God's Not Your Keys: Why Searching for God Doesn't Work

Half the email on the planet went down this week, which means Bo never got the listener questions. So we did what we do best and talked about whatever was in our pockets. Bo's wife and dog are back in the house after six months, he's showering daily, and he turned an old church stage into a bike showroom with a hand-painted Idaho sunset. I'm just back from Villanova, where 15 nuns told me they love the podcast (one listens with an earbud in while she works and is afraid of getting caught) and Jack Caputo showed up to dinner with questions about part four of Process and Reality.

The heart of this one is Byung-Chul Han's new book, Speaking About God, a book-length dialogue with Simone Weil that I read the day it came out. His thesis flips the script on the death of God. The problem isn't that God became unavailable to us. We built a world, and a kind of human being, that is no longer available to God. Attention, silence, beauty, pain, inactivity: every wisdom tradition trained those capacities, and we're letting them atrophy. Bo, a self-described descendant of the death-of-God theologians, says it turns his whole lineage on its head. We also get into orcs and Augustine, our favorite podcasts, why the guys at my cigar lounge are asking what a mainline Protestant is, and the 60 Minutes interview where Trump told Ross Douthat he couldn't forgive his enemies even in heaven.

You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube

Mentioned in this episode

The book: Byung-Chul Han, Speaking About God: A Dialogue with Simone Weil. Chapters on attention, decreation, emptiness, silence, beauty, pain, and inactivity. We may read it together in the new year.

Support Bo's bike ministry: paypal.me/freeforallbikes. They could also use bike lights.

Take the listener survey and send a question: forms.gle/BDM8g6VzgXpoAUiE7

Other books: Marjorie Suchocki, The Fall to Violence; Theology at the End of Modernity, edited by Sheila Greeve Davaney; Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle; Simon Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless; Stephen Prothero, God Is Not One.

Support the show: ad-free episodes and more at processthis.substack.com. Excellent Christmas gift.

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