Segall

"I love beautiful cathedrals and sacred architecture, yet I also feel church can be in a living room over tea, sharing how our personal struggles relate to deeper spiritual sources''. 

"I appreciate modern values like individual freedom and the emphasis on democracy, yet it can and has lead to a certain deification of the human ego. The Catholic Church is massive (over a billion people), spanning diverse cultures. There’s real potential there, though there’s also much diversity outside Catholicism, like the Islamic world and various non-theistic paths. I see Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy as an attempt to preserve communal bonds in a divine body while also allowing for many forms of spiritual communion. When it comes to politics, I think the founders of the United States were wise to separate church and state so we could have a diverse society. But then we end up with capitalism as our moral compass, which is problematic, obviously. Catholic social teaching is vital source of resistance and provides a viable alternative for addressing that. Pope Francis—particularly in Laudato Si’—has done a lot to extend that social teaching into ecology. There’s the notorious “dominion clause” in Genesis, where humans are told to have dominion over creation, and Francis helps us see it really means stewardship, not exploitation''.

"The evolution of media and technology is central to the question of how we relate to this moment in history, whether it calls for a retreat via traditionalism or a forward movement into metamodernism (or some entirely non-modern future). Marshall McLuhan, a Catholic, was very insightful. Think of how the printing press challenged the Catholic Church’s power, enabling the Protestant Reformation. Radio and television likewise reshaped politics, as with Hitler’s use of radio during the rise of Nazism in Germany, or the antiwar movement in the 60s being inspired by images beamed back from Vietnam. Then there’s the Internet and social media, which continues to disrupt politics and culture in ways we are only barely beginning to catch up with. Even the Bible itself relied on the invention of the alphabet, and each leap—from alphabet, to printing press, to telegraph, to radio, TV, and the Internet—shapes and reshapes consciousness. McLuhan, Steiner, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin...all saw technological evolution as a kind of gradual incarnation of the Logos, transforming the physical world into a medium for spirit. It gets esoteric, but the Garden of Eden story and the serpent can be read as an analogy for the role of technology in human life...It’s part of the sacred history we’re in, though we must resist letting it distract us from our sacred task''.

MS