Transcript
Laurie Patton:
Good afternoon everyone. It's
wonderful to see folks here. You're kind of halfway through, depending on how
you measure your AAR race. My name is Laurie Patton. I am ambiguously the
president of the American Academy of Religion, having just handed over the
gavel to my successor Jose Cabezon at the business meeting but still having two
wonderful plenaries. So, I'm in an in between state. But I'm delighted to
welcome you all here today. And as you know, the three plenaries that we have
designed for this year are about the public sphere and the relationship between
individual scholars and the public sphere. Our first yesterday, in this very
room, was a wonderful panel on expanding and creating, and redefining,
particularly redefining the public sphere for Muslim independent intellectuals
and those who work on Islam. Today, we are focusing in that triumvirate of
expanding, redefining and creating on the expanding part. And tomorrow we will
be looking at 25 years of social media. And that will be a very exciting one,
religion and social media, and that's creating a public sphere.
Laurie Patton:
Today I am delighted to welcome
Kate Bowler. And Kate and I were at Duke together but we know each other
through music and musical engagements at Duke. And in addition, I know very
little, except as a generalist, about Kate's field of study. But that's why
these conversations at the AAR are so exciting as I've had the opportunity to
read in much of her work and to think with her even though I am a South Asian historian
of religion. So, let me tell you a little bit about Kate. If you don't know,
she is a historian at Duke Divinity School. She's an associate professor of the
history of Christianity in North America. And her book, Blessed: A History of
the American Prosperity Gospel from Oxford, received widespread media attention
as the first history of the movement based on divine promises of health, wealth
and happiness.
Laurie Patton:
She has researched and traveled
in Canada and the United States interviewing megachurch leaders and everyday
believers about how they make spiritual meaning of the good and the bad in
their lives. And her work on the Prosperity Gospel has been featured in The New
York Times, The New Republic, Guardian, Time Magazine, The Atlantic, The
Economist, The Washington Post, NPR and BBC. So truly, a claimed scholar in
many different ways, who also has, I think, the skill and the talent of
integrating her own personal reflections. And I want to just begin with that
question, which is you worked on the Prosperity Gospel to great success and
then your scholarly questions became real ones that you had to ask yourself,
are good things a sign of God grace, bad ones a sign of God's judgment? Tell us
about that journey just so we can get oriented and situated.
Kate Bowler:
Yeah, sure. And hello crowd of
90% people I know. Thank you for coming. 10% of whom I'll gladly meet afterward
so we can vacation together in the future. I was just kind of ... I thought of
my work as being something that really interested and excited me but also just
part of the academic super train. At some point, you find yourself accidentally
hyperspecialized, you know what I mean? Like you look up at your library one
day and you're like, "Whoa, this really got out of control." And I
was an expert in the idea that good things happen to good people and I was
really good at asking that compassionate question like, "So, when you get
that promotion or when you get that diagnosis, how does that make you think
about how God loves you and if your faithful?" And all kind of the tender
questions that get at the heart of whether we think that our lives are going to
work out for us based on our faith and our effort. And it felt compassionate
and authentic to my training.
Kate Bowler:
And then I started to get a
really weird stomach pain. And I'm a decent advocate or narrator of my own
experience and so I did a lot of using my healthy outdoor voice at doctors for
about three months, and it just went nowhere. And we thought maybe it was my
gallbladder and no big deal. And then one day it just hurt so badly that I
refused to leave a doctor's office until they gave me a new scan. And the next
day, I was in my office, conveniently attached to Duke Hospital, and I got a
call from a physician's assistant that said that I had stage four cancer. And
that was like the end of a world I knew. I'm like, "I have a good
plan," I thought. Just like, work hard, get tenure, check, check, check.
And then everything came apart really quickly.
Kate Bowler:
And if you've ever been sick, you
know that most of it is fear in waiting rooms. So, there's a lot of sprinting
for what feels like your life and then just watching someone else get there
called for blood work. And in that intense stop start, I realized that I was not
prepared to answer the questions that I really had, which was like, "Why
am I so outraged?" I thought maybe I would be just the regular like,
"I don't want to die or I'm only 35." But I was actually outraged
that this would happen to me. And then I thought, "I don't think I'm being
honest about what I thought would happen to my life and maybe there's something
about this thing that I've been studying all along, that maybe good things
should happen to good people, that I've been a little bit more affected by than
I expected.
Kate Bowler:
So, I started to write, not
assuming a public in any way because it was so intensely private. And in fact,
everything I said out loud, I realized was quickly becoming a lie. I got sick
and I was a world-class liar immediately. I was like, "No, it's great mom
and dad. Everything is really going to ... I'm sure it's fine. They'll figure
it out."
Laurie Patton:
We'll beat this.
Kate Bowler:
Winners. A lot of winning against
cancer. I was starring in a reality show about a girl who gets cancer but is
really excited about it. And there's also ... I realized a lot of performative
gender stuff that goes along with wanting to be strong and optimistic and
you're a mom and you don't want to scare anyone. But also you're trying really
hard not to be bad sick. You want to be good sick because if you're good sick,
then you will successfully audition for the consideration and care of people
who may save your life.
Laurie Patton:
Heroic sick.
Kate Bowler:
I'm like, "Here's a picture
of my kid." "Oh, I think our kids are the same age." Like you're
putting in all the hooks to try to build a bridge.
Laurie Patton:
So, when we talked earlier about
talking together now, you said something very profound that you just raised
briefly now, and that is about lying and writing. So, I asked you, what made
you start to write in a way that made you a public intellectual that's
different than a successful hyperspecialized scholar? Tell me a little more
about the use of writing as a way of no longer lying.
