How to Recover From the ‘Crisis of Meaning’ in the West: John Vervaeke

[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW] “People don’t know where to go to cultivate wisdom. I will ask my students: ‘Where do you go for information?’ They’ll hold up their cell phones right away. ‘Where do you go for knowledge?’ And they’re … a little bit more suspicious. They’ll say, ‘Well, the university, science …’ and then I’ll say, ‘And where do you go for wisdom?’ And they don’t have an answer.”

John Vervaeke is a professor of cognitive science and Buddhist psychology at the University of Toronto. He is the creator of the internationally acclaimed lecture series “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis.”

“There’s no possibility of truth without trust,” he says.

Mr. Vervaeke’s work merges science and spirituality, and reaches into the past to understand the history of ideas. He has developed a set of practices to cultivate insight in the quest to regain meaning.

“On social media, you have connections, but you don’t have actual social relationships with people. So people pile up the number of connections they have, but they’re not actually connected,” says Mr. Vervaeke. “The deepest truths are not accessed by us. They don’t get disclosed by us unless we’re willing to go through transformation, and unless we’re willing to grow our personhood.”

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek: John Vervaeke, it’s such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders here at Dissident Dialogues.

John Vervaeke:
Thank you, Jan. It’s a great pleasure to be here.

Mr. Jekielek:
You’ve been looking into the meaning crisis. You actually coined the term, and it’s been making its way into our overall cultural zeitgeist, which is important. But let’s start with this question. Why are we so obsessed with zombies?

Mr. Vervaeke:
I wrote the book, “Zombies in Western Culture: A Twenty-First Century Crisis,” with my two co-authors, Christopher Mastropietro and Filip Miscevic. We were basically arguing that the zombie is a new myth. It’s not that old, and it’s one of the rare new myths of the 20th century. We argued that the zombie actually portrays and exemplifies the meaning crisis.

If you think about zombies, they lack a sense of meaning, but they’re hungry for the organ that makes meaning. They like to eat brains, which is really weird. They move around, but they have no purpose. They have no goal and they just drift. They hang out in groups, but there’s no community.
They’re driven by this insatiable need to consume that which never satisfies them.

We thought, “Why is this myth speaking to so many people? Why do they want all these shows and movies? Why do people go on zombie walks?” It is because this is touching a nerve and doing what all great myths do. It gives people an image to take something that’s otherwise inchoate in their experience and put it in front of them so they can look at it and say, “Yes, that’s what is happening right now.”

Mr. Jekielek:
It’s deeply disturbing if this is the case. Because if these monsters really
exemplify how we imagine ourselves, or somehow it speaks to our culture today, this is obviously highly problematic.

Mr. Vervaeke:
There are a couple of times in The Walking Dead TV series where they very famously say, “We are the walking dead.” The idea is that the zombies are just us, decayed and fallen apart and drifting and homeless. They’re not like vampires and werewolves. They are us. The fact that we are now seeing ourselves through this image is very symptomatic of a lot of things that are happening for people now.

We’ve got this spike in suicide among the younger generation in affluent areas. The age at which people are committing suicide is dropping down into childhood. We’ve got a mental health crisis that seems to be just spinning out of control. We have a loneliness epidemic that is getting measurably worse, decade by decade. The number of close friends people have is going down each decade.

I can give you more and more symptoms. We are losing a way of being in the world that supports human flourishing and you can see all the symptoms. There is something going on that is putting us under tremendous stress. The very fabric by which we understand ourselves and each other in the world seems to be falling apart.

Mr. Jekielek:
One of the things that has become apparent throughout the pandemic is how callous people in power can be with other people’s lives.

Mr. Vervaeke:
We made use of the work of Porteus and Smith in the book with this notion of domicide, which is the killing of home, where people don’t feel like they have a home. One of the symptoms of domicide is that people feel that they are becoming increasingly distant and disenfranchised from the power holders. More and more people feel that they have less and less impact on the political system, the corporate system, and the legal system.

The loneliness isn’t just personal loneliness. It is this kind of cultural loneliness, a profound sense that it doesn’t matter if I’m here or not, because I make no difference and nobody cares. It was really surprising to a lot of people that I made the “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis” series during the pandemic. I actually made it two years before the pandemic. People said, “What?”

