Show Notes
How do we hold onto a hope that refuses both cynicism and naivete in a world filled with contradictions of beauty and brokenness?
Author and sage Steven Garber returns to the Nuance podcast with host Case Thorp for part two of their conversation on his new book, Hints of Hope. They dive deeper into the concept of proximate justice, the profound influence of Augustine’s understanding of love, and why the American church desperately needs to listen to global voices.
📚 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/
Paraclete Press: https://paracletepress.com/
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
Hopeful about our culture, or maybe cynical, naive? Well, I’m back today with author and sage Steven Garber, and we’ll cover it all. Welcome to Nuance. What does it look like to live faithfully when justice is never complete, when our best work is always unfinished, when the world in which we live and the one we hope for is just out of reach? Today, we’re going to press a bit more deeply into the proximate and how it applies in our vocation, in our public life. And how do we hold onto a hope that refuses both cynicism and naivete? Well, friends, welcome to Nuance, where we seek to be faithful in the public square. So last week, I sat with Steven Garber and we explored the heart of his new book, Hints of Hope, what it means to draw near to what is real, to know the world and to still love it. So we’re going to go ever more deeply today and I do want to thank you, Steven, for being with me again.
Steven Garber
It’s a great gift to see you again, to hear you again, to talk with you again, Case, thank you.
Case Thorp
Friends, please like and share. It helps us to share this good word and this robust theology and life application with a wider audience. So I mentioned Steven’s new book, Hints of Hope: Essays in Making Peace with Proximate. It is published by Paraclete Press through these eight lyrical essays. That’s the best adjective I could think of. Steven’s writing is so lyrical. He explores what it means to be human, to wrestle with the contradictions of beauty and brokenness, wonder and despair and still yet to choose to love. So last week we worked through this concept of proximate and how it’s worked its way out in some very concrete real world situations. And I want to keep going in that direction. And so Steven, proximate justice is a phrase you mentioned last time that sparked your imagination in this particular direction. So my goodness, our world today with Washington and all its foibles, we see a lot of bad justice or injustice. What kind of lens do you think Christ followers should have when thinking about proximate justice in the chaos right now?
Steven Garber
We have four or five hours to talk about this, Case, is that right?
Case Thorp
That’s it.
Steven Garber
Well, I’m deeply Augustinian in ways that probably would have surprised my mother, who was a dear, holy woman of God, but I’m not sure she read much of Augustine. I have, and I’ve been deeply influenced by his thinking. It’s hard for us looking back on 1,500 years to think, is that really true that he wrote his work, his best-known work, while he watched Rome implode? But he did.
He had no categories like the decline and fall of Roman Empire. That wasn’t a book written in his lifetime. But literally was writing The City of God while Rome, the eternal city, was burning. It was falling apart. And he wrote a book for the ages, we call it The City of God, which is a book about the nature of love. And we think how can that be? This is a more serious book, isn’t it? How can it be about love? But Augustine argues that actually it’s the ordering of our loves that is central to what it means to be a holy human being. It is central to flourish as a human being. In fact, to use the language of Jeremiah, it is central to the flourishing of a city and society. If we disorder our loves, our love is in the wrong order.
We will fall on our faces eventually because it’s still God’s world. We can imagine we can do that because maybe for a period of time we think it seems to work to do it that way, to make things that are not so important be the most important, to think that this matters more when it really, can’t matter more because it really isn’t true. It’s not true. And what Augustine is saying is that it’s only in the ordering of our loves that we actually can find our way both to individual flourishing and our cities and our societies can flourish. So in almost everything about what happens in the news of the day and the world beyond America too, I find myself thinking, I mean, it is instinctively for me now, Claes, to think, I wonder what this means in terms of what priorities have been chosen, what loves have been set before, what’s been made most important. It almost always, I mean not almost, it always seems to me that in whatever particular we’re having to discuss this day, economic issue, some global trade issue, some border dispute, that to me it’s always a matter of how are we ordering our lives? Are we getting the right things in the right way? Are we making things that never could be, never should be more important than they can be?
Case Thorp
I’ve just finished a fascinating book called Augustine the African. Augustine, and that’s how we say it in the South, Augustine, not Augustin.
Steven Garber
You’ve got to say Augustine, don’t you, down there in Florida?