Kate Bowler:
Yeah. Well, I think what I was
bumping up against that I couldn't totally figure out was the idea that I was
unable to speak because there were these thick cultural scripts that were being
given to me, and then none of them were quite true anymore. And part of it was
things I'd learned in the Prosperity Gospel or just simply in American
bootstrapping, and it was that of hyperindividualism. That if I simply tried
harder, I could be self-constituting. And then I just came to the end of myself
really quickly. I mean, partly because you're on so many drugs and you're
getting so many surgeries and you're in a lot of cotton, and people are seeing
you, especially your colleagues because as I had mentioned, my office is
attached to the hospital. So, people you previously wanted to be very serious
with are now wandering in, in the middle of your wound changing and you're
like, "Well, I guess this is where we're at now."
Kate Bowler:
So, I think I wasn't able to
pretend that I was invincible anymore, academically. And so, I started to use
the only thing I knew, which was writing to do sort of intellectual, I thought
maybe theological archeology and get in deep and be like, "Why ..."
Because you know when you're writing and there's a kernel of a thing you're on
the edge of but you're not totally ... I just would write until I saw it. And
then I was like, "Oh, that is not flattering." And then for some
reason, I let other people read it.
Laurie Patton:
So, that is something that I've
been thinking about as you've been talking, which is there is an industry in
journaling. So, you could have kept a journal but there was something else that
motivated you to think about the wider world needing this.
Kate Bowler:
Well, I thought I was going to
die for sure, that year, and I was angry. I was extremely angry.
Laurie Patton:
And so, the move to not just keep
it in a journal but go-
Kate Bowler:
I'm like, "Screw it." I
mean like, "What chips am I going to put in?"
Laurie Patton:
... to New York Times. Right.
Kate Bowler:
And it was actually the lovely
and erudite Molly Worthen who had this ... Who is an amazing professor of
history at UNC Chapel Hill and she writes these amazing op-eds for the Times
all the time, so she had this editor she loves that she worked with. When I
came up with something that was mostly me crying into my laptop and lightly
short-circuiting it, I was like, "Well, that looks about right." And
then I just said, "Molly, do you know somebody?" And she said,
"Yes." And I emailed it off. And maybe because I was used to selling
out my library copies, like hitting that 500 mark of Blessed: A History of the
American Prosperity Gospel, that I didn't really expect ... You just write it
to write it.
Kate Bowler:
Like my dad's a historian and he
used to do these early morning talk show radio in Winnipeg, Manitoba. And so
for him, public ... Which I loved. He would drive out four in the morning to
these Q&As on Christmas because he's an expert in Christmas. And he would
drive out, he'd be just bleary sitting in front of a microphone and then they
would inevitably bump him for that second hour to talk about potholes in
Winnipeg and I thought-
Laurie Patton:
Of course. Got to do it.
Kate Bowler:
That's about right. That's where
we fall in the totem pole of people listening to us, somewhere right under
potholes.
Laurie Patton:
But I'm struck by this in a
certain way, two things, and I would love to hear your comments on both of
them. The first is there is a lot about participation in the public sphere and
ideas in the academy about what that looks like and what the public
understanding of religion might look like, that suggest that we have a
direction. We become a public scholar and then we write the op-eds and go to
the workshops and then submit, and someone loves us. And it's very directional
like we write a book and submit it to an editor in the scholarly world. I'll
never forget my first conversation with an actual agent rather than a
university press person who said, "You've been so successful in the academic
world. You should stay there." And I ignored her, thank goodness. I know.
But it was really kind of an interesting moment because I was like, "Okay.
How do I do this?" And she's like, "Ah."
Laurie Patton:
So, I think your story is also
very similar, which is you didn't care. There was a kind of ... It wouldn't
have mattered to you if it had been in a church in Chapel Hill that it got
read, or the church newsletter. And it happened to be The New York Times, which
was wonderful, and it happened to strike a chord about this universal thing
called human suffering and whether you deserve it or not, which you also happen
to be an expert on. It was a kind of wonderful thing. But you didn't sit and
strategize with an agent about your "platform".
Kate Bowler:
No. Well, I wrote because I felt
poisoned.
Laurie Patton:
Yeah. Yeah.
Kate Bowler:
I did. And I realized part of it
was the tradition which I was formed and part of it was the Prosperity Gospel
I'd come to know and part of it was this American civil religion, I think, of
endless possibility. And I didn't know how to outwork something that was just
about to eclipse me. Yeah, I was really scared and also the oped thing was a
bit dumb, I will just say. It was a bit dumb to write at a time when I was
feeling like this because the flood of mail I wasn't prepared to receive. I
mean, part of it was so confirming because you realize, "Oh, we're all
experiencing this thing where we've come to the end of ourselves and we can't
see past the edge." And then the rest of it was like, "Dear Kate,
surrender your petty understandings of meaning into a non-caring universe.
Sincerely, Joe, from Indiana." And you're like-
Laurie Patton:
Thanks Joe.
Kate Bowler:
Joe doesn't get that I'm in chemo
right now.
Laurie Patton:
Let's take another [crosstalk
00:13:24] right, right.
Kate Bowler:
Yeah. A lot of it was like, the
public doesn't really care that much about your feelings.
Laurie Patton:
Yeah, this is ...
Kate Bowler:
As much as I had expected.
Laurie Patton:
It's amazing the way that works.
Yeah. I'm exercising extreme verbal restraint on a couple of things because I
want to focus on our job today, which is around the public sphere.