One of the things the pandemic did was to show how much domicide people really experience. When the busyness and distraction was removed and people were thrown back onto themselves and their own life, many of them panicked or went into despair or relationships fell apart. It was very destructive, precisely because the pandemic just exemplified and magnified the meaning crisis. You’re right. The people in power in no way took this into consideration.

Mr. Jekielek:
Their policies magnified it.

Mr. Vervaeke:
We took one thing, physiological health, and we made it paramount at the expense of everything else, which is a hallmark of the loss of rationality. A rational person understands that any relationship has these inevitable, complex, nuanced, and dynamical trade-offs. We’re now seeing that there are long-term negative consequences in people’s lives by the way the policies were imposed, and also by the way they were communicated. People were not given a sense of participating in this. They were just given mandates on what to do.

Mr. Jekielek:
Let’s come back to the meaning crisis. Some people say that there
was a religion-sized hole left in people’s hearts as we became a more secularized society. That might not be the whole story, but that’s part of it.

Mr. Vervaeke:
Yes, it’s a big part of it. When we’re using this term meaning, we’re using a metaphor. We’re saying that our lives and experiences are organized in the way a sentence is organized and means something about the world. If I say that there’s a cat over there, that sentence has a meaning, and it connects you to that situation so that you can determine what’s real in that situation, and whether or not it’s true or false.

We say there’s something about our lives that has that connectedness.
That’s what people are talking about when they’re talking about meaning. Life is this sense that there is a coherence to life. Life hangs together in such a way that I feel that I’m deeply connected to myself, to other people, and the world.

Now the thing about that is human cognition is dynamic and complex. The processes that make that connectedness possible also make us prone to self-deceptive and self-destructive behavior. We need several practices, not just one practice. There is no one panacea practice. We need a whole living system.

I sometimes call it an ecology of practices for ameliorating the self-deceptiveness and foolishness of our lives, and for enhancing the connectedness and the flourishing of our lives. We need a way of cultivating wisdom. The problem is that for a very long time, the places that were the tenders of these ecologies and practices, honed them, and gave them an overarching, justifying worldview, were the religions.

As we’ve lost the religions—for a lot of good reasons, by the way—we’ve thrown out the baby with the bathwater. We’ve lost all of these ecologies and practices, and a philosophical framework that helps people put them into their lives, so people today don’t know where to go to cultivate wisdom.

I will ask my students, “Where do you go for information?” They will hold up their cell phones right away. I ask, “Where do you go for knowledge?” They will become more suspicious and say, “The university of science.” Then I’ll say, “Where do you go for wisdom?” They don’t have an answer.

People sense that they are not connected and losing touch. They are beset by this self-distress. I’m going to use this term in a technical sense, like the way the philosopher Frankfurt does. They are beset by all the BS in their lives. There’s so much BS in the media, but they don’t know how to cut through it. They don’t know how to train themselves. They don’t know how to connect to other people so as a group, they can cut through this and get at what’s really going on.

This is not optional and wisdom isn’t optional. People struggle and they get into weird rabbit holes. They try this and they try that, and then they suffer. The loss of the religious worldview, what Peter Berger calls a sacred canopy, has opened people up to this sense that they’re beset, but they don’t know by what. They have a sense that something needs to be done and that something is wrong, but they don’t know what it is, and they don’t know how to address it.

Mr. Jekielek:
You articulate the distinction between lying and BS, as you call it. As it turns out, lying is a lot simpler to deal with.

Mr. Vervaeke:
Yes.

Mr. Jekielek:
Please explain that for us.

Mr. Vervaeke:
This is deeply influenced by the work of Frankfurt who wrote a famous essay on BS. A liar is depending on your commitment to the truth. They have been trying to get you to believe something that isn’t true. If you believe something to be true, that will affect your behavior, so the liar tries to get you to believe something that isn’t true. By the very fact that you’re committed to pursuing what you believe to be true, they will manipulate your behavior. That’s very clear.

Now, we have this metaphor that says, “That person is lying to themselves.” But no one can really do that. You can’t really say to yourself, “Believe this, even though it’s not true.” That’s not how belief works. Belief isn’t a voluntary act that way.

But the BS artist isn’t trying to manipulate you in terms of your commitment to the truth. The BS artist is trying to get you to be disinterested in whether or not what’s being said is true. They’re trying to unplug you from your commitment to the truth and plug you into something else that
motivates your behavior—how salient something is, how much it stands out, how catchy it is, or how much it grabs your attention.

