Show Notes
Why do we so often struggle when our best work remains unfinished, and how can people of faith be okay with achieving only proximate justice?
Author and thinker Steven Garber joins host Case Thorp on the Nuance podcast to discuss his newest book, Hints of Hope: Essays on Making Peace with the Proximate. They explore what it means to wrestle with the “now but not yet” of our vocations, and how to faithfully engage in the messy reality of politics, business, and culture.
Whether you are a young professional entering the workforce or a seasoned leader navigating complex cultural challenges, this episode provides a theological framework for pursuing honest, good work without giving in to cynicism.
📚 Episode Resources:
Hints of Hope: Essays on Making Peace with the Proximate by Steven Garber: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F9TPCTB4
Dr. Garber’s Other Books: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Steven-Garber/author/B00JG6XT84?ccs_id=ec2907b5-7d05-4bfb-b35e-4b5e50e0089a
The Washington Institute for Faith, Vocation, and Culture: https://washingtoninst.org/
“Making peace with proximate justice” in Comment Magazine: https://comment.org/making-peace-with-proximate-justice-reprise/
Economics of Mutuality: https://eom.org/
Nuance is a podcast of The Collaborative where we wrestle together about living our Christian faith in the public square. Nuance invites Christians to pursue the cultural and economic renewal by living out faith through work every facet of public life, including work, political engagement, the arts, philanthropy, and more.
Each episode, Dr. Case Thorp hosts conversations with Christian thinkers and leaders at the forefront of some of today’s most pressing issues around living a public faith.
Visit wecolabor.com for resources, events, and more.
Episode Transcript
Case Thorp
Today we probe what it means to wrestle with the contradictions we all face in our marriages, in our workplaces, our friendships and our jobs. What does it look like to come close to perfect, but as people of faith to be okay with being proximate? My guest is author and thinker, Sage Steven Garber. Friends, welcome to Nuance. Well, today I’m joined by someone who has shaped my own thinking about vocation and culture, and in many ways more than most, and that is Steven Garber. He is author of a new book entitled Hints of Hope: Essays on Making Peace with the Proximate, published by Paraclete Press.
Steven has been a teacher of many people in many places and his work has been a wellspring for those of us who care about having a faithful presence in the world. Steven, welcome back to Nuance.
Steven Garber
It’s very good to see you again. Thank you.
Case Thorp
Well, thank you. How is Meg?
Steven Garber
She still loves me, so that’s a great gift to me in my life.
Case Thorp
And y’all recently moved. I saw this on Facebook.
Steven Garber
After 35 years in Washington, D.C., we moved to Charlottesville, Virginia last summer. So it’s about two hours south of D.C. We had three of our children go to the University of Virginia. And so we knew the city very well over many, many years. And two of our two oldest kids and their kids, now eight grandkids between them, live in Charlottesville.
We actually give this long practice that Meg and I have had to choose a neighbor before you choose a house. We bought a house across the street from our daughter. So she and her family live across the street from us and our son and his family live about eight minutes away.
Case Thorp
Wow, wonderful. So lots more grandkids in your life.
Steven Garber
That’s exactly right. And it’s an easier city to live in than D.C. is, of course.
Case Thorp
I bet. Yeah. Well, listeners and viewers, again, welcome to Nuance, where we seek to be faithful in the public square. Let me remind you, as I always do, please like, share this episode, leave a comment. It helps us reach further with our work in remarkable ways. Well, so I like to have Steven as a regular guest for us here on Nuance. His wisdom, his kindness, his voice is really needed in today’s world. So he is a writer, a teacher, and as I’ve mentioned, one of the leaders in the faith and work movement. He was a founder of the Washington Institute for Faith, Vocation, and Culture, and now serves as senior fellow for vocation and the common good for the Murdoch Charitable Trust. He’s held appointments at Regent College as Professor of Marketplace Theology and serves as Senior Fellow for the Institute for Marketplace Transformation and Access Ventures. His earlier books include The Fabric of Faithfulness and Visions of Vocation. Visions of Vocation is one of my top 10 books. I teach it every year in our Gotham Fellowship and in our Orlando Fellows. And the other day, Steven, you’ll love this, I had one of our youth directors in my office who is now working on his seminary degree at Reformed Theological Seminary. And he had been an Orlando Fellow many, many years ago. And he was looking around my office at my books and he saw the yellow binding of Visions for Vocation. And he pulled it out and he went, warm brown sugar. And I said, what?