Kate Bowler:
I'm so sorry.
Laurie Patton:
No. It's great.
Kate Bowler:
Yes. We are for it. We're for it,
right?
Laurie Patton:
We are. We like it. Yes.
Kate Bowler:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Laurie Patton:
We like the public understanding
of religion. We think it's a good thing.
Kate Bowler:
Yeah.
Laurie Patton:
Can we go back to the Manitoba.
And I'm identifying only because one of my favorite things that I ever did was
on Middlebury closed-circuit TV, which ... And having had other broader
context, the Middlebury closed-circuit TV is run by a cop who has a PhD in
philosophy and decided that a PhD in philosophy wasn't going to be as
effective. He was going to be as effective a human being as he would as a
really good cop in Middlebury, Vermont. And then he decided to run a TV station
so ...
Kate Bowler:
As one does.
Laurie Patton:
I know. Wouldn't you think?
Kate Bowler:
Yeah.
Laurie Patton:
And it was a lovely moment,
series of moments about truly philosophical questions that he wanted to ask his
neighbors. That was it. It was a deeply local motivation. And I think there's a
vibrancy to that. You're still going to get the funky mail but the funky mail
you're going to meet the person buying the oranges in the grocery store who
sent you the funk ...
Kate Bowler:
Yeah, it will get weird.
Laurie Patton:
Right. It gets weirder. But I
think that there's a power in the local that you clearly have lived as well.
And so, I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about the tension between
your deep commitment to the local, to the empathic interview, to the ways in
which you understand community and that big sphere that you also have been part
of.
Kate Bowler:
Yeah. Well, because it was really
the local that helped me. It was my little ... Oh, let me. Here.
Laurie Patton:
It's okay. I'm good.
Kate Bowler:
No. No.
Laurie Patton:
Thanks.
Kate Bowler:
There's a lot of good adjectives
about me on there and I'm very grateful for that. As an immigrant, I didn't
have my family structure, I didn't have my ... I had my school. And that was a
little embarrassing, as I mentioned, to be immediately turned inside out in
front of the people that two weeks ago I'd really wanted to impress at a wine
and cheese function and then be like, "No, come on in. No, they're just
adjusting my meds. I won't tell you everything I've ever thought Ellen
Davis." But the feeling of their hands on my head, the idea that I didn't
know who I could ever be again. I think that's maybe just how it is when
something comes apart, is like you have no idea if you have a gift yet to give.
And the thing about being surrounded and having that version reflected back to
you, is it helped me learn ... Sorry for all of this.
Laurie Patton:
You are so good.
Kate Bowler:
Okay. I'm hoping there was a
Kleenex in there somewhere. It taught me what hope was because hope felt like
... It did feel like a ... It felt like being delusional. When they give you a
30% chance to make it and then people start telling you to dream big, you're
like, "I feel like I might dream a little smaller." I mean, dream
reasonably is not like a bumper sticker that people have.
Laurie Patton:
Well, there is any functioning
adult 2020, which is my favorite bumper sticker.
Kate Bowler:
Any functioning adult. That's
very funny. It was actually my community at Duke Divinity School and my
scholarly community, which was very local for me, that helped me figure out what
agency meant in that context. It was the young scholars' program that comes out
of IUPUI. They created what they called an academic meal train where if I was
working and I wanted to just work during chemo and I needed a secondary source,
they would go look up a footnote for me. And it was like, "What better
thing is there in the universe than someone who gets your particular
absurdity?" And they helped me feel like I could be on stilts. Like my
step could just be a little longer.
Laurie Patton:
I think there's a very
interesting space in local publics for a certain kind of compassion in public.
And that's a really interesting space to be in like that, that the family
situation is not quite the same thing. I mean, some of us are lucky to have a
family that could look up footnotes but some of us choose a family that don't
care about our footnotes and that's a good thing. But I think then that
secondary layer, which is a local public, is really in between, in a way, a
public and a private sphere.
Kate Bowler:
Yes, that's right.
Laurie Patton:
And-
Kate Bowler:
And the larger public can have a
very funhouse mirrors effect because it will immediately try to tell you who
you are and where you fit into a national conversation. And you're not really
trying to fit into a national conversation, you're just trying to figure out
where your best gifts reflect some kind of larger meaning-making. And it was my
scholarly community that helped me sort of thread the needle on that. I think
because when I started doing the memoir writing, I thought well that was sort
of the deep work I could do. And I think when you're sick, there's a lot of
legacy work that everyone's trying to do, just be known. Like what if I'm gone?
How am I known?
Kate Bowler:
And we're known if ... Because
we're obsessed with our jobs that's why we're here, is we want to be known in
this, in what we can write. But sweet, sweet Doug Winiarski who is my mentor
for young scholars, he said, "Kate, I think you think that the op-eds or
the memoirs is the place where you could be really known or remembered for your
family. But with your academic work, with the scholarly stuff, the stuff that
seems less accessible," he was like, "Kate, even if the worst
happens, people will still find you there." And the way he said it, that
was the most ... Like everything we make, it's actually really just a little
sliver of who we are. That was so comforting. That means it doesn't ... We can
kind of make anything as long as it's our beautiful thing. Okay. I got to
simmer down.
Laurie Patton:
You're great. I think everybody's
with you.
Kate Bowler:
I'm sorry.
Laurie Patton:
So, finding you there in the
scholarship you mean in addition to your more of testimonial work.
Kate Bowler:
Yeah.