This is how advertising works. You watch a shampoo commercial. This person is using the shampoo. For some reason, they’re in this beautiful botanical situation and the sun is shining and they’re happy. You know that’s not true and they know you know it’s not true. It doesn’t matter because they have made this wonderful emotional association with the product that makes it salient. When you go into the store, without you realizing it, it jumps off the shelf at you and then you buy the shampoo.

This is what BS is. It disconnects you from the truth and gets you all caught up. This is why our social media is all about clickbait. It’s all about
salience. It’s all about getting you to not care about the truth. Here’s the important thing, Jan. You can’t lie to yourself, but you can BS yourself.

I can make something salient just by giving it my attention. Then my memory will remember that that was salient for me, because I paid attention to it. When I’m looking around, I will be drawn back to that and it becomes more salient for me again. I get looped in and slowly start to forget there are other alternatives and other things to look at.

Mr. Jekielek:
This is very disturbing, because what a cesspool of BS we are stewing in. We are constantly being assaulted and they attempt to push as much BS into the system as possible.

Mr. Vervaeke:
That is very easy to do, if I can get you to stop caring about bringing careful, reflective attention and dialogical conversation and thinking about whether or not something is true. Instead, I will say, “Hey, look at how shiny this is. Look at how fast it is. Look at the rhythm and the beat. Look at how much it is catching your attention. Then it is so much easier, faster, and effective to manipulate you and control you.

The problem is you start to do that with other people because the only way you can get their attention in a world that is beset by BS is by really pumping up the salience. I know all about this. I’m on YouTube and I’m constantly struggling with this. I think, “Okay, you have to make this accessible. You have to get people’s attention.” But I don’t want to do that at the expense of calling them to the careful attention and reflection that is needed for the pursuit of truth.

Mr. Jekielek:
You mentioned this idea of a dialogical conversation and this is central to your thinking. The bottom line is that it’s a relationship that is forming, and you’re talking about the absence of that relationship. Today, it’s like a mirage of a relationship with these quick clicks. Please explain that for us.

Mr. Vervaeke:
On social media you have connections, but you don’t have actual social relationships with people. People pile up the number of connections they have, but they’re not actually connected with people.

Mr. Jekielek:
Earlier today you talked about how dialogical conversation is central to the process of real education. Please explain to us exactly what that means.

Mr. Vervaeke:
This goes towards the heart of education and also towards the heart of how democracy is supposed to work. When this gets undermined, both education and democracy get seriously undermined. Here’s the basic idea. There’s lots of scientific evidence for this and it’s mounting.

Have you ever noticed that if your friend is doing something foolish, you can notice it easily? You can say to them, “Hey, what are you doing?”
But when you’re doing something foolish and it’s you making the mistake, it is very difficult to see your own bias. When you’re outside someone’s perspective, it’s very easy to see that perspective is biasing them. But when you’re within a perspective, it’s very hard to see it.

Here’s the thing. You are actually my best chance of me correcting my biases, and I am your best chance for you correcting your biases. What we both have to do is commit to trusting each other. We’re going to entrust ourselves to each other and commit to a shared process. Instead of I’m right and you’re wrong, we both want to get closer to the truth.

I’m going to pay very careful attention to you with the understanding that you are seeing mistakes in my thinking that I can’t see myself.
All I ask from you is that you do the same for me. Then together we enter into this mutual opening up, reinforcing, and self-correcting. We don’t necessarily have to come to agreement. But we can both get to a place closer to the truth than we could our own.

Mr. Jekielek:
That’s a real relationship.

Mr. Vervaeke:
Yes, it is.

Mr. Jekielek:
You are codifying things which are natural and basic to the human experience, but are absent for so many people. That leads to all of these terrible statistics that you were citing earlier.

Mr. Vervaeke:
That’s exactly it, Jan. Because remember that meaning in life is actually a sense of connectedness. I’m trying to get at the sense of the connectedness by not just you and I simply being involved in some exchange. It’s like I’m making a commitment to you and you’re making a commitment to me.

We’re both making a commitment to the relationship between us. It is going to take us places that we couldn’t get to on our own. We can’t even foresee those life-changing conversations that take on a life of their own and take us beyond where we are.

I use a Latin word that is one of the proposed etymological origins for the word religion. It’s religio, a living connectedness that really makes us capable of doing so much more together than just exchanging viewpoints, or me trying to convince you of my viewpoint, and you trying to convince me of your viewpoint.