Steven Garber
Hahaha
Case Thorp
I said, you remember that? He said, okay, I’ll never forget it. And it’s because when I teach it, I open every single class with rubbing it on my cheek and saying “warm brown sugar.” Because it’s a feel good book and it’s so deep and more than just feel good, but it feels good to read it. Steven’s newest book, Hints of Hope, is a collection of eight lyrically written essays in memoir form, exploring what it means to draw near to the deepest realities of life and to still love. So Steven, you have talked a great deal about this work and I have so enjoyed reading it. For folks who are new to this conversation, what do you mean by proximate?
Steven Garber
That’s the billion dollar question, isn’t it?
15 years ago, I had lived in Washington D.C. for many many many years and had taught politics a long time in D.C. even on Capitol Hill.
People who knew me and my work had watched that, I suppose, but one was a new friend in Toronto, Canada. He was South African and had been part of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa after Apartheid and had moved first to Vancouver to study at Regent College and then moved to Toronto. And he was editing a journal or a magazine called Comment. And he said to me one year, you’ve been watching Washington, D.C. a long time. Is there a vocation in the political world? And I thought about it quite a while, actually. And I offered an essay back to him called Making Peace with Proximate Justice. And what I was arguing was that if you’re going to stay in a messy, messy city like Washington for more than a few months and decide to try to actually work at things that matter over the long haul, you’d have to be willing to make peace with doing something that’s more true and right and real and honest and good. But you never get everything.
You can pick your question of whether it’s immigration reform or tax reform or US-Israel relations. You can pick the problem that has to be addressed. But if you imagine that because you’re so smart and you’re so well resourced and you know everybody, that you’ll get it done because you always get things done, guess just who you are. Well, probably after six months or a couple of years at most, you’ll go back to Des Moines thinking, I tried that. You can’t do it there. But if you’re to stay there with a sense of vocation, a deepened sense of calling to serve God and the wider world, you’d have to be willing to make peace with doing something in the now but not yet of this life.
Case Thorp
I think you get to the answer of my next question, but you frame it as making peace with the proximate. There’s an assumption of conflict. Why those words? Why making peace?
Steven Garber
Yeah. That’s a good, very good question, Case. Well, you’re married and I’m married too. So if we take it out of the public square for a moment and come back more intimately and personally to your life and my life, I’m just guessing that once was a time, one evening probably, where you said the most deeply meaningful words you had ever, ever said to anybody else in the face of the earth, making promises your whole soul to this woman who is now your wife. I’m also guessing that even having done that, you know, it might have taken five days or a couple of weeks or, you know, two months or something, but you begin to realize, hey, it’s harder to live this out.
And so even though I promised everything to her, I had no idea how hard it would be to actually be an honest and good husband. And so all I’m saying is that in the world we live in, this now but not yet, this somehow where Christ has come to make everything be new, yet even the creation still groans, that we have to live with, we have to make peace with, something that’s true and beautiful and good, that’s worthy of your life and mine, but it won’t be everything.
Case Thorp
The now and not yet concept in the Bible and in theology is one that lights me up. For somebody that may not have heard that phrase before, what do you mean by that?
