1. When did you first become interested in journalism?
As a kid I dreamed of becoming a novelist. (I still do sometimes.) At some point I learned that novelists didn’t make any money. I would need a fallback plan to pay rent. So I decided to become a journalist. This also turned out to be a poor financial decision.
My first published newspaper article was about a friend of mine who modified his VW Jetta to run on used French fry oil.
2. You grew up in Burkina Faso, the son of missionary parents. What do you think of the term “third-culture kid”? To what degree does it apply to you?
When I was a teenager I wrote an article for my parents’ denominational magazine in which I railed against being classified as a “third-culture kid.” I can’t remember my argument now. I think I mostly didn’t like being labeled. Now, some decades later, I still have trouble with the term. Perhaps my critique is similar to that of the word “expat.” (Why do mostly White people get called expats and not, say, Nigerians living in Canada?) It seems to me that the term “third-culture kid” focuses on a narrow range of experiences, excluding a whole world of multicultural childhoods. Why do we deserve a special designation?
3. What inspired you to write a book about faith and climate change?
Because those were the two things keeping me up at night. Two topics I kept returning to as a magazine writer were climate justice work and religion. I started to see the many ways they intersected. I became curious about how religion was influencing climate change and how climate change was influencing religion. In other words, how was our growing awareness of our power to disrupt the life systems of the planet influencing our belief systems? And how were different belief systems engendering different responses: denial, grief, compassion, activism, solidarity?
4. Which chapter in The Temple at the End of the Universe was most difficult for you to write?
The second-to-last chapter, the one about my mystical experience in the desert in Arizona, was both the easiest and hardest to write. I knew it would be the culmination of the spiritual quest I’d been on, but I had no idea how hard it would be to face my own existential demons. I still feel the reverberations of that experience in my day-to-day life.
5. You begin the book by saying “this book is for those who are lost” and end, in my reading of it anyway, with some sense of finding yourself again. If I’m right about this, since the book was published, do you still feel this way?
While writing the book I experienced anger, grief, solace, and a deeply felt emotional awareness of the collective work being done to transform human consciousness and reorient our political and economic systems away from destruction and towards the flourishing of all life. Writing the book helped me find ways to reconcile my spiritual and scientific understandings of the universe. I no longer see Divine Mystery as something or someone who holds the power to set everything right (otherwise why would we see children dying in Gaza?), but as an accumulation of all the love and kindness and creativity and compassion that is at work in the world. Why has life managed to prevail through the multiple mass extinction events evidenced in our geological history? I feel like I’ve continued exploring that path since I finished the book.
I’ve since come to an even stronger conviction of the necessity of spiritually grounded collective work to transform our political and economic systems. The problem is not individual human nature, but the systems we’ve allowed to dominate, systems that prioritize the health of capital over the health of human and ecological wellbeing. These systems can be overturned. Human and non-human life can flourish together.