Case Thorp
Augustine, right? I live down the street or the highway from St. Augustine. And it’s not an ethnocentric approach to Augustine, it’s a play on modern categories in contemporary schools of thought by saying Augustine the African. She does a wonderful attempt to draw out the Carthaginian perspective looking north over the Mediterranean towards Rome. I think that I have so long understood and learned about Augustine from a Roman perspective or from the Christian evolution in theology. And she goes into a number of the political situations, the cultural situations going on in Carthage and across Northern Africa that then led him to write and respond and then work out his theology on these many things. And so it inspired me to think about how the American Empire, if you will, the American dominance economically, culturally, militarily, is something that needs to be understood from a variety of points of view, not just from the inside. And as you think about justice being achieved or gotten close to either here at home or that which we advocate and fight for abroad, I’m reminded not to always rest on my laurels or assume my experience and perspective, but really hear and look at it from other angles. Very interesting work. We did a lot of work in Madagascar, and they’re at the bottom of the world looking up at all the world powers. And when I was physically there, I understood their posture, their curiosity, their reactions, both positive and negative in ways that I just had never seen or known before. Your book reflects this.
Steven Garber
I think it’s impossible. Well, it does reflect that because I, because you know me pretty well, Case. You can see in the writing that I, not because I was trying to do something, I don’t think that’s ever what it was. I just wanted to do something. I wanted the book to be read by people all over the world. And so I chose chapter by chapter to include images, references, stories from the whole world.
I wanted there to be something of Africa, something of Europe, something of Latin America, something of Asia. And of course, I’m a North American, and so it’s full of that as well. But I wanted people who I know who live in Singapore to think, I see myself here, don’t I? I wanted somebody who lives in Oslo to think, I see myself here, don’t I? I wanted a Japanese friend to think, I see myself here, don’t I?
And it wasn’t, there isn’t anything in me that is, you know, I don’t think, you know. I think simply, I see the writing as a way to love my neighbor, as I love myself. And I know that when I write, when I read, I’m always wondering will this be something for me or will it be something that’s not quite thinking about who I am.
I know some years ago I was speaking to a group of political business leaders in Kenya, all over the nation, they were gathered together. The person who introduced me had been in Washington, DC for many years working for the World Bank, a man from Nairobi. When he got up, he said to his whole group, I did a lot of things with Steven Garber through the Washington Institute when I was in the States. But one day he said to me something that just shocked me. He said, you do know, Cosmo, that Augustin was an African. And I said back to Steven, no. You know, that wouldn’t be the case. I mean, because I think in the way the story’s been told, Europe brought Christianity to Africa was how he did. He was bright and gifted, a globally able man working for the World Bank in Washington, D.C., so nothing less than that for my friend. He said, I never, ever thought about that. But he said, some years later, I’ve done my own reading, and I was thinking, Steven, you were right about that. He says, it’s changed my sense of being part of the church because I realized that the church is more me than I thought it was.
Case Thorp
Yeah. Well, a friend who is a military chaplain and a pastor in our presbytery, the regional association of churches, whenever we have a new pastor transferring in and they’re being examined on the floor of presbytery, my friend will, and this is kind of his go-to question and everybody knows, don’t take it because it’s Brian’s, and he will stand up and say, can you please name three African theologians in the church? Well, of course, our minds immediately go to contemporary individuals and it also exposes the fact that we’re way too male and pale and we read everything from Netherlands and Scotland but neglect the other global voices. And then he throws them, or I guess he relieves them of the tension by saying, Augustine, Anthony. And then the room kind of erupts in laughter because we’re kind of used to it.
But I think it’s important for every Christian to hear voices from all over the world, to intentionally get beyond our own little enclave. Because you can’t understand how you’re proximate with justice if you don’t know what a full perspective of justice really is. And it’s quite a hubris to think that we, in our culture and in our time, know it, know what it is.
Steven Garber
Again, I want to be cautious and careful in the best ways, you know, talking with you about all this stuff because even though you are given to the public square, you, as well as anybody else, knows how fraught that is with danger to talk about what that looks like in practical terms in the moment we’re in.
But I would say that given what you just said, it’s been very, very important to me to listen to people from the other parts of the world who love God as deeply and seriously as anybody that you and I would know, who look at America and say, are you sure that you know what you’re doing? Because when we look at you, we have concerns for you.
And I don’t think that their concerns are even imagined by most of the church in America, because we don’t have people we know like that who we’re talking to. We live with our neighbors or people who look just like us, talk just like us, and we couldn’t even imagine that somebody, for example, who’s been through, you know, decades and generations of totalitarianism would have anything to say to the Church in America in the year 2006. Just think, well, who are they? They’re not us. I would say, you know, we actually are fools for not listening to people who know more about this than we do.