Steven Garber
Well, we could look at many, many places, of course, but think with me about Romans 6, 7, and 8 as some of the best windows into the reality of this. Here is the apostle Paul, who’s as serious about God as anyone in history and written about it as well as anybody in history has ever written about who God is and who we are and what the work of Christ means. The book of Romans, of course, is, you know, is there no better book, I’m sure, that sets forth, it looks like this, you know, it looks like this. This is who God is, this is the nature of salvation, this is who we are. Then, of course, it moves from chapter one to two to three to four to five to six to seven and eight, and especially six, seven and eight are wrestling with our wrestling.
You have the Apostle Paul saying, well, I know and yet, I want and yet, I’m aware of, I wish I, I hope I would, and yet. And so I think what the theologians are getting at when they describe this as an already but not yet type of history is we are saying, well, we do confess to believe with the apostles and the church over the centuries that Christ has come.
He’s made his salvation relevant and meaningful and has offered it by the graces of amazing grace. It is true. And yet, we all live day by day thinking, but why did I do that today then? Why did I think that way? Why did I make a choice like that today then? If in fact I have been made new, if Christ has made me be, why aren’t I completely new then?
Case Thorp
Why aren’t I fully new?
Steven Garber
So the “now but the not yet” gets at that. And I think, I know, again, that language, which I’ve already referred to in Romans 8, even the creation groans, even the creation groans because it too, it senses that in fact, well, someday, someday, someday it’ll all be new. It’ll be a new heaven and a new earth. We live for that in our deepest being. And yet right now, we look around us, whether you can look at it in the city of Orlando in the state of Florida or America or the world at large, you think, well, that can’t be quite right. Or even you think sometimes the Earth itself almost seems to vomit back at us and thinking, you can’t do this to me. And so we’re aware, if we think about it more carefully, that in fact even the world around us isn’t the way it’s supposed to be.
Case Thorp
So true. I find in the pastoral sense, particularly new believers get so excited and understandably and appropriately for their salvation and then the brokenness of life still is there. And they know the answer in Christ, they know the future reality to come, but we have to still endure and live in this world.
Steven Garber
He still is there.
Case Thorp
Now you chose the the memoir format and I’ve shared this with you before, but for listeners and viewers to know I have finished a manuscript and I have a writing coach, not a ghostwriter, but a coach who encourages me and helps me edit and and think through my logic which I need help with and this individual, he kept pushing me, what’s your voice, Case? What’s your voice? You’ve got to find your voice. And because I so appreciate your writing, I finally articulated, I want to write how Steven Garber writes, now, certainly not at your talent level or wisdom, but to me, the way in which you use the memoir vehicle, I guess, to take the reader from your own personal experiences and insights, then you dip into deep theology.
And then you come up through scripture and then we’re back into how you’ve applied this or seen it at work in the many rich conversations and people you’ve met over the years. I feel like that’s such an effective, effective mechanism. So why did you choose this means? Why couldn’t another format have worked?
Steven Garber
I’m sure another format could have worked, but not for me probably. So I had a long, one of my longest friends in the world write me an hour ago. She lives in Charleston, South Carolina. And she has been reading John Stott and his commentary on Romans.
She has just been so deeply nourished by Uncle John’s gifted exegetical pastoral ways of looking at the Bible and saying this and this and that and that. Make sure you understand this about this. Well, again, he was a great, great teacher to me. And that’s unabashed in my honoring of him.
But that’s not me and I’m not him and I think you have to in some ways come back and make peace imagery a bit. Make peace along the way with well who are you then? What is your gift? It can’t be that, it won’t be that. I think there’s also something for me, I did my PhD in the philosophy of pedagogy, the philosophy of learning.
So I spent a long time reading and thinking and writing and reading and thinking some more about how we learn and what learning actually looks like, how it happens in the world. And after I’d finished all the university required of me to do that, I spent another several years actually beyond the degree, but I was still in a very significant serious learning mode, trying to understand how did Jesus, the rabbi of the rabbis teach.
You know, a lot of things we can say about that. There isn’t just one sermon to say, well, this is how it is all the time for everyone. But it was impressive to me that in the teaching of Jesus that we call the parables, he’s asked a question by an expert in the law in Luke chapter 10.