Laurie Patton:
So, you've said something a
couple of sentences ago about continuing on in the public sphere, in the big
public sphere, and you have. And that's been fantastic for all of us. We all
love reading your essays, your work. And you also talked about it and I
empathize about the funhouse mirror. There are usually the theory of the two
bodies of the king, right?
Kate Bowler:
Yes.
Laurie Patton:
So that there's who you are and
then there's people's idea of you. And once you become a public persona,
they're going to make those two bodies all the time. You have that public
persona out there that you ... I sometimes even have conversations with my
public persona like, "Oh, what do you think about that today?" And
it's a really interesting exercise. So, what's interesting to me is that during
that year, you published a lot, wrote a lot. It was amazing. You learned that
there were many ways in which publication and being public mattered to you that
was also scholarly. And then things got a little better and then you kept in
the public sphere and you still have now this very amazing public engagement.
So, tell me a little bit about that journey, the next piece of that journey.
Kate Bowler:
Yeah. Well, I wanted to ... I
mean, I thought part of the problem with cultural scripts, I thought about suffering,
was that it always relies on the idea that there's the right kind of suffering
person. And here she is, very special and extremely plucky and will likely
overcome.
Laurie Patton:
The heroic sick person.
Kate Bowler:
Yeah. And I was concerned that by
writing this and kind of focusing on me, which is the nature of memoir, that it
would accidentally cause people to have the mistaken impression that I'm
special. And I am unfortunately not special. So, I started a podcast called
Everything Happens to talk about everybody else's befores and afters to try to
thicken up the language and extend a range of categories in which people could
see themselves living with precarity. So not necessarily a diagnosis but
understanding their own fragility, attempting to move toward inner dependence
and being absolutely unable to figure out exactly what language would help them
get there.
Kate Bowler:
And so, that helped me think
through the category of limited agency, that helped me understand various
gender, racial, economic implications. Those conversations helped me move
beyond, I think, maybe also the narcissism of pain where you're positive that
you were the only one who's ever experienced that one feeling. So, that did
help me extend the reach of what I thought could be done in public. Even though
I didn't ... Podcasts are not very serious. I just made a slogan called don't
be above it and I committed myself to it.
Laurie Patton:
And when you say don't be above
it, you mean public engagement is sometimes understood from a scholarly
perspective as being less serious in some way.
Kate Bowler:
I have received this feedback
before.
Laurie Patton:
Right, right.
Kate Bowler:
Yes.
Laurie Patton:
So, I'm going to sit on a small
little soapbox and then get off of it, which is I do think that public
engagement has its own rigor and that we can evaluate public scholarship with
we need to develop those criteria, but it's an incredibly important piece of
criteria. There's a reason why there's journalism school for example. It is a
craft, it is an understanding. It's not just taking what you know and making it
simpler or making it more accessible, there's some other piece to it. And so,
I'm really glad you put that mantra up over because you probably also saw that
some of the things you were intuitively doing were also part of a craft. Would
that be accurate?
Kate Bowler:
Yeah. And then the next academic
book I ended up writing, ended up largely being a history of the spiritual
marketplace. And that offered me sort of sharper categories of what I think the
public sphere demands of all of us in terms of ... I mean, sometimes it's just
in terms of pacing. I mean, for many of us who write op-eds, out of our
specialties, we're writing out of eight to 10, to 15 years of research experience
and then they're like, "You've got 700 words. Go. In the beginning."
Kate Bowler:
And then for someone like a lot
of the journalists I know, when they get a book sabbatical, they get three
months. And there's a pacing question about when we feel that we can create a
generalizing tone. When are we experts? And I struggled initially to step into
more, I think ... To make more normative declarations about what I thought were
some of the pernicious side effects of our scripts around suffering. I was a
little worried about at first because when do you get to be an expert in
normative statements? But then I just got tired and scrappy so then I just went
for it.
Kate Bowler:
But the book on The Preacher's
Wife about studying women, religious celebrities, was a very eyeopening look
into how the American entertainment industry, which has its own religious
subset, creates national brands around conversations and the breathless pace at
which that industry requires people to operate. I think one of the things I
think is most special about academia is that we are afforded the luxury of
long-form thought and we are one of the last refuges ... Refuges? Refuges?
Laurie Patton:
Refuges. Refuges, yes.
Kate Bowler:
After a while, you struggle to
spell.
Laurie Patton:
Yeah.
Kate Bowler:
Sanctuaries for long-form
thought. And I think it's an incredible privilege and I do think it will bear
up the weight of civilization at times.
Laurie Patton:
And I love the fact that perhaps
in that really hard year, you are now less unafraid, you are more courageous in
making larger statements like that.
Kate Bowler:
Thanks.
Laurie Patton:
I think a lot about ... So, just
continuing on that thread and your trajectory, you had your first motivation of
engaging with public, which was here you are, it's time. I need a legacy, I got
to speak my truth. Second was, "Now I need to speak in a different way
that doesn't just focus on me." That's a really different motivation than
many people have for the public sphere, which is usually that they like the focus
on them. And so, that's interesting in its own right.
Kate Bowler:
You're like, "Speaking of
me."
Laurie Patton:
Right. What do you think of me?
Is that still your motivation or are you now in almost a third phase of Kate
Bowler public intellectual [inaudible 00:27:35]?
Kate Bowler:
Sounds horrifying. To me, I think
part of it was when I wrote that first oped, I felt like I was introduced to a
community of the fellowship of the afflicted. And when they wrote in, I felt
responsible to all of us who have to live in liminality. And because my
situation is not always curable but that I live with chronic cancer, it meant
that I never got to get over it. So, sometimes in interviews, I would get a
question like, "So, it's been a couple of years. When are you going to get
over the thing that happened?" And I remember feeling very offended
because I thought, "Why would I want to get over this?" I think the
ability to see clearly, frankly, that we are all more delicate than we'd like
to be and that it causes certain obligations.
