We started with alt-blonde beards, the Lakers selling for $12.5 billion, and the gambling apps that will call you with Super Bowl tickets when you lose your year’s income and cancel your account when you win. Then Bo told the story of the four-clergy ministerium in Twin Falls discovering that none of them use the same words for the same things — vestry, deacon, elder, narthex, vestibule — which turned out to be the perfect on-ramp for the actual hour. I brought slides from this week’s Luther Seminary class, where the students had been reading Hartmut Rosa and Byung-Chul Han together, and the conversation went somewhere I did not plan. Rosa’s resonance: the vibrating wire between a self and an uncontrollable other. Han’s terror of the same: the elimination of the negativity that makes thinking possible. And then Bo confessed his hyper-sacramentality to a Board of Ordained Ministry that had no idea what he was talking about, and we ended up with an ecclesiology conversation about Dunbar’s 150, octave equivalence, and why singing together is a spiritual technology 190,000 years older than any doctrine. Also: the flock cameras, the performance zombie, and a line from a student I am stealing forever.
Highlights from the conversation
- Nobody uses the same words. Bo’s Twin Falls ministerium — one Methodist, one Presbyterian, one Anglican, one Lutheran, four total in the whole town — discovered they cannot understand each other’s credentialing processes or vocabulary. In Methodism the vestry is the room where you put on your alb; to the Anglican it is a committee (named for where the committee used to meet). An elder is a priest in one tradition and a lay leader in another. Bo’s takeaway: when someone says Christian, they picture one thing. In a town this size it means six entirely different things, and we do not even mean the same thing by communion. Religion is housed in language and practice. Words do not contain meanings — they are containers we pour meaning into.
- Rosa’s resonance and the muted world. Hartmut Rosa’s Resonance: the phenomenology of a self coming alive. Affection — being touched, wounded, called by an independent reality you do not control. Emotion — the self-efficacious response back toward the other. In that space, self and world emerge mutually changed. The violin is the anchor image: an instrument has real resistance, and it is exactly the semi-controllability through craft and attention that makes music an event. Affect plus response without alteration is not resonance. That is consumption — the infinite scroll, the dead baby ad followed by the poorly understood Lord of the Rings meme. And late modernity’s stabilization structure is acceleration, which means every sphere it touches gets made available, attainable, controllable — and therefore mute.
- Bo’s hyper-sacramentality meets the Board of Ordained Ministry. After his mother died, Bo abstained from communion for years. Watching people at the Loft serve each other changed him into what he calls hyper-sacramental — not remembering Jesus like Mr. Rogers with a beard, but re-membering, becoming members of a body again. He quoted Karl Barth (the only time in his life) on proclamation becoming the very word of God, and told the board: the table is a vibrating wire, not an echo from the past. Their response: we have no idea what you’re talking about. But is the bread transformed? And his DS, in public: maybe let us help you sound a little more Methodist. Tripp’s follow-up on Cobb and Suchocki — the sacraments as Christian practices of attention that hone us through repetition to the form of divine self-giving in every moment. Wesleyans don’t do total depravity. It is above the pay grade of finite creation to erase the given goodness of its status as products of the word of God. All creation can become the sacrament of God.
- “Artificial intelligence is incapable of thinking for the very reason that it cannot get goosebumps.” Han’s line, and the one multiple students flagged. AI computes at lightning speed precisely because it is deaf, handless, and without pathos. Meaningful experience requires the negativity of pain and threshold feelings — Han calls human life a via dolorosa, where spirit shows up in the encounter with suffering and resistance and breaks the totality of the ego. Goosebumps are the somatic signal of being seized by an otherness you have not yet put into words. Also from Han: when the human mind conforms to the logic of the algorithm, we trade spirit for intelligence. And: in order to survive, humans are abolishing themselves. We may succeed in becoming immortal, but we shall achieve immortality at the price of life.
- Dunbar’s 150, and the church planters who already knew. Robin Dunbar, the Oxford primatologist who moved to studying humans because the grants were better, worked out the biological limit of a genuine sympathy group at around 150 — and then discovered, cross-culturally, that the average religious congregation is also 150. When he presented the research at Oxford, the Anglican clergy in the room essentially said we know, this is how we do church planting, and handed him their data. Bo’s cell-church training in 1997 had the same rule: cross 175 and send 25 out to start something new. One of Tripp’s students, on staff at a 3,000-member megachurch, mapped it out and found the church is actually about eighteen churches of 150. Plus octave equivalence — male voices drop exactly one octave at puberty, which lets men, women, and children sing in perfect unison across natural registers, which triggers the endorphin network that makes cooperative sociality possible. Opening-night camp karaoke is an ancient spiritual practice.
- “We’ve engineered a world with nothing to say and a listener with no ears.” A student’s line synthesizing the two readings, and the crescendo of the hour. Rosa: we have eliminated the willful object, the site of resistance where the wire gets hung. Han: we have eliminated the negativity of the other. Both describe an embodied ontology in which otherness is erased — producing a ghostly infosphere of communication without community, and a mute world with nothing left to resonate with. Tripp’s Lutheran-seminary punchline: for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, faith comes by hearing — we are building a world that lacks the conditions for the possibility of gospel proclamation. And underneath it, Heidegger’s care disappearing: if the future is perfectly predictable there is no vulnerability, and therefore no need to care. Rosa’s performance zombie — you, performing for the datafied version of yourself. Bo’s honest response, after being lit up thirty minutes earlier: the In-N-Out shooting in Twin Falls two weeks ago, none of the victims local, and the town’s quiet admission that the reaction would have been different if they had been. The distrust of the other, exposed.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download