Mr. Jekielek:
Let’s put religio off to the side for a moment and talk about religion. The common thing people will say is that there is a religion-sized hole in their hearts.

Mr. Vervaeke:
Yes, it’s a God-shaped hole.

Mr. Jekielek:
How does that fit into that very human connection that is central to our experience?

Mr. Vervaeke:
The Christian framework of Western civilization is a platonic Christian framework. Look at the word dialogue or dialogical and in it is this notion of logos, which is where we get the word logic. But we forget the original meaning which is this living word. It gathers things together so they make sense.

When you and I are gathered together by a conversation and it starts to open us up and we’re making sense together, that’s logos.
But also in it is what Christianity talked about—agape. This is not the love of eros where we want to be one with something by consuming it, or a philia, which is a friendship where we reciprocate.

This is the love you have for a child. It takes a living creature that can’t talk, can’t reason, can’t drive a car, can’t vote, can’t learn science, and turns it into a full-fledged. cognitive, person that has moral rights and responsibilities. That’s agape. If we are going to genuinely get at the truth, we need logos and we need agape.

Here’s why. The deepest truths are not accessed by us. They don’t get disclosed by us unless we’re willing to go through transformation and we’re willing to grow our personhood. Think about this. You give agape to the child. The four-year-old can’t understand Heidegger’s philosophy. But if you love them and you do logos with them, they can come to a place where they can understand Heidegger’s philosophy.

That’s what maturation is. Maturation is a growth through logos and agape love, so that deeper truths become available to you. Maturation is to be able to face reality. Look at the word face. We don’t say see. We don’t say grasp. We say face reality.

I’m just using Christianity as an example because of its prominence in the West and I keep saying it’s also platonic and Socratic. But you had a living tradition that made people aware of and responsive to and responsible to logos and love and therefore meaning-making and person-making in a coordinated fashion. Without religion you lose all of that.

The other machinery that we have tried to put in its place is education. Education eventually loses that purpose because our humanity is ultimately grounded in logos and love. Education drifts into ideology and indoctrination and BS. Then we turn to the government.

That’s what we’re doing with all of these things. We try to make them take the place of religion, but they have not succeeded. They fall prey to the meaning crisis that is that hole you’re talking about in people’s hearts.

Mr. Jekielek:
There have been multiple films over the years which involve a child being raised by a robot nanny or a non-human. This kind of theme has been coming into cinema.

Mr. Vervaeke:
Yes, and for a good reason, because the potential advent of artificial general intelligence looks like it might be right on the horizon. We are already cyborgs carrying around these smartphones and tablets.

Mr. Jekielek:
Those nannies, for lack of a better term, are unable to do agape.

Mr. Vervaeke:
I would say they can’t even do logos. They’re logic machines and the sophisticated ones even go beyond that. But I won’t get into the technicalities of cognitive science right now. So much of what goes on in communication has communing within it. We’re not just sending signals.
We’re actually trying to create this living relationship. That has to do with a lot of the scientific work where I talk about relevance realization. It turns out that that process is not well captured by a lot of these robotic and AI models that we have.

I would agree with you. These machines don’t care, therefore they’re not capable of agape. But that also means they don’t care about the truth. They don’t care about being in deep connection to reality, since they also don’t have logos in a deep and profound way.

Mr. Jekielek:
When thinking about the world from a Marxist perspective, the only real interaction that’s happening is me trying to exercise power over you or you trying to exercise power over me. They would say that all of this high-minded thinking about logos and agape is just a subterfuge and a way of you trying to manipulate me in some way. If you view the world from this Marxist perspective, isn’t that what psychopathy is, where you are doing things purely in terms of exercising power?

Mr. Vervaeke:
I would hesitate to paint all Marxists with the same brush, but I understand your point. Marxism and Nazism were examples of pseudo-religious ideologies where people tried to create ideological systems of belief in hope that by manipulating belief you could actually manipulate religio.

Of course, now we’ve got social media that can manipulate belief way better than any totalitarian state did. We can see that it doesn’t give people religio. It doesn’t. That was the promise of social media. We were going to all feel so connected. This view fails because it thinks that what is primarily driving people is the assertion of their beliefs and that all that is behind it is a power relationship.

There’s a notion called a performative contradiction. A propositional contradiction is when you say two propositions that contradict each other, Like saying this is a square and this is not a square at the same time. That’s a propositional contradiction.