In the 21st century language we would say the expert in the wild wanted to deconstruct the idea of neighbor, didn’t he? Let’s take it out here and abstract it and put it out here in a place to talk about it abstractly. Jesus says, well, I won’t do that with you, but I will tell you a story.
And we know the story, of course, is the Good Samaritan. So I know that in my thinking through of what Jesus did and how he taught, again, I would say that in John chapter one, the heart of Christian theology is the incarnation, that God became flesh. But I would also say that it’s a genius pedagogy, that we have to actually see that words can become flesh to believe them to be true.
We don’t believe words that don’t become flesh to be true. You think about your life, Case. So I would just say there’s something about who God is and who we are, He knows to be true about us, that we have to see in fact that this can be played out in life. It actually can look like the life we live for us to understand what’s being said and to be persuaded by what’s being said.
Case Thorp
Yeah. The power of story. When I teach the scriptures, especially to our Orlando Fellows, I point out God could have used Plato’s essays and God could have written a systematic theology. But what do we receive? We receive letters that are rooted in relationship. We receive parables that are simple in the sense that they are very concrete and relatable, but yet profound in the depth of insight that they provide. And there we learn the story of Jesus. And so there’s such power in telling stories. Speaking of stories, I want to hear, I want everybody to hear about your experience with the 30th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution. I don’t know if you saw in the, I think it was the Wall Street Journal this week, an interview with Lech Walesa of Poland with the Solidarity Movement, he laments the fact that he’s the last one left in terms of the major leaders in Europe and abroad that brought down communism. And Vaclav Havel’s role, you write a great deal about in the Central European context. Tell us about that story.
Steven Garber
Why would I even be interested in this story? In some ways I have this deep thesis that runs through my life that most of life is pretty autobiographical. And that’s true for all of us, for blessing and for curse, that most of life is pretty autobiographical. So why am I interested in the story of Europe when I grew up in California, born in Colorado, a long ways from Czechoslovakia, of course in a thousand ways it is, long ways, but I grew up in a family where my father fought in World War II. And I’m one of four sons, I don’t know why really, but I’m one of the four sons that really took up the life and the war years of my father’s, you know, growing up and began to be very interested in that. And I think in my twenties when I began to articulate the idea of a worldview and to think that worldviews had meaning and had consequence, I began to see World War II and especially the nature of Nazism as a very powerful incarnation of worldviews gone bad, destructive and terrible and horrible.
It wasn’t just a historical moment, but was a set of ideas about the way the world should be, would be, and always will be. That went terribly, terribly bad. It was destructive from the beginning all the way to the end. So when I began to see that Nazism in the war years as arresting over world views, and those were years in my 20s and 30s when that language was pretty important to me.
My wife and I had this little joke between us when the years of having little kids in the house and before we had streaming possibilities with, you know, all over the universe. And you had to go to the local video store to get a movie to watch after the kids were in bed. And after that happens, sometimes on a Saturday night, we’d think, well, could we? Can we? Shall we? And I’d go off and she said, well, just make sure, don’t bring back another Nazi film with German subtitles.
And, you know, because I had done that a lot and a lot and even more than that. And I’ve seen most of the good films made about that era and I’ve read a lot about that era. So I think, you know, when communism eventually fell, which was not Nazism, was the next Totalitarian great horror for Central Europe.
Case Thorp
Right.
Steven Garber
I got drawn into coming to speak one summer in Bratislava, Slovakia, which of course was the other side of Czechoslovakia. When the nations separated, they became their own people again. I spent two or three weeks with a of former Soviet Union 20-something men and women who had never been that far into the West.
Bratislava is right on the Danube. They never had ever, ever seen the Danube. Never looked into the West across the river. It was just sort of like astounding for them. But I was asked to speak to them about what’s going on in the world, what has happened in the world, and what does a vocation then mean for a 20-something person who’s been in the university looking into the rest of life. And I did that, and then I got invited back again.
