The Walt Sessions

May 19, 1996

Back after a couple of months off, Walt and George start with an essay Walt read on how efficiency fractures our lives. He agrees with it, but says critics like this never put themselves into it: “Unless you want to lower your standard of living, don’t pop this shit to me.” That leads into how the sacred has shifted over history, from nature, to nationalism, to today’s sacred of consumption, progress, and efficiency. That last one improves our lives materially, but “all of it fractures us qualitatively.”

From there they turn to Project Neighbors. Walt worries that Hilltop Neighborhood House, as badly needed as it is, will institutionalize the families it serves (“We’re hurting kids as we’re helping”). He lays out an idea for a small community loan fund, run by the people who would borrow from it, so that poor families aren’t forced to lie, cheat, steal, or lose their jobs to get by. George then raises something Pat has been feeling about living between two cities: Chicago, where her work is, and Valparaiso, where almost no one sees the city’s problems as their own. Walt answers that Valpo has its own kind of poverty (“the saddest form of poverty is the search for wealth”), and he imagines twinning the two, with parts of Valpo paired with Cabrini Green or Cook County Hospital so each could learn from the other. 

The conversation ends on education. Walt proposes “a Saturday school, not a Sunday school,” a couple of hours a week, open to all ages, to help kids put the rest of their school week in perspective. George wants teachers who teach kids how to think, and Walt, looking back on his own years of teaching, concludes that his real teachers were the students around him:

“Every scenario I’ve been in, I was with young people who took risks.”

March 17, 1996

The conversation picks up with Walt on law and gospel, which he translates as "compassion and firmness, or yes and no." We are called to both, he says, but there's no rule for when to be which. That is where "fear and trembling" (from Paul's letter to the Philippians) comes in. From there he argues that the intellect has been left out of modern life, and that without hard thinking "you're just a Republican or a Democrat." His conclusion is that "a free person wants critique. That's unheard of today." Walt also takes up justice that yields to love, and the popular versions of freedom he rejects, from "Pepsi free" to the army's "be all you can be."

George then asks where Walt's idea of freedom came from. Walt traces it to always being caught between two extremes: friendly fundamentalists proselytizing him aboard ship on one side, his closest friend, who was Jewish, on the other; empty chapel services before combat; and a communion rule that kept him from the sacrament. He recalls his 1960s heresy trial and Oliver Harms, then president of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, who was too afraid of the John Birch Society to help a parishioner's daughter marry a seminarian from a different synod. Walt explains his sense that the world was "spinning on a leftist axis," which led him to seek out the left in Chicago, including members of the Chicago Seven (tried for the protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention).

Walt says he rebuilt the Black Panther headquarters twice after police firebombings, and he recalls arguing with Bobby Rush (a Panther leader, later a congressman) and others about the free breakfast program and medical clinics: "these are fantastic programs, but you're making them political absolutes. You're going to regret it." Other stories follow. A young woman in Japan, during his time in the service, asked whether she would be as good as a British or American person in heaven. A conservative pastor advised him to "leave a little room in your life." And Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, whose son had been in Walt's seminar, pulled him into his office for an afternoon to tell him, "You were right. It's an illusion." George describes his own disillusionment with a political campaign, and they agree the point is to be in the world but not of it.

The last stretch moves to the Hilltop renovation: asbestos, cement, and Walt's agonizing over a small bathroom ceiling ("I get scared of making these decisions"). George talks about defending a young man facing eight years in prison, and Walt says he detests the rule that professionals shouldn't get involved with their clients. On his way out, Walt returns to George's question with the story of his two older brothers, one a teenage drinker and the other, Ernie, who "couldn't be more perfect." After Walt leaves, George adds a closing note: "for seven years he had a great father, and then for ten years he had none."

March 10, 1996

Walt opens this session by handing George an article by a well-known scientist (Rustum Roy, a Penn State materials scientist who wrote about technology and about French philosopher Jacques Ellul), and the two use it as a way into the morning's news. A Chicago Tribune story on shipyard workers in Gdańsk who say life was better under communism strikes Walt as one more comparison of ideologies. An article on Hamas recruiting suicide bombers is, for him, "an extreme form of the sacred" that is really an ideology. With communism gone, they note, the 1996 campaign has had to invent new devils. Walt then draws his key distinction: "The sacred is a given, you don't even raise a question." Today that given is progress and technology, and no one in the news ever questions it.

From there the conversation turns to why the churches, which know Ellul's biblical writing but not his critique of technology, play no role in questioning where society is headed. Walt praises Madeleine Garrigou-Lagrange's book of interviews with Ellul, In Season, Out of Season, and talks about what an art it is to be an interviewer. He argues that liberal arts and theology have been swallowed by technique ("The English department is now the communications department"). George pushes back that sometimes you have to be inside something to understand it, pointing to Pat's work on the health system, and Walt answers that "the rewards of not questioning are great." They touch on a downsized government that only grows more powerful, Adlai Stevenson and the 1950s faith that science would solve every problem, and the era of backyard bomb shelters.

The last stretch is about young people and meaning: nihilistic rock lyrics, and city schoolchildren who have all witnessed violence. George wonders how far "one step at a time, one relationship at a time" can really reach. Walt reflects on the luxury of having spent forty years on that question rather than at a job where thinking isn't allowed. The episode closes with Walt's notes on a Project Neighbors brochure written by Pat (George's wife and Walt's oldest daughter). He wants a paragraph on Hilltop added, and he's clear about what it should never become: "I know what I don't want. A fundraising paper. I can't stand them."

March 10th, 1996

Episode description coming soon.