Kate Bowler:
I had originally thought of it as
just creating enough space to write but then last year, roughly at this time,
my friend Rachel died and she was also a public person. And when she died, I
saw all ... It was like a hurricane around her that it touched everybody else's
grief but then what it ends up doing is centering on the family and the people
immediately around Rachel because she was a brand and a conversational
centerpiece. And it was so entirely unfair that we force sufferers to bear the
weight of our theodicies. And I thought ... Wow.
Kate Bowler:
And because I was in a better
place, I thought, "Oh, I'm actually in a position that I can help."
So, I made sure that with the podcast and with the infrastructure that I have, that
I could build up enough of a team that I can hire someone whose expertise is in
grief responses and that we could redirect mail so that everyone who wants a
response and needs one around these questions would get one. And that feels
like the community piece.
Laurie Patton:
Yeah. What I'm struck by in your
response is I think a lot about multiple publics and the fact that we need to
move beyond the idea that there's a single public out there. And that was also
means, I think, and you provide an excellent example of ethical reflection even
on the big public, even on the CNN thing. So many of us who live in various
ways in public lives, you ignore the comments. You don't read the comments
because the big public is hell right now. There is nothing about the big public
that isn't hell. So, you create a smaller public community of care, if you
will, or you just ignore the big public even though you know you're out there.
So, it's a really interesting space because you got those awful comments that
you probably chose after a certain point not to read or to experience
differently.
Kate Bowler:
Yeah.
Laurie Patton:
So then instead, what you did was
take that big public and make it something that could be of use to most of the
public that chose to engage you. Would that be a good way to describe your
third phase?
Kate Bowler:
Yeah. Wow. I like this. I feel
like I am moving somewhere and I like it. And I think just recognizing my own
limitations and that helped me understand ... I mean, we need more language
other than compassion, fatigue and what it feels like to be out there for all
of us. The second we're on Twitter, we feel the weight of it. I wish there was
a better word for storyful, the feeling of like you're bearing up the weight of
so many kinds of stories and you don't know how to fully feel like you can
stand up under it. But because I believe in experts, I just believe that we can
create teams of people who can build better communities and it's been lovely
...
Kate Bowler:
I mean, I use the podcast to get to
know different institutions who do it really well. I did an episode with ...
Like I had my own questions of like, "How do I tell my kid when I'm ...
When do I tell my kid that I'm sick?" It's a horrible question so I went
to Sesame Street and I was like, "You guys are adorable." But also
run by an incredible team of child psychologists. And so, just to be able to
ask honest questions to know that we can use other intelligent and kind
institutions to hold our questions for us, it makes me feel that the work of
religion is so much more interconnected with a broader range of public
institutions that I hadn't expected. And that part makes it feel like it's kind
of lovely out there. Like, weather is not so bad.
Laurie Patton:
Krista Tippett does a beautiful
conversation around this and it's why she is relentlessly going forward with On
Being, in her own space. Apart from NPR, et cetera, is she's convinced that
what's happening at a local level is far more transformative of our society
than what we see in the big public space. And I think that that's a power in
its own right.
Kate Bowler:
Because I do think people get
confused with the very distortive nature of entertainment, celebrity as a cast,
that surely if we have these avatars that we can understand our own experiences
through. And really, I just want everyone to know could they put their kid in
Girls' Scouts? Like what are the local things that hold up the weight of our
lives? And with the fragility of institutions, there are so a few places that
get to hold us.
Laurie Patton:
And there's a wonderful example
in what you just told us about the alliance between religious institutions and
academic institutions, and secular institutions, which I think has got to be
the new formula for a new public space.
Kate Bowler:
Yeah, I agree.
Laurie Patton:
Are in those alliances and that
we actually ... Whichever institution we are, we have come to the end of our
rope. We can turn to other institutions, as you said, to hold that suffering
differently, which-
Kate Bowler:
That's right. And so, I do see
that as kind of my public role, is like come for the Kate, stay for the
institutions. And just push them into other ... Because those are the things
that hold us up, is for many of us it's our churches and it's our local schools,
and it's our book clubs. It's the ways that we see each other and somebody else
knows what happened last week.
Laurie Patton:
Yeah. So, what do you tell your
graduate students about being a public intellectual?
Kate Bowler:
Yeah. Well, many of them have
written beautiful op-eds so I think maybe their first question is, "Will
it ever hurt my chances on the job market if?" I think all of us are
asking the same question like, "How do I develop my voice? What will it
sound like? What will it feel like to hear it reflected back? What if no one
reads it?" So, I'm very positive about encouraging them to get out there.
I think not because it's ... And it's fun to have ... Everyone wants clickbait
and it's fun to have clickbait. But I think it helps us all practice knowing
how valuable our gifts are. Like we've spent so long developing rich resources
around topics that other people give themselves two hours to be an expert in
and write about. So, I think we're just a lot more ... We are a lot more
special than we give ourselves credit for. So, I want us all to, if we have a
minute, none of us have a minute but if we did ...
Laurie Patton:
To push that forward.
Kate Bowler:
Yeah, I do.
Laurie Patton:
So that raises a really
interesting question that I have spent a lot of time talking with fellow
scholars about, which is journalism and journalists. The journalists are the
people that do amazing investigative work and yet at the same time, scholars
don't like journalists for two reasons. One, is their narrative. They're not
interested in being a platform for you and that's the first thing you have to
make sure ...