I began to read more and understand more. I became very, very taken by the political philosopher who’d been the playwright poet, Vaclav Havel. I read everything he wrote, and finally found my way spending time in Prague and walking through the streets of Prague and sitting in the cafes that Havel sat in and looking up at the balconies where he gave his important speeches.
In fact, this is a little bit self-referenced, I’m sorry to be that, but I went to my speaking there for a weekend in the former Czechoslovakia, and a man walked to me afterwards and he said at the end of the weekend, he said, you know, you’re an American, but he said, I think I know more about being Czechoslovakian now than I did before you got here. No, it’s not because, of course, I am an expert at any of those things, but I’d taken very seriously the people and the place that I was in.
The Velvet Revolution, of course, it’s a reference to, there weren’t tanks and there weren’t machine guns. There was really more ideas that brought about the fall of communism. And so you’ve asked, you know, my involvement. In the Fall of 2019, I was asked to make, again, they said, would you come return this time and speak about the challenge of vocation for the common good 30 years later? So that was 2000, you know, 1989 to 2019. So I did and it was really that I would say doing that that made me think, I think maybe if I can, if I can, I should write a book about the proximate. Because I could see that the question that was theirs to wrestle with 30 years later was the question of the proximate. As the wisest man in Bratislava put it to me, Milan Cicel, PhD in physics and gifted and serious and done good work with the whole of his life. He said to me, Steven, what did you think would be the case? He said, on Friday afternoon in 1989 when communism fell, the Communists ran the trains. Of course they did. But on Monday morning they did too. And he was saying that 30 years later, not everything has changed, Steven. And so he says, we need help thinking through how do we then live lives in this time in history where we had such hopes for more, which had not happened 30 years later. But what do we do now?
Case Thorp
Hmm. And your answer?
Steven Garber
I wrote a book for them. I was back there this fall, actually, again, and I’ve been back twice since that time, in the last few years. But in the book I’ve written about them, actually. The very first chapter is a chapter with three windows into the block cement. One is the story of my father, one is the story of my friends in former Czechoslovakia, and then the third is a story of my reflection on reading the Lord of the Rings again. So it’s sort of a comparing of reading the stories when I was in my early twenties, reading them in my sixties and thinking how did I read them differently and what did I see differently reading them years later.
So on all three stories, all three windows, they look into the nature of the proximate.
Case Thorp
For those who’ve lived through the trauma of dictatorships and devastating war and decades of communism, how might their understanding of the proximate differ than ours as Americans? Or is it a common human response and longing?
Steven Garber
Yeah. Well, that’s a very good question, Case. I wish we had more time just to walk and talk together. Maybe we should take a walk along the Danube together. We could see what all this looks like, you know, in the flesh.
Case Thorp
Let’s go.
Steven Garber
But, well, I would say that in America we have, you know, I would say this is a gift to us, mainly, but it’s also made us fat, you know, and slovenly and lazy. And we don’t in some ways take them as seriously as other people in the rest of the world do. They have lived with ideas gone very, very bad. People who I’ve got…
Case Thorp
Not at all proximate, but perpendicular.
Steven Garber
Well, very perpendicular. I mean, part of what I wrote about in that first chapter was, you cannot talk to a person of a certain age in that part of the world without them having a story of great sorrow to tell you, if they’re willing to tell you. Not everybody has the willingness to do that, but if you take time to know somebody well enough, they too have a story. You think, Jesus, this is a terrible thing to have to hear with my heart, you know, because you know the sorrow and the grief and the weight that they bear because, you know, as I’ll just give you an example, my father was taken away when I was 14. I didn’t see him for two years. He never ever talked about what happened to him two years away, but I knew it was terrible. And it affected our family life for the rest of his life. That story is repeated again and again and again and again and again. And Americans, as Americans, don’t have that story to tell typically and we haven’t had that to live with. We sort of bandy about, you know, well, you know, what is this, what is that, and what does this political party mean, you know, what do they promise, and, you know, and I would say that people in the rest of the world often are not as intellectually or politically lazy as Americans are. We think that, you know, it’ll all work out okay, won’t it? This is America after all. And the rest of world does not see it that way, Case.