Case Thorp
Yeah, yeah. One of my most humbling, and, I don’t want to say shameful, I experienced shame. I don’t think the individual, well, the experience was this. We had a project in Madagascar where we were helping the major Protestant denominations’ theology schools do some strategic planning and some renewal of their structures and thinking about how they go about what they do. And so I had a meeting with the top theological leadership, many of whom were professors, and with me was our expert consultant in this project, a man named John Jusu, an accomplished African theologian who is Kenyan, and he had flown in from Nairobi for this consultation. And we were in a small room, very tight, with probably a dozen individuals, and as we talked through the different parts of the project, and John Jusu was a wonderful translator, not in a language sense, but just to help describe for them what our hopes and aims were, which was to truly contextualize and give them the power. Well, one particular professor who I understood later was quite difficult in a number of fronts, lit into me, lit into me as an opportunity to sort of lash out at the choices of the American government and American military that he had been stewing on for years.
And he let me have it in terms of what we had done in the Middle East and what our military had done here and there and how we had compromised the ability to do missions, that Americans show up and everybody wonders what sort of power struggle they’re trying to do rather than to bring Christ, and that Malagasy’s were now being able to go into the Middle East and bear greater witness than we were. All to say, it was a very humbling, very humbling experience. And I wouldn’t wish it again, but boy, I felt the pain and saw the perspective from a dear Christ-centered brother. And I learned so much.
We’ve got to stay in touch with those voices. I want to move to the voices of students in your life. You share so many great stories and insights on the very students that you’ve come across on Capitol Hill and who are having to interpret and understand the messiness of Washington. And this, I think too, is benefited by your PhD studies in pedagogy, which your first book, Fabric of Faithfulness reflects upon, how have you seen students change over the course of your career? How are the questions different or maybe the same?
Steven Garber
That’s a very good question, Case. I think there’s a yes and no in my mind to the question. On the one hand, things do change, don’t they? 2026 isn’t the same as 1996, and isn’t the same as 1776, and 1276. I mean, things do change in histories and centuries, and we need to pay attention to that.
And, you know, it is interesting to me to talk about the generations of XYZ and, you know, whatever else is going to come into the future. I’m interested in those things. And yet, I would also say that we are perennial people, too. Most profoundly, we are perennial people. We are, in the best language of George MacDonald and C.S. Lewis, we are sons of Adam and daughters of Eve. And if we forget that one, we miss something awfully important about who we are.
So on the one hand, yes, my grandfather couldn’t have imagined, you know, having an iPhone. What are you even talking about? He was college educated. He read two papers every day, you know, as bright and good as you can imagine. But he would have no idea not only that it exists, but that it could exist long enough that people who are serious analysts of our time in history are writing books of serious critique about what does an iPhone mean for the way we even see the world, not just that we use it to call somebody, but the better analysts, as you know, are arguing seriously. Our brains are being rewired right now.
Case Thorp
Yes, they are.
Steven Garber
Well, something’s happening that didn’t happen 50 years ago. So we need to pay attention to that and not be naive about that. Parents who are pastors and churches, staffs who are not paying attention are missing things that are really important to us. So that does change. You and I have talked before in other podcast conversations about sexuality a little.
And I would say, again, is there a figure to the wind? I pay attention with the year 2026, 21st century. Well, it isn’t the same as it once was. In all these questions of what does it mean to be sexual? What does it mean to be male and female? We talked quite a bit about gender and identity the last time we talked.
And so yes, we need to pay attention to that and realize that for the 15, 16, 17, 18 year old coming of age right now, that they will be, I would say, the world, the flesh and the devil will bear down upon them heavily on these questions of the nature of technology and the nature of sexuality. We need to pay attention to that. But I would also say that in tension, we must not forget that we’re perennial people and that things don’t change either.
Things don’t change either. If you are bright and you’ve traveled, you read and you understand that, you know, shock of all shocks when the people of Israel finally made their way through the long, long pilgrimage from Egypt into the promised land. The promised land, it wasn’t from God himself. They crossed the Jordan River. What they find, they found hillsides covered with what? Giant phallic symbols.
And we think, well, it’s oppressive to us to be confronted with pornography anywhere we look, all different kinds, soft and hard. But we realize that Joshua and his fellow Israelis, fellows, were confronted with their own engorged sexuality, distorted sexuality in their faces, a long time ago.
And why have all the commandments of God, of the ten that are given to us, why is the only one that’s repeated have to do with merit or fidelity?
Because that’s been a perennial problem for human beings. We’ve stumbled over that generation after generation after generation. If we imagine that it’s something unique to our moment in history, well, the internet is the internet and you can do all these things anonymously and la la la la la la la. Well, yes, yes, yes, but it’s also true that the only commandment that’s underscored of the 10 has to do with be faithful to your husband, be faithful to your wife.
