TOKENS PODCAST: S1E0
Host Lee C. Camp divulges a professional lie.
And a new podcast is born.
Host Lee C. Camp divulges a professional lie: that he is, perhaps, not really an ethicist. And, that trying to be an ethicist is much less helpful to the public good than, perhaps, being a theologian. And, that he suspects that secularist critics of public theology are quite right, in some important ways. And, thus, a new podcast is born.
ABOUT TOKENS & LEE C. CAMP
Tokens began in 2008. Our philosophical and theological variety shows and events hosted throughout the Nashville area imagine a world governed by hospitality, graciousness and joy; life marked by beauty, wonder and truthfulness; and social conditions ordered by justice, mercy and peace-making. We exhibit tokens of such a world in music-making, song-singing, and conversations about things that matter. We have fun, and we make fun: of religion, politics, and marketing. And ourselves. You might think of us as something like musicians without borders; or as poets, philosophers, theologians and humorists transgressing borders.
Lee is an Alabamian by birth, a Tennessean by choice, and has sojourned joyfully in Indiana, Texas, and Nairobi. He likes to think of himself as a radical conservative, or an orthodox liberal; loves teaching college and seminary students at Lipscomb University; delights in flying sailplanes; finds dark chocolate covered almonds with turbinado sea salt to be one of the finest confections of the human species; and gives great thanks for his lovely wife Laura, his three sons, and an abundance of family and friends, here in Music City and beyond. Besides teaching full-time, he hosts Nashville’s Tokens Show, and has authored three books. Lee has an Undergrad Degree in computer science (Lipscomb University,1989); M.A. in theology and M.Div. (Abilene Christian University, 1993); M.A. and Ph.D. both in Christian Ethics (University of Notre Dame,1999)
JOIN TOKENS ON SOCIALS:
YOUTUBE
FACEBOOK
INSTAGRAM
JOIN LEE C. CAMP ON SOCIALS:
FACEBOOK
INSTAGRAM
LEE C. CAMP WEBSITE
TRANSCRIPT
My name is Lee C. Camp. I am a college professor, who teaches courses in ethics. But there is a problem with that last statement, viz., that it is not altogether honest. It is, really, more like a lie. And of course it is hard to overlook the irony in someone saying “I am an ethics professor” and then acknowledge that that is something like a lie.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
One of the reasons that I will sometimes introduce myself as an ethicist is because of people’s reaction to the other alternative, which goes something like this: I sit down on an airplane, trying to avoid eye contact. If we make eye contact, we will likely say hello. And if we say hello, then the odds of a conversation go way up. Now I enjoy conversation. I’m a southerner, after all, so usually I enjoy conversation a great deal. Just not on airplanes. I want to be left alone on airplanes.
But imagine a scenario in which the other person catches my eye. We say hello. Then the follow-up questions start, until the inevitable question arises: so what do you do for a living? I say “I’m a college professor.” There is a note of respect, “oh wow, cool, what a great job.” There’s this note of admiration that stokes my vanity. Those who know a bit about academic life might follow-up: “And where did you do your PhD?” And I’ll tell them Notre Dame. More “oh what a great school,” and then the inexorable follow-up: “and what do you teach?”
Then I say “I teach theology.” Their countenance falls, along with their voice. “Oh. That’s interesting.”
But at least it allows me to be left alone on the flight.
There once was a time in which theology was considered the “queen of the sciences.” To do theology was to engage in a public discipline. Religion was not thought to be a privatized matter of private spirituality. It was seen as something that should facilitate a helpful ordering of our lives in all its realms and facets. Theology, in such a world, carried a sort of public heft to it.
Some unfriendly critic might respond, “Of course it did, you idiot.” They might go on: “That was the day in which the theologians were burning people at the stake. That’s why we had the Enlightenment. To privatize you people.”
To these sorts of critics, to the unfriendly and aggressive secularist, to be an “ethicist” is just fine. But to be a theologian in public? Perhaps that’s as appropriate as making love in public. Just more threatening.
I never imagined when I started my career that I would encounter as much hostility as I have, simply trying to do theology in public. Once a Nashville radio rap-station had a call-in survey, the results of which declared me stupid by a wide margin. Or the day the local FOX affiliate aired a story complete with some folks calling for me to be fired. Or the emails, like the one I stumbled back across recently, where a gentleman wrote to me to say: “you’re worse than an idiot, because an idiot never knew. You’re just an ass-hole.”
But many of the secularist critics have good reason to be suspicious: they might say: it’s the Inquisition stupid, the burning at the stake, the public violence that seems to result from public theology.
And, well, this is true, at least in part. More, I resonate with such suspicions. Too much maybe. My lovely wife Laura has grown weary of the many times she’s heard me tell stories like the one about the 16th century radical reformer Menno Simons, who pushed back against the public theologians and orthodoxy of his day, was taken to trial, convicted, and then his tongue cut out, his flesh torn with red-hot tongs, and then he was tied to a ladder and burned on a bon fire. And then his wife was executed by drowning.
All these legit suspicions raised by the secularist critics are yet again one of the reasons I’m hesitant to say that I’m a theologian in public.
But still, I wonder. Might it not be better to have open and public conversations with all parties being more honest about who they are? Can I be a Christian theologian in public? Or must I, ultimately, be merely an “ethicist,” whatever the hell that might mean, committed to vague notions of right and wrong, and endless arguments about complex dilemmas?
I realized recently that I don’t think I can be a very good so-called “ethicist.” I was guest lecturing at a university which is one of the finest in the world. They had a summer program, inviting undergraduates from all over the world, themselves from the finest universities in the world. My host indicated it would be better, in effect, if I took the “ethicist” route rather than the “theologian” route. From a strictly academic point of view, I could technically say either.
But what I discovered was this: in being an “ethicist” and not being a “theologian,” I felt castrated in my lecturing. There is a great wealth of resources in the theological tradition, remarkable arguments, compelling historical anecdotes, brilliant intellectual lights. And yet I had committed to making all this intellectual wealth off-limits. I was boring. Ineffectual. And I think I failed to contribute to the public good day that day, as I could have otherwise.
So the Tokens Podcast dares to do theology in public, but it’s a kind of theology that insists upon having conversations about supposedly non-theological topics like society and politics. Things like whether (or how) to be happy; habits and human flourishing; music, books, the arts, and poetry. We shall dare to publicly discuss theology in a way that refuses to be overbearing while also not pretending like most people don’t care about faith, theology, and the traditions that form us. We promise to be non-partisan – neither right nor left nor even necessarily religious; which another way of saying we commit to extending hospitality to those with divergent voices and convictions, welcoming poets and authors, theologians and activists, scientists and educators, musicians and writers and politicians.
In the meanwhile, I should acknowledge that this experiment may lead me to conclude that I should simply be an ethicist. May be. But maybe not. We shall see.