Case Thorp
Yeah, it’s all we’ve ever known.
And I can imagine for your Eastern European friends, their desire certainly evolved over those 30 years from ‘89 to 2019 and continues. The great hope at the beginning of we can get this right, we can correct all these wrongs and then finding out, okay, you can only get so far, you can only get so close.
And how do you keep hope alive in the midst of that rather than giving up on the enterprise? Or even the way in which societies and cultures and people take steps back?
Steven Garber
Yeah, that’s worthy, those are words worthy of being written down again and again and said out loud again and again, Case. Of course, it’s not only the 30 years of the last generation, but this is the two generations before that for these people who did live through Nazism, did live through communism, and so these are memories that are still alive for them. And again, that generation, those generations are getting older and older, and so it’s their children and grandchildren now.
Part of what keeps drawing me back to them is that even in the face of such intense, weighty, burdensome policies brought about by totalitarian governments, which did not ever finally and fully leave these places, I see these people as wonderfully, remarkably courageous and visionary people who’ve tried and tried and tried to, I’ll use a way to image here, but it’s a good one. They have worked for years and years now to try to work to bring about a healthy social ecology in their cities. The city of Bratislava, for example, which, you know, on the one hand, looks like a fairy tale kind of a city. It’s right on the Danube, and there’s a castle on top of a hill, you know, the streets leading up to it are all cobblestone streets, and the buildings below are all pastel-colored buildings.
You think, that’s so pretty, really. But then if you look back behind you, you can see across the Danube, you think for miles and miles are communist infrastructures left behind when the communism fell that were intentionally built to be ugly. It was ugly, architecturally embodied. And they left that all that, of course. And so that’s what the city of Bratislava is also.
But what I’ve seen, Case, is these people, in every area that matters very much to us at all, the church, the arts, education, business, they have worked very hard to create windows or signposts of something different than what was for the city as a city to enjoy, to be part of.
One of my dearest friends in my life now is Jozef Luptak, and he’s a remarkably gifted cellist, very globally renowned cellist. But for 30 years, 25 years now, he has curated an arts festival, music festival for the whole of Slovakia. And it was brought into being, he said to me, Steven, I just found myself thinking after generations of political, social, economic ugliness, cultural ugliness enforced upon us, I thought my people need to know that beauty still exists in the world. So for 20, 25 years now, he has brought it to be at the annual festival called Konvergencie. K-O-N looks like Convergence, Convergency.
And it’s for the whole of Slovakia. I mean, it could be for a little group of churches in Bratislava, but this is for everybody. The whole of Slovakia is divided into this. And Konvergencie, well, he doesn’t always say this out loud because the artwork is very, very graphically sophisticated and their advertising is very engaging and draws the whole country into it. But Konvergencie for him is to say, could we, in and through the work we do, offer a window into the way heaven and earth touch each other in bringing about a more beautiful moment for us to enjoy. The convergence of, now he doesn’t say, up with his cello and say, well, it’s heaven and earth tonight, my dear Slovakia people. But clearly, if you have eyes to see and ears to hear, you think, where does this beauty come from, Jozef?
Case Thorp
Right.
Steven Garber
But I would say that’s just an example of wonderfully good work. And I’ve written about these people twice, pretty substantively, in this new book.
Case Thorp
Dictators have often hated Christians because they have a global connection to one another, that national boundaries and countries are secondary to our bond with one another in Christ. But also, wouldn’t you agree for the fact that we carry out this hope that your oppressive rule and ridiculousness isn’t forever and cannot fully control us. And that spark, that hint, as you say in the title, is quite threatening to oppressive regimes.
