In Conversation with David Goa

Last November I was invited to animate a Round Table conversation in the Faculty of Divinity at Necmeddin Erbakan University in Konya, Turkey. Konya was the home of the great Sufi mystic Rumi and the Faculty of Divinity has a large professoriate and well over 2000 students, mostly women. In my Round Table remarks I discussed American Evangelical Christianity including its current role in America culture. 

Several of my remarks resonated with Tahir Uluc, Professor of Islamic Philosophy, and the author of a number of books largely on the Sufi tradition of Islam in Turkey. We met following the Round Table and discussed the gifts and challenges facing Turkey and our larger world. Professor Uluc is a keen observer of Turkey, a fine professor who has a deep interest in his students and in education in Turkey.

Some context is important to understand what continues to unfold in Turkey and Professor Uluc’s concerns. When the Ottoman Empire ended following the First World War Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founded the Republic of Turkey and becoming its first President in 1923. His political party led the modernization of Turkey and ushered in a secular state that modeled itself after elements in France following its Revolution in 1789. Religion was removed from its central place in Turkish culture, many religious leaders were executed, some banished, and others went underground. Fine contributions were mixed with virulent ones, as is so often the case with sweeping social change.

With the election of Recep Tayyip Erdogan as Prime Minister along with his Justice and Development Party in 2003 another set of remarkable changes were ushered in. I have visited Turkey a number of times in the last decade and appreciated many of these changes. I have also been a critic of how the Western press characterizes the changes coming about in Turkey. The fears expressed show little appreciation for this remarkable country and no understanding for its distinct form of Islam and its potential role in the modern world. I welcome your thoughts on our conversation and may be reached at www.davidgoa.ca/contact.

Several yeas ago I met the iconographer Symeon van Donkelaar. He had been traveling across Canada collecting samples of the earth from each region. It was part of a large project conceived in light of the United Nations declaration of 2008 as the International Year of Planet Earth. The exhibition that flowed from this work took each sample with its particular minerals and metals and, as artists have done since time immemorial, called forth their particular and unique colours and beauty. 
In July, Symeon was invited by the Virgin Mary Anglican Church in Regina, Saskatchewan, to do a workshop on the writing of icons. We met in the church and discussed his “earth works”, his deep engagement of place and the spiritual meaning of the use of local colour born of the depth of the earth in his writing of icons. Symeon apprenticed with Fr. Nathaniel in a monastery in the United States and, over the last few years, has developed the Conestoga Iconographic Studio in Ontario.
I welcome your thoughts on the various themes in this podcast and encourage you to visit davidgoa.ca and the website of the Conestoga Iconographic Studio at https://www.conestogaicons.com/. I welcome your thoughts on our conversation and may be reached at www.davidgoa.ca/contact.
18 July 2019

In November of 2018 I was invited to speak at the Second International Congress on Spiritual and Religious Care for those incarcerated in prisons. The Congress was sponsored by the Centre for Values at the University in Istanbul. My Turkish hosts asked me to speak about my approach to teaching in Canadian prisons, a matter I have written about in “The School of Joseph: Prison Meditations” which you can read on my website. Over an evening meal in a lovely Turkish restaurant close to the Marble Sea I sat across from Amjad Hussain, young, affable, and full of interest. We had a wide-ranging conversation with many surprises in it. At one point, embarrassed at only knowing a few words in Arabic and Turkish, I spoke one of the few phrases I know in Norwegian, my parents language: “kan du snukke norsk” (“Can you speak Norwegian.”) To my delightful surprise out poured the most beautify natural Norwegian I had heard in years. He was born in Askim, Norway, south of Oslo near the Swedish boarder and speaks the mother tongue I never learned. He grew up in this town of 15,000 people in the homeland of my parents. He is also fluent in his parent’s mother tongues, Urdu, Punjabi, as well as being an Arabic and Turkish speaker.

Dr. Amjad M. Hussain is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Divinity at Marmara University, Istanbul, Turkey. Previous to this post he was a Lecturer in Religious Studies at several universities in Wales. His many publications include the books, A Social History of Education in the Muslim World: From the Prophetic Era to Ottoman Times (2013), The Study of Religions: An Introduction (2015), The Muslim Creed: A Contemporary Theological Study (2016) and Islam for New Muslims: An Educational Guide (2018). He has also written a number of chapters for books and published numerous journal articles in the United Kingdom, United States, Malaysia, and Turkey. I welcome you to our conversation on Norway, Islam, and issues of religion and public life. I welcome your thoughts on our conversation and may be reached at www.davidgoa.ca/contact.

