Norman Wirzba on Land, Life, and Dominion | Faith & Politics #15

Norman Wirzba — Gilbert T. Rowe Distinguished Professor of Theology at Duke and author of This Sacred Life and Love's Braided Dance — joins James Spencer and Ashish Varma for the tenth episode in the faith and politics series.

Wirzba grew up farming and wanted to be a farmer, then went through graduate school without encountering a single farmer on a syllabus. Reading Wendell Berry changed that, and gave him a way to see that agricultural traditions open the major philosophical and political questions rather than sitting off to one side of them.

The conversation moves from what happens when land stops being a source of life and becomes a financial asset, through data centers and the water they need, to a reframing of dominion that may be the most useful thing in the hour: mastery understood the way a musician masters an instrument — you become a student of it, and what you master is better for your engagement with it.

It closes on the difference between being pro-baby and pro-life, and on the Colossians hymn as evidence that the early Christian vision was never about individual souls escaping the world.

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Thinking Christian is hosted by Dr. James Spencer, president of the D. L. Moody Center and author of Digital Discernment (InterVarsity Press). Each conversation reads the Bible as the final authority for life and faith, questioning the assumptions of our culture, even our Christian culture, so that we don't settle for a narrower vision than God's word offers.

Unsettling convention. Cultivating conviction.
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Chapters:

00:00 Introductions

01:31 No farmers on the syllabus

04:36 From Yale to environmental ethics to Wendell Berry

09:58 The Old Testament and living with land

11:25 When land becomes a financial asset

14:39 Data centers and the water question

17:22 Auditing what we actually use AI for

20:38 Vines and bugs on a Roman temple of peace

24:51 The fantasy that humans don't need

30:44 Technology is never simply a tool

34:06 Do you want to disappear?

37:54 Bucking bales and embodied knowing

39:19 The garden as vocation

42:34 Mastery: the guitar, not the machine

48:36 The Anthropocene and a car without brakes

56:26 Pro-baby or pro-life?

1:00:26 Colossians 1 and the scope of redemption

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