March 3rd, 1996

In this sweeping and reflective conversation, Walt revisits the arc of his personal and political evolution—from WWII soldier to community organizer to radical educator—grounded in experience rather than ideology. He opens by expressing gratitude for the young people who took risks to work alongside him over the years and begins tracing the shifts in his thinking, marked by a journey through socialism, communism, and organized religion.

Much of the episode centers on Walt’s intense and self-funded efforts in Germany during the 1980s to introduce the writings of French theologian Jacques Ellul—whom Walt calls one of the great but ignored thinkers—to German students and institutions. He recounts teaching in German, paying to translate an entire book, and ultimately winning credibility through a powerful candlelight speech at a major student rally in Germany. “Think globally, act globally” becomes a theme, rooted in these direct experiences.

Walt also reflects on the origins of Project Neighbors and the Prince of Peace Volunteers, rooted in local risk-taking by youth, not institutional support. He critiques leftist movements for being overly fixated on economic definitions of poverty, arguing instead for a broader understanding of what it means to be uprooted and dehumanized. Marx, Mao, the Black Panthers, and organized religion all fall short in different ways—yet faith, especially if truly lived out from the bottom up, remains for Walt the only enduring source of revolutionary strength.

The episode closes with a discussion about two new homes being supported by Project Neighbors and the informal, decentralized networks making them possible. Walt argues this “un-American” way—of people giving without strings—is closer to real change than anything he has experienced. But he also wonders aloud how to honor and deepen it without institutionalizing it: “Something is being born here.”

February 25th, 1996

A sprawling conversation, from personal philosophies, to current thoughts on work with Project Neighbors, to more on Walt’s history. Starting from a conversation on family values to the individual, and the destruction of the individual. Walt touches themes such as what it means to be a “true revolutionary” and moving against the state and “high tech,” before getting into more tangible work with Project Neighbors and how to build relationships, support one another, and moving away from “charity.” On talking about some of the families they have worked with in Valparaiso, and getting closer towards how Walt sees the world, he says: “I hate to use the word ‘make it.’ First of all, they won’t ‘make it’ in terms of the world. And secondly, I don’t want them to ‘make it’ in terms of the world. I want them to live and not just survive.” 

From there, Walt and George dive into Walt’s history a bit during the Urban Studies program from 1968-1982. Walt talks about preparing to apply to go to Germany as an “out” financially, and spends years working on his German, spending summers working in Germany, and even working towards a PhD in Germany to apply to the Reutlingen program at Valparaiso University. Walt tries to move on, talking about how big Chicago/Cabrini Green were, and how Valparaiso was more manageable, but George brings him back to those 15 or so years during Urban Studies, where they talk about what fatherhood was like for Walt during that time – splitting himself, and his family – between Chicago and Valparaiso. 

Walt ends reflecting on that time: 

"After war and poverty, the other thing that has most affected my life – I'm leaving Lois out; she transcends it all – has been the fact that the students I've been with, have all been special students. Almost every single Urban Studies student in 20 years had to fight their faculty advisor, fight their parents. 'Why don't you go to Florence? Why don't you go to Cambridge?' ...'I don't want you to go to Chicago.' They had to want to come to the city....They were special students. They made some risky choices."

January 14th, 1996

This week, Walt and George spend their time talking about the operations of Project Neighbors, the nonprofit they run in Valparaiso, Indiana. They also discuss themes of leadership and the importance of building relationships and community. 

December 10th, 1995

Walt talks more about his personal history, from Christmases as a boy during the depression and waiting for “the” gift he knew was coming each year… to being marooned for weeks on an island in the Philippines during WWII where he and several others were taken in by local families and a person whose name Walt has never forgotten: “Domingo Valado.” George and Walt end this journey into Walt’s past by making the connection to a central theme that appears throughout: “choice”... “choices are what it means to be human, that’s what it’s all about.” And today we live in a world where we think we have more choices on the one hand, but in reality, the choice between a million different computer companies is not really a choice at all. In reality, we live in a world with far less real choice, and consequently less humanity?

November 19th, 1995

George starts their conversation by talking about his brothers’ partners’ death from AIDS and about having some control over his own death, not letting the medical establishment intervene when there was nothing that could be done. Walt talked about the importance of being able to suffer with those that suffer. He also talked about the joy he finds in reconciliation when there shouldn’t seem to be reconciliation possible. He relates this to being in World War II, a condition that he believes no one truly understands. He talked about what being in war meant for him and how it is the root of what has caused him to call out the bullshit whenever he sees it. He said that war was the start of “de-sacralizing” everything for him (the constraints of religion, America the Beautiful). While still calling out all the bullshit , God still remained a focus for him. The war led him to non-violence and believing in relationships with people. 

November 5th, 1995

Walt and George open their conversation talking about “where do I belong?, “who am I?” Walt talks about that biblical directive that we don’t belong to anyone – the quest of discovery of connections is the point. As opposed to any other religion or ideology, Christianity (especially organized religion) does exactly the opposite of what we are called to do. Walt recounts listening to “religious” channels to hear what people are saying and about attending his church; it is all about “belonging” but nothing about the quest. And often “belonging” is equated with giving money. Institutions are not the gospel; they are necessary but that’s all. There are two segments of organizational Christianity that are not freedom – the focus on origin or the focus on end times. The Christian Right is focused on both. Both are about rules, not freedom. To walk away from bull in the world is not the way to demythologize it. How to confront it is the constant struggle. Thought must be connected to action and that has to work the other way as well. 

Walt talks about how he is always trying to figure out how to have real conversations even when they are uncomfortable, without harming relationships.