Steven Garber
I think that is, and I think it is. Even yesterday was the terrible anniversary of Alexei Navalny’s murder by Putin and his government. I was reading this morning one of his statements when he was in his last days of his life in the jail or the prison of Putin, looking up from his cot, looking up at the ceiling.
Case, this was as confessional and open-hearted and acknowledged that God is God and that I live in God’s world and what I do, I do for the sake of God as you can find by anybody anywhere in the world.
And he thought he would die. Then within a week or two or three, he was murdered by Putin. He knew where he was and why he was. And he wasn’t pretending. He knew the terror of what was before him, which eventually did kill him.
It’s a remarkable confessional moment of saying, this is who I am, this is who God is, this is where I lie, looking up the ceiling into the ceiling, but also to the heavens beyond, and I know just where I am, and I want to be here, because it matters in the words of Havel. It always makes sense to tell the truth.
Case Thorp
if you would speak truth to anyone listening who is in their profession, educators, medical field, housekeeping, plumbing, whatever it might be, and illustrate for them where the proximate may live and yearn in their heart, and then how is it that in your daily job you, as a Christian, learn to keep moving forward?
Steven Garber
Well the answer to your question of course is, you know, could be answered a thousand times and my mind’s kind of on here thinking which window to give in to this but again this morning somebody asked me a question about one of the projects I work on. Maybe I will just come back to this question but 20 years ago I was drawn in by my pastor, actually, Anglican rector, said, Steve, a person came to see me this morning. Would you talk to him? And he said, you know, he had a complex life he had, a very difficult work to do. And the question of the person who to see the pastor was, what does what you say have to do with what they do on Monday morning?
He said, well, would you talk to him? So I did. At the time he was, you know, I won’t get into all global secrets here, but he was about as high as you could get in the international security world agencies that we almost don’t want to talk about because they are so secretive. But that’s where he worked for a long time.
He did a DPhil at Oxford studying British American spy agencies essentially and that’s what is his life. But we got to talking about what he was hearing on Monday morning, on Sunday after it was Monday morning. Does the Apostle’s Creed have to do with what I do in the push and shove of a post 9-11 world? And we talked and talked and became good friends.
It wasn’t too long after, maybe a couple of years. I first of all, Case, drew him into a little fellowship of my friends who I knew were theologically serious people who also knew the public square. So since nuance is about public square life, I’ll just say this. I drew a collection of some of close compadres whose theological instincts I trusted, but who had long lives in the public square. And I wanted them to come around him, but my new friend had to say, resting with is not new. Let’s talk about how the church for 2,000 years has worked its way through these questions. We spent a lot of time on Augustine in the city of God and walked our way all the way through the centuries up into the modern world.
His response to us as he walked away that first day was, thank you for taking my vocation seriously. It’s never ever happened before. But within another year or two, he left that agency and began working for the Mars family, the Mars Corporation, which makes M&Ms and a lot of other things in the world. We kept talking and kept talking and kept talking. Mars is a hundred-year old company. We know M&M’s and Dove Ice Cream bars maybe, but they also make probably most of the dog and cat food that your dogs and cats eat.
Case Thorp
Wow, I pay their light bill then.
Steven Garber
You do. And they sell about $45 billion a year worth of products. But the question you’ve been asked by one of the owners of the Mars Corporation, one of the siblings who owned the whole company, what is the right level of profit for us as a company? Now that may seem like a question from Mars, more of the planet in the solar system, than anything else. You think, well, is that an obvious, why are we even asking that question? Isn’t the obvious question and the answer all the money possible you can make?
And sometimes if Christians are answering the question, say, well, I’ll screw you, make all I can make, and then I’ll tithe what I don’t think I need to the First Church or whatever it is in Orlando.
Case Thorp
No, right, right.