So on the other hand, I would just say, yes, things change, but we’re perennial people too.
Case Thorp
Yeah. Well, and I think the, was it, did you say this in your book or maybe you said this in your conversation the other night with Borger that only the true is worth reading or saying, or you know something’s good because it’s the truth.
Steven Garber
Yeah, I mean, it’s one of your best southern writers, Case Thorp. Walker Percy, yeah, grew up in Alabama, grew up in Mississippi, lived his life in Louisiana. But, you know, he put it this way, an essay that’s really captured my heart for years now, that bad books lie, they lie most of all about the human condition.
And I would say that’s true of books, it’s true of films, it’s true of ideas, true of economic ideas, you know, that the question’s always going to be, what does it teach us about what it means to be human? That’s always the question.
Case Thorp
And I think back to, related back to what we said about various cultures, you’re writing for that individual in Norway and elsewhere, you’re at the higher level of the big human questions. And those human questions are the same over generations, they’re the same over centuries, and over cultures. And that’s an important place to be, too many might think, you know, that’s too heady or too up there for me. Yeah, but we’re deep down, you’re asking the same thing.
Steven Garber
Yeah, they are. They are.
Case Thorp
And we do in a variety of ways. So, Hints of Hope, that title. Why couldn’t it be named Hints of Optimism? What’s the difference in optimism and hope?
Steven Garber
Well, two things I would say back to you, Case. You ask good questions, of course. I did teach politics for a long time in Washington, DC. And we had eager beaver, bright, longing for the future of their lives, the future of the world 21-year-olds coming to be our students. But I began over time to think they needed to hear me say it before the semesters were all over to lecture on the difference between hope and optimism.
And what I argued for, I had to read an essay by the Duke theologian, Stanley Hauerwas, examining that contrast between hope and optimism. What he argued, and I began to flesh that out in my own way, was that optimism is a lie about the world, to lie about who we are, the world is really like, and inevitably, inevitably, it will cycle down into pessimism and cynicism, because it will be believed a lie to begin with. We aren’t like that. We are too much glorious ruins all bound up together. We’re not all glory, and life isn’t all glory. It isn’t all happy, happy, happy. It isn’t all good, good, good. There’s a tension. Glorious ruins together we are.
I think the phrase, hints of hope, actually does come from Walker Percy, the gifted Southern novelist and essayist. When he was finally discovered by the New York Literary Critics and given the National Book Award for Fiction for his novel, The Moviegoer, they, of course, wanted to talk to this person and they were assuming, having read his novel, that he was now going to be seen as the American Camus, Albert Camus, the French existentialist, philosopher, novelist. We had somebody serious like that in America who looked bleakness right in the eye. He wrote amazing stories about bleakness. And Mark Ripper, he said back to them, well, yes, but you don’t get me either. You misunderstand who I am.
I do, I am honest about how bleak it is much of the time. But he said, there’s always a hint of hope in my writing.
And I loved that image years ago and I held on to it and wrote about it in the book and finally when we were giving a title to the book we decided to use that imagery of Walker Percy’s. He wasn’t saying that hope is not there but he was just saying okay let’s be careful how we use it because if we promised too much well that’ll change, know, that’ll be different, she’ll change, she’ll be different, know. You know all the ducks in order, well, everything will work out, won’t it? Well, you might think that when you’re 13 you don’t know any better, but of course when you get to be 23 and you thought it’s harder, or when you get to be 63 and you realize there’s a lot of sorrow in this life actually. You begin to realize that, you know, in my reading of The Lord of the Rings 40 years after I first read The Lord of the Rings, I didn’t hear Gandalf say to Frodo, “You know Mr. Frodo, not all the wounds in this life are going to be healed.” When I read the book the first time, I just missed that completely. But then you begin to realize, well, how are you going to live with the wounds that we do bear into the world? Can you do that? Can you still do that and be a person of honest joy? That’s the challenge we have. But if we imagine somehow that it’s not that broken world, we lie to ourselves, we lie to the world around us.
Case Thorp
You so beautifully asked the question, and it’s not rhetorical. The answer is yes, we can endure those wounds because of Jesus, because of the gospel, the way in which that relationship, but also Christ gives us the tools to understand this broken world. It’s not going to ever be perfect, but then how to have hope and to bring love and to see the kingdom of God break out in a beautiful way.
Steven Garber
Because you read so widely, Case, I’m sure you have read some of N.T. Wright or Tom Wright’s work. But years ago, in becoming right into Lent, beginning tomorrow, but he wrote a book of Lenten essays and meditations years ago, and there was a paragraph that jumped off the page right into my face.