Kate Bowler:
That's a really good summary.
Laurie Patton:
Yeah. Right.
Kate Bowler:
When you spend three hours on the
phone with a journalist and then you see you're misquoted half a sentence and
you're like, "Oh."
Laurie Patton:
Exactly. Right. And you're great
for them but they're not so great for you.
Kate Bowler:
Yeah.
Laurie Patton:
And you are misquoted frequently.
And the question of the level of expertise is entirely different so they're
kind of our worst enemy and our best ally all at the same time.
Kate Bowler:
Yeah.
Laurie Patton:
So, given that you've had so much
experience with that now and you believe so profoundly in the role of the
scholar in the public sphere, talk to me about that relationship.
Kate Bowler:
Well, and it's tricky. Like I've
been plagiarized several times where I'll all of a sudden read a summary of a
talk I gave but incredibly someone else wrote it and I'm very happy for her.
Laurie Patton:
Several bodies. Not just two
bodies but several more bodies. Yeah.
Kate Bowler:
I've come to believe that part of
the contribution we have is part of the nature of the sources. I have a lot of
friends who write really tough pieces on, say, sexual abuse scandals inside of
religious institutions. And the work that they do, it feels like they can chip
away at hard sources, just like, "And then when was it? Was it a Tuesday?
Did you meet with so and so?" It's just like pick, pick, pick. And then they're
outside their door and then they're showing up around. I mean, they do things I
would never do and it is wonderful. But soft sources, when I can sit down with
someone and say, "Hey, did you really mean that? What happened
there?" And then get a lovely long-form account. I think in terms of some
of the softer sources and the ability to create a beautiful, larger narrative,
this is where we reign supreme. It's our ability to say, "Huh, that's
weird. It all began in the 1840s." And everyone else ...
Laurie Patton:
Settled in by the fire.
Kate Bowler:
Yeah. We're great when everyone
else just shifts into middle distance.
Laurie Patton:
But isn't that itself an
interesting possibility that you're raising, which is public scholars are not
just using a different platform that's simpler for their work but actually
perhaps public scholarship could be a new invitational form that is about the
long-form. Not the long-form of the dissertation of the monograph but some
other long-form.
Kate Bowler:
Yes.
Laurie Patton:
It is very counter cultural what
you're suggestive however, right? Because we don't do long-form anymore. So ...
Kate Bowler:
No, we don't. And it's such a
privileged placed on the journalistic totem pole to get that longer New Yorker
essay. So, it's not that our stuff isn't lovely enough to be a New Yorker
essay, it's just that we didn't work for 20 years inside that one community to
achieve that [crosstalk 00:38:35]
Laurie Patton:
Right. Right.
Kate Bowler:
Yeah.
Laurie Patton:
And you use the word, I think,
soft a couple of times and it raises ... I don't like the word soft because of
its gendered engagements. And I want to talk to you about that because we've
had some conversations about gender in the public sphere.
Kate Bowler:
Yeah. Yeah.
Laurie Patton:
And you have some really great
insights about that because a suffering woman in public is really different
than a suffering man.
Kate Bowler:
Oh yeah. Her name is Kate. It's
not Dr. Roller. Her name is Kate. She's very plucky. I realized that when ...
It took me a while to realize that even if ... Like in the memoir, about 40% of
it was an account of my scholarly journey behind writing my Prosperity Gospel
movement and that it was overwhelmingly just cultural critic but it was all
branded as memoir because memoir is typically a female genre. And that men that
I knew that wrote very similar structures, that they were offered this sort of
luxury of a universalizing tone, that they were thought leaders whereas I was
Kate.
Kate Bowler:
And it took me a minute to
realize the way that we feel that we're able to step into an expertise, who
gets to teach the masterclass. And I did notice very quickly that if I did very
well in my genre, and I'm not being ironic, this is just a true story. That if
I did very well, that I would be invited to nicer and nicer yoga retreats. And
I mean, I'd love to go to Bali some day. But I wanted to be on a different kind
of stage only because then we could, I think, encounter the ideas more
honestly. I think the more they're obscured by the personal, the more I think
it excludes women from the ability to have this kind of considered neutral
public voice.
Laurie Patton:
And if I may perhaps share an
illustration that you gave earlier, you're on a panel with a male journalist who's
written a memoir and you are a woman scholar who's written a memoir. And the
male journalist has become the expert in the area that he's written the memoir
about and you have written a memoir about your personal experience.
Kate Bowler:
They're like, "When are you
going to stop writing about your personal experience?" It's weird. I
thought I was writing about the American civil religion but no I guess I'm just
writing about my cancer time.
Laurie Patton:
Right.
Kate Bowler:
Yeah.
Laurie Patton:
And so, how do you, as a woman in
the public, push against that? And what are your ways of changing that? Did you
turn to either the moderator or the male journalist and say, "Actually,
I'm an expert to, kind of, sort of." Or ...
Kate Bowler:
I came up with something like
that. Yeah. I did use my direct eye contact and less vocal fry. Partly, it's
just I really believe in what we do. I just do. I think we have worked so hard
to know what our ideas mean. So, that's partly why I love my podcast, is I get
to talk to other people as experts in and experiencers of. Most of whom are
women who don't ... Like all of us are trying not to be eclipsed by just one
thing. And so, that's ... I mean, it's something I ended up writing a lot about
in The Preacher's Wife, how most women find their way into the spotlight
because of borrowed power standing next to someone who gets to be the
universalizing voice. And I think it plays in different ways but we're
struggling to escape our particularity.
