort of more capable of doing this than others. Mm-hmm. What I'm trying to say again and again is all books are in that same position as the telephone book. They don't have intention, they don't tell us to do things.
And I include the Bible very. Intentionally in that list of all books and not everyone is gonna like that move. I recognize that, but that's the move that I'm making in order to really kind of bring home the ethical point and to really draw it out and make it clear for people that when we're talking about the Bible, you know, the Bible told me.
So that's a kind of false condition. That's a condition where we are using the Bible to cover. It's becoming an accessory to our crimes in that sense. It's covering for us, it's telling an alibi, well, it's okay, I told him to do it. I'll take the fall for it. But we can't let the object do that. We have to put the fall and the responsibility for the violence that we involve ourselves in squarely on ourselves.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. Let's move to the Bible as platform. How do you like to go from the Bible is a book to the Bible is a platform.
David Dault: This is an another example of. A part of the book that got rewritten a number of times, and what I'm trying to get at here is. When you have a kind of modular approach, so let's say that you, you go to the car dealership and you want to buy a Ford F-150 truck, well, you can get that Ford F-150 truck modified in any number of ways, but the basic chassis on which it rests is always gonna be pretty much the same.
But you get a chance to sort of mix and match as you wish. And so, trying to think not only of the Bible as a book, but also the Bible as a kind of basic platform upon which we can make, and we do make any number of additions. So if you have a study Bible, for example, you have a basic chassis of the text, but now you have these other things sort of.
Added to that basic chassis where you now have editorial notes and scholarly inundations and you know, a really nice kind of running commentary at the bottom of the page with a scholarly apparatus that like tells you sources and things like that. Or if you have a children's Bible, you're gonna have lots of illustrations strapped onto the text that, again, each of these is gonna augment your experience in some way.
In the same way that, you know, choosing whether you're gonna have suede leather seats or a a certain type of radio or a certain type of tires are gonna change your experience of driving that truck. And so we really do, uh, make the Bible a very modular thing, even as we talk about it as a singular thing.
It is to its very basis a commercial object that is designed for our pleasure. And some examples of this, of course, come out from my conversations with some of the administrators at Thomas Nelson Publishers and some other research that I've done materially on the Bible, where they will talk about ways in which they will enhance the Bible with certain.
Additions, like the base chassis of the Bible will be, uh, designed to be appealing to a certain market niche. And in the process of that, you know, they know that they're gonna sell a certain number of copies. Now they're doing that for a kind of mission purpose. They want to spread the word and they want to be able to do everything.
But at the same time, that mission purpose is there. There's absolutely a commercial purpose.
Evan Rosa: Yeah, of course. Help us understand the meaning of platform then where a concept of, you know, platform or chassis to then add these extra appendages or accessories, you know, to, to do some kind of work. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you're trying to say it also is moving towards more intentionality.
It's moving more towards some kind of. By the person who's controlling that platform.
David Dault: Well, let's think about platform in a slightly different way then. Let's talk about something like Facebook or Twitter or these social media platforms. In the past, we may have thought of a newspaper and we could look legally at a newspaper and we could hold a newspaper responsible for certain things that they print.
Is it libelous? Is it true? Is it untrue? Is it character assassination? Mm-hmm. But when these new platforms. Arose Facebook and others, these social media platforms, they very carefully, legally tried to differentiate themselves from being an editorial content provider. They instead would say, we're merely a platform upon which other people express themselves.
And so there is a sense of a platform as a kind of through fair. A kind of medium, if you will. Yeah. For your own personality. Like if you go to my Facebook page, it's gonna look different from your Facebook page. The things that get emphasized, the things that get curated are gonna push in a different direction, perhaps.
And different from my Republican friends and different from my Libertarian friends, I'm sure as well. And so in that sense, a platform can try and make itself invisible. It can say we, we have no moral obligation for the content here. Rather what is happening is that people themselves are doing the sort of pass through of the content.
Well, in that particular case, we can read this in two different ways. One, we can read this as well, who's providing the content. Well, if we get very lofty, God is providing the content, right? In which case, you know, we, the platform that we have in our hands is not responsible. This is literally the word of God.
God is the one writing the texts. Okay? If we go in that direction, then suddenly it disappears and the Bible simply becomes a pass through of some divine word. But we can also, in light of the earlier part of our conversation, think about the ways in which various denominations, various congregations, various individuals, will decide that certain aspects of this need to be curated in certain ways.
And so they'll lift out and they'll just like you if you retweet something, or if you take a passage on Facebook and you augment it on your own feed, you can curate from the flow. And in curating from the flow, suddenly you're creating a completely new reading experience and a completely new moral experience.
One that, again, is not necessarily authorized or normed by the text in your hands, but rather it is your process of interacting in a kind of originary way that is creating this experience for those. And if you're a preacher, you do this all the time, but we can see increasingly that it's not just those that are in the pulpit, but those that are, you know, on social media and others will make, you know, grand biblical pronouncements from very few texts, and again, has great deal of moral import.
The best example recently is the woman who went around and was calling all of the different congregations, asking if she could get baby formula. And there has been a Baptist preacher, Dan McClellan just did a video on this recently where this particular Baptist preacher is taking two texts from First Timothy and basically saying, well, I wouldn't give baby formula to Hartz either.
And you know, and just taking an entire, kind of, building an entire moral universe out of a couple of texts and using the Bible as a platform for that kind of violent exclusion. Yeah. So that's really what I'm trying to get at with this, this platform chapter.
