In Conversation with David Goa

Our conversation begins with a brief reflection on Augustine, Aquinas and Luther with Augustine highlighted as the one who opens the gate in a post-Christian world.Ryan Topping’s early formation was within a Mennonite community he continues to treasure in his heart. A period of time followed in and shaping an intentional community with a common purse and common work and with the good fortune of studying with several professors, Orthodox, Catholic and Anabaptists, for whom the “great tradition was alive and shedding light on the spirit of our age.” During his doctoral studies at Oxford University, he and his wife sought the fulness of the Christian tradition and explored Orthodox and Roman Catholic soil, roots and spiritual and theological pathways. Our conversation touches on Nietzsche, Habermas, Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali and others along with his professor and mentor Aidan Nichols of Blackfriars, Oxford, who led him reluctantly at first and then joyously into the Roman Catholic Church. Our conversation concludes speaking about the new shape education of priests and laity alike is taking at Newman Theological College.

As a child Lorraine sat on her uncle’s knee watching the television series MASH and eating vanilla ice cream flavored with creme de menthe. Her parents, one Scottish Presbyterian and one Irish Catholic, regularly invited their respected clergy over for dinner and hospitable conversation across religious lines. Not surprising she grew up with an interest in the depth of the Christian spiritual tradition. She studying philosophy and ethics at Dominica College University in Ottawa. It was here that the depth of Christian thinking about the spiritual life was opened to her. Building on her initial intellectual formation she went on to do her Master and Doctorate degrees with a research program on trauma and healing, on “moral injury”, the undoing of one’s sense of character, on guilt and forgiveness., on being both a victim and victimizer.  Since the common psychiatric models have been largely ineffective with returning soldiers she has worked at finding the healing waters that spring from the continuous work on the spiritual life at the heart of Christian understanding.     

Steve grew up on the Westside of Chicago. He received a football scholarship to Notre Dame and has a stellar journalistic record. A small intimate storefront church was central to his formation and, in more recent years, he has engaged the gifts of the Orthodox Church that, of course, has deep roots in African and the Levant long before it migrated to Europe. Our conversation begins with his family of blessed memory in Memphis, Tennessee, and their migration to Chicago. Grandparents, aunts, and uncles were all laid to rest in a small town cemetery, a pilgrimage site for Steve. They are his most intimate saints and martyrs.  
We recorded our conversation in the late fall of 2019 prior to the crisis shaking both our countries. In listening to it to prepare this podcast I was struck at how it has enlarged what I hear in the voices of Steve’s brothers and sisters (and mine) and of our First Peoples in Canada. Moving through the prism of slavery and freed of the luxury of hatred, the last bonds that hold all victims, it speaks to the salvation offered to those of us who are privileged. Are we ready to receive it, ready to step out of the prison of privilege, the precincts we are blind to?     
Welcome to our conversation. 

Central to Professor Ferrin’s perspective is how he understands Islamic civilization (to be distinguished form Islamic Empire) and the recent development of Islamism. Put another way: how has it come about that “religionism” and a curious kind of nationalism have come to be wedded in the mind and heart of some forming a new identity claiming to be that of a “pure Islam”? In the Quran it says that when there is no more trade and no more friendship the world ends. Ferrin’s deep study of the living tradition of Islam sees its central gift as brotherhood across societies, languages, cultures, and even religious commitments. Islamism, to the contrary, is a bricolge, made up of desperate elements creating an ideology of religious substitution adopted by those who see themselves and their society as impotent in the face of colonial and modernizing forces. This is the root of its apocalyptic and puritanical view creating silos of identity anchored in nostalgia for a past that never existed. One is faithful to the extent one becomes a warrior of the last day. My sense is that this should not surprise Christians and secularists since we have similar reductionist movements in our world. 

David combines, as few do, superb legal analysis with equally superb theological thinking. When Karl Bath, who stands alongside the Apostle Paul, Maximus the Confessor, Aquinas, and Calvin, came to America in 1962 he met William Stringfellow. Stingfellow was a lawyer like Calvin and David. Barth said Stringfellow was the finest theological mind in America. If the great theologian were to come today and was fortunate enough to meet David he would laud him as well. 
My own thinking is always enlarged by the conversations we have had over the years moving in areas I have only occasionally considered. What is the purpose of law, not just how it functions technically as a profession but the why of law? Why is justice important? Similarly what gift does business bring to our common life? What is the inner dynamic of the businessperson, the way one must engage in a full range of considerations to accomplish stated purposes and live or die based on one’s judgment, decisions, and relationships? Does the Conservative tradition still exist within our political parties? And, is capitalism, as some have recently argued, at the end of its tether? While it may be a stretch for some, certainly not for David, how does the Christian understanding of the Incarnation and the Trinity shift thinking on these practical questions and move them beyond the usual theological reduction imposed by ideology on both the right and left. Finally, there is the question of stewardship and philanthropy. What has motivated David and others to devote half their time and all their skill and energy to seeing that artists and others with cultural vision may flourish?
Welcome to our conversation. 