Laurie Patton:
Yeah. A followup and then I know
there'll be lots of people who'll want to share comments and thoughts with you.
The question of sharing particularity, it's a great way to think about ... I
sometimes feel, in public discourse in particular, that the particular also
becomes feminized because it's about an experience, a single experience that
may or may not be universalized. But there's also a way in which, I think, in
your journey as a public intellectual and a scholar, you've also been very
committed to the particular. You told me wonderful stories about your
relationship with your dad in that space. And I'm wondering just as a final
thing, before we open it up, if you could share a little bit about how in your
particular experience of him, has grounded you as an expert in these broader
questions.
Kate Bowler:
Oh, sure. I don't know if it's
normal that we got into this because one of our parents was an academia and it
just seemed at some point less weird than usual. But both my parents are
academics and when they were younger, they were very hopeful about it. And then
the job opportunities dried up in Canada and my dad ended up following my mom
to a job at the University of Manitoba where it was a rough road for her
because she was the only woman trying to get tenure. And my dad openly, he just
struggled. They gave him ... At one point he shared ... His office was also the
custodial closet so whenever we'd be in there, four or five people would be
coming in and out and he was so grateful to get an office, he said. And what I
learned from my dad, my dad for a while had probably about ... Instead of a
4/4, he had about a 7/8 because he only got paid about $1,500 a class.
Laurie Patton:
Those are not hat measurements,
that's a course load.
Kate Bowler:
Yeah, course load. Yes. And he
wouldn't get a grader and he was the sessional. And so, he ended up teaching
... He was a tutor historian who was teaching history of Asian civilization,
history of murder mysteries, a wonderful ... He'd be so good at like,
"Well, it's not true in the south of France." Hoping no one would ask
a followup question when we had no idea what he was talking about. And-
Laurie Patton:
It's what Robertson Davies, a
Canadian novelist, calls the professorial nod where you just nod as if you
really know what the person is talking about. Yeah.
Kate Bowler:
He fell into a really savage
depression and that was before ... I know the year that Prozac became generic
in the Canadian marketplace because it was the year my dad stopped living in
the basement. And whenever I walked in, he was surrounded by those thin little
blue books and he would just grade hundreds at a time. And when I was about 14,
he moved away to take the only full-time job that had ever been offered to him,
two provinces away. And he hated leaving us but we understood that something in
there was a man trying to save his own life. And that's something about our
work, if it's not recognized for too long, it corrodes something important.
Like something that has to bear up for us to keep doing the purity of the work
we do. And everything's fine and when he came back, he gave up his job after a
couple of years there to come back and teach the unwashed-masses of the
University of Manitoba undergraduate system and he came back thrilled.
Kate Bowler:
He stopped doing tutor history
and started writing histories of Christmas just because he thought it was fun.
And he was the kind of person who would ruin long car rides in July by being
like, "Sweetie, what's your favorite Christmas carol?" And it's like,
"I cannot talk about Good King Wenceslas one more time with you." But
he found a passion. He didn't care anymore about never having had the feeling
of getting somewhere and he decided to do it out of pure joy. And watching him
arrive there was the place where I started into my desire to be an academic.
Because I realized if it has its own fire and that it can burn so brightly,
that you can see the world more clearly. Then as he would say, your brain will
also be a really fun place to be. Anyway, it's kind of why I double down.
Laurie Patton:
So, what's inspiring and a great
place to turn it over to our colleagues here to talk more with you, is the way
in which you are as committed to the public sphere in new ways as you are
committed to academia. And I think that's a balance that so many of us as we
move in the American Academy of Religion to public understanding of religion,
trying to define that, trying to create a space for that, and trying to see how
different people live that.
Kate Bowler:
Yeah, because usually no one's
watching and that's a hard feeling. Yeah.
Laurie Patton:
Or if they are, they're kind of
amused by you at a certain level. But I think you've created a kind of contours
for a really serious path in both spaces. And we'll close with a couple more
comments but with that, let's turn it over. I'm sure there are folks who would
love to engage and ask questions to Kate.
Kate Bowler:
Hello my friends, literally my
friends. How are you?
Laurie Patton:
Thank you. There we go. Thank
you.
Kate Bowler:
And this is my dad's best friend.
I love you.
Laurie Patton:
Thank you. I'm good with silence
but I'm sure [inaudible 00:48:39].
Speaker 3:
So many things running through my
mind.
Laurie Patton:
Oh, there we go.
Speaker 3:
Kate, thank you so much for a
wonderful talk.
Kate Bowler:
Hi.
Speaker 3:
For a tremendous book. I've
shared it with many people.
Kate Bowler:
Oh, thanks.
Speaker 3:
I've shared it with a friend
whose husband was ill and suffering from cancer and really wrestling with many
of the questions and the onslaught of people's theologies cast upon them. And
so, the book was very helpful for her. I did have a question. Something you
raised about gender and being in the public sphere and was writing for the
masses. As soon as you said that, I went back to the cover of your book because
I kind of have it ... There's a picture of it in my mind and it says,
Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I've Loved, Kate Bowler. And it
doesn't say PhD. Was that a decision from your publisher or was that your decision
to try to connect with more people in the public sphere? How did you make that
decision? Because the book looks very inviting. So, I can imagine if it said
PhD-
Kate Bowler:
I can point at my publisher if
it's weird for him.
Speaker 3:
Right. If it said PhD, I have a
feeling that it would have done something different for people.