Evan Rosa: There's a sense in which I think this could get into some of the stuff about community as well, but there's a sense in which appeal to the platform, there's a kind of, I don't know.
I worry that there's a little bit of bad faith at times where there's an effort to pour in a message that really does come from some kind of other place. And it could be, again, without questioning anyone's actual conscious intentions, there's this desire to appeal back to some objective message that can come through a neutral platform and somehow excuse yourself, somehow excuse your own agency in the process.
But when in fact, now I, we, we do have more agency than that. There is more within the bounds of our control and sort of blaming the Bible for a particular. Teachings or particular moral interpretations that lead to particular social behaviors and policies. Um, there's this desire to sort of like, well, no, I didn't write the Bible
David Dault: well, and if I may, this is exactly why.
Early on in the book, I try and say, as much as this seems like this is a book about bibles, this really is not a book about bibles. This is a book about you and me and how we care for each other. It's a book about us, not about the Bible. And so that, that is really the move I'm trying to make, and you've completely and totally grasped it, that is that we're continually trying to defer responsibility off onto this, this text when the responsibility lies with us.
Evan Rosa: Uh, you use this wonderful phrase to help conclude your text catastrophic love. And I think it's a fitting way to close the conversation. David, would you just guide us there because as you've just said, you know, in many ways this. A book more about community than it is about the Bible itself and, and you're doing just that.
You're doing so much more in this. So help us land the plane here.
David Dault: Well, Evan, thank you again for all of these wonderful questions. So as we think about the responsibility that we have with others and for others, and as we think about how we proceed with moral seriousness, nobody actually reads a Bible alone.
No matter how you approach a Bible, you are always participating in some kind of community just by the fact that you have access to a language to read. It means that there are others who have come before you and you're participating in the community of readers, if nothing else. And so part of the question is then we have gotten very good in our world at taking things that have a community basis and institutionalizing them.
Institutions, whether you go back to Thomas Hobbes or you go to someone more contemporary from the 20th century like Stafford Beer, you have the notion that communities are organic, but institutions are in many ways mechanical and they're trying to sort of reproduce themselves again and again and again and really not change.
And so a dynamic arises out of that so that when a person raises their hand in an institution and says, this isn't working for me, the most rational thing for the institution to do is to eliminate that person, either to silence them or to push them to the side. In other words, to break the body of the vulnerable person for the sake of the preservation of the institution.
Catastrophic love is attempting to unthink that process and to try and gesture you in a direction where, what would it be like if instead of breaking bodies for the sake of institutions, we were willing to risk breaking our institutions for the sake of the vulnerable bodies that are within them. And that move, I think, is.
It's talked about by Pope Francis, as he says, the Church of the Second Millennium moving into the Church of the Third Millennium, has to be a church that is no longer hierarchical but is Synod. We are moving into a space where we can no longer trust that the institution will care for people because we have now, you know, hundreds of years of evidence that the institution doesn't.
Care for the vulnerable bodies. It cares for empire, it cares for power, it cares for violence, but it doesn't necessarily care for the least of these among us. And so what would it be like to recenter that? And so again, I go back to James Baldwin and a wonderful essay of James Baldwin's that, that I go back to.
And in the process he says, okay, let's imagine that you are moving along and you're in America, you're in Chicago, you're wherever you are. To you. Hong Kong is only a name. But then imagine somehow that you fall in love with someone who is in Hong Kong and for whatever reason, they can't come and be with you.
And he says suddenly Hong Kong would go from being simply a remote name to being the most important place. And again, to use that flashlight example, all of the other focus would fall away. And you would have to completely reorder your life because it would be meaningless to continue without this person.
And so you let all of the institutions of your life. Draw away for the sake of being with and caring for this person so that their life is enhanced and your life is enhanced by being together. Mm-hmm. And so if we're thinking about community, if we're thinking about what it really means to be in a community that gathers itself around the name of Jesus Christ, we're talking about a situation where we can't continually try and protect an institution in the midst of that because Christ is constantly bringing us drag queens and bringing us homeless people and bringing us people that have the wrong politics and people who have the wrong economic status, and people who have the wrong ideas.
And all the people that make me uncomfortable are the people that Jesus keeps drawing me to. And so I can either say, okay, build bigger walls. We're gonna make this church institution great again. Or I can say F the church institution or FF my comfort or F my safety. And I have to figure out how to be responsible and responsive and morally serious with these people and learn how to be a Christian in the sense that when they are near me, they say, wow, my life is better.
I feel safer. I am flourishing more because you and this community are here. Yeah. And that to me is the fundamental of what we're needing to do. As we look to this third millennium,
Evan Rosa: David, we really only scratch the surface. I feel like the project that you've taken on here and that I understand, you're gonna be continuing in the covert magisterium is really important and it lays bare how otherwise really.
Highfalutin or esoteric stuff like hermeneutics and meaning and constructivism and all sorts of stuff really does impact us at a personal level. And I think the more we can continue to be doing that, the better. The more that we're able to connect ideas to people and as you say, you know, be willing to sacrifice the institution for the person so much the better.
Thank you so much,
David Dault: Evan. What a joy to be with you and I hope we get a chance to talk again soon. Thank you so much for your good questions
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center For Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured David Dault, production assistance by Noah Senthil. I'm Evan Rosa and I edit and produce the show. For more information, visit us online at faith dot Yale dot edu and life worth living dot Yale dot edu.
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