I grew up listening to conversation on Christian Zionism. This idea developed after the Reformation, received clear articulation in seventieth century England, flourished in the 1840s and has continued down to our own day anchoring much of the support for the policy of the Israeli government among North American evangelicals and others. Christian Zionists believe that the gathering of Jews in Israel is a requirement for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ and the unfolding of the end of history. In my home province of Alberta several forms of this teaching flourished. In the 1930s both the Premier of Alberta from 1935 - 1943, “Bible” Bill Aberhart, and L.E. Maxwell, founder of Prairie Bible Institute in Three Hills Alberta spread this teaching through their radio ministries and Bible teaching. It took root and continues to inform a relationship to Israel, a peculiar understanding of the Jewish people of whom Jesus Christ was a part, and is used as an effective political tool garnering support for a whole range of issues. Historians have argued that it also migrated into Jewish, largely secular Jewish circles, and seeded forms of Zionism that are foundational to the Israeli state. One of the foremost Jewish scholars of this matter is Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro. He forcefully argues that Zionism has moved Jewish identity away from the Covenant and Commandments, which called the Jewish people, as the scriptures tell us, “to be a holy people and a nation of priests”. Zionism has grabbed the limelight and confused the question of what it means to be a Jew. Is Jewishness an ethnicity, a tribal identity, a national identity of one nation among others? Or, is it, “to be a holy people and a nation of priests”? Rabbi Shapiro is Emeritus Rabbi, Bais Medrash of Bayswater, Queens, New York. After graduating high school at age 16 he entered a traditional Orthodox program of education and intellectual formation.

David Brooks, one of America’s fine public intellectuals in his recent book The Second Mountain, quotes C.S. Lewis. I remember reading Lewis’ comment years ago and was delighted to have it brought to mind. “The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken.”

In preparing this conversation with Ray Sawatsky I heard the echo of Lewis’ words. Ray is CEO and Executive Director of the international NGO Global Aid Network (GAIN). They partner with local governments and churches in various places around the world drilling wells where water is increasingly scarce.

Our conversation turned and returned to the three transcendental, the good, the true, and the beautiful. We explore the gifts and challenges he was bequeathed through his early formation in the Brethren Gospel Halls, an evangelical and fundamentalist portion of the protestant church with an impact far above its weight. The gifts of the Brethren Church carried a shadow that Ray has struggled with and found his way through.  His insight into the brokenness that so often frames human experience, his surprised discovery of the love and compassion of God, and his growing recognition that the two commandments in the Gospel, to love God above all and ones neighbour as ones self has transformed his understanding of charity into a call for “faithful presence” to those we are blessed to come to know.

Some years ago I hosted Norton in Edmonton for several lectures on the demanding geo-political issues that so often frame our understanding of Israel/Palestine. We also traveled and lectured in Syria and Turkey and engaged colleagues in the Muslim community.

Norton is a considerable critic of Israeli political policy toward the Palestinians. This has often garnered the ire of supporters of the Government of Israel and the favour of supporters of Palestinians. I have also watched as he carefully and forcefully responded to his audiences and taught them to distinguish between political criticism and the kind of anti-Semitism such critique can mask.

In our conversation we explore his childhood formation in a loving Orthodox Jewish family in Ames, Iowa, his study with a teacher of Hebrew and Bible several days a week in Des Moine beginning when he was five and continuing through his eighteenth birthday. His reading of Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of the Reconstructionist movement, and author of the seminal book, Jewish Civilization was the beginning for his thinking about the implications Zionism and his thinking developed through his friendship and work with Rabbi Elmer Berger of the American Council for Judaism.

Norton’s father came to Ames, Iowa, from Ukraine in 1912 aspirating to live as an Orthodox Jew among non-Jews. As Norton took me back thought his life to his childhood it was his father’s vision that I began to see as the affective kernel unfolding through his life and work. I welcome you to our conversation.

In June I sat down with Bradley Jersak at his home in Abbottsford BritishColumbia. He is a teacher and preacher who’s formation was in the evangelical church, Baptist and Mennonite with a little of the charismatic movement along the way.
He also studied at Briercrest College and Seminary in Saskatchewan, Trinity Western University in Langley and, most recently, received his Ph.D in theology from Bangor University in Wales.
We have known each other for a number of years having met at All Saints of North America Monastery outside of Mission British Columbia when he was taking his initial steps exploring Patristic theology and growing into the Orthodox Church.
Our conversation ranges from his early formation and the gifts of the evangelical church that have shaped him: a love of the scriptures and the life of prayer and his early personal relationship with Jesus Christ. We talk about his Pauline like ministry that, largely, continues with evangelical seekers and his deepening understanding of the ancient church’s teaching about the spiritual life, about the love and mercy of God vividly present in the Christ of the Gospels.
For a number of years he pastored Fresh Wind Christian Fellowship, a church in service to people with disabilities, children, “prodigals”, and the poor. I admired this work from first hearing about it. Bradley, or Irenaeus as I call him, is an author and teacher and is a Reader and the monastery preacher at All Saints of North America Orthodox Monastery. He teaches Patristics and New Testament at Westminster Theological Centre in the United Kingdom and at Saint Stephen’s University in New Brunswick.

You can visit Brad's website at https://bradjersak.com I welcome your thoughts on our conversation and may be reached at www.davidgoa.ca/contact.

My friend Greg Pennoyer who sits on the board of Prison Fellowship International (PFI) introduced me to Andrew Corley who became the President and CEO of PFI a year ago. I welcomed the opportunity to meet for several reasons. First, is the work in prisons through the Ephesus project colleagues and I have engaged over the last few years. Second, is Andy’s formation and service through the Salvation Army, an evangelical church that befriended my mother in Norway when she was a small child.  Evangelicals have long been leaders in prison ministry around the world. Charles Colson, chief counsel for President Richard Nixon, founded Prison Fellowship following his guilty plea in the midst of the Watergate inquiry and his incarceration at the Maxwell Federal Prison Camp in Alabama for seven months. There are now national Prison Fellowships in 119 countries spanning various cultures and religious communities and Prison Fellowship International works with all of them assisting in ways to enlarge their good work. 

Andrew developed his strategic thinking and leadership skills in management as director of global construction companies. I welcome you to our conversation moving from his way of shaping business and questions of purpose, on what it means to be “salt and light” in the market place, and, on how working in prisons is transformative for those who enter behind the walls of separation. I welcome your thoughts on our conversation and may be reached at www.davidgoa.ca/contact.