Kate Bowler:
Yeah, totally. Well, I didn't
write that stuff but that was a question I always asked the women that I was
interviewing for that book because many of them had, for instance, MDivs but
they were never Reverend Amy, they were always just Amy. And so, I do think
part of attempts to move from outside of academia into trade publishing
typically strips, especially women, off ... Because the attempted
accessibility, it gets to our much coveted interested nonspecialist reader.
Speaker 3:
Absolutely.
Kate Bowler:
So yeah, I think part of the way
that all women are marketed is attempting to be a very low entry barrier. She's
friendly, she's nice, she won't use too many adjectives, she's Kate. So that
part wasn't a conscious decision on my part but I think you're absolutely
right. And that was certainly true of the people inside the book too.
Speaker 3:
Thank you.
Kate Bowler:
Hey, it's nice to see you. Hey.
Speaker 4:
Hi. Hi Laurie.
Laurie Patton:
Hi.
Speaker 4:
And thank you Laurie and Kate for
this conversation. Kate, I teach a course at Augustana College, which is a
undergraduate liberal arts school, called Suffering, Death and Endurance, just
got its name changed to Suffering, Death and the Vitality of Hope. And we read
your book last year, the last time I taught the course, and the students really
took to it and were moved by it and helped by it, which leads me to ask a
question about the public and the academic. The trick for me in teaching 18 to
21-year olds have been to find text that they can not slog their way through in
a way that feels like all of our time is spent just understanding but to get
and then be able to do more with. And I was wondering if you think of your
work, your public work, as including undergraduates or younger students. I
think I've benefited of seeing them more like that as I try to relate to them.
They're not academics like we're academics. They're in some ways, closer to the
public so I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Kate Bowler:
And thank you for teaching my
book. That's really kind. Because most of the audience that I've gotten to
know, I call sad NPR. They're smart, they're a little sad. I usually have an
older demographic of listeners and readers typically because we all age into an
awareness of our limitations. But I think the undergraduate audience is such a
beautiful ... They haven't been socialized out of asking big questions. They're
not yet made to feel embarrassed by their universality and it's a wonderful
time just to say like, "Hey, do you think your life is going to work out?
Why? Why not?" I think it's the time of big questions and I just don't
have a lot of direct access to them because I teach in the master's on up.
Yeah. Thank you.
Speaker 4:
Thank you.
Laurie Patton:
We have time probably for two
questions if they're very quick.
Kate Bowler:
I'll get long and lingering in my
responses then.
Speaker 5:
This is quick. And I want to
first of all thank you for your absolute frankness.
Kate Bowler:
Oh, thanks.
Speaker 5:
When I first saw the subtitle,
And Other Lies I Have Loved, I didn't realize how deep my sigh of relief would
be because I would be so readily enraged by everything happens for a reason,
God doesn't give you more than you can handle.
Laurie Patton:
Never. Yeah. It's great like
that.
Speaker 5:
And people meant well and I
wanted to be compassionate and held back saying bullshit and worse things than
that, because they were seeking to comfort usually in the way they could.
Sometimes they were seeking to kind of keep it at a safe distance but my
question is for those who hanging on, and I say this deliberately, hanging on
for dear life to those beliefs because they're facing something, diagnosis or
whatever that's so frightening and possibly terminal, how have you come to
think about that? And the second thing, if there's time, is I'm wondering how
the folks who you know, who are in these Prosperity Gospel movement, have
responded to some of what you've written now in this very frank way.
Kate Bowler:
Yeah.
Laurie Patton:
Kate, I'm going to ask the woman
behind this woman to ask and then you can answer all of the questions as a way
of wrapping up.
Kate Bowler:
Sure, thanks.
Speaker 6:
Hi. My name's [inaudible]. We've not met. Thank you for your book. I have a quick question
about humor because I think when you talk about plucky and in my own similar
experience, you spend a lot of time trying to disarm people through humor. And
I wondered how that plays out in the public person in terms of what you're
talking about, about gender, because I think humor does incredibly powerful
work. So, this is a half thought-out question but it also does very complicated
work in terms of being the right kind of suffering person, so I wondered about
that.
Kate Bowler:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And so,
to that I would say ... Yes. I mean, humor is in part because most people
refuse to engage with the intensity of the topic. It does, I hope, allow for
oddly more frankness in the end. It does sweeten it a bit but then it
hopefully, just gently, punches people in the esophagus. But I do think it's
important always, especially in trying to figure out which hats we get to wear,
when would I also wear an expert hat? And making sure that there's enough
opportunities for me to be just a structured blazer. And we all need a chance
to show off what we know, and that one can't obscure the other.
Kate Bowler:
I think the way that I approach
... I think the question of other people's explanations for their lives is such
a tender one because I am over lessons. I really am. I'm over being a problem
that other people need to solve in realtime in front of me as they try to
figure out why it's me and not them. But I don't want to ever be above meaning.
And so, offering people, especially those who are wanting to hold on to a
reason that something that's happened, giving them enough space to feel like
the particularity of their lives and their pain is also deeply cherished. And
if it's in a religious context, that they're also deeply loved by God. And that
finding beauty in the darkness is not the same thing as shining a flashlight on
it and explaining away why it happened. So, a little of both, I hope.
Laurie Patton:
So Kate, in the spirit of a
little of both, let me just close by thanking you because in addition to your
courage and your humor, and your grace, you've really given us a way of
thinking about walking both paths of public and scholarly, academy and world in
ways that most of us hadn't even thought of. So for that newness and for that
teaching, for all of us today, please join me in thanking Kate Bowler.
Kate Bowler:
Thanks Laurie.