Welcome to In Conversation. In this conversation I have the pleasure of talking with Professor Cyril Hovorun a research fellow at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and at the Stockholm School of Theology. He is author of a number of substantial books on public and political theology including the recently published Political Orthodoxies: The Unorthodoxies of the Church Coerced.

I welcome you to our conversation on church and state and the challenges to the Orthodox churches posed by nationalism, fundamentalism and anti-Semitism in the post-Soviet period. I welcome your thoughts on ourconversation and may be reached at [email protected].
In February 2014 in the central square in Kiev, the Maidan, we witnessed the Ukrainian Revolution. It was a rare occasion in the history of an Orthodox country. Priests and monks came out to support the people as they challenged political authorities. Professor Cyril Hovorun, a political insider, spoke out eloquently on this occasion. His analysis of the relationship between ecclesiastical leaders and political leaders, between church, state and society drew on his scholarship from Constantine through the Patristic period to the contemporary world. Fr. Cyril is a Patristic scholar and keen observer of how the culture wars in Eastern and Southern Europe turn into bloody conflicts. He focuses on the theological underpinnings of these wars that emerged with the fall of communism and the spiritual renewal of Orthodoxy. In Russia, Ukraine and other countries of Eastern Europe the Orthodox Church became an influential political protagonist. All to often religion is being politicized and weaponized, used in service to narrow nationalism and anti-Semitism. His work calls for a rethinking of the Orthodox doctrine of the Symphonia, the harmony between Emperor and Hierarch, State and Church. His analysis is singular in helping us understand the troubling movements unfolding in many Orthodox countries. His guidance is sorely needed for the church to find its better angels.
Professor Hovorun is a research fellow at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and at the Stockholm School of Theology. He is author of a number of substantial books on public and political theology including the recently published Political Orthodoxies: The Unorthodoxies of the Church Coerced. I welcome you to our conversation on church and state. I welcome your thoughts on our conversation and may be reached at www.davidgoa.ca/contact.

In this podcast I have the pleasure of talking with Professor Molly Worthan. She teaches history at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill focusing on the intellectual and religious history of North America. She is also the Director of the Honors Program, an opinion
writer for the New York Times, Slate and other publication. Her superb book, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism explores the intellectual history of American evangelicals and the culture wars since 1945. 

A decade and a half ago I received an enquiry for an undergraduate student at Yale University. She was learning Russia and wanted to come to northern Alberta to spend the summer doing field research work in the Old Believer community near Athabasca. I first met this community in the 1970s shortly after they arrived. A bit later I spent sometime with my colleague the anthropologist David Scheffle who also did field research and published a book on the Old Believers. This community had its origins in Siberia to which their ancestors had been exiled following the reforms introduced to the Russian Orthodox Church by Patriarch Nikon in 1666. Some made their way into a remote region of China, live a reclusive life, and occasionally hunted Siberian tigers for European zoos. In order to avoid the reach of the communist government of China in the 1960s they moved again and eventually settled in Canada. It was not the sort of community I would readily suggest a young woman (or man for that matter) endeavour to engage. 

I called the phone number on the correspondence and met Molly Worthen.
She spoke easily about herself and her interests, mentioned growing up in
Chicago, the city that entered my blood when I studied there in the 1960s. It was clear to me that she had the intellectual curiosity and formation, a spirit of hospitality and simple good judgment and determination suitable to her proposed work. Over the summer we got to know each other and her work in the Old Believer community flourished. That summer played a little role in Molly focusing her work on North American religious and intellectual history, particularly the ideas and culture of conservative Christianity. She is a professor of History at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Director of the Honors Program, an opinion writer for the New York Times, Slate and other publication. Her superb book, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism explores the intellectual history of American evangelicals and the culture wars since 1945.

I welcome you to our conversation on President Trump, the evangelicals and what is unfolding in America political culture. I welcome your thoughts on our conversation and may be reached at www.davidgoa.ca/contact.