A performative contradiction is when you say something and the state from where you say it contradicts what you’re saying. I’ll give you a non-controversial example. I could say, “I am fast asleep right now.” If that sentence is true, I couldn’t be in the state to say it.

There are two things going on there. First, you have what Paul Ricoeur called the hermeneutics of suspicion. It’s a cynicism that everything that someone is doing to you has a secret agenda behind it. There’s a secret meaning. Then you get Freud, and Marx, and Nietzsche, and the hermeneutics of suspicion.

The problem with the hermeneutics of suspicion is that it can’t be fundamental. Here’s why. You can only say that something is distracting or misleading or an illusion by pointing to something else that is real. Real is a contrastive term. It’s like the word tall. It makes no sense to say everything is tall. You can only say that something is tall relative to something else. To say something is an illusion is to point to it and say, “This is an illusion because it fails in comparison to that.”

Underneath the hermeneutics of suspicion is the hermeneutics of beauty, but not beauty in the sense of pleasure giving. It is this ancient idea that beauty is when appearance discloses reality and a deeper reality shines through that appearance. That’s the first problem with that view of Marxism. You’re buying into the hermeneutics of suspicion.

The second question is, “What do you mean by power?” You say, “I mean the ability to manipulate a person.” I would reply, “Oh, so there are really people and causal factors and psychology.” You actually have to commit to a whole bunch of things you think are really true, that you care about, and that matter to you. This person is speaking from a place in which being connected to reality is what really matters to them. That’s why they want power.

Then you say, “If you really want power because you want to be connected to reality, let’s talk about what it is to be connected to reality.” Then we’re back to religio. You could ask, “Why do things matter to you? How are you connected to reality?” This position actually undermines itself as the person is enacting it.

Mr. Jekielek:
But it seems to be a powerful, intoxicating way to think about the world.

Mr. Vervaeke:
It is. It’s super salient. There’s errors of excess and there’s errors of deficit. Power is one of the ways in which we sense reality. Look, we have different ways of knowing. One of our ways of knowing isn’t our propositions, our beliefs, or our statements. It’s our skills.

I aspire to be a powerful martial artist. Power is an indication when your skills and your sensory motor interactions with the world are working. Power is one of the ways we judge realness. But it’s not the only way.

We need our propositions to be true. We need our skills to be powerful. We need our perspectives to give us a sense of presence. I’m taking a proper perspective on you if you can come to life within it.

Then there’s participatory knowing. This is the knowing that comes by flowing with reality. I know because of the kind of self I am and the kind of agent I am, and that has a different sense of realness. That’s the sense of belonging. That’s the sense of being with other people. We have all these senses.

Now, because power is one of the senses of realness, it has an evolutionary marker on it. It’s salient to us. But it has been made salient at the expense of other things that are also real, genuine markers of realness. The word trust and truth and troth, like in betrothal, all have the same etymological origin. They all point to the same thing.

The word belief didn’t initially mean to assert a statement. It came from beleben, to belove, to give your heart to something. But just picking up on this point, there’s no possibility of truth without trust without a betrothal of both people to a shared commitment. When you’re betrothed to somebody, the two of you are committing to a relationship. That’s going to take on a life of its own.

Mr. Jekielek:
You said that education is inherently dialogical in exactly this way. We wonder why all these kids can’t do the basics. It’s because they’re not actually experiencing education as it needs to function in this dialogical way.

Mr. Vervaeke:
I know lots of good teachers at the University of Toronto. But they’re good teachers in spite of, not because of. Educational psychology is far too driven by ideological concerns, rather than good cognitive science and psychology about how human beings actually learn and mature. This has very much been the problem.

We have a Promethean utopian model given to us by Nazism and Fascism and Marxism, and also by the liberal version of the Enlightenment.
It is the idea that we can shape people for a particular political vision. That’s the main thing we’re trying to do with our education. We’ll make this political vision come about by making human beings instrumental. That means they don’t have value as people. They have value insofar as they will take up membership in some particular political cause, because that’s what actually has the intrinsic value.

As soon as you instrumentalize people, you immediately dehumanize and depersonalize them. As soon as you instrumentalize human thought,
you remove it from a commitment to rationality. You remove it from a commitment of seeking the truth for its own sake, so you undermine things in a profound way. You dehumanize the students and you de-incentivize them about caring about the truth and about caring about the process.
You just get them focused on having certain end results.