I first read the book and he says something pretty close to this that the vocation of Jesus was to take into his own heart both the most remarkable joy and the most remarkable sorrow and as we take up the imitation of Christ in our own vocations our own lives we too will find that same remarkable joy and remarkable sorrow and we are called to weave them into the pattern of our days.
Case Thorp
Beautiful.
Steven Garber
It is beautiful and it’s true. And I know when I read that, Case, I thought, well I’m not a Buddhist, I’m not going to be a Buddhist in this life because there is real joy and there’s real sorrow. They’re not the same thing.
And so you have to somehow have a way to make a count of, to understand what they are and how they’re different and to realize that in this now but not yet world we are called to take up both, like Jesus himself, into our own lives and somehow live for tomorrow as again.
Case Thorp
Yeah, yeah. In closing, and I don’t want to close, this is too good, but we live in the now, not the not yet. What gives you hope?
Steven Garber
Wow, coming in from this morning, we’ve had, unlike you there in Orlando, I’m sure, but we had in Virginia for about two weeks, six inches of frozen snow. And initially, for the first week or so, you couldn’t even walk outside. It was so slippery, it was not snow, it was frozen snow, six inches solid of frozen snow. Well, three weeks later, I was noticing, just coming in this morning, little green shoots popping up out of the ground. You’re probably three or four weeks ahead of us in Orlando, but these are daffodils popping up. And in the life that I’ve lived, I have loved and loved and loved again flowers and flowers and more flowers. So for me, watching daffodils pop up out of the ground gives me hope. We bought a house across the street from our daughter and her family. Most nights, not every night, but most nights, my 10-year-old grandson will come over about 8 o’clock and we’ll read a chapter of a book together. You know, not all little boys are like this, but he happens to be, he always snuggles up next to me and wants to be as close as he possibly can, you know, and we read a chapter together and I ask him, you ready to be done tonight? And he says, I need to get to bed, you know, but sometimes, we can’t stop here, you know, we read a second chapter, you know, but I would say that gives me hope.
His little brother who’s just five, when he sees me, more often than not, he looks up to me with his eyes as bright as bright eyes can be and a smile on his face. And it makes me have the deepest smile of my life to see a little person like that, know that I love him or I love her. That gives me hope. I would say that the work I get to do.
One project, this one on rethinking the business of business, but I can talk about other things as well that I get involved in week after week. I choose to be part of projects which in my mind are projects born of honest hope, that things are not, we’re not just stuck. We’re not just having to curse the darkness. We could actually say to each other in the world around us, this is worth my life, it’s worth working on. Because in fact, it’s true, and it’s real, and it’s right, and it’s worth giving myself to actually just try to see this accomplished in the energy and the time that I have.
I’m going be at Oxford next month doing a remarkably good thing, a wonderful thing to be able to do, it’s called the Peregrine Fellows. And it’s people from around the world coming for a week, and it’s people who are, I don’t know how old you are exactly, but people more probably in their 40s, I’m guessing, who have, they don’t need a degree. It isn’t like I studied at Oxford University. That’s not what this is about. There are people who actually are already serious about the world and lived in the world for a while as serious people, but they want to go deeper. They want a deeper understanding of God and themselves and the work of the world, and so they’re willing to spend a week in a busy, busy life to say, I’ll step away from my life in Orlando, I’ll step away from my life in Miami, my life in Seattle, I’ll step away from here and here and here and here and I’ll take up a week. Why? Because you see, all this stuff matters to me. It matters to me to be as faithful and thoughtful as I can about my own work in the world and I’m willing to give myself to something like this. So being drawn into projects like that gives me hope.
Case Thorp
What a great note to end upon. Projects of Honest Hope. That’s what I hope we are doing here at The Collaborative and you give us inspiration, Steven, thank you.
Steven Garber
A great gift to be with you again, Case. Thank you.
Case Thorp
Friends, let me encourage you, go and get Hints of Hope from Paraclete Press. You can find it on Amazon or wherever books are sold. You can learn more about his work at washingtoninstitute.org. You will find that link and others in our show notes. Well, friends, that’s all for today. Thank you for letting us join you on your commute or maybe as you work out. If something stirred your thinking, share this episode with a friend at work. Hop over to our website, wecolabor.com and we’ll send you a copy of Zeitgeist, our latest journal on faith, work and culture. You’ll also find us across the various social media platforms. Many thanks to the Magruder Foundation for making today’s episode possible. I’m Case Thorp, and God’s blessings on you.