Steven Garber
But this was a question saying something different and I kept, I was asked to meet with two executives to answer this question. Anyway, Case, it’s a long, it’s 20 years of history now, but we talked and talked and talked and talked that morning. Finally decided to name our breakfast conversation within a few months, the Economics of Mutuality. The economics of mutuality. I would say substantively, it is a serious, surprisingly serious effort to rethink the business of business, the world.
Case Thorp
Yes. And I really have grown to appreciate their resources. I’ll put them in the show notes for anyone interested, but they produce some great stuff.
Steven Garber
Yeah, I would say, yeah.
And if you think about what a mortgage family is looking for, it isn’t in the business of getting situated to sell next year. That isn’t a morally bad thing to choose to do, I would not put it that way. But if you’re family owned and privately held, you actually have a different question. You want to keep making money over the long haul. You wanna sustain profitability.
So that’s where it works, and it’s now moved from Washington DC and the U.S. there to Geneva, Switzerland. Been there for about eight or nine years now.
Case Thorp
The Economics of Mutuality, not Mars.
Steven Garber
Yes, this project. I was with the team of these people that sold South Korea, in the fall, some work there and made some presentations and to engage in a to create a new partnership with the major business school of Seoul in South Korea, Hong-Yong University, which now wants to teach this new paradigm to their students. And I would underscore, I mean you think, well, come on business is business, Steven, you know and I know God is God, you should be sure that’s God, I mean when we get into business it’s just business, isn’t it really? And I would say well… I think that it must be seen that way. If the Kingdom of God is the prime reality of human existence in the world, it does call for a different set of questions to be asked, different sets of loyalties to be addressed.
Steven Garber
So I would say that there’s nothing parochial about the project. It isn’t as if somehow there’s a little, not this would be a bad thing to do, but there is not any quoting of a Bible verse on your little bag of M&Ms, it isn’t there. Because the Mars-ian people don’t see the world that way, from what I can understand. But there’s a conscience, maybe an unusual conscience, asking harder questions, more complex questions like, what’s the right level of profit? How much money should we make this year?
And if you really get to rethink the business of business, and if you understand it to do that, you have to be willing to acknowledge a more complex bottom line than simply have you made the most money you possibly can make? Then other things are going to become important to you. I’ll just finish this with this Case, but you asked about the proximate here. And I’ve never, ever, ever thought of this project as heaven come to earth in all of its fullness.
Case Thorp
Right.
Steven Garber
Somehow if we get the numbers right this year, we get the right paper argued for, we get the person we talk to, then somehow the kingdom of God will come in all of its fullness here and now. I’ve never ever thought that way. I have seen it though as could we work our tails off to create a signpost of the way business could be done in the world, maybe the way business should be done in the world, content with that to work for a signpost. Something proximate, so a reality, it’s true, it’s honest, it isn’t everything, but it’s nothing either and that’s, I think, the life that all of us are called to, whatever kind of work we do day by day.
Case Thorp
Wow, so good. These kind of conversations, I never want to end, and I’m sure those listening in feel the same. Well, we’re gonna pause here and pick up next week as Steven and I continue to look at our public life together and politics, the marketplace, the church and where the proximate plays a role in that. Friends, you can find Hints of Hope: Essays on Making Peace with the Proximate wherever books are sold. You can also go to its publishing webpage, paracletepress.com. Learn more about Steven’s work at washingtoninstitute.org. You’ll find those links and others in our show notes. Steven, thank you for your time.
Steven Garber
Good to be with you, Case. Thank you.
Case Thorp
Friends, thank you for inviting us into your day. If this conversation has moved you or made you think of a friend or a colleague, share it with them and bless their day. Leave a review like it will help us to reach even further. Go to our website, wecolabor.com. Drop us your email and I’ll send you a copy of Zeitgeist, our latest journal of faith, work, and culture. I’m grateful for today’s sponsor, the Magruder Foundation. Join us next week for part two of this conversation with Steven Garber. I’m Case Thorp, and God’s blessings on you.