The hallmark of rationality is when people step back and ask, “How am I coming up with these ideas? Maybe I could come up with something better.” Racism is an issue and I share the goal of trying to ameliorate it. I don’t think we can eradicate it because it’s a trade-off relationship. Murder is a horrible, horrible crime, but we don’t want to give the state the power to eradicate murder, because it would be a totalitarian intrusion in our lives.

We have to ameliorate racism. We should be able to ask, “What are the best possible ways to do this? Here’s a proposed method. Let’s investigate it and see if it actually works.” That’s not what we’re doing. We’re leaping to, “We’re going to eradicate it.”

Then everybody has to automatically, often unquestionably, commit to these interventions that we don’t have good evidence are working. We might have some evidence that they’re actually counterproductive.
They’re driving the kind of separation between racial groups or ethnic groups that we have good evidence actually increases hatred and racism.

This is the hallmark of irrationality. You could say, “I actually want that goal, but I think the way you’re trying to do it is taking us away from that very goal. Could we at least step back and question the method?” That is becoming increasingly impossible to do. That is part of the problem with education.

You would expect education to be the place where people are most open to self-correction. It is becoming the place that is least open to self-correction.
It breaks my heart because I love being an educator. I love my colleagues. I love my university and it has treated me well. But I do not like the way things are going right now.

Mr. Jekielek:
You describe using immersive practices to face this meaning crisis. Please tell us about this.

Mr. Vervaeke:
Notice that when you’re suffering from a lack of religio, getting new beliefs isn’t the answer. You have to engage in practices because you have to transform all these other things. You have to cultivate some skills that you don’t already have that will connect you to the world. You have to cultivate different states of mind, so you can take on new perspectives of the world. You have to cultivate a new identity. You have to cultivate your character so you can be with the world in a fundamentally different way.

Because all those non-propositional ways of connecting are actually the deeper places where religio is to be found. Individual and collective immersive practices are not just about informing you. They are about transforming you and are absolutely indispensable for people recovering religio. At the Vervaeke Foundation, we have built ecologies of practices
that have these trade-off relationships.

You do meditative practice and you step back and look inside. But you should counterbalance that with a contemplative practice that teaches you to look out into the world. You say, “I’m doing a still, seated practice.” Great. You should also do a moving, mindfulness practice, because they counterbalance and correct you and protect each other.

With all of these individual practices, you should counterbalance them with dialogical practices engaging other people who are also doing an ecology of practices. All of this creates this rich, living ecology by which at many levels of the psyche. By both reaching out and reaching in, we can ameliorate our foolishness and afford our flourishing.

Mr. Jekielek:
Quite a number of our viewers are religious, Christian and otherwise. They would say that they need to stick to one practice. How would you respond to that?

Mr. Vervaeke:
Let’s look at Christianity where you have multiple practices. You probably pray, go to church, sing hymns, and have Bible study with other people.
You are doing multiple practices.

Mr. Jekielek:
Now I understand what you mean by practices.

Mr. Vervaeke:
Yes, that’s what I mean. Notice that there are some practices that put emphasis on propositions. Then there are some that are much more about how you’re paying attention. There are some that are about participating. The Eucharist is a deeply immersive, participatory practice if you’re a Christian.

Then you balance that with private prayer, but you also have communal prayer. There is a rich trade-off because no one of these practices is sufficient. They all have strengths and weaknesses, and they have to be brought together. Religions have a history of cultivating this ecology. That’s why I use the metaphor of a gardener cultivating this ecology. That is why it is important and valuable.

Mr. Jekielek:
John, a final thought as we finish up?

Mr. Vervaeke:
I do want to speak to the people who are the nones that do not have a stated religious home. I want you to know that there are a lot of good faith people who are creating ecologies of practices, often by entering into good faith relationships with people from the legacy religions.

I’m saying this because I’m a Christian. I’m a Christian because I don’t want people to give up hope. Don’t give up because there are a lot of positive things happening. There is a lot of creativity and effort.

Yes, there’s a lot of BS, and there are a lot of charlatans. You have to cultivate discernment and you have to be careful. But there’s also a lot of people of good faith and good talent out there as well.

Mr. Jekielek:
John Vervaeke, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Mr. Vervaeke:
Thank you, Jan. It was a great pleasure to be here.

Mr. Jekielek:
Thank you all for joining John